Fear of People in Masks and Costumes
Masklophobia
Masklophobia, sometimes written maskaphobia, is a specific phobia covering a general and in some cases irrational fear of masks, of people in costumed clothing and of mascots, and it is common among toddlers and young children. Its timing is the most informative thing about it. Symptoms are generally seen between birth and eight years of age, and children begin developing facial recognition skills at around six, reaching adult recognition skills at around fourteen. The fear occupies the years before the equipment for reading a face is finished.
The common cause is not known. Coulrophobia can sometimes be associated with it.
What it looks like
The reaction is physical:
- sweating and heart palpitations
- screaming and crying
- shaking
- hiding, or running from the masked or costumed person
These belong to a larger panic attack that can occur near the figure, and the anxiety worsens as the costumed individual gets closer. Halloween is the predictable occasion, being an event at which a great many people put on costumes that are usually frightening to children in the first place. Some children and adults also developed irrational fears of seeing other people, particularly strangers, in face masks during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Which explanations are on offer
No cause is widely accepted, but several rationales circulate and they are all about the same difficulty. A young child's developing mind can have trouble separating reality from fantasy when a fictional character such as Mickey Mouse turns up at human size. A child taught not to talk to strangers may be confused and made paranoid by a large costumed figure that is neither a stranger nor not one. And unfamiliarity with a life-size costumed character can be frightening against a child's general expectations of what a human face looks like, which makes a masked person hard to make sense of. That last theory is the one the developmental timeline supports.
What the treatment involves
Exposure-based therapies are what is used, helping the sufferer confront masked and costumed individuals to relieve the anxiety and stress, which is the general standard for treating any specific phobia rather than anything particular to this one.
Noah Syndergaard, the Los Angeles Dodgers pitcher, has it, and gave the shortest available summary of the subject: they are just creepy.
What the single figure is worth
A UK professional-development reference puts the number of children in Britain with masklophobia at approximately 120,000, and adds that many of them grow out of it before adulthood.
That is the only figure attached to the term anywhere in the sources, it names no survey, and the catalogue records it as a claim rather than a measurement. What is more useful is the mechanism it gives for growing out of it: children stop being frightened when they learn there is a person inside the costume and that the person will not hurt them.
A fear that resolves on acquiring one piece of information is a fear about missing information. That fits the developmental account better than anything about the appearance of the mask.
Why the face does the work
The brain is built to read faces, and to read intention and emotion off expressions. A mask removes those cues while leaving a face-shaped object in place, and the result is unease and mistrust rather than a startle.
That is why the reaction worsens as the figure approaches rather than easing. Getting closer to an ordinary face supplies more information; getting closer to a mask supplies none, while making the absence more obvious.
It also explains the individual variation the sources describe. Some people fear every mask and every costume; others fear only one class of them, horror masks, or religious masks, or masquerade masks, or medical ones. Each of those is a different kind of concealment with a different implied intention, and a person who has learned to read one of them will not be troubled by it.
What the pandemic added
The medical face mask belongs on that list since 2020. Some children and some adults developed irrational fears of seeing other people, strangers particularly, in face masks during the COVID-19 pandemic, which is the same removal of facial information applied to everybody at once and for years.
Halloween is the other concentrated exposure, and it has a term of its own, samhainophobia. A single evening on which a large number of people put on frightening costumes is the closest thing to a scheduled trigger any fear in this catalogue has.
Told apart
Often confused with Fear of People in Masks and Costumes
- Fear of ClownsCoulrophobia is named as sometimes associated with it, and a clown is a costumed figure with a painted face, which puts it inside both definitions at once.
- Fear of DollsBoth concern a human likeness that is not a human, and both are explained by the difficulty of matching what is seen against an expected face.
- Uncanny ValleyThe facial-expectation theory here is the same mechanism the uncanny valley describes, arriving from developmental psychology rather than from robotics.
Common questions
Questions about Masklophobia
- Why does it belong to early childhood?
- Symptoms appear between birth and about eight, while facial recognition skills only begin developing at around six and reach adult level at around fourteen. The fear sits precisely in that gap, which is the strongest argument that what disturbs a small child is a face that will not resolve into one.
- What happens as the figure approaches?
- The anxiety worsens. Sweating, screaming, shaking, crying, hiding, running away and palpitations belong to a panic attack that intensifies with proximity, which is the reverse of what happens with a face: getting closer to one supplies more information and getting closer to a mask supplies none.
- Did the pandemic produce a version of it?
- Some children and adults developed irrational fears of seeing other people, strangers particularly, in face masks during COVID-19. That is the same removal of facial information applied to a whole population for several years, and the medical mask now belongs on the list of specific types people fear.
- Which explanation fits best?
- The one about facial expectation. A life-size costumed character is hard to reconcile with what a child expects a human face to be, and the developmental timeline supports it.
- How many children have it?
- One source puts it at approximately 120,000 across the United Kingdom, adding that many grow out of it before adulthood. It names no survey and this catalogue records it as a claim rather than a measurement. It is nonetheless the only number attached to the term anywhere.
- How do children stop being afraid?
- By learning that there is a person inside. The mechanism the sources give for growing out of it is finding out that the costume contains somebody and that the somebody will not hurt them. A fear that resolves on one piece of information was a fear about the information being missing.
Added 2026-08-23 · Revised 2026-08-26
Nearby in the catalogue
Related entries
- Fear of ClownsThe 2022 survey behind the 54 per cent figure is reported without its authors, and Wikipedia files coulrophobia as a redirect rather than an article.
- Fear of DollsA horror director explains it better than the clinical record does: a human figure missing emotion, with eyes that stare and nothing behind them.
- Uncanny ValleyMori proposed it in 1970, and the sharpest account is about category: a figure in the valley reads as a person failing to seem normal, not a machine succeeding.
- AcephobiaTwo studies found asexual people rated as less human than other orientations, and a built-in control for unfamiliarity failed to explain the result.
- AnglophobiaA Glasgow study measured Anglophobia and Islamophobia side by side and found the same predictors. The object of the prejudice was close to interchangeable.
- BiphobiaIts commonest form is not hostility but denial that the category exists. Its synonym, monosexism, names the belief rather than the feeling and fits better.