The Boogeyman

In our youth, before we have become aware of all the different faces that evil can take, we all had fear of the Boogeyman. There are many different spellings of this denizen of the dark like Bogeyman, Boogyman, bogyman, Boogieman and Boogey Monster, but no matter how you spell it the name is still the same. It is the monster under the bed that waits for you to go to sleep so that it can get you. It is the monster in the closet that is always watching you, waiting for its chance to get you. We have in our youth been told if we do not behave that the Boogeyman would get us.

The name of this being that caused many a sleepless night for so many children may have come from Scotland and the legend of the Boggart. A Boggart is a spirit that haunts a family and causes things to disappear, the family’s animals to have problems and milk to sour. Unlike other folklore entities that may do mischief the Boggart is always a malevolent spirit and is said to follow the family it plagues wherever it goes. Even if it is a Boggart or a Boogeyman it instills fear in who ever crosses its path. So what do these Boogeymen look like and what is their purpose?

The description of the Boogeyman is as varied as the people that have had an encounter with one - covered in hair or scales, big eyes and no eyes, you could say that whatever is scariest to the person is how it will appear. Many people say that the Boogeyman is only in our mind and that it is totally just a figment of our imagination. So it could be like the anti imaginary friend or an imaginary stalker. I don’t think that I will talk about the mental state of people or children in today’s world, I would much rather take a stroll down an imaginary or supernatural road. Well maybe not all imagination but some may think so. When you look at the paranormal and find something that is so widely thought to come from the imagination of children and that people use it as a catch all for something unexplained there may actually be a basis for the fear. Put it this way, the fear that the individual has is triggered by something. Like I said, I am not going into the mental side of the rainbow; I am going to stay on the supernatural side. I don’t think I will list out all the different entities that a Boogeyman could be, it is just too numerous. What I would like to say is that in a child’s eye the Boogeyman is anything that is unknown and scary. This is like calling all the different sodas a coke or pop - it is a catch all name. Looking at the fact that a child may not know a name of what is being seeing and that parents generalize their fears into one thing it is not hard to see that there could be so many different entities that could be called a Boogeyman.

Some of the stories that I have heard over the years from parents have the entity being a Boogeywoman instead of a man. Just as with the description of how they look, there is a fifty-fifty chance of it being a different sex than of the one of the witness. This leads us again to believe that there is more than one type of entity that is being called a Boogeyman. I believe that there are many different entities that feed off our fears. The fear of the young may be a training ground before moving on to adulthood. Like many predators in nature when they are young and small or weak they prey on smaller and weaker prey before they can graduate to larger prey. Taking this hypothesis a little further, we could say that the Boogeymen are the young of the entities that we know the names of when they are older. Or it could be that as one person I know says, many entities are attracted to the young, (the light and purity of the energy of the young). They need to disrupt or subvert the energy so they torment the young maybe hoping to turn the young away from the light. One person I know said that the more light in your soul is more reason that the darkness will attack or try to subvert you. This could be true also with the way I look at things.

I see the universe as a balance of everything, light and dark or good and evil included. These entities could be just a part of the nature of the universe, an inter-dimensional parasite that comes into our dimension to feed on our energy. Until we have the technology that allows us to see the other dimensions we will have to just try to make our best guess. Taking what information we have and try to fit it into one of the many different theories that there are on the who, what and why. Even as we do this, we will still have to deal with what is happening - just because we cannot say for sure what it is we cannot ignore the event.

So is the Boogeyman an inter-dimensional entity? From all the information that I have seen I would have to say yes. Our dimension is not its primary plane of existence, just as most supernatural entities exist on a different plane. Just about all of the supernatural entities, ghosts included, are not always on our plane of existence. This is to say that they exist in a different dimension. Sorry for getting off the main topic a little, it is good to see how it may all fit together.

