Sunday, May 20, 2018

10 Creepy Mannequins

Copyright 2018 by Gary L. Pullman

Mannequins are creepy. Made in our image, they represent us, but they don't necessarily represent us as we see ourselves. They don't always adopt attitudes with which we're comfortable, either, and they're sometimes used for purposes we wouldn't think of serving. Whether in stores, rice paddies, dental school labs, a bombed town, or elsewhere, dummies can be more than a little peculiar, as these 10 creepy mannequins demonstrate.

10 Surveillance Mannequins


Mannequins never move, but we expect them to shift their position, to stretch, to sit down, or to do something other than simply stand in place. Yes, we know they're plastic, not flesh, and they're artificial, not alive. Nevertheless, we sneak peeks at them from the corners of our eyes, trusting our intuition, knowing, deep down, they're going to twitch or stir. Our uneasiness in their presence would soar if we knew some mannequins watch our every move.

Cameras programmed to read human facial features are being installed in display mannequins so the dummies can keep us under surveillance while we shop. Surveillance mannequins can detect age, gender, ethnicity, and “even the amount of time” customers “spend looking at each product on display.” As a result, retailers can develop customer profiles and use store floor plans and merchandising to their best advantages. (LINK 1) 

9 Scarecrow Mannequins

She looks lovely in her purple straw hat with its blue ribbon band, her straw-colored hair peeking out from under its brim, above her wide, innocent eyes. She doesn't have a body, but she doesn't need one for the work she does. The pole upon which her head is mounted is sufficient. All day and all night, she gazes upon the rice paddies she guards in Kobe, Japan, a tireless scarecrow now that she's retired from her previous career as a hair stylist's mannequin. Other mannequin heads perform the same service, keeping hungry sparrows at bay. A brunette stares straight ahead, unblinking and unmoving. A redhead with arched eyebrows, wide eyes, and a serene expression, surveys her acreage.

Canadian photographer Dennis Doucet, who snapped pictures of the guardian heads, shares a secret. Not only do they look eerie in the darkness, when cars' headlights flash over them, but “as the heads become moldy or bleached by the sun, they become even more” frightening. Some of the mannequins-turned-scarecrows retain their bodies, but many have been decapitated, impaled on sticks, and put into service simply as heads. At harvest, the heads finally get some rest, as they are stowed away until the next year's planting. (LINK 2)

8 Bridal Corpse Mannequin


Dressed in a beautiful, flowing white bridal gown and a long veil matching her collar, La Pascualita, or “Little Pascuala,” named for her father, stands in the front window of La Popular bridal shop in Chihuahua, Mexico. She isn't a mannequin. She's the mummified daughter of the former proprietor, Pascuala Esparza. Pascaulita died on her wedding day, the victim of a black widow spider's bite, and her mother mummified her. The unfortunate bride's been standing in the shop's window since 1930.

At least, that's what happened to the young woman according to local legend. Rumor has it that other inexplicable incidents involving Pascualita also occur. She changes positions. Her eyes follow customers as they move about the shop. Although skeptics say she's nothing more than a mannequin, Pascualita frightens Sonia Burciaga, one of the shop's employees. “Every time I go near Pascualita, my hands break out in a sweat,” Burciaga admitted. “Her hands are very realistic and she even has varicose veins on her legs. I believe she’s a real person.” (LINK 3)

7 Hairy Mannequins


By definition, fashions come and go, and they involve more than clothing styles and accessories. For several years, it has been fashionable for women to shave their nether regions completely bald or to trim them in a variety of decorative patterns. Therefore, mannequins displaying thick, luxuriant thatches and patches where, of late, there were none caught the eye of many New Yorkers in January 2014, when the plastic ladies appeared in see-through panties, posing in the windows of an American Apparel store in Soho. The mannequins were equipped with merkins, or pubic wigs, for the occasion.

According to the clothing company, the displays were not shown for the sake of publicity, but as an educational exercise intended to celebrate “natural beauty” while inviting “passersby to explore the idea of what is 'sexy' and consider their comfort with the natural female form.” Generally, the company received “positive feedback,” a company representative said. (LINK 4) 

6 Groped Mannequins

In the past, and, in some cases, even now, such conduct was called “teasing,” but Ragamalika Karthikeyan, the programme officer for the gender violence research and information task force at the NGO, said calling the behavior by such a euphemism trivializes it. “Most women,” including health care workers and students, he added, have experienced such harassment.
Attired in white fabric from head to toe and holding a basket, a female mannequin covered in stickers displayed outside Chamiers Cafe in Chennai, India, is only one of several stationed around town. Their purpose is to show where Indian women have been groped on the streets. Prajnya Trust, a non-government organization (NGO), conducted the 16-day campaign in an effort to raise the public's awareness of “street sexual harassment and gender violence.” The stickers bear spread hands to indicate where women say they were inappropriately touched without their consent.

