Describe Your Boogeyman

[Hades]

This is an early draft of a blog post I'll make some time in the future, that will include illustrations. For the time being, though, I'm curious about your Boogeyman.

Everyone knows about the Boogeyman even if they know him by a different name. The concept is always the same, just a vague threat to children in the night. He's gonna get you. He lives in your closet. He lives under your bed. He scratches at your window. You better eat your veggies, do your homework, and be nice to your siblings, or he's gonna get'cha.

What makes the Boogeyman such a scary thing to us as kids is the fact that we are left to create our own terrifying manifestation of that creak we hear in the dark, or that unknown fear lurking just outside the door. This is also what makes the Boogeyman so interesting to me. Like horrid snowflakes, no two Boogeymen are the same. I want to know what your Boogeyman is.

What does he look like?
Where does he live?
What does he do to you if he gets you?
How do you protect yourself from being gotten?

What he looks like.

I've always been frightened by the distorted human form. The so-called gray aliens are a perfect example of what I mean. They don't have fangs or claws. They don't have spikes or stingers. They're just vaguely human-like. Spindely limbs, long boney fingers, and holy mother of Christ, those fucking eyes.

My Boogeyman features all of these fear-enducing attributes. I imagine him to sort of look like the Soggies from those old Cap'n Crunch commercials. Just a tall, pale, lumpy, drippy-looking body with long skinny limbs, long boney fingers, and big empty eye sockets as black as the abyss.

Where he lives.

I've never really been scared of anything living in my closet, because for my entire childhood my closet was packed to the gills with my grandmother's old sewing junk. Even though I was irrational enough to believe in the Boogeyman, I was still rational enough to know that even his demonic powers couldn't trump a full closet.

Mine lived under the bed, or just outside my door. It depended on the night. If I was having trouble sleeping, I would stare at door. I was sure that any second I would see those pale, spider-like fingers wrap around the edge of my door, and he would peak through the crack with one of those lifeless eyes.

If I was getting ready to fall asleep, I would always make sure to keep all limbs on the mattress. All it takes is one idle foot and you're a goner. That icy nightmare hand is going clasp onto your little ankle and drag you under. I figured that the Boogeyman had the power to create portals to his lair and that there was just enough space under my bed for one.

What he does when he gets you.

Oddly enough, I never really gave it much thought. The process of being gotten was a much bigger concern than what would happen afterward. After all, if you can avoid being gotten, it doesn't really matter, does it?

How to protect yourself.

There are two things that all kids know deep within their souls:
1) Cooties are contageous.
2) The Boogeyman abhors light.

For the longest time in my childhood I had a really hard time sleeping without some kind of light source. It could be anything. The glow of a tv, a light in the hallway, a Glo Worm nightlight (yeah, I had one, bitch). As long as there was light I was safe from all the things that live in the dark, chiefly the Boogeyman. I didn't always get to have a light on, though.

One thing you have to contend with as a kid is the fact that the underneath of your bed will always be a dark spawning ground for hellbeasts, no matter how lit your room is. Remember when I said that keeping limbs on the mattress was important? It was important, but not that important.

If I wanted to be bold and let a foot hang off the edge, there actually was a way to protect myself. My foot had to be tucked into my blanket. Dangling a bare foot is just inviting doom. For some reason, though, a blanketed foot was an impregnable fortress for the Boogeyman, and he daren't even try.

Doesn't make sense? It never did to me, either. All I know is I was never gotten, so I must have been doing it right.

[Art Vandelay]

Oddly enough, I never really gave it much thought. The process of being gotten was a much bigger concern than what would happen afterward. After all, if you can avoid being gotten, it doesn't really matter, does it?

I swear the idea of being hunted down by something you can't possibly hope to fight evokes a very primal fear that has us instinctively shitting our pants. Hell, I remember as a kid playing Banjo-Kazooie, the enemy I hated the most was that motherfucking shark. You couldn't fight it and you couldn't outrun it, the only thing you could do was get the fuck out of the water before he caught up to you. Even though from a gameplay perspective in most cases you could easily tank the damage long enough to escape and even back then I understood that a simple game over is hardly a reason to get one's trousers in a twist, it still invoked a deeply hardwired by millions of years of evolution sense of "DO NOT FUCKING WANT". I was hardly the only one either, pretty much everyone I knew who was my age and played that game had very similar thoughts on the matter.

Back on topic though, I've never really had a boogeyman of my own. My mother taught me to be sceptical of anything superstitious/mystical/whatever from an early age, so I never entertained the notion that boogeymen were real (or in fact realised that others did until much later on).

[TheL]

I'm your boogieman, that's what I am...

Honestly, though, I was never afraid of monsters as a kid.  I was more afraid of bad people.  Monsters were from fun stories and weren't real, but Mom's watched Law & Order and those real-life crime shows for as far back as I can remember.  Brrrr....

