The bunny’s body was furry white – clean, in fact, for a child’s toy – but there was something oddly disconcerting about that face. It lacked whiskers, a knobby nose and puffy cheeks.
Its face was the porcelain image of a real human baby. “Creepy,” my auction buddy Janet said when I pointed it out to her. And that word described it aptly and succinctly. I had a hard time looking into the face of this “creature,” which was exactly how it felt to me. The bunny looked like someone’s science-lab project gone awry – a mixture of human and animal genes that produced a being that was neither.
It was not the cute babies of the famous “put a baby in an unusual outfit” photographer Anne Geddes. She has baby-faced stuffed rabbits, squirrels, bears, bees and more, but hers are sweet – not scary – because most of them have human-like hands not furry paws.
This bunny gave me the creeps as it sat there on a shelf at the auction house, but it was fitting for Halloween. As much as it made me shudder, I’m sure that some young trick-or-treater would find this baby-faced rabbit adorable.
I kept trying to remember if I had seen anything like it in any of the hundreds of horror or sci-fi movies I’ve seen and loved. I could only think of Frankenstein’s monster.
I do remember that the first time I saw the 1968 movie “The Night of the Living Dead,” I was certain that I glimpsed a dog with a human face. The next time I saw it, though, the dog’s face was actually normal. Maybe I got the image scrambled in my head because I watched the movie both hiding my eyes from its images and peeking to see what was actually happening on the TV screen.
I wondered who came up with the baby-faced bunny, since it seemed so unnatural. Maybe the person had in mind a baby wrapped in a bunny outfit to keep warm or wearing a bunny costume. That was not the first explanation that came into my mind when I first saw it, but maybe I could stretch my imagination to embrace it. Nah.
I checked the bunny to see if there was a maker’s tag, but all I could find was a label noting that the face was porcelain and that the bunny was “Made in China.”
The bunny was one of several stuffed animal at the auction (there were some cloth dolls, too). About a foot away was a true stuffed toy: A white bear that looked liked he was supposed to look. At an auction a week ago, I came across lots of stuffed rabbits that were true to their pedigree.
It was not the only eerie thing that crossed my path over the last week. And this one wasn’t at auction: One of the pumpkins my neighbor had set out in the walkway between our homes was nibbled around the top in an uneven rectangular path. We can only assume that the squirrels did it.
