Bundy Affected: Why The Seattle Freeze Makes Perfect Sense

You may be familiar with the term ‘The Seattle Freeze’. It’s a nickname given to the tendency of Seattlites to at first be extremely friendly to newcomers and then to suddenly freeze up, closing the door on further friendliness. The person experiencing the Freeze feels offended, all the more so because the Seattle person was so friendly just moments before.

Notice how they actually use our friendliness as part of the complaint.

I can’t argue with the idea of the Seattle Freeze because I do it all the time. I don’t know how to behave any other way. I’m like a lot of people in Seattle: I think I’m a friendly person. I like helping strangers find a good restaurant. I’m quick to offer directions, quick to spontaneously draw someone a map. And then my good deed will be punished, almost immediately. The stranger will somehow push the boundary. Maybe it will be a suggestion to have coffee, maybe they’ll just stand there talking a little bit longer. That’s when I’ll feel a sudden discomfort (and to be honest, it’s kind of a scared discomfort) and that’s when they’ll get the Freeze. It’s a not so subtle vibe the Seattle person gives the newcomer and it communicates: OKAY THERE YOU GO. WE’RE DONE HERE. LEAVE NOW.

That’s when the other person will act hugely offended, like I’m the biggest jerk he’s ever seen. Only a moment ago I was wonderful. I, as the Seattlite, will note his reaction and this will make me angry and frustrated and I’ll be thinking: I just spent 15 minutes helping a total stranger, just to be nice, but I don’t know what it is you want. Am I supposed to ADOPT you? Knit you a sweater? Cook you a roast? That’s unreasonable. What a jerk you must be.

The part I find fascinating about the Freeze is how we can admit that yes, we DO do something like a Freeze, but we seem to regard it as a fact that cannot be changed, even if we wanted to. And we don’t want to. Stranger still, we don’t want to change because we think it’s not only normal and good to be exactly this way, we think it would be strange to be any other way. And if we go deeper, we think it sounds scary to be any other way. We are not accidentally this way. We are, at some level, deliberately this way.

In my opinion, it has a lot to do with a person who came here as a boy, who was a newcomer. And that boy, Ted Bundy, soured us on friendly faces.

Once I started thinking about different ages and generations, it made a lot of sense. First of all, people didn’t start complaining about the Freeze until around the 1980s. Secondly, I dismiss the notion it has anything to do with any particular cultural influence. We’ve been a very multicultural city for some time.

We want people to like us and we want people to like Seattle and yet even when we can see the effect the Freeze is having on you, even when we know how it will make you feel, we go right ahead and do it anyway. We do it to men. We do it to women. To people of every age. We’ll see how it makes you look slapped and we’ll keep doing it. And we’ll blame you for making us give you the Freeze.

In any case, the Freeze is supposedly something mainly done by people who live here and are from here. I guess maybe it’s also done, to a lesser degree, by people who moved here and have lived here most of their lives. I maintain this age group, the ages of people capable of giving you the Freeze, is from 5 to 95. And I maintain that group has been affected by a single phenomenon that directly caused that personality trait. I believe we’ve been Bundy Affected.

For those of you not from Washington State, I’ll give you a quick history lesson: in the mid 1970s we had a serial killer in our state who stayed active and faceless for years and this scared the hell out of everyone. When they caught him, it got scarier (and this is where the Freeze begins): turns out he was as regular as they come. He looked like any guy you’d see walking down the street. In fact he was charming and successful and good looking.

A former law student, Bundy tried to use every loophole in the world to get out of jail. In fact, even while in jail, he escaped twice. While on the loose he continued his killing, not just in Washington but also in Oregon, Utah, Colorado, Idaho and Florida.

Those are the ones he confessed to. He confessed to over 40 murders but is believed to have actually murdered up to 100 people, both men and women. In Florida the unofficial motto is We Kill People Who Do That and when Bundy’s youngest victim was found to be a 12 year old Florida girl, the state reminded him of this motto. A Ted Bundy alive was a Ted Bundy who was potentially still a threat. They put him to death in 1989.

Ted Bundy caused parents across Washington State to warn their children: be afraid of a stranger who seems nice. They taught us: if you don’t REALLY know someone, if you only know his name, be afraid. He could be a murderer. They taught us that the nicer a person seemed, the more suspicion we should use.

And the thing is, a serial killer is uniquely scary. The fear of one does harm to the psyche of a community. Here you have a killer who never gets tired of killing and must be good at what he does because the police can’t catch him. The longer the person is loose, the more exhausted the community becomes. The long term hypervigilance takes a toll.

So those of you who have experienced the Seattle Freeze and had your feelings hurt, please consider the following: imagine you’re in around…1978. Take a snapshot of that time and imagine that in 1978 you had people in Washington old enough to be grandparents, parents, the older kids and the little kids.

