This article is based on uncanny encounters with Julia deVille's exhibit, "Phantasmagoria". Inspired by Deleuzian-informed research practices, the author experiments with provoking practices to defy dominant developmental notions of childhood. This article reworks a humanist ontology by bringing together the discursive, the material, the human, and the more-than-human through the interweaving of provocations and encounters. Enacting an experimental and performative methodology, the reader's movement through the article mimics the journey through an exhibition and the storm of thought and feeling that art can provoke. These provocations set into motion meanings about childhood that sit outside of developmentalism and are rarely entertained in the field of early childhood education.