Ghoul gang assemble! Thanks so much for listening to the latest episode of Small Town Spooky, the only podcast where I attempt to combine a passion for folklore, research, and reading unmoderated internet forums into a coherent narrative that will scare the hell out of you—or, failing that, lull you gently into a fitful sleep. Today we’re getting weird and talking
about the origins of a common childhood fear, with a side of cryptids and creepypasta.
I just wanted to shout out the people who’ve been streaming the show--we’re over 460 downloads and that’s huge! Tell your friends, tell your neighbours, tell that interesting-looking person you take the bus with about Small Town Spooky so that we can get it up to 500! And maybe even 1000, if I dare to dream. And if you haven’t, I would truly appreciate it with all my strange, spooky heart if you’d leave a 5-star rating and review on Apple Podcasts or anywhere else you’re able to, so that more people can find this little spooky show.
Now to set the scene for today’s episode: Scholastic Book Fairs aren’t something you’d normally associate with horror. In North America in the 90s, the Scholastic company would release a paper catalogue with school-approved books listed by grade and age that you could bring home to your parents. You could pre-order books and the company would bring them, along with a selection of other titles, and set them up on shelves or tables in the cafeteria or gym or what have you and you could browse around. They still do it today, apparently, and that makes me glad. When I was a kid, Scholastic Book Fair Day was probably the best day at school next to Pancake Breakfast day, which they always served with that weird and delicious McDonald’s “orange” juice. It’s probably unsurprising to hear that I was an avid reader as a kid and read pretty much anything fantasy- or sci-fi I could get my grubby little hands on. One of those books, brought to said grubby hands courtesy of a Scholastic Book Fair, was Bruce Coville’s Book of Nightmares.
Bruce Coville is an R. L. Stine contemporary who wrote some children’s fiction, but mostly
dabbled in scifi and fantasy for kids, releasing classics like My Teacher is An Alien, The Drangonslayers and a slew of anthologies like Bruce Coville’s Book of Magic, Bruce Coville’s Book of Aliens, Bruce Coville’s Book of Ghosts and the one that was about to ruin my third-grade life: Bruce Coville’s Book of Nightmares. The title story of this anthology is There’s Nothing Under the Bed, the involved saga of an average white suburban kid who one day wakes up to find that the grey nothingness under his bed, which he’s lived with all his life, has lately transformed into a swirling portal—ever since his bully of a cousin pushed his cat under there, and the cat came back weird.
Book of Nightmares isn’t in print anymore from what I can tell and I’m about to spoil the ending. You can either skip ahead about a minute and read the story in the digitized copy of the book on the Internet Archive, or deal with the disappointment now. The boy eventually gets dragged through the portal under his bed, abducted by nightmare monsters into an alternate dimension that he can’t come back from, where these creatures pass back and forth between their dimension and ours, distributing nightmares to children all over the world.
“[...] I climb the ladders of nightmare and come up underneath your bed. [...] And once I’ve risen up beneath your bed, I lie there in the darkness beneath you and whisper to you while you sleep[...]. Why don’t I try to run away one of those nights? If I told you, you might never sleep again. And I need you to sleep. After all, if you don’t sleep, how can I do my job?”
The boy is held hostage, an unwilling carrier of nightmares from his new world to ours, until the day a new “weak spot” appears under another child’s bed and he can drag them down into misery and release himself from his involuntary servitude.
As an eight-year-old, this was the most terrifying thing I had ever read. Could it happen to me? If not at my house, under my bed, then what about at a sleepover? I spent sleepless nights for years agonizing over the possibility that I could be next. This story stuck with me like a mental burr, and I think about it still today, even though I don’t find the prospect quite as terrifying as I once did (I tend to get stuck more on the bureaucracy of the nightmare realm—do they have some kind of internal HR? Why is there such a labour shortage there? Maybe they need to offer more competitive wages and increase their benefits package). But I do remember being absolutely horrified at the possibility of an unknowable horror lurking in the dark corners of my room, or in the small space between the bedframe and the floor, waiting to spirit me away from right under my parents’ unsuspecting noses.
Like so many former kids transfixed by terror at the thought of something waiting for me in the dark, I want to know: where did this primordial fear come from? And is there anything linking it to real threats? In this episode I pull apart the threads of the monster under the bed narrative, share some urban legends and ghost stories from the under-the-bed spaces in some small towns, and attempt to answer the question I’ve been asking since I was old enough to tie my own shoelaces: is there something scary hiding under the bed?
Now let’s ghost into it.
Trigger Warning
Trigger warnings for this episode include mentions of child abduction, accidental death by drowning and falling, cannibalism, stabbing, and skinning humans and animals.
There’s Something Moving in the Dark
“The monster did not care about clichés when he contacted me
From under the bed. I am here, he said, using a voice in my mind,
And I will in all likelihood destroy you with teeth like ivory knives.”
