washed in red light
Faint footsteps circled the tent. We were camped near Bonar Bridge in Scotland. Sticks snapped in the midst of a crooning whistle. Everything we owned leaned on a tree nearby.
For weeks we had been joking that night didn’t exist this far north, that the light lingered through the edges of each day, disrupted only by our sleep.
Someone silently shook me awake. I opened my eyes to a face turned upside down by terror. It was dark out.
𓃴
I visited the UFO Watchtower in the San Luis Valley, Colorado, for the first time with a gaggle of sixteen-year-old girls in tow. We started in the gift shop: a domed, cement structure stocked with kaleidoscopic, alien-themed merchandise. The girls flipped apathetically through thick binders filled with far-fetched photos of UFOs while the owner of the Watchtower, Judy, proudly relayed her favorite tales of alien encounters.
“Psychics discovered energy vortexes on my property,” Judy explained. “They say that the veil here is thin.”
Judy used to run a cattle ranch. In the early 2000s, facing bankruptcy, she decided to capitalize on the notoriety of her location—sometimes called the Bermuda Triangle of the West—and transformed her barn into a tourist attraction. It became a huge success. Thousands of UFO enthusiasts visited each summer, camped on her property, and turned towards the stars, hoping for an extraterrestrial experience.
I was there for work. The girls were my campers. Two co-counselors and I, all only twenty-years-old at the time, were taking them on a weeklong excursion through southern Colorado. The Watchtower was our first stop. The next day, we would visit the alligator farm a few miles down the road and, after that, The Great Sand Dunes National Park. It felt deeply overwhelming to manage this group, filled with women not much younger than myself, in a public setting. I didn’t believe in my own authority. In the woods, where we spent the rest of the month-long session, our crew felt shielded from the insidious influence of the outside world. Here, the facade of innocence began to fracture.
The gift shop was surrounded by metal platforms that rose several stories, providing a dizzying 360-degree view of the surrounding landscape. A series of shrines called “The Healing Garden” snaked around the ground level of the property, containing everything from alien figurines to scrap metal to vape pens. The girls eyed the e-cigarettes ecstatically, and I wondered what we would do if we found one hiding in their belongings.
The sun was starting to set, so we ventured up the metal stairs to the Watchtower deck, looking out across the largest alpine valley in the world. Miles of flat farmland stretched in every direction, interrupted to the east by 100,000 acres of sand. In the dwindling light, the dunes crested in waves of shimmer and shadow, a wind-sculpted mirage pressing up against the base of the towering Sangre de Cristo mountains, tips turned blood red by the sinking sun. Above us, the silhouette of an unidentifiable bird flashed across the indigo sky. We blinked twice.
𓃴
In his 1919 essay “The Uncanny,” Freud defines the title word as “that class of the terrifying which leads back to something long known to us, once very familiar.” He arrives at this definition through the German translation of uncanny: unheimlich. In The Grimm Dictionary, the meaning of unheimlich and its opposite heimlich, collapse: heimlich evolves from “friendly, familiar, intimate” to “‘homelike’...something withdrawn from the eyes of others, something concealed, secret” until it becomes “something hidden and dangerous,” or unheimlich.
Despite Freud’s impulse to reduce the uncanny to castration anxiety—an ode to his phallic proclivities—scholars continue to engage with his analysis for its nuanced articulation of the frighteningly familiar. For example, in The Resonance of Unseen Things: Poetics, Power, Captivity, and UFOs in the American Uncanny, Susan Lepselter uses the uncanny to trace the cultural resonance of alien abduction narratives, arguing that these stories surface by way of expressing the sensations of containment and surveillance that seep into our everyday lives. Through the public reiteration of UFO signs and stories, Lepselter suggests that abduction takes on an uncanny vibration that “strikes a chord, that inexplicably rings true, a sound whose notes are prolonged. It is just-glimpsed connections and hidden structures that are felt to shimmer below the surface of things.” In other words, the strange, unsettling immanence associated with the uncanny arises when that which we’ve repressed returns to us. In this way, the present is haunted by the past.