OK. Now the people terrified about the “Ted” they couldn’t catch, imagine the grandparents and parents being the ones doing the warning. The children, imagine the ones between the ages of 15–30, those were the ones in the Ted victim age range. The younger kids, say age 15 and younger, they were also warned, even more so when Bundy’s youngest victim turned out to be a sixth grader.

Now fast forward. The grandparents of that time are likely dead or at least would be in small numbers. The parents of 1978 are now the grandparents. The kids who were anywhere between 10 and 30 in 1978 are now between 45 and 65 and our own children are anywhere between the ages of 5 and 40. The warnings we got, we have passed along to our children. Not specifically about Ted Bundy (although I’m sure he’s still used as an example) but the warnings about being cautious with everyone, even if the person looks and seems nice. We have passed along not just wisdom but also the fear we felt firsthand and the fear we felt coming off our parents.

We’ve passed this to our kids and some of our kids are old enough to be warning their own children. In Washington State, when we warn our kids we put an extra zing into it. Here the boogeyman is not urban legend, he was an actual student at the University of Washington.

Details we learned about the Ted Bundy case included that most of his victims were women who ordinarily were very cautious with strangers but who, for some reason, made an exception just once. All of them were distracted by some detail the day they were abducted, all of them had their defenses down: they were worried about family, upset over an argument with a boyfriend, stressed about an upcoming test, etc. They met Bundy who, most often, requested their assistance in some charming manner. That was often how he got them.

And just to make matters worse, while Bundy was incarcerated, we started having a new serial killer, the Green River Killer. Like Bundy, he seemed to be police-proof. And it was Bundy himself, from his jail cell in Florida, who contacted the very people in Washington who had hunted him and offered his assistance, his technical know-how, if you will, to help them capture the killer. You may have seen the movie it inspired: The Silence Of The Lambs. Ted Bundy came up with a NUMBER of specifics the police had never thought of and it was largely due to his suggestions that they successfully captured Gary Ridgeway, who later confessed to killing 48 women.

So while we were still telling ourselves Ted was safely locked in a jail cell on the other side of the country, we had a separate serial killer on the loose. Between 1974–2001, we’ve had endless news broadcasts showing one photo after another, “missing and believed to be a victim of” the person they just cannot catch. And according to Bundy, we have “a whole bunch” of serial killers in Washington. He saw this from just looking through newspapers and reading about seemingly unrelated murders.

And it’s true, other places have had serial killers, not just Washington State. I’d be curious to see if, in those places, they do some version of the Seattle Freeze. I’ll bet they do. And if they don’t it might mean they had some other statistical something that had additionally affected the overwhelming number of state residents to dilute the serial killer effect. I think a study of this would be fascinating.

My point is, for those of you like the blogger who wrote she was giving Washington a chance but that we’d better stop that Freeze or else she’d leave, it isn’t that easy. We do the Freeze naturally in some situations: when you are being perfectly nice but we really don’t know you well. When we only know your name and you could be anyone.

When visitors have a bad reaction to this, that bothers us. To us, you seem to have no normal boundaries. When you seem to be impossible to please and then so quick to judge us, we think you’re the rude ones, not us. We probably couldn’t change the Freeze even if we wanted to and let me just repeat, I don’t think we actually want to.

But for those of you new to the Seattle area or considering coming here, I think it’s worth taking the time to think about our history and to consider why it makes perfect sense that we’d be extra cautious with newcomers.

Consider the following: Ted Bundy had a letter of recommendation from a former governor of the state, he volunteered on the Seattle Crisis Line, he saved a toddler from drowning in Lake Sammamish. Any Safe Guy credentials needed, he had them.

Actually, if you come here and you seem too good to be true, we will specifically hold that against you. You will be all the more suspect for just how good you seem.

But you can’t issue an ultimatum for a region to stop being traumatized. It doesn’t work that way. If you were going to be in a relationship with someone, you’d care about traumas they’d had to deal with. If you’re going to make Seattle your home, you might take into consideration the stuff we’ve had to deal with. I say Seattle but really the Bundy Affected Zone would be from the Canadian border all the way down to Portland.

In any case, you need not take it personally. It isn’t about who you are, it’s about who you might be. This is why we’ll probably be like this for some time. It’s why we teach our kids the way our parents taught us: we know no other way. It wouldn’t occur to anyone from Seattle to think that this is a negative or that people would dislike us just because we’re cautious. Because that sounds insane.

Which isn’t to say we dislike newcomers. We love newcomers. We love showing off our city and we want you to keep coming here. But please understand, we like to be nice to you but before we trust you on a deeper level, we need to know you. That’s all we ask, and it’s not asking that much.

Amie Ryan is the author of essay collections Green Shoes Mean I Love You and Starfish On Thursday, both available at http://www.amieryan.com/

Originally published at seattleamieryan.blogspot.com on January 18, 2015.