Real Monsters, Gruesome Critters, and Beasts from the Darkside. Brad Steiger
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Man”?
I’ve considered this for years, what if this is what children fear when they’re in the dark or alone in an unfamiliar place. Maybe I’m getting a little too Stephen Kingish, but I’ve often wondered if what I saw wasn’t some sort of entity who’s assigned “job” was to frighten small humans. Aside from the “daylight” element of the encounter, it had all the earmarks of a classic bedroom night-visitor.
Don had a lot of incidents with the Bogey Man in which he would wake up with the blanket pulled over his head and having the sensation of something sitting on his stomach and punching him in the ribs.
But the incident that chills him to this day is that awful night when he was sleeping on his side and awakened to see a monstrous little Bogey Man crouching beside his bed.
According to Don:
“It was small and thin and it had wings. The skin looked black and gray, spotted with small shiny spots that looked like mica. I could see the veins in its head and hand. It had cat-like ears. I screamed and swung at the being.”
And now comes the bizarre Warner Brothers cartoon aspect of the visitation, similar to Peter’s. After Don’s father entered the bedroom, turned on the lights, and comforted his son, he left the lights on in the room to keep the Bogey Man away. A few minutes later, Don’s stepmother came into his room to check on him. When she left the bedroom, however, she turned out the lights.
“Instantly, a large cartoon-like figure appeared behind her as she closed the door. I am not pulling your leg! It was a typical cartoon of Satan with bright red skin, complete with pitchfork, standing in polka dot underwear. I screamed; my stepmother screamed; and both of my parents came in my bedroom once again to comfort me.
“My impression after all these years is that the winged creature was real, and the fearsome cartoon-like figure was an hallucination created by the being. The thing that bothers me is that I had no previous reference as far as the being was concerned, and it seems difficult to fathom how my mind could have created it as an hallucination.”
Martha was another who learned as a child that hiding “under the bed” might not be the safest place to hide while playing hide and seek:
I was at my friend’s house for a party, and we were in her basement just having a good time. Then, my friend decided we should all play a game of “hide and seek” in the pitch-black darkness.
I had no objection; in fact, I had fun doing these types of things. So then we shut all the lights off and began. I was picked to be “it.” I could hear all my friends scurry off into various nooks while I fumbled around after the muffled noises. I searched for a long time. I had looked everywhere—except for one room … an especially dark room. It was my last resort. My friends had to be there.
Martha immediately began to pull back her hand, but it was stopped. Something grabbed her arm! It started to pull her under the bed (art by Ricardo Pustanio).
I started to walk down the hallway, feeling against the walls. I entered the doorway, and I had this amazingly bad feeling in my stomach. I felt like going into the room would just be horrible, but as uncertain as I was feeling, I did it anyway.
I walked in and discovered that this room was a spare bedroom. I knew there was a bed, and I assumed my friends were underneath it and ready to freak me out. So I thought, “Better just get it over with… .”
I reached under the bed and began to feel around a bit. That’s when it happened. This enormous spark occurred under the bed. I could see its brightness. And it was loud, too. The shock vibrated through my whole body.
I immediately began to pull back my hand, but it was stopped. Something grabbed my arm! It started to pull me under the bed. Luckily, I was able to retrieve control of my arm and ran from the room. I screamed for my friends and they popped out and turned on the lights.
And they did NOT come from the room. They came from the totally other side of the basement, and there was no way they could have sneaked past me. We went back to the room, flipped the lights on and checked under the bed. NOTHING.
Kevin M. is a single man who lives alone and who has been unable to form any lasting relationships or to hold down any jobs for more than a few months. He is not ashamed of the way things are in his life, for he feels the circumstances that he finds himself in are not of his making and he feels no guilt for the person he is.
His problems began when he was a child and a man began to appear in his bedroom at night.
As Kevin tells his story:
My parents entered the room when I would scream that there was a man in my room. I remember feeling puzzled as to why this man was there and could not be seen by my parents. This man frightened me, and I would often cry out due to fear.
On one occasion, I remember this man coming over to my bed and peering down at me. We both made eye contact, and it slowly dawned on him that I could see him. This seemed to cause a mild panic in the man, and from that night on, he would often come over to me and try to talk with me—which just had the effect of scaring me stupid, and I would yell for my parents. As soon as my parents would come into the room again, the man would back away. All I could say to my parents was that there is the man that I don’t like.
Of course my parents looked about, saw nothing, and assumed it was a bad nightmare. This continued for quite some time, and I was eventually moved from that room to sleep in my parents’ room. Here, I always slept well.
The episode of the man in my room was totally forgotten until I reached my early-to mid-twenties when I started to receive severe spirit contact. During a discussion with my mother, she said that she recalled my man-in-the-room experience. She also added an explanation for it. It turns out that the cottage in which we were living had a previous tenant, an old man with a walking stick, who was disabled and lived most of his later years in the same room as mine. Because of this man’s disability, he would often tap or bang his walking stick on the bedroom floor to get the attention of relatives down below. This man had passed away some years before our tenancy of the cottage.
My parents would often hear this banging in the house, which would seem to come from upstairs but whenever they went to investigate, it stopped. They just assumed that it was a water pipes. Now, as I learned of the deceased/disabled man and the knocking on the floor of his walking stick, we started to put two and two together and realized that the man I saw in my room and the knocking heard in the cottage were from the same source: The disabled man, desperately wanting someone to answer his signal for help.
Patrick M. relayed a number of remarkable encounters with the “Boogey Man.” Although he was old enough to deal rationally with his night time visitations, they were nonetheless unsettling:
In the mid-to late-1980’s while at my aunt’s house in Cataumet on Cape Cod, my mother, who knew I had an interest in ghosts, bought a book for me called New England’s Ghostly Haunts by Robert Cahill. Later, alone in the house, reading the book on the sun porch, and grown fairly nervous by what