Cucurbitophobia Is No Laughing Matter

Jessy had what was surely the most embarrassing phobia ever.

To have a debilitating fear of spiders, say, or snakes, or elevators, was pretty commonplace. It was understandable. Fear of clowns, mimes, or dolls was not unusual, and certainly reasonable, given the plethora of movies about murderous clowns or possessed dolls.

But Jessy’s great, crippling, (and embarrassing) fear was .... pumpkins. Cucurbitophobia. She had an overwhelming, irrational fear of benign, silly-looking round fruits, that as autumn approached, were absolutely everywhere.

Her family was aware of her phobia, though somewhat exasperated by it. Her little brother loved to tease when he could get away with it. He’d made her actually faint last October, when he put a small pumpkin on her pillow while she was in the shower. She’d come back into her room, seen the thing crouching on her pillow, and simply, slowly, sunk down onto the floor, consciousness fading as she fell. “Tony, do NOT tease your sister about pumpkins!” her mother had scolded. “How would you like it if Jessy teased you about wasps?”

Wasps were the one thing Tony was afraid of, but not with the intensity that Jessy was afraid of pumpkins. And wasps were a perfectly reasonable fear. Pumpkins, though?

Jessy felt ridiculous trying to explain her malady to people other than family. Explaining why she couldn’t approach the grocery store, or hardware store, or farmer’s market, by the time September rolled around made her face grow red and hot, as she heard herself say, “I have this terrible phobia where pumpkins are concerned…”  

But the tidy stacks of bright orange fruits that other people welcomed as heralds of autumn, and, even better, Halloween, Jessy saw as horrid lumps of tumorous flesh. No matter how symmetrically lovely a little Sugar Pie pumpkin might be, to Jessy, it just looked like a squat, sullen head that might have come off of a squat, sullen goblin. The majestic Atlantic Giant pumpkins were worse, appearing to her as obscenely overgrown orange blobs. And the worst, the warty pumpkins, that others thought charming and quirky, were atrocities to Jessy, lurking on produce stands everywhere, waiting to infect her with their nasty, bumpy growths. If someone had forced her to touch their dry, warty rinds, Jessy was sure she would simply collapse from the horror of it.

If some deep, childhood trauma involving pumpkins had been the root of her cucurbitophobia, she at least could have tried to work through it. Perhaps then she could get through autumn without feeling as if she were on the constant edge of a nervous breakdown. But, as far as she knew, she was just inexplicably terrified of pumpkins.

January through July, she could almost forget the horrid things existed. Photos of pumpkins, seed packets, Halloween event advertisements, all caused no more than a quick shudder of revulsion. Her phobia lay slumbering in the back of her mind, nearly forgotten. Her parents would breathe a sigh of relief, thinking that maybe this was the end of Jessy’s pumpkin issues. It all seemed to silly to them. 

And, in spring and summer, it almost seemed ridiculous to Jessy as well. But with August’s cooler nights and shorter days, with autumn lurking, darkly golden, her fear came creeping back, crawling in with the sly slowness of changing daylight. Soon, pumpkins would be everywhere, and by mid-September, Jessy’s sleep was haunted by nightmares at least two or three times a week.

Her nightmares were the stuff of fairy tales of old, where the heroine did not always have a happy ending. In one, pumpkin vines grew rampantly, crawling sinuously across their yard, and up the walls of the house. Vines insinuated their way right into her bedroom window, while dream-Jessy watched, frozen, as the vines hovered in front of her like leafy green cobras, ready to strike. In another, she walked out her front door to find pumpkins covering everything, the lawn, sidewalk, the street; cars were weighed down, crumpling under the weight of massive pumpkins. She turned to run back inside, only to see her parents standing in the doorway, their heads replaced by bumpy, wart-crusted gourds. Most of these nightmares ended with Jessy shrieking or gasping herself awake, heart pounding, blood rushing in her ears, but even those she managed to sleep through left her sleep restless and anxiety-ridden.

Jessy wanted to ask for therapy, but she hated the idea of confessing to a therapist that she was morbidly afraid of pumpkins. So, this autumn, she did the same as she had done every autumn since she could remember: she just trudged through it as best as she could, sleep-deprived, anxious, and embarrassed. She couldn’t wait for Halloween to be over.

She felt extra guilty this year, too, as this fall, there was an inaugural Pumpkin Fest at a local farm, and of course, Tony wanted to go. 

“Jessy, pleeeeease can you take me? Mom and Dad are both working that Saturday, but Mom can drop us off there in the morning. I’ll help you not be scared, I promise!” Tony begged.

“I don’t know, Tony”, Jessy said uncertainly. “What if we get there, and I pass out, or something stupid? I can’t even get close to the stupid things without feeling sick.”

“You don’t even have to go near the pumpkin patch”, Tony wheedled. “You can just sit at the edge of the farm. I’ll be good, and you’ll be OK away from the pumpkins.”

He was so earnest, and really, he had been kinder lately than her parents about the pumpkin thing. And so, the first Saturday in October, Jessy found herself seated under a big maple tree on a hill, overlooking a huge field full of pumpkins, while Tony ran off with the other kids, shrieking delightedly as they capered through the patch.