 The campaign involves many other methods for getting the word out against sexual harassment, but the mannequins, which were first displayed in 2008, encourage women to speak up against such behavior and generate discussion about it. The stickered mannequins also present powerful testimony about how pervasive and outrageous the behavior truly is. (LINK 5)

 5 Musical Mannequin


She's young and pretty, with cropped blonde hair. Some days, she wears a black-and-white-striped halter top, a short blue denim dress, yellow socks, and black shoes. Other days, she might sport a halter top resembling a cut-off sailor's shirt, a Navy blue mini-skirt, knee-high socks, and dark shoes. She likes to show off her legs and tummy. Or, rather, her owner, Luthier Lou Reimuller, enjoys dressing her as he likes, changing her outfits as he sees fit. The girl's also a double amputee: she has no arms. Worse yet, the neck of a guitar juts from her abdomen. In fact, she is a guitar, an electric one, shaped like a girl. To play her, Reimuller stands behind the mannequin, tips her slightly to the side, and strums her strings. His guitar girl is eye-catching, but it's also creepy, and, many might add, blatantly sexist and inappropriate, to say the least. (LINK 6)

4 Dental Mannequins


For many dentists, their first patients are mannequins. In fact, in November 2009, New Zealand's University of Otago dental school acquired 73 such patients. The mannequins, which are kept in a “computerised dental simulation laboratory,” replaced plastic training heads on which dentists in training practiced their art prior to the receipt of the mannequins.

The dental school opted for German-made dummies. The Japanese versions might have proved a bit too alarming for students, because, “drilled in the wrong places,” they scream and bleed. Such a spectacle might get students' attention, but, Dr Warwick Duncan, the associate dean of the school's facilities and clinical services, objected, “I couldn't see the point of those. Real patients don't scream and spout blood.”

The mannequins provide the practice students need to perfect their skills, which is something their future patients will appreciate, Duncan suggested, saying, “I am sure our real patients will be pleased to know students are not allowed to work on them until they have got it right.” (LINK 7)

3 Derriere Mannequins 

According to Ralph Pucci, who manufactures mannequins, bigger, fuller, lower derrieres are fashionable nowadays, thanks, in good measure, to the anatomical examples set by Jennifer Lopez and BeyoncĂ©. As a result, Pucci said, he added as much as “two and a half inches more” curves to his latest “Goddess” mannequins. “People with these types of body are flaunting it,” he said. “They're comfortable with it.” Mannequins sell clothes, because they give women a good idea what the outfits the mannequins wear will look like on them. Mannequins sell themselves, sometimes, too, Fredy Shabani, the owner of Via Metro clothing store, pointed out. “Some guys come in and buy” them.
Pucci attributes the expansion of mannequins' assets to such forces as popular culture, the popularity of jeans, and expanding “body shapes.” These forces have led to the creation of “more realistic proportions, particularly around the hips,” giving rise to the derriere mannequin. Other trends in mannequins also indicate that beauty standards and women's expectations favor more realistic representations of women's figures, including “ethnic variety and recognition of different body types,” such as bigger, bolder bottoms. “Mannequins,” Pucci contends, “should reflect the times we live in,” and, nowadays, derrieres and fuller figures in general are seen as girlier. Following the trend, clothing stores stock attire fit for fuller fannies, too. (LINK 8)

2 Exploding Mannequins


In July 2015, to educate the American public about the dangers of fireworks, the US Consumer Product Safety Commission (CPSC) turned to dummies. In the process, mannequins representing both adults and children were burned, blown up, and otherwise destroyed. In one demonstration, intended to show how quickly a sparkler can set a child's clothing afire, a girl mannequin holds the sparkler against the dress of another girl mannequin. Quite a few seconds pass before the mannequin's dress finally ignites, causing what, were the situation actual rather than simulated, would have certainly been third-degree burns or worse. But, as the public was warned, the dress did, finally, catch fire.

The demonstration suggested it would be a bad idea to fire a bottle rocket at another person and demonstrates the truth of this admonition by sending a lit rocket along a wire leading straight into a mannequin's left eye. As predicted, the rocket causes extensive damage, obliterating the dummy's eye socket altogether and spilling egg yolk from inside the mannequin's head, which, presumably, was added to represent the decimated eyeball. The rest of the demonstration features other creepy and memorable exhibitions. (LINK 9)

1 Nuked Mannequins


In the middle of the Nevada desert, the United States built a town just so it could be destroyed. Then on November 17, 1953, in an operation known, weirdly enough, as “Operation Doorstep,” the town was destroyed by the 16-kiloton atomic bomb dropped on it. To determine the effects of the bombing, personnel inspected the remains of “wooden-frame homes, cars, and mannequins” that had been positioned on the test site. A mannequin couple occupied a car. A mother and her three children sat next to a window in their house, as “an unaware family” might do. A video recording a nuclear blast as it sets a house on fire and blows it apart, all in seconds, suggests what might have happened to the family of dummies.

Mannequins that survived were damaged, sometimes severely, and some lay under fallen debris. Some, although intact, had half-toppled over. A female mannequin wasn't as fortunate; she lost her torso. All the mannequins, substitutes for actual people, would have suffered devastating levels of radiation. The carnage, even though it involves only dummies, is eerie, disturbing, haunting, and bizarre. (LINK 10)


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