This excerpt from the “The One-Time Monster”, a poem by Michael Bazzet first published in the Winter 2015 issue of The North American Review, exemplifies the ubiquity of the “monster under the bed” cultural concept, seen anywhere from literary reviews to children’s books. In fact, most children go through a phase where they believe something unspeakable is lurking in the dark of their room, whether it’s under the bed, in a closet, or in a particularly menacing unlit corner. Fear of the dark and fear of something imagined can both be traced back to the earliest stages of human development. But what fuels these fears, and gives them the familiar shape of something lying in wait in the dark?
[Image: A four-panel Calvin & Hobbes comic. P1: Calvin, tucked in bed with Hobbes, says "Any monsters under my bed tonight?!" P2: Monsters under Calvin's bed say "Nope!" "No!" "Uh-uh!" P3: Calvin stands on his bed and yell "Well there'd better not be! I'd hate to have to torch one with my flame thrower!" P4: Hobbes asks "You have a flame thrower??" and Calvin, now lying in bed, replies "They lie, I lie."© Bill Watterson]
The development of fear in humans from infancy has been studied extensively. Understanding fear might give some insight into its specific function, or help us understand why some people seem to have no fear at all, or others, struggling with phobias and anxiety, have too much. In his book Not So Different, exploring parallel behaviours between humans and animals, Nathan Lents writes: “Fear is one of our most basic emotions. It is the most automatic, instantaneous, and difficult to control.” Lents describes the “psychoevolutionary theory” that fear is “one of a very small number of simple preprogrammed emotions in humans”—sometimes called “primal” emotions—along with joy, anger, trust, surprise, anticipation, stress and sadness.
Some clinicians posit that infants are born with two innate fears: loud noises, and falling. Researchers have looked for metrics to measure infants’ fear response to everything from scary masks, snakes, strangers, and jacks-in-the-box. Citing a longitudinal study that began in the 1980s, professors from the University of South Carolina charted the progression of fear responses in children from ages 0 to 14+ like this: from the ages of 0 to 6 months, loud noises, sudden movements, and loss of support would provoke a fear response; from 7 to 12 months, strangers, the sudden appearance of large objects and loud noises; from 1 year, separation from a parent, strangers appearing, injuries, and toilets were cause for alarm. At the two-year mark, researchers observed in children a fear response to the dark—along with large animals, large objects, and sudden changes in personal environment. The fear of dark persists all the way up to 12 years old, along with a rotating roster of other things like ghosts, monsters, being alone, thunder and lightning, wild animals, snakes, being hurt, being kidnapped, guns or other weapons, being sick, bad grades and tests.
[Image: Black & white photo showing a close-up of a child lying in bed, touching their face with an anxious expression. Source: Annie Spratt via Unsplash]
Before the age of 8, children start to think and articulate more fully, using symbolic images and imagined play scenarios to learn more about the world around them. That growing awareness can prompt their imaginations to fill in the blanks based on what little information they have. Younger children struggle more with distinguishing between what they know is real, and what they imagine. Children between the ages of 4 and 7 might imagine a monster or a ghost or something else moving in the dark, prompting a true fear response based on their anticipation of the monster hurting them or taking away their caregiver. They might know the monster is in their head, but the fear of what it might do feels very real. Some children are more attuned to the separation between fantasy and reality. They may be able to say, after being presented with a pretend scenario in which they encounter a frightening creature, “I don’t need to be afraid because monsters don’t exist.”
A child’s level of fear in the face of a “fear object”, like the monster they imagine is under their bed, is based on the child’s own understanding of or confidence in their capacity to address or mitigate whatever threat, injury, pain or loss the fear object represents. According to The Cambridge Handbook of Play, kids playing pretend may hold the key to developing the cognitive ability to conquer their fears. Children from all walks of life engage in “pretend play”, though what they play-act depends on social and cultural context (Nicolopoulou, 2019). Imaginary play allows kids to create scenarios or situations that are exciting or slightly unsafe, perhaps in order to train for future experiences where they might be confronted with something really scary. Playing pretend danger might help them prep for the real thing. And while playing, kids do get themselves into precarious positions—climbing too high, wading into water too deep, setting things on fire—all in the pursuit of the fantasy, of the adventure (Gray, 2019). They must then get themselves out of trouble, whether real or imagined.
Fears change as kids get older. Studies of fear in children from North America, South America, Europe, Africa, China and Australia show that young children are more predisposed to a fear of the dark. The study of fear in children is complex and is almost as old as the field of modern psychology. The development of “normal fear”—that is, fear that is rational, age-appropriate, transitional, and does not interfere with an individual’s everyday functioning—is of great interest to researchers who want to understand how phobias, anxiety and other fear-based pathologies develop. Eleonora Gullone’s paper reviewing over a century’s worth of research into “the developmental patterns of normal fear” cites a survey undertaken in 1897 for the American Journal of Psychology with over 1000 respondents. Findings from this study showed that children ages 4 to 15 reported a fear of darkness that began to taper off as they entered mid-to-late adolescence.
