When Keanu Reeves was six and haunted by a ghost jacket
So, fun fact, when I was a teenager, I had a night terror where I woke up to find a jacket of mine crawling towards me. I bolted out of my room, and to this day, I haven’t felt that kind of blind panic ever since… God only knows how Keanu Reeves must have felt when something similarly ghost-like happened to him.
I had the luxury of two things: the first was that it was clearly a dream, and the second was that I was a teenager – the first meant that I had a very simple thing to tell myself as a way of calming down. Especially after I’d sprinted out of my bedroom still in my pyjamas… Reeves, on the other hand, had neither of those things, he was very much not asleep when he saw his traumatising jacket incident, and what’s more, he was all of six years old when it happened.
Reeves told Jimmy Kimmel in an interview on his talk show that it had happened shortly after his family had moved from Australia to New York City when he was a child. He spoke of how, as his parents got settled in a whole new city, he was left in their new apartment with their nanny, Renata.
One time, when it was just the two of them in their new home, the young Reeves was getting ready for bed with Renata’s help, then looked over at his bedroom door and saw a jacket standing in the doorway.
Looking for all the world like it was being worn by an invisible man, the jacket stood in the doorway, waved, and then disappeared. Now, if your six-year-old turns to you and says that a jacket just waved to them at the doorway, then disappeared, that’s one thing.
You’re most likely to say words along the lines of “that’s nice, dear, have you brushed your teeth?” Reeves seemed to know this would happen, turning to point out their stylish visitor to Renata before seeing something that, honestly, is much, much scarier than a disembodied jacket.
He turned to find Renata staring in utter shock at the place that he’d just seen the apparition, shaking like a leaf and deathly pale.
Because let’s face it, when you’re six years old, you already know that most people won’t take what you have to say seriously, especially when it’s something like “I think there’s a ghost in our apartment”, but when he saw that whatever it was, Renata had seen it too, then he could know for sure that “Oh wow, that was real.” Makes me think about my encounter with a spooky sartorial item. No one had been there to see my night terror, which begs the question.
What if it wasn’t a night terror?