𓃴
In Scotland, both citizens and tourists have the “right to roam,” an ordinance that grants public access to land across the country, allowing visitors to walk, bike, and camp almost anywhere. At twenty-five, between seasons of work, two of my girlfriends, Grace and Berkeley, and I had used this freedom to our advantage on a six-week bike trip. Pedaling north from Glasgow, we followed wet dirt roads through the spare and misty moorlands, pitching our tent everywhere from densely wooded mountainsides to public parks.
On this particular night, we had set up camp in a park on an inlet of the North Sea, across the water from a small village called Bonar Bridge. Our stuff sprawled chaotically across the campsite as we cooked dinner and chattered about the happenings of the day. A few miles before descending into town, we had ridden by a series of exposed alpine lakes where several groups were camping. At one point, we passed a little girl in a hooded dinosaur onesie. She was pushing herself around the dirt on a hot-pink balance bike while her family cooked dinner in the background. As we zoomed by with glitter on our cheeks and tutus around our waists, she stopped to stare at us, her tiny body the locus of the blurred landscape, and we smiled and waved. She waved back shyly, her small mouth slightly ajar.
“I hope that was, like, a core subconscious memory that influences her to get into bike touring someday!” Berkely said excitedly over our dinner of rice and beans.
“I know! I wish I could remember all the women I saw doing cool things as a little girl,” I replied.
By this point in the trip, we had settled into a comfortable rhythm. The exhaustion of biking all day was a salve that made sleep and food extra delicious, and each night at camp, we changed into our pajamas, shoveled dinner down our throats, and crawled eagerly into bed. In the lingering light, I would stare up through the blue-and-white fabric of our pyramid-shaped tent and feel sleep hit me like a sedative.
𓃴
Five years passed before I visited the San Luis Valley again. This time, I was with my partner Sam. On our way to go backpacking, we stopped in Crestone, a tiny town in the foothills of the Sangre de Cristo Mountains that’s teeming with temples, prayer flags, and—apparently—paranormal activity. Google filled us in on the lore. For many years, Crestone (population: 150) served as the headquarters for the Love Has Won movement, a New Age cult invested in spiritualized conspiracy theories, led by Amy Carlson, who called herself Mother God. Followers believed that Carlson would lead them to “the fifth dimension,” a plane of existence beyond most people's perception.
As the cult grew in popularity, Carlson, under increasing scrutiny, faced allegations of abuse for subjecting group members to sleep deprivation and brainwashing. In April 2021, she vanished. Authorities found her corpse a few weeks later. She was mummified, wrapped in a sleeping bag and Christmas lights, her eyes missing, and her face covered in glitter.
Carlson was not the only woman to die under mysterious circumstances in Crestone. A few years earlier, a young mom who had moved to Crestone seeking enlightenment went missing in the surrounding hills. Her remains had yet to be found.
I read these details aloud to Sam from the dusty passenger seat of his blue truck.
I turned to him with a concerned look on my face, troubled by the dark history of this place and the memories it brought up for me. He suggested a walk around town.
As we strolled down the dirt roads that cut through Crestone, nearly every building we passed featured an elaborate arrangement of prayer flags, crystals, and spinning metal wind sculptures. We decided to stop at the natural foods store for a treat. They had hibiscus iced tea on tap; we each got a cup and drank the vibrant magenta liquid on the patio in the morning sun.
“Do you think this store is an energy vortex?” I joked.
“Maybe this tea will send us to the next dimension,” Sam replied.
“I hope so,” I laughed.
As we lounged in the pleasant breeze, my thoughts drifted back to my first time in the San Luis Valley.
“When I worked for that summer camp a few years ago, we took the girls to the UFO watchtower,” I told Sam. “And one of them stole a JUUL from the alien shrine.”
“How did you find out?” He asked.
“It fell out of her bag a week later,” I replied. “I was horrified. I had no interest in getting her in trouble, but because I was her counselor, I had to do something. She got sent home early.”
