People describe fear at an egungun appearance, and the arrangement is designed to produce it: the figure comes out at or before dawn, is completely enclosed with no human surface visible, moves in a manner marked as not human, speaks in a voice altered beyond recognition, and is surrounded by attendants with switches who drive spectators back. The prohibition on contact is serious and enforced. The tradition's claim is not that the community is agreeing to treat a masked man as an ancestor but that the ancestor is present in the cloth, and the total covering exists precisely to remove the human referent from view. Participants who know the identity of the wearer do not discuss it, including afterwards. Anthropologists have noted that this produces a socially useful ambiguity — judgments delivered by an egungun cannot be attributed to a person and therefore cannot be resented in the ordinary way — without that observation exhausting what the participants take themselves to be encountering.