Studies spanning the 1930s to the 1980s confirmed this, with children between the ages of 6 and 10 reporting fears of imaginary creatures and darkness as most intense. Differences between the binary sexes were of interest to researchers; younger girls reported being more afraid of the dark, while boys were more preoccupied with what might be lurking in it—“nightmares, imaginary creatures including monsters, gorillas, and dinosaurs.” A 1945 study out of Michigan contrasted the differences between children living in urban areas with those in the country: of the almost 600 respondents, aged 4 to 16, the most common fears were animal-related (bears, snakes, tigers, elephants and horses) with rural children skewing higher on these, while urban children “more frequently report[ed] fears of supernatural phenomena”.
A landmark study in 1996 comparing cross-cultural fears in American, Australian, Chinese and Nigerian children aged 7 to 16 revealed the average fears were related more to injury and death than the unknown. Chinese children were more likely to fear “bears, ghosts and spooky things” than the other country’s respondents. Younger children from Nigeria and Australia were more acutely afraid of the “unknown”. In a 2007 survey of over 200 Australian children, researchers asked subjects to “tell me some of the things you are scared or worried about”. Thirty-nine percent of the subjects described fears associated with “the dark” or fear of animals, with children aged 6 to 8 “significantly more fearful” of monsters than those aged 9 to 12. In a 2008 study in the U.K. surveying nearly 8000 children aged 5 to 16, “the most commonly reported fears” included “animals” and “the dark”. The study showed that the younger the child, the more likely they were “to have fears of the dark, the natural environment, loud noises” and “imagined supernatural beings”. Younger children, especially girls and children from Bangladeshi, Pakistani and Black African families, “were at least three times more likely to have fears of imaginary or supernatural beings than white children”.
Where most children outgrow their fears of the dark and the scary things that might be lurking in it, a 1990 study done in New Zealand showed evidence that “autistic children were more fearful of thunderstorms, dark places, large crowds, dark rooms or closets, going to bed in the dark, and closed places” than their similarly-aged peers. In 2012, researchers from the State University of New York Department of Psychology affirmed that children diagnosed with Autism Spectrum disorder tend to have higher rates of anxiety and specific phobias than other children their age, and from a small test group determined that fear of the dark was one of the ten most common fears self-reported by autistic children or their parents. Neurodivergent children are at higher risk for other fear-related disorders like anxiety and depression. Studies of environments where toddlers’ caregivers display depressive or anxious tendencies show that young children’s “normal fear” can sublimate into chronic anxiety and depression. Young children with sleep-related anxiety may grow up to struggle with general anxiety or depression.
Before humans adapted the use of artificial light like fire, the dark would have been an unnerving substance, concealing as it might dangers like pitfalls and predatory animals. Human eyes lack the amount of rod receptors necessary to see well in the dark or low light. The dark would have been dangerous for humans, who “rely on vision above all other senses”. Nathan Lents draws a parallel between humans’ fear of the dark and nocturnal animals’ photophobia, or “fear of light”. Certain nocturnal animal species, exposed to artificial light in a lab with their neural responses monitored, have shown a measurable, neurological fear response to bright lights, implying that they have evolved an adaptive fear of the light, likely to protect them from predators who have difficulty seeing in the dark. Similarly, humans’ fear of the dark could have evolved as an evolutionary “tool”, to keep our earliest ancestors from venturing into danger.
Our ancestors spent a lot of time in the dark, and I’m not just talking about the ones from the Pleistocene era, although they’re included. Archaeological evidence suggests that Homo erectus began creating, controlling and using fire deliberately as a tool some one million years ago, a full 4 million years (by the most conservative estimate) after the first hominin species emerged. “The role of darkness is hugely apparent in the archaeological record,” writes Robert Hensey in The Archaeology of Darkness.
“Many artefacts were intentionally deposited in places that exclude light, not only caves and megalithic monuments, but also barrows, cists, pits, tree throw holes and countless other site types, or simply buried directly into the earth.”
Grime’s Graves (that’s the neolithic site in Norfolk, England, not a private cemetery where the Canadian singer and former partner of Elon Musk buried her music career alongside her dignity) is one of the oldest and largest underground mining sites in Britain, used for mining flint. Work in these dark, enclosed spaces would have only been possible with the use of some artificial light, like torches.
In North America and Europe, the industrial revolution heralded advances in lighting residential homes and public places. By some estimates, over 60% of Europeans and Americans today—those living in populated, urban areas—don’t see “real darkness” or what “night” looked like for people just 300 years ago. In his book At Day’s Close, author A. Roger Ekirch gives an account of what those living in Europe and America from the late Middle ages to the early nineteenth century thought about the night—mainly, to quote an author also very interested in Late Middle Age Europe, that it was “dark and full of terrors”. Accounts from the 1600s describe black country landscapes teeming with shadow and mystery. The tenebrous nighttime hours in rural areas were said to be the dominion of Satan, as they “closely resembled Hell [...] where fire gave no light and the ‘foulest of fumes’ blinded the eyes.” From the 1500s to the 1700s, popular opinion held that people were “more likely, after dusk, to fall sick and even die”, with theories circulated that night air could be toxic, or in some instances, even fatal. People traveling by night, even over short distances, were subject to injury, death and disappearance, swallowed up by the dark moors or drowned in rivers whose depth and speed they misjudged. Horses spooked easily at night, throwing riders. In 1739, a fifteen-year-old girl in Aberdeenshire died when, walking through a churchyard at night, she took a shortcut and tumbled down into a freshly dug grave.
