Some people in Grand Marais love to perch creepy mannequins or dolls in upstairs windows.
I’m not sure if this is suposed to be funny, frightening or transforming, as in – “I’m lost in time, visiting this little town and, oh look, there’s a person in a nightdress looking out at the harbor.”
What I mean is this:
This is a mannequin that was perched in a second-story window over a shop. It was a male mannequin, which perhaps my limited drawing skills don’t portray properly, that had a long-haired, white wig perched on its head.
Ben Franklin?
Norman Bates?
My cross-dressing neighbor?
The mannequin was wearing a very fancy nightshirt and grinning out to sea; Lake Superior to be more exact. In my mind, I’ve made a scenario in which these shop owners were hoping to create a tableaux in which a wistful wife waits for her sailor husband to return from a long voyage. Unfortunately, they only had a male mannequin and a wig from some long-ago Halloween with which to make it happen.
When I see things like this, I imagine  the particular day someone set this up in the window. Think of the time involved. Get the wig, dress the dummy in the period-appropriate nightgown and then run down to the street to look up and see if it’s placed to your satisfaction. And then… wander off to watch TV or something, I guess. Judging from the dusty look and the faded nightshirt, this all happened in 1991 and has remained, frozen in time, since.
I like your scenario to explain it, and I think you’re on to something, but you’re forgetting an important detail: the wig is explictly built to have a bald forehead, Ben Franklin style, which means that their tableaux is of a wistful wife with some sort of terrible hair problem.
Maybe she pulled it all out from worry.
Bald forehead? Hmmm… we’ll have to “go to the tape” and look at the photo I took to confirm. I guess it’s Ben Franklin Bates, newly escaped from the institution, waiting to see if they are going to find him and make him go back.