[Witchyjoshy]

I liked monsters.  I didn't need a night light growing up

At the same time, however, one thing I remember scaring me was looking out a bathroom window and seeing the frosted glass distort lights outside into glowing faces, like of clowns and stuff.  It was entirely unnerving and made me scared to go into the bathroom with the lights off.

I was also scared of a few of my toys.  In particular, potato in a sack, which is essentially a giant plush tomato with a face and a sack that it wears like a sleeping bag.  I HATED THAT THING.  Every time I entered a room with it, it felt like it was staring at me, so my parents had to move it face down so that it wasn't looking at me.

Come to think of it, my greatest fear was being looked at by things.  I wonder if that's indicative of anything.

[ironbite]

I ate my boogie man when I was 12.

[Her3tiK]

I don't think I really had a boogeyman as a child. Part of that might be because I shared a room with my brother until I was 17, so I was never really alone, but nothing ever really got to me that way unless I'd been watching a horror movie or something. I've always had vague images of shadows crossing walls and ceilings after turning the lights off for the night, but they always moved with my eyes, so I knew it was more or less the same thing as that annoying light that follows your around after a camera flash.

Now that I'm older, on the other hand, I find that I've got this intense fear that one of my close friends is going to get beaten or raped. It doesn't help that most of my closest friends have been women, or how of them have already experienced at least one of those in their lives (or that I've had to shelter one in high school because of it). Nothing else really gets my blood boiling like the thought of that, or a tear-filled phone call at night. I can barely even write this post without those memories making me want to rip someone's throat out. Maybe this isn't quite the answer you're looking for Hades, but my nightmares very rarely involve threats to my well-being; it's always someone close to me that I won't be able to protect or help until the damage has been done.

[Sleepy]

I swear the idea of being hunted down by something you can't possibly hope to fight evokes a very primal fear that has us instinctively shitting our pants. Hell, I remember as a kid playing Banjo-Kazooie, the enemy I hated the most was that motherfucking shark. You couldn't fight it and you couldn't outrun it, the only thing you could do was get the fuck out of the water before he caught up to you. Even though from a gameplay perspective in most cases you could easily tank the damage long enough to escape and even back then I understood that a simple game over is hardly a reason to get one's trousers in a twist, it still invoked a deeply hardwired by millions of years of evolution sense of "DO NOT FUCKING WANT". I was hardly the only one either, pretty much everyone I knew who was my age and played that game had very similar thoughts on the matter.

The shark in Banjo-Kazooie scared the ever-living fuck out of me the first time I encountered it. And all the subsequent times.

Anyway, my boogeyman is just a dark figure similar to this guy (if you're wondering, that's the Shadow Man from LSD). He's a more abstract shadowy figure, thinner but tall, that lurks in the dark and shows no skin, no face. He's silent, and rather than chasing me like villains often do, he slowly floats toward me and impairs my movement as I try to escape. He lives everywhere, often appearing when I'm exhausted, and again in my dreams.

What frightens me the most is what occurs when he finally catches me. There's no brutal torture with weapons, no kidnapping or any sort of combat. I simply die when he passes through me. My entire world turns to complete blackness, and my consciousness is gone shortly after that. It's the worst feeling I've ever experienced. Lately I often jerk awake in bed unable to see due to the darkness in the room, so I claw myself as proof that I'm still alive. I have a nasty fear of sudden death lately.

I can't protect myself from him. Sure, I can make sure the house is well-lit so he has nowhere to lurk, but if he doesn't get me in real life, he'll haunt my dreams.

[The Right Honourable Mlle Antéchrist]

I never referred to him specifically as "The Boogeyman", but:

What does he look like?

I always envisioned him as either looking a bit like the creepy old man from the second Poltergeist film, or, when I was really young (before school age), just a greyish-brown, lumpy, vaguely humanoid thing.

Where does he live?

In some dark, hidden world during the day, but he'd come into our world and hide in the shadows of your bedroom at night.

What does he do to you if he gets you?

He'd take you somewhere bad, leaving your bed empty for your parents to find in the morning. My imagination never expounded upon what this bad place was, beyond that fact that it was dark, cold, and impossible to escape from, and you'd never see the people you loved again if he managed to bring you there.

How do you protect yourself from being gotten?

Having the lights on, hiding under your covers, making him think you were asleep (he couldn't get you if he didn't know you were awake) or not believing in him.

I never truly believed in him, since my parents and the adults around me didn't use him as a threat when I was bad (they preferred the old "I'm calling Santa!" trick), but the idea of a monster coming to take me away during the night still scared me.

[Jebediah]

I have a cousin who has a deformed hand. He's missing a few fingers and the ones he has are fused together. When we were younger, he would tell us (my siblings and other cousins) that the boogeyman bit off his fingers. I never truly believed in the boogeyman, but when I thought about him, I always imagined a shapeless blob with razor sharp teeth who bit off body parts.