In towns and cities, buildings built close together made a haven for shadows to cluster in sheltered streets and alleyways. With a lack of streetlamps to light the way home, residents were susceptible to stumbling over cracked cobblestones, falling prey to muggers, or slipping off unsecured bridges into rivers and canals. Streams of refuse— mostly human waste—flooded walkways from above and below, as inhabitants emptied their chamber pots directly into the street from second-storey windows. Poor light in the home could be even more dangerous at night, with people taking trips and spills down the stairs, lighting bedclothes on fire with candles left burning, or in the case of one five-year-old girl in 1649 New England, getting out of bed one night while her parents were out, only to drop through an opening in the floor to the cellar. She fell into an uncovered well and drowned before her parents returned home.
But for all the physical dangers represented by the dark, none were considered so fearful as those supernatural beings ensconced in shadow, waiting for their chance to pounce on an unwary child.
Of Monsters and Haunted Dreams
While books like Monsters Under the Bed and Other Childhood Fears: Helping Your Child Overcome Anxieties, Fears, and Phobias and countless helpful articles from parenting websites aim to help modern parents coax children through their nighttime fears, adults throughout history have routinely employed frightening tales to keep kids in line. Children in rural settler communities in North America and in the European countryside in the 1700s spent a lot of time unsupervised, and many did not attend school. Some children might be let out at night for small, invented errands; a parenting book from 1748 encouraged parents to send their children out in the dark “as if by accident” to complete a short task, in order to build up their courage.
To ensure some extra measure of safety, parents might fill their children’s impressionable young heads with all manner of terrifying stories. The Nataska and Soyok Wuhti, figures in Hopi First Nations mythology, played a part in a traditional coming-of-age ritual for Hopi children. Adults dressed in cloaks and fearsome masks play the parts of these Kachina or “ogre” spirits, with long, straggling hair and blood-smeared knives, “visiting” three times a year in a community ritual and demanding gifts of food and proof of children’s good behaviour, lest they kidnap or eat them. Parents give the adults playing kachina reports of their children’s bad behaviour in advance. When the kachina admonish them for specific bad behaviour, the children get the impression that they’re being surveilled by supernatural beings. Inuit parents letting children play alone caution them to be wary of the Qallupilluit, a sea creature who lives near the water at the edge of the ice and lies in wait to drown unsuspecting children, serving the invaluable purpose of scaring Inuit children away from the dangers of the shore.
Nineteenth century German legends warned children of the Nickert, a “small, gray” creature that “lives in the water” and “has a great desire for human children”. From the same time period in Japan, accounts circulated of children being kidnapped from their homes or prefectures by yamaotoko—part-human mountain dwellers with “glittering eyes” and long, straggly hair, tall and covered in fur, or perhaps tree bark and leaves. One story tells of a young girl who went up into the mountains to gather chestnuts and never returned. A few years later, a hunter met the same girl on a mountain road, who said she had been abducted by a terrifying monster who could take on the appearance of a man, except his eyes, which were a “terrible colour”. The hunter tried to bring her back to her family when the man in question appeared and snatched her up again. He was a tengu, a creature who haunts the high mountains of Japan, “with the wings and beak of a kite, tiger’s claws and oddly glittering eyes.” The mammā, an ape-like creature described in written and oral folklore from the Brahui people of modern-day Pakistan, was said to descend from the mountains and abduct willful children to carry back to his cave (Claus, 2003).
As a preventative measure against bad behaviour, parents invoked images of spirits and monsters who preyed on misbehaving children. In England, Ireland, Scotland and the British Isles, mischievous goblins and fairies might spirit away a child in the night and leave an enchanted block of wood in its place. Settlers who came to North America repeated these stories and reshaped them; fairies in Newfoundland might “bite off your toes if you refuse to cover your feet in bed” or tickle a child until they went mad with giggling (Smith, 2004). Ojibwe and Abenaki tradition spoke of “little people”' called puk-wudjie or memegwesiwak who lured children into lakes or over cliffs. Bogeys or bogeymen (the root thought to come from the Middle English “bogge” or “bugge”, indicating something frightening) abounded in and out of the home, waiting to prey on children who didn’t mind their elders. A girl in seventeenth-century Ghent was terrified by the story she’d been told of a “man with a long coat” who stalked the streets on a ceaseless search for firstborn children to kill (Ekirch, 2006). Der schwarze Mann was a shadowy, inhuman thing that lurked in dark corners or under beds, waiting for the children it would carry away. L’uomo nero in Italy is a man dressed in a black coat so long you cannot see his legs. Parents sing their misbehaving children a lullaby beseeching l’uomo to take the ragazzi away for a whole year, returning them when they’re better behaved.
