The Haunting of Homer Simpson

By Soncirey Mitchell
Reader Staff

I used to be terrified of Homer Simpson.

It was the first grade, 2007, and the Simpsons were everywhere thanks to the then-upcoming movie. Burger King was giving away golden talking action figures, and I had the misfortune of picking up a yee-hawing Homer in a cowboy hat on a family road trip. It was innocent enough at first — he played with my Polly Pockets and generally stayed out of my way. It wasn’t until I went back to school that the horrors began.

There I’d be, sitting quietly in class trying to learn my numbers, when who should manifest before my eyes but Homer Jay Simpson. In my uncontrollable daydreams, he would pop up to block the chalkboard with his cowboy hat, “yee-hawing” as he did. His voice drowned out the teacher’s as he vied for my attention. I would plead with him to leave me alone, and though he would sometimes slink out of the room with his head bowed, he would always reappear to distract me.

Naturally, I assumed the Burger King toy was possessed by a malevolent spirit sent to stifle my academic goals. I was terrified that my teacher would discover my brain was harboring Homer and would punish me for not paying attention, as if it were my fault I was haunted. I had no power over him. I was a child.

To escape him, I began hiding the statuette around the house so he couldn’t follow me to school. My mom would inevitably find him while cleaning and give him back to me, which showed me that, as with Chucky, Homer would never truly die. I eventually began hiding from him, averting my eyes and clinging to my mom when in his presence. If The Simpsons came on TV, I would run out of the room with my eyes shut and my ears plugged, yelling, “La la la la la.”

My mom got the hint and tried to throw Homer away, only for my dad to resurrect him and place him on top of the bookshelf, where he would look down on me like a wrathful god. As long as I avoided the bookshelf, Homer left me alone, and I could finally learn 3+3.

As a kid, I had no way of understanding what was going on or explaining it to my parents. The only logical explanation was the supernatural. Now, at 25 years old with an obsessive-compulsive disorder diagnosis, I can safely say that Homer was a bizarre, childhood version of an intrusive thought.

The diagnosis makes sense in retrospect. I had a lot of panic attacks growing up; I washed my hands until they were cracked and bleeding; I meticulously folded towels and clothing — the list goes on. But this is North Idaho, and though I’ve had just about every symptom of OCD for my entire life, it wasn’t until I was 23 that I was formally diagnosed.

If you talk to just about any mental health worker or advocate in Sandpoint, they’ll tell you that North Idaho is a desert. All levels of care are hard to come by, which is why I ended up going to naturopaths who told me to carry quartz and get acupuncture and wear red socks “to ground me.”

Talking about mental health and learning to spot the issues is also a relatively new idea. My mom had never experienced OCD, so how was she to know that my little idiosyncrasies were something larger? There was no one to teach her or me. Now there’s the internet, National Alliance on Mental Illness Far North and millions of other resources to address mental health.

The moral of the story is, if a child in your life has little ticks or funny habits, read up on them. Life is so much easier when you know why you do the things you do, and how you can work around blips before they balloon into larger problems. Otherwise, you have to be — or deal with — the kid who’s haunted by Homer Simpson, and that’s unnerving on so many levels.