“That’s tough,” Sam said empathetically. He had spent a few years leading youth trail crews in the southwest, so he understood the challenges that came with managing kids for weeks at a time. I took a deep breath.
“Should we get rolling?” I asked. Sam nodded, and we stood up, tossed our plastic cups in the trash, and loaded into his truck. As we drove up the washboard road to the trailhead, I stared up at the steep, granite peaks before us and felt sorry for myself.
My initial interest in the outdoor industry stemmed from a childhood obsession with natural disasters. As a kid, my hours passed by in a daze of delight at the sublimity of a spinning sky, a shaking earth, a city submerged. I was both terrified and taken by the thrill of things falling apart, which seemed to reveal a truth that no one had told me yet: that everything could change in an instant. Futures were fragile.
I fantasized about being immersed in these moments of upheaval, of directly encountering ecological systems under stress, a desire eventually realized while working seasonally in a warming world.
Five summers of field work later, and I was feeling totally fried. For the few months leading up to this trip with Sam, after my trip to Scotland, I had been working on an invasive species crew in the mountains surrounding Salt Lake City. For eight hours a day, I sat in the summer sun, hand-pulling weeds alongside local trails with crews of volunteers. We were trying to protect native plant species, but it often felt like a fruitless task. The weeds had colonized the base of each major canyon in the area, spreading in fields of green, monocultural madness. In July, the average temperature was 94 degrees. It didn’t rain once that month, and the ceaseless sunny sky became an oppressive force in my daily life. I spent several hours each afternoon in a sleepy delirium, lying on my bed with the ceiling fan spinning, fading in and out of consciousness as my body struggled to recover from the heat of the day.
Now that being outside every day was my job, and the creeping realities of climate change had seeped into my worldview, the natural world had lost its luster. Landscapes that once lit me up now fell flat, mirroring my discontentment back at me. I was devastated. What would save me if not the birds and the wind and the trees?
𓃴
The uncanny is the shadow self of serendipity, more menacing than miraculous but still associated with awe. Uncanny encounters often feel fated, as if orchestrated by forces beyond our control. According to Freud, this sense of destiny comes from our subconscious tendency to project secret or superstitious meaning onto recurring patterns of experience in our lives. He calls this phenomenon repetition-compulsion. He claims that through rationalism, we can surmount this tendency and become immune to the uncanny.
I wonder: if the uncanny arises through repression, might it move us closer to something we once knew to be true but have, perhaps regrettably, learned to reject? In what ways might rationalism be its own form of repression? Amitav Ghosh explores these questions in his book The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable, arguing that extreme weather events are uncanny precisely because they force us to reckon with the harmful implications of our consumer-driven lifestyles. He writes, “[Freakish weather events] are the mysterious work of our own hands returning to haunt us in unthinkable shapes and forms.” It seems, then, that we should treat the uncanny not as a character flaw but instead as a window to lost wisdom, a sign of misalignment that demands our attention.
𓃴
Grace shook me awake in the darkness. Someone was outside our tent.
“Come out, come out, sexy girls,” a voice slurred.
Grace and I shuddered, staring wide-eyed at each other while the lilting whistling went on.
“Should we run?” I whispered forcefully to Grace. She just blinked at me. It took every ounce of willpower that I had to stay still, to not unzip the tent, push past the person outside, and escape into the dark night.
“We’re going to take the bikes if you don’t come out,” the voice jeered.
This woke Berkeley up, and she promptly started to unzip the tent. Grace, still unable to speak, shook her head and smacked Berkeley’s hands.
“But someone’s trying to steal our stuff!” She said, her eyes swollen with sleep.
Sticks hit the tent, and our shelter for the past six weeks started to feel like it might swallow us whole. Everything we could have used to defend ourselves was outside that thin wall of fabric. I imagined being stabbed to death. I imagined fighting back. I imagined the headlines: “Three American Girls killed at Bonnar Bridge.”
The taunting continued: the voice close, then far, sometimes whistling, sometimes speaking, always circling. The three of us squeezed each other's hands. Our eyes were teary. Our bodies trembled.