In South America and many Spanish-speaking countries, the Sack Man, el hombre del saco, is a terrifying asustaniños who carries a bag in which to stuff misbehaving children. He is also
called El Coco or El Cuco, or sometimes Sacamantecas or El Silbón. In all aspects he is a gaunt-faced man dressed in rags; in some legends he whistles a tune that chills the blood of the children he is coming for, in others he hides under their beds at night and snatches them up. Some legends have it that he eats the children he takes; others that skins them and trims their fat, because fresh grease made from tender children works best for oiling car axles and other machines. In Quebec, French children are warned of Le Bonhomme Sept Heures, a sinister figure with a shabby hat, carrying a cane and a bag, who will abduct any children not in their beds by seven o’clock. In the Netherlands and some parts of Germany, the Butzemann, meaning “scarecrow”, is a hairy man or a demonic figure who will take away wayward kinder. Tonton Macoutes, a folktale figure from Haiti, puts children in his makout or basket and eats them alive.
Brazilian children hear of La Cuca, a similar figure to El Cuco (though female). Antije Somers frightened children in colonial South Africa, a cross-dressing man who appears in a dress to catch children out late at night based on a real case of a flasher reported in 1866; in Germany, the “Rye-Mother” or “Grain-Wife” was said to hide in grain fields, snatching up any children who passed by. In Afghani Muslim folkore, Madar-i-Al is the mother of evil spirits, a female supernatural being with “glaring eyes” who comes at night to kill babies in their cribs. Parents invoke her name to scare children into behaving (Claus, 2003). The Quileute (Quillayute) First Nations legend of a giantess cannibal, sister of the spirit who created the world, gives the reason why good Quileute children “don’t cry anymore”. Wearing a short dress made of snakeskin and carrying a large basket, she roamed the woods, listening for the sound of children crying. Hearing one, she would emerge from the woods, put it in her basket filled with sticky pitch, and later make a snack of it. The Kawkiutl and Alsea First Nations have a similar story of the dzonokwa, “a hideous looking giantess who carried children away to her home deep in the forest” and would sometimes bring nightmares to those who misbehaved.
Pop Culture and Creepy Pasta
If the monster isn’t hiding under the bed, maybe it’s concealing itself in a child’s dreams, ready to emerge when their head hits the pillow. Pop culture depictions have repurposed and remixed the monster under the bed in film and media. The 1989 animated feature Nemo: Adventures in Slumberland scared the hell out of me (again, my parents were really not as good as they ought to have been at keeping frightening media away from my dumb little eyes). In the film, Nemo, a little boy, travels to Slumberland where he is tricked by a clown (!) into unlocking a door that contains an undulating, terrifying nightmare.
That same year, Little Monsters was released. The film starred Fred Savage and Howie Mandel in full monster-makeup. A more classic depiction of the imaginary monster under the bed, the plot (here’s your last chance to avoid spoilers!) starts out as a fun imagining of what would happen if you befriended the monster and discovered a portal to a magical world under your bed. The film devolves into childhood horror when Fred Savage’s character Brian discovers the truth: Maurice, the monster under his bed, has “befriended” him as a way to turn Brian into a monster, as all monsters were once normal children who were turned into monsters by the ones lurking under their beds. Ten years later, an entirely new generation of kids were ready to be traumatized by the Disney Channel original movie Don’t Look Under the Bed, which posited that (again, spoiler alert!) boogeymen were personally assigned. Children who left their imaginary friends behind were at risk of being haunted by the former figments, who devolved into boogeymen if abandoned. Three years later, in 2001, Pixar gave us a look beyond the veil beneath the bed with Monsters, Inc., an explanatory look at why monsters scare children, through a decidedly monster-apologist lens.
Grown-up horror has tackled the childhood bug-a-boo, too. The Boogeyman, a schlocky, gorey slasher from 1980 offers the thought that the past always comes back to haunt us, and that parents may unwittingly be setting up their children to pay for their mistakes. In the film, the titular creep is actually the spirit of the heroine Lacey’s mother’s dead ex-boyfriend, who was murdered by Lacey’s kid brother. The Boogeyman appears in Lacey’s nightmares, tormenting her, and passes into the physical world through mirrors, wreaking murderous havoc on anyone who gets in his way. In 1984, a new nightmare man appeared on the scene: Freddy Krueger. Again, I can’t stress enough how much I’m going to spoil the Nightmare on Elm Street films.
In an incredibly interesting paper for the Studies in Popular Culture journal titled “The Bogeyman of Your Nightmares: Freddy Krueger’s Folkloric Roots,” Karra Shimabukuro dissects the similarities between Freddy Krueger and the folkloric figure of the “boogeyman” or any figure meant to keep kids in line by menacing them into good behaviour. Shimabukuro writes that what makes Freddy Krueger so terrifying is how he acts on the reality of his victims without being acted on by their reality. They can’t kill him or escape him because he exists only in their nightmares—and he uses their fears to punish and terrorize them. Freddy Krueger too represents the “weight of the past”, representing “the hidden crime that Nancy’s parents committed”. Just as in the cautionary tales of folklore, the story of Freddy Krueger presents a lesson to be learned: what you try to bury will not stay hidden. It will always come to light.