“I will be OK. I WILL be OK,” Jessy mumbled to herself, quietly. She was sweating, and a little queasy, but thought she just might make it through the afternoon. The sky was gloriously azure, and a light breeze kept the sun from feeling too warm, but Jessy thought it best to keep her head down, and only glance up periodically to check on Tony. He was being good; while a small group of the other children were screaming and throwing dirt clods at each other, Tony stayed mostly by himself, wandering through the pumpkin vines that covered the gentle slope. Jessy knew he was hoping to find a tiny pumpkin, one so inoffensive that she wouldn’t be afraid of it. She had been getting so little sleep lately; perhaps she would just rest her head on her folded arms and close her eyes, just for a minute.

She dreamt. She was in a pumpkin patch. Lost, crying. The huge pumpkin leaves towered over her, on their spiny stems, seeming to deliberately block her way every time she tried to go forward. She heard a voice calling her, shouting, angry, then frantic, and knew that she would be in trouble when the owner of the voice found her. The voice grew louder, more piercing, shrieking her name, louder still….

Jessy gasped and woke with a start. The shrieking from her dream was still there, calling her name shrilly.  

“JESSEEEEEEE! BEEEEES!! HELP ME, JESSEEEE!”

It was Tony. He was at the top of the slope, and he was shrieking and slapping at himself as though possessed by some demon. “BEEEEES!!” he screamed. Jessy was running toward him before she could even think. 

“BEES!! BEEEES!! Ow, ow, OOOOOWWWW! JESSEEEEEEE!” her brother’s shriek turned into a howl as he cried to Jessy for help. She tripped through the pumpkin vines, watching in horror as her brother seemed to go mad, flinging himself forward, falling, and trying to get up again. 

The pumpkin patch exploded into absolute chaos. Kids began running, screaming, without even knowing where to run to. Parents raced into the field, cursing and shouting, to snatch up children and race to their vehicles.  

Jessy was close enough to Tony now to see the furious swirl of yellowjackets, rising from their nest in the ground, intent on destroying any moving thing. A few lit on her, and began stinging, as she blundered up to Tony.

“Up, Tony”’ she panted. “Up now. We have to run”, and, tugging at him, she half dragged him to his feet. He already had livid little welts rising on his hands, and Jessy could barely get him to stop his frantic slapping and start moving away from the nest. “Come ON, Tony!” She could feel panic taking hold; where to run to? She knew yellowjackets would pursue until she could get herself and Tony into shelter, but where, in this stupid, horrible pumpkin patch? She doggedly tugged him along, feeling her chest tighten as she stumbled over vines, over pumpkins that seemed to jeer at her, all the while swatting as best as she could at the angry, stinging insects.

“Here, I got him, you run; my car is right over there,” a tall woman swept Tony up, and ran toward the row of parked cars at the edge of the field. Jessy staggered after her, trying to just stay on her feet, trying just to push air in and out of her lungs, but the stinging, and the panic of actually being amongst all those pumpkins took over, and she fell, down, down, into grasping vines and darkness. 

Consciousness, and strange dreams, came and went then. She saw herself, tiny, lost in a pumpkin patch, as in her dream. She remembered the angry voice, now, as belonging to a long-ago babysitter, who had left Jessy to go talk to a boy, while minding Jessy at a long-ago fall festival. Remembered, too, the scolding upon being found by this babysitter, and the threat, “Don’t you dare tell anybody! Those pumpkins will come and eat you up if you tell anybody!” She also heard unfamiliar voices, sirens, and eventually, her parents’ voices, worried, but all sounding very far-away.

“Jessy? Jessy, honey….” Her mother’s voice, closer now. More real. Jessy tried to open her eyes, but they would only open to slits. Her face felt all wrong, somehow. 

“Mom, I think she’s waking up!” That was Tony. She couldn't see him very well, but he seemed to have bandages over his arms and hands. “Hey, Jessy, can you hear me? You got me away from those bees!! You ran straight through all those pumpkins to get me!! And then we had to ride in the ambulance!” Tony sounded almost proud of himself. “You got stung way more than I did, though. Your whole face is all swollen up…”

“Shhhhh, Tony. Let’s let her rest.” Jessy’s dad whispered. 

Two more days went by. Jessy, still puffy, but feeling much better, was sitting up in the hospital bed when her family came to visit. “Hopefully, you can come home tomorrow”, her father said, as Jessy sipped her lunch through a straw. “And Jessy, once you are feeling up to it, your mother and I think it’s time we took this pumpkin thing seriously. This cucurbitophobia of yours is no laughing matter. We talked to a therapist who deals with phobias, and we think it might help you to go see her. What do you think?”

Jessy nodded. Talking was still not much more than mumbles, but she managed a “Good idea”, and a sigh of relief. She wasn’t sure if the dream about the babysitter was an old memory, or just a dream, but it would be good to talk about it with someone who wouldn’t think she was weird. 

“And then maybe next Halloween, you won’t be scared any more!” Tony chimed in hopefully. “Or sometime, anyway. You can just do like this!” he made a face, as at an imaginary pumpkin. 

And Jessy, though her face was still puffy, managed to make a face back, and then a grin.