The Boogeyman Lives! (Part Two)

The Boogeyman is like the symbolic equivalent to Santa Claus for the first eleven months of the year. In December, kids better “be good for goodness sake” because Santa is an ill-tempered bastard who is not afraid to withhold toys from kids if they piss him off.

I mean, really, why does HE get to decide if kids are good or bad? One bad day could mean coal in your stocking (a veiled threat to burn down your house if I ever did hear one).

Parents use Santa to keep their kids in line late in the year. It’s kind of distressing, actually, but The Boogeyman is much, much worse.

After all, the nightmarish creature is a living, breathing manifestation of every child’s worst fears that will come and get them if they misbehave... and it can find anyone at anytime and at anywhere!

Is it me, or does it seem a little bit dramatic to tell your kids to brush their teeth and be asleep within an hour or The Boogeyman will pay them a visit? Of course, knowing such a creature existed was enough to keep me from ever falling asleep between the ages of six and twelve.

Talk about a sinister concept. What are you afraid of? Well, for me, my younger self was terrified of centipedes and spiders (especially giant man-sized ones), the Grim Reaper, ghosts and demons.

I never did actually meet The Boogeyman (who is such a bad-ass that I even capitalize the “The” before his name) but I knew exactly what he looked like: He was about 14 feet tall, with giant centipede arms, skeleton legs, demonic eyes, one thousand razor-sharp teeth, a vacuous smile, spidery-legged wings and he dressed in an ebony cloak that sucked all the light of existence into its blood-soaked embrace.

I slept with the closet doors open (to see That Bastard coming) and all my comics books stuffed under my bed, so that this fiend from Hell could not fit under there while I sat up, ever on guard.

And the kicker? I was basically a good kid (well, until I hit puberty anyway). I didn’t think I deserved to be visited by The Boogeyman, but my brothers were such pains-in-the-ass that I was sure he’d come for them and slither into my room by mistake.

Of course, I take some comfort in knowing that I was not the only sleep-deprived child to suffer permanent psychoses due to this creature of ultimate evil. The Bastard has been around for hundreds of years.

The history itself is muddled enough where it’s hard to say the actual origin of the concept. However, it is likely related to pirates.

Some etymologists trace the word “Boogey” back to the 17th Century when England lost hundreds of merchant ships to Barbary pirates who liked to kill, torture and enslave their victims. Near the coasts of Devon and Cornwall was the port of Boujaya, or Bougie in French. Most sailors were afraid The Bougie men would get them. And, they were right, apparently.

Also during my intrepid studies, I was quite surprised to discover that somebody recently introduced visual evidence of the so-called mythological Boogeyman to prove its actual existence.

I always assumed such a creature could not be photographed since its reflection would change depending on who was viewing it, but clearly that is not the case.

While The Boogeyman might change some of its minor surface details to reciprocate the fear of its victims, there is, apparently, one underlying concept of terror that applies to every single being in the entire universe.

In other words, there is something so dreadful that it could be considered the physical incarnation of ultimate evil and fear throughout all of existence. Don’t believe me? Just look at the picture below.