Just like the child who says “I’m not afraid of monsters because they aren’t real”, Krueger is banished by Nancy in the original Nightmare On Elm Street when she states, “This is just a dream.” In the 2014 Australian indie horror The Babadook, we see a mother on the brink of madness, refusing to accept that what she and her son are experiencing is real. Again there’s a thread of unacknowledged trauma: in the film (spoilers!) Amelia gives birth to her son in the hospital after she is involved in a car crash that leaves her husband dead. Her son, Sam, and she herself live this claustrophobic little life where neither of them openly talk about the trauma of his death, and when Sam starts acting out and seeing the terrifying figure of The Babadook, an impossibly tall man wearing a long black coat and a dark top hat, Amelia immediately tries to shut it down. Eventually Amelia is overcome and possessed by the spirit of the Babadook, acting out her darkest impulses and terrorizing her son before he brings her back to herself. In the end, the Babadook isn’t vanquished so much as contained; locking him in the dark basement, Amelia feeds him earthworms in an attempt to keep his black fury in check.
That same year, the boogeyman for the internet set stepped his overstretched limbs and pale, blank face into the limelight. In May of 2014, two twelve-year-old girls in Wisconsin lured another into the woods and assaulted her with a knife. The girl survived, and when her attackers were taken in for questioning, they asserted that they had done it for “Slender Man”, a legendary figure who slipped his way into the heart of Creepypasta, that is, a genre
of horror media for the terminally online, which takes its name from “copypasta”, a bastardization of “copy/paste” and a term used to describe how stories are circulated online—copied and pasted from one email, forum or social media site to another.
Slender Man was the creation of SomethingAwful.net user Victor Surge, who manipulated real, rather innocuous photographs of children with a blurry, slender figure dressed in a black suit and tie in the background. The figure seemed to be extending tentacle-like appendages from the center trunk of their body, and the photographs were captioned in Surge’s 2009 forum post to imply that they’d been “recovered” from files of an official government body, for consideration in a thread where users tried to create paranormal images that seemed like they could be real. This was the thread that launched a thousand ships—the ships in question including a YouTube series done in a found-footage style where the creator’s friend goes “missing” and their disappearance seems to connect to Slender Man, a Minecraft character spin-off called Enderman and several Slender Man webgames. Slender Man was a boogeyman for a new age; spinning a web of increasingly dense mythology around himself as the story made the rounds online. He was once a man. He predates human history. He compels people to violence. He abducts children. He dwells in the shadows, in the moments before major tragedies strike unsuspecting communities, or perhaps in the deepest parts of the darkest forests.
The specificities of Slender Man were vague enough that they encouraged those who interacted with the myth to embroider it, turn it into something more complex and gratifying in a way that has been compared to the mythos of Cthulu, the invention of noted racist and American horror writer H. P. Lovecraft, which has been fleshed out by multiple artists, game designers, writers and others. Lovecraft wrote extensively in the fictional universe of his imagining. Several of his stories take place in a realm called the “dreamlands”, where horrible monsters called “night-gaunts” resided; these were taken directly from Lovecraft’s own, real-life nightmares; bat-winged beasts who, he dreamed, would snatch him out of bed by the stomach and carry him over “dead and horrible cities” and “mountains with needle-sharp peaks” that would later form the basis for the terrifying landscapes of his stories.
Turning nightmares into the stuff of creepypasta, the internet is rife with anecdotes about inexplicable encounters with entities in their childhood. A commenter on a Reddit thread describes the imaginary friend he had as a kid, who lived in an antique dresser in his home. The kid described the imaginary friend to his parents, calling him ‘Peter’ and even drawing them a picture of the figment, who was tiny and wizened and had unusually large hands with very long fingers. His father and his uncle took the dresser out of the house and burned it. As it turned out, the dresser was a hand-me-down that his uncle had had in his room as a kid...where an imaginary friend named ‘Peter’ lived. Thirty years before, ‘Peter’ and the uncle used to spend all their time together until the uncle started having horrible night terrors centered around his (presumably former) imaginary friend. All across the web, forums devoted to “true” ghost encounters catalogue childhood terrors: a 10-year old in Texas feels their leg being pulled by an invisible presence under their bed. A tween in New Jersey hears heavy breathing from beneath the mattress. In Wisconsin, a 5th grader sees a hand emerge from under her sister’s bed, only to check under the sheets for their prank-playing sibling and see that no one is there. In a TikTok video from early 2021, a father shares footage of his toddler being “pulled under the bed” by what he thinks could be a ghost.