“Should we run?!” I asked again, desperate for a response. I imagined banging on doors or screaming for help. There had to be someone, somewhere nearby, who could help us. There had to be something we could do to save ourselves out here, several thousand miles away from home.
“I don’t know if we have anywhere to go,” Berkeley replied sadly.
So, we stayed put, stuck in the swirl of the deranged whistle.
𓃴
We were backpacking to Willow Lake, a place where Sam had had an idyllic experience a few years prior. In pitching this trip, he had described soft, golden light on the surrounding cirque at sunset. He had used the words stillness and serenity. He wanted to share that experience with me. Since my Colorado summer, I had dreamed of exploring the Sangre de Cristos—the name, so foreboding, the peaks, so impenetrable. I was hoping this trip might shake me out of my funk, that the promise of the new and the beautiful would shroud the dullness inside of me, that I might, once again, feel overtaken by awe.
As we started hiking, thick smoke from the wildfire burning to our south blew in, obscuring the valley behind us. Growing up in the smog of Salt Lake City had left me with sensitive lungs, so we walked slowly, as if shallow breaths would protect us from the particulates. The trail was steep, traversing through a combination of cliffy stands of trees and sprawling meadows, sheer granite peaks peeking over the ridgeline ahead of us. We mostly walked in silence. Mosquitos swarmed each time we stopped, buzzing at the same high-pitched frequency as the spinning thoughts in my head, interrupting the stillness of the surrounding landscape.
As we approached the tree line, cartoonish cacti appeared all around, their thorny, fallacious tips drooping heavily toward the earth. In classic Colorado fashion, a thunderstorm formed suddenly above us—lightning flashed across the sky in ribbons of violet while rumbles reverberated across Willow Lake like a whip. Dime-sized pieces of hail fell sharply on our heads. We took cover under a tree and laughed at our poor luck.
We decided to set up our tent in a nearby meadow to escape the hail. My rain jacket was soaked through, so I stripped out of my wet clothes and stuffed them in a pile under the fly. We zipped our sleeping bags together and lay there naked, our wet bodies clinging to the polyester fabric. I leaned into the warmth of his soft body and shoved my always freezing feet between his thighs. He squealed and pulled me closer. We joked about how unfavorably our trip was going so far. Relief washed over me. Relief to be out of the rain, to rest on the ground, to be held. Snuggles gave way to sex, soft breath mixed with the sound of rain, and then—faint footsteps circling the tent, sticks snapping sharply. We stopped. I sat up.
I poked my head out of the tent. The light was beginning to fade as my eyes darted across the landscape, scanning for the perpetrator of the footsteps. Could the man from Scotland have followed me here? Was I cursed? Something rustled in a nearby bush.
I turned to the right and found myself face-to-face with a deer. Relief filled my naked body, and Sam and I laughed. I was reminded of a TikTok that went viral in 2024, where a group of women was asked if they would rather be stuck in the woods with a man or a bear. All but one chose the bear.
“It’s a pervy deer!” We exclaimed.
We got dressed and went outside to cook dinner. The rain had stopped at this point, and the mosquitoes were out in full force. We realized we had forgotten a lighter. With a sigh, Sam offered to go ask someone else for one and wandered away across the willowy creek. The deer lingered at the edge of our camp, innocently nibbling plants with its head down, acting very deer-like.
When Sam left, its head shot up, and its dark, glassy eyes met mine, unwavering. I scanned its shiny fur and full figure, struck by the resolve with which it stared at me. I stood up. It started to get closer.
“Hey deer!” I warned. It was undeterred. It moved even closer. I willed Sam to hurry back and threw a rock at the ground near its feet. The deer flinched but didn’t run. I decided to ignore it until Sam came back, and I hid in the tent. I could hear it circling outside. My heart pounded. I had never seen a deer act so brazen before.
“Go away!” I heard Sam yell upon his arrival, his voice absurdly deep. I jumped out of the tent. The deer was less than ten feet away from me, daring me to come closer. We continued trying to scare it off, but we were more scared of it than it was of us; we always backed away first. It stood its ground. We decided that this must be the deer’s spot and that we should move, so we packed up the tent and our sleeping bags and made our way back to the trail. We decided to camp near another group of people about half a mile away from the original meadow.
