A Final Thought: Goosebumps

It’s almost Halloween, a time for ghosts, goblins and goosebumps, and I’ve been thinking about the times I’ve experienced goosebumps myself—those rare moments that take our breath away, when our full attention is focused on something outside of ourselves and our bodies respond automatically.

One such moment for me was standing on the South Rim of the Grand Canyon for the first time. I was awestruck. I’m sure my mouth was agape as I tried to take in the beauty and vastness of what I was seeing.


When Spanish conquistador García López de Cárdenas and his men first stood on the South Rim in 1540, they, like me, suffered from a profound lack of depth perception. They had never seen a chasm so vast. From the rim, Cárdenas estimated that the Colorado River at the bottom was only 6 feet wide and that the rock formations below were about the height of a man.

To verify what they were seeing, Cárdenas sent three members of his party down into the canyon to investigate. They made it partway before the terrain forced them to turn back. From that lower vantage point, however, they saw that the “stream” was actually a massive river and swore that the rocks Cárdenas thought were man-sized were “bigger than the great tower of Seville.”

Goosebumps.

Not every breathtaking moment is a positive one. My wife and I recently watched an episode of Apple TV’s comedy/horror series, Widow’s Bay, featuring a creepy basement scene that made the hair on the back of my neck stand up. I’d had goosebumps before, but never like that. The hairs were no longer mine; they took on a life of their own.

This summer, my wife and I saw Ohio Shakespeare Festival’s production of The Tragedy of Macbeth, in which the Bard explores this very sensation. Macbeth, upon hearing a woman’s scream, says:

I have almost forgot the taste of fears.

The time has been, my senses would have cool’d

To hear a night-shriek; and my fell of hair

Would at a dismal treatise rouse and stir

As life were in’t: I have supp’d full with horrors;

Direness, familiar to my slaughterous thoughts,

Cannot once start me.

Macbeth had felt his hair “rouse and stir as life were in’t.” That’s exactly the sensation the basement scene gave me.

(By the way, immediately after Macbeth utters these words, he learns his wife has died, which launches him into his famous “Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow” soliloquy, during which he says, “Out, out, brief candle!”)

My most memorable goosebump moment came on Monday, April 8, 2024, at 3:13 p.m., when totality occurred during the solar eclipse in Northeast Ohio and the sun’s corona became visible. I was overwhelmed by the beauty of it, but also by the extreme rarity. Yes, total eclipses happen regularly, but few of us have the resources to travel the world to witness more than one in our lifetime.

Standing there with my wife, children and grandchildren, as confused bats fluttered above us under a haunted, darkened sky, I felt an overwhelming sense of the love and luck I have had in my life, intensifying the goosebumps. The sensation was compounded by my appreciation and awe for the science that could predict such an event so precisely—science that has existed in some form for more than 2,600 years. Ancient Babylonian astronomers recognized the roughly 18-year cycle we now call the Saros and used it to forecast when eclipses were likely. More recently, Edmond Halley accurately mapped the path of totality and the timing of the solar eclipse over England on May 3, 1715. His prediction was off by only four minutes and about 20 miles.

Humans are amazing.

In October 2009, I attended an annual dinner honoring a local philanthropist for a lifetime of successful fundraising. There were 500 people in the room when the slideshow depicting the honoree’s life showed a photo of her seated at a table in front of large glass windows divided by tall columns. That’s when the emcee said, “Here she is, having lunch with her family at the top of the World Trade Center…on September 10, 2001.”

All 500 of us got goosebumps and gasped, inhaling simultaneously. For me, the shared moment gave a powerful new meaning to the expression “sucked the air out of the room.”

Mitch@MimiVanderhaven.com