Before creepypasta, we had urban legends. In “The Licked Hand”, a story that remixes the “monster under the bed” story for those adults (and kids) more concerned with B&Es than Mike Wasowskis, a young girl is staying home alone for the first time. Her parents remind her to lock up the house and keep the dog close to her for safety while they’re out. The girl does as she’s told—but fatefully forgets to latch the one small window at the back of the basement. She goes to bed, fearful of the news report stating there’s a killer on the loose in her neighborhood. Later that night, she hears the slow drip of a tap somewhere in the house. Remembering the news about the killer, the girl is too afraid to get up and check if the noise is simply coming from a leaky faucet. Instead, she reaches underneath her bed, feeling for her dog who normally sleeps there. A warm tongue licks her hand and, relieved that her doggy companion is protecting her, the girl rolls over and goes to sleep. The next morning, her parents arrive as predicted. When the girl is eating breakfast, her mother comments that she was surprised the girl left the dog out all night. The girl, confused, says that couldn’t be right—when the father enters, white-faced, and says he found a man’s shoeprints in the basement, and the basement window wide open. The police arrive in short order and confirm that the escaped killer must have been in the house. The girl goes up to her room and finds a note underneath her bed that reads “Humans have tongues, too.”
Some version of this story has been in circulation since the early 1900s, and that’s the least-gorey version; almost every other one has some combination of the killer skinning or disemboweling the dog, and/or murdering the girl.
A thematically similar creepypasta story, a version of which appears on r/NoSleep, describes a child lying in bed when a deep voice speaks to them from the floor underneath them. Terrified, the child asks if the monster under their bed is there to scare them—the entity responds, “I’m here for the man in your closet”. The man in question turns out to be a killer who’s broken in and hidden in the child’s bedroom; upon being outed by the monster, he flees, leaving the child unharmed. I’ve also heard this version with the positions reversed—the monster in the closet reveals itself to the child, warning it that there’s a stranger under the child’s bed. In the creepypasta classic “Bedtime” by Michael Whitehouse, the narrator recalls an event in his childhood where something gets into the empty bottom bunk of his bed, thrashing around in the sheets, unseen, as the boy’s terror increases; over a series of visitations, the entity breathes loudly and prods at the boy through the slats underneath the top bunk, terrorizing him through the night. And one of my favourites is this incredibly short, anonymous creepypasta that’s been recirculated thousands of times, which I’ve adapted here:
A father goes into his son’s room to tuck him into bed.
“Daddy,” says the boy, “can you check under my bed for monsters?”
Chuckling, the father reassures him. “Alright! But don’t be scared, I won’t let him hurt you.”
Leaning down, the father is shocked when his eyes lock with his son’s—face wet with tears and cowering in fear from his hiding place beneath the bed.
“Daddy,” whispers his son, “there’s somebody on my bed.”
Outro
What makes a child afraid differs between cultural and social contexts. Children who sleep in rooms with family may not experience the same fear as a child who goes to sleep in their bed alone in a dark room. A monster for one child might be a fearful, slavering beast from the woods; where another might envision a shaggy humanoid coming down from the mountains; or yet another, a shapeless mass haunting their hallway. Children with parents who try to “prepare them” for the real dangers of life out in the world may find that as adults, they’re better equipped to confront the unexplainable. Or maybe it’s the very thought of all the terrifying things contained in the unknown that still keeps them awake at night.
You’d think I’d have trouble sleeping, with all the legends and scary stories I’m reading, but it seems like the things that kept me up as a kid have lost some of their potency. I thought the parallels between different cultures’ conceptions of the boogeyman (or boogeywoman, or boogeyperson) were so fascinating. You can see the threads of what parents are getting at in scaring their children—trying to keep them away from dangerous natural areas, like the ice floes on the ocean or the woods, or encouraging them to be leery of strangers. Some of the stories about them reflect real historical anxieties, like Antije Somers starting out life as a drunk flasher harassing a particular neighbourhood, then growing into a legend. The Sack-Man of Spain using children’s fat for axle grease is also a reflection of anxieties in Spain at the time surrounding the Industrial Revolution. The Tonton Macoute of Haiti have real-life links to state secret police who committed horrifying atrocities and would have represented a real danger to Haitian children in the 80s. And a fascinating sidebar I tried really hard to stay away from was the way the European witch hunts of the Late Middle Ages factored heavily into bedtime stories told to children, to keep them from staying out at night or behaving badly.
[Image: Black & white of a child lying on the ground in the fetal position, illuminated by a small rectangle of light. Photo by Mali Desha via Unsplash]
Digging into the study of fear and trying to understand how it develops in kids has been really eye-opening. In the book I mentioned, Afraid of the Dark by Nathan Lents, he differentiates between “startle fear” and “sustained fear”, two types of fear that are pretty much what they sound like. “Startle fear” is what happens when you see something unexpected—something moves into your field of vision, spooks you. Sustained fear is more cerebral, less a reflex. Most of the time when you’re startled, you’ll flinch—blink—recoil. When you’re in “sustained fear” mode, the higher centres of your brain jump in, with the amygdala, which mediates fear, and allows you to apply “reasoning” to your fear. You have time to think about it. The example Lents gives is moving through a dark room—you take your time, assess the shadows. Is something moving in there? What could it be? Is it dangerous? Can you get away in time? Will you have to fight it?