Seeing others sitting around small campfires while eating dinner peacefully helped us shake off some of our fear. This was a silly situation, we assured ourselves. The deer must be used to humans, must have been fed by some ignorant backpackers, must be expecting the same treatment from us. Hopefully, with so many other people to choose from, we wouldn’t be the sole beneficiary of its advances.
When Sam and I got back to our new campsite after hanging our food for the night, the deer was waiting for us in front of the tent, its head cocked to the side. We didn’t know whether to laugh or scream. Both of us had spent more time in the woods than in the city in our adult lives, and we’d never seen a deer, even those extremely accustomed to humans, behave this way. Something about it felt deeply unsettling.
Sam briefly considered hiking out, but it was almost dark at this point, and we were pretty sure deer weren’t known to hurt humans unprovoked. We figured if we got in the tent and left it to its own devices, eventually it would get bored and leave us alone. Our food was far away, what more could it want? I hung up my wet clothes on a branch nearby and crawled inside.
For several hours, the sharp thud of the deer's hooves sounded rhythmically outside as it bounded around the tent like a dog with the zoomies. Sam and I lay there in silence, staring at the ceiling, holding hands. I imagined death by stomping.
Then, a shocking, guttural growl rang through the air. We both sat up and looked at each other. We gulped. The noise became progressively stranger and louder.
“I’m going to look,” Sam said. He turned his headlamp to red mode and slowly unzipped the tent. Right outside, surrounded by the silhouettes of spruce trees, the deer, washed in red light, stood with its head tipped toward the starry sky, teeth bared, my purple sports bra halfway down its throat, lacy trim hanging over the edge of its lips. It was choking.
𓃴
According to Freud, our inclination toward the uncanny is rooted in “the old, animistic conception of the universe.” Animism, he argued, is an “infantile” and “narcissistic” worldview, passed down to us by “primitive forefathers,” that arises whenever imagination overtakes reality, projecting autonomy onto non-human beings. He believed it was something to outgrow.
Recently, animism has seen a revival in Western scholarship, informed by indigenous epistemologies that never ceased to believe in the agency of all things on earth. New animist thought seeks to offer a framework for reconfiguring our relationship with nature in order to reduce ecological harm. It asks us to re-enchant the world so that we may care for it more effectively. However, scholar Sam Durrant warns that, “New animist thought itself risks being subsumed within the nature industry in so far as it appears to offer ways out of, or beyond, modernity, exhorting its readers to recover a sensual or spiritual relation to the ‘natural world’...”
Where Freud pathologizes animism, contemporary culture risks commodifying it. Durrant urges us to resist viewing the world as a magical object and instead frames animism as a form of solidarity: a way to identify more deeply with our fellow damaged beings.
Perhaps, then, the uncanny is a vehicle through which this solidarity can stir.
𓃴
Eventually the whistle faded into the distance. Soft light seeped into the edges of our tent, and slumber took hold of our terrified bodies. We woke up in the morning like toddlers from a nightmare, with a sense of altered safety. Though nothing had actually changed: The man never tried to enter the tent, didn’t take any of our things. He only taunted.
I was briefly reminded of a comment I made earlier on our trip, which, until this point, had felt like a fairytale: Filled with impromptu tea parties, enchanting landscapes, and a kind cast of characters. I had said, in a huff of self-righteousness, in my need to believe that nothing good could ever last, “Every fairytale has a villain.”
While our oatmeal boiled, Berkeley and Grace hugged each other and cried. I, meanwhile, stared off into space, my brain short-circuiting as it searched for some possible solution to the situation from the night before. Everything about the day felt gray.
While we ate breakfast, Berkeley shared that it was seven years ago today that her dad passed away, that for the hour we were being stalked, she kept wondering if her fate was tied to her father’s, if her mom would have to add the weight of her daughter’s death to that date.