Startle fear produced this burst of catecholamines—hormones like epinephrine and dopamine—in the brain. It tenses and then releases, and the come-down is slightly euphoric. Sustained fear is uncomfortable. You start freaking out, running through all these potential threats in your mind. You can’t know what you should be afraid of, and that unknown is, ultimately, less terrifying than the things your mind tries to fill it in with. That’s the key to these monsters and bogeymen that we terrify children with in cultures around the world. They’re mutable; they resist being defined, categorized, known, and that’s what makes them so alarming. Some of them change shape. Some of them offer treats, only to hand out tricks. They might speak like someone you can trust, a friend, only to reveal themselves as more dangerous than any foe you could have imagined. They get in your head, and leverage your own fears against you. They confirm the worst: that your irrational fears are rational, that they have a source, that the thing you’re most afraid of knows about you and is coming, reaching out for you in the dark. The monster you imagine is always going to be worse than any monster in reality, because the monster in your imagination isn’t constrained by any limitations. It’s the pure potentiality of fear.
If fear, in part, develops in us when we’re little so that we can learn to respond to it—like the kids who put themselves in risky situations and then figure out how to resolve them safely—then it also helps us move from an understanding of the world as something purely random, a disordered series of events, to a realm that we have some control over, that our actions help to shape. Now, as an adult, I feel like that’s less true every day—life really is, to some extent, random and you have less control than you think. But the belief that every action has an equal and proportionate reaction, I think, helps us to move through the world without totally losing our minds to the fear of what might be coming next.
The stories of frightening, mysterious characters used by parents to enforce good behaviour through fear affected more than I expected. If a child is trying to understand how to navigate an incredibly complex world, they have to devise their own set of rules. They have to start figuring out how things work, through trial and error, and applying these principles to the world around them. But when I was a kid, so many of the expectations and “rules” my parents wanted me to follow seemed so arbitrary. I wanted to know why and their stock answer was always “because I say so”. Sometimes it was for my own protection, sure, but often it was for their convenience. I was a very anxious child, constantly worried that “something bad” would happen to me because I had done something to deserve it, even though I could not have told you what I’d done.
For neurodivergent kids, or kids who struggle with understanding social cues or why things are “done a certain way”, I can see how using fear to enforce desirable behaviour could lead to them not trust their own internal sense of what’s right or what’s rational, or fearing retributive punishment because they’ve accidentally done something wrong. While some parents might act in the interest of protecting their kids (like warning them away from natural or human dangers), many kids are punished simply for misunderstanding or inadvertently flouting certain social conventions that they just aren’t old enough to understand yet. Studies show that as children get older, their fear of things causing shame or humiliation—like getting bad grades, or looking stupid in front of their friends—overtakes their fear of supernatural beings and the dark, and becomes almost equal to their fear of guns, violent death, sudden illness, etc.
I think the risk we run here is fear-based tactics for controlling and encouraging good behaviour eroding into a child internalizing the belief that every time something bad happens in their life, it’s because of something they did, that was their fault. If a child’s friend dies because of gun violence, it’s not because they, say, shoplifted gum from the corner store one time. If a child gets bad grades because they were so anxious about failing that they couldn’t focus on studying, there’s a larger issue at play; it’s not solely that the child is misbehaving or deserves to be punished. And I’m not advocating for totally squashing children’s sense of accountability or control over their lives; what I’m saying is that there has to be a way to show kids that they can manage things when they’ve screwed up, rather than simply terrifying them into always doing the “correct thing”.
This was a bit of a different episode format but if you liked it, do let me know so I can do something similar again! And if you’ve made it this far and you want to support the show—you have so many options! You can check out smalltownspooky.wixsite.com/home and find the link to the Small Town Spooky Ko-Fi account there. You can leave a five-star review on the podcast streaming app of your choice. And if you have any of your own stories of childhood monsters or freaky experiences involving dark rooms, haunted dressers, creepy closets, and you want to share, email them to smalltownspooky@gmail.com! You can write me a lil story or record a voice note and I will feature it in an upcoming episode.
Music Credits
Special thanks to the providers of the music for this episode.
It’s Not Hard to Get Lost by Bryan Mathys (title theme); The Void Says Hi (long version) by Doctor Turtle; Evermore, Mercy and Smoldering by Kai Engel; The Silent Grove and Frost on the Meadows at Dawn (after Holst, Abroad as I was walking / Lord Dunwaters) by Axletree; and Autumn Sunset by Jason Shaw all licensed under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.
Nocturne by Kai Engel licensed under Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial International 4.0.
Courtesy of Freesounds.org: “Slender” by CommanderDerp licensed under Attribution License 3.0; all other sound effects licensed under Creative Commons 0.
Sources & Further Reading
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