We biked away from Bonnar Bridge and came upon a huge herd of elk. To our left, they were moving across a hillside covered with an intricate maze of wire fence, which most of them were able to leap over. But one smaller elk was trapped. It kept trying to duck under the wire, and it was getting all tangled up. A few members of the herd turned back to try and help the little one through the maze, but it couldn’t make it, and eventually it was left behind.
Less than a mile later, we biked through an upscale resort that was deep in a pine forest. Like most places in Scotland, sheep roamed freely, and while we were biking up a hill, we came across a mama and her baby standing in the middle of the road. The baby sheep’s skin was falling off, severed from neck to hind legs and dragging on the ground behind it, exposing glistening red muscle. The baby cried and cried, struggling to walk but still on all fours, and the mama stayed close, protectively. We looked at each other in disbelief but stayed silent, not wanting to increase the distress these two creatures appeared to be experiencing. The baby, with its sweet face pulled down by the weight of its skin, struck a chord in all of us. Berkeley broke down into snotty, shuddering sobs.
“This is too much for me,” she said. “Too much.”
𓃴
In the morning, we found my bra in a slobbery, chewed-up pile in the dirt. I picked it up with a Ziploc baggie and stuffed it into the bottom of my backpack as we packed up the rest of camp. In the early light, the events of the night took on a brighter tone, and we laughed at the absurdity of the situation. The deer was nowhere to be seen.
“Let’s eat breakfast at the lake?” Sam asked, hoping for the chance to salvage some part of our trip.
I agreed, and we made our way to the water, setting up our stove on a small outcropping of flat rocks that jutted into the lake.
As we sipped coffee, a slight breeze carried birdsong across the rippling water, and we reveled in the way the sunlight kissed both our skin and the surrounding cirque. Overnight, the smoke had disappeared from the sky.
When we finished eating, we decided to go for a swim. We stripped naked, ditched our clothes on the rocks, and plunged into the icy, alpine water. The cold sent adrenaline pumping through my body, and as soon as my feet hit the gravelly lakebed, I jumped up and crawled desperately back onto the rocks, shrieking. Sam laughed at me from the water, which he was treading calmly. Eventually, he climbed up to join me and perched on the rocks in a tight ball, knees pulled up to his chest. In the morning light, water dripping down his goose-bumped skin, his eyes looked brighter than I’d ever seen them, and I pulled my disposable camera out of my backpack to snap a picture. Then, we lay down on the rocks with our eyes closed, holding hands, and letting the sun dry our damp bodies as our heart rates slowed.
After a while, I had the sensation of being watched. My eyes fluttered open, and I pushed myself up to a seated position. I squinted around.
Sure enough, to our left, a deer poked its head out of the trees at the edge of the lake. It was staring right at us. I smacked Sam to get his attention.
“The deer is back!” I squealed. He gasped, and we were both on our feet in a hurry, laughing. It was time for us to go.
The deer looked on as we got dressed, packed our packs, and began to briskly hike out. For the first mile, we looked over our shoulders every so often, unable to shake the feeling of being followed.
Once we reached the cliffy bench that marked the edge of the basin, the energy around us totally shifted. It felt like feet hitting solid ground for the first time after months at sea. As we descended, I became chattier than I had been in months. Bonded by our shared uncanny experience, I felt at ease asking Sam about his ex-lovers, discussing challenging memories from childhood, and reflecting on my trip to Scotland from a few months prior.
As I looked out across the San Luis Valley and caught the glint of the UFO watchtower in the distance, it was difficult to resist connecting the man and the deer in my memory. In both cases, a force beyond my control had aroused a primal fear within me. In both cases, nothing bad had actually happened. The threat was ambiguous, impossible to grasp, and in a strange way, these experiences worked together to move me closer to something true. For years, I had chased peak experiences in the outdoors, putting so much pressure on the natural world to fill me with wonder that I had lost sight of my smallness, had forgotten that uncertainty, not control, leads to awe. It required a subversion of my expectations—encounters with the uncanny—to put me in my place: Afraid and brimming with astonishment.
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