Is the Boogeyman a good or bad entity? Well I would have to say that it is not a good entity. First I have never heard or read a story where the Boogeyman made me feel safe and secure in my bedroom. There is always some negative emotion involved with this denizen of the darkness. Is it a fear of the unknown that is happening? Well,  most of the cases I have looked into state that they have a feeling happening before the sight of the entity, so no it is not the fear of the unknown. Looking at this, the entity may cause the fear before it becomes visible. So the entity may need for the witness to feel fear before it can become visible. Many think that if they feed on our fears that as they feed they become stronger and become visible in our plane of existence. Or, that as we feel fear that our energy’s frequencies change to be in-sync with the entity’s energy frequency so that we can see them. This could be true with many different things in nature, like some animals can sense fear or malice and respond in accordance. If we continue to lump all the different types of entities that the Boogeyman could be we will not be able to truly understand its nature. There is the main problem with the Boogeyman - there is not much that stays the same. For any that may have had an encounter with a Boogeyman please compare this recount to yours and see the differences.

“I was 12 or 13 yeas old and staying with my grandparents for a week one summer when I had an encounter with the Boogeyman. When staying with my grandparents there was always things to do and people to see. My grandfather was well known and would take me with him as he went on his rounds seeing the different people that he would talk with each day or each week on a certain day. I can still remember some of the events of the day before the encounter because we went to the old-time soda fountain and had a float. We walked all over town so at the end of the day I was very tired and went to bed early.

Sometime in the dead of night I awoke with the fear that something was in my room. At first I could not tell were it was but as I became more and more awake I could tell it was in the closet. I don’t know why I could tell it was there but that is the location that all my attention was drawn to and it seemed to be where my fear was emanating from. I thought that I saw the door starting to open, so I ducked under the covers. Under the covers I thought that I could hear it breathing standing at my bed. My fear grew for what seemed to be hours, then as suddenly as it started it stopped. My fear started to subside and I could not hear the breathing, it was still some time before I could uncover my head and look out and turn on the lamp by the bed. I looked around the room and did not see anything but the closet door was slightly open. I got up and closed the door, without looking in the closet, and put a chair in front of the door before I went back to bed. Eventually I went back to sleep and when I woke up again it was morning and the chair was moved back to where it was before I moved it and the closet door was slightly open. Needless to say I was unnerved by what I saw that morning.

I went to my grandfather and told him about what happened. As most adults when a child comes to them with a story like mine he said that I must have been dreaming. He said that he thought he might have heard me get up in the night and did see the light from under my bedroom door when he got up to check on me. He said that he did not hear anything so he went back to bed. I kept telling him all that day that I did not think I was dreaming and that something was in my room. That was one of the first times that I can remember hearing the name Boogeyman. He asked - had I done something bad the day before? And I asked him why he was asking if I had been bad and that was when he said that it could have been the Boogeyman.

He said that the Boogeyman visits bad little children. He was saying it like a joke to make me feel better but I still did not want to sleep in that room again. I did sleep in the room again after he used the, “I was too old to be scared of the Boogeyman.” I slept with the light on and the chair in front of the closet door with a bell on it also so that if it moved I would wake up. Nothing else happened that night but until we sold my grandparent’s house many years later I would not sleep in that room."

This is one of the stories that happened to me when I was young and may have been a factor in the path that I am on now. Just because in all reality I did not believe in the Boogeyman, it did not mean that something was not there that night. I think that most children at one time or another have had an encounter with the supernatural. Children have not yet learned to be skeptics, they still see and hear things that we as adults have in our minds shut out.

Adults do not believe in the Boogeyman and most of what goes bump in the night, we have rationalized them away. We don’t sit in awe at a butterfly or a bubble for hours using our imagination to see more than what is there. A child’s mind is more in-touch with its subconscious which allows them to see more that the adult that is only seen with their conscious mind. Or you may say that the energy of the child is so that they can see the inter-dimensional entities and in turn see the Boogeyman. We as adults must be the ones that don’t put all the entities that we do not believe are there into the one catch all name of a Boogeyman. We need to look at what the child has seen and felt and from there we need to address the true entity and not the Boogeyman. In doing this we will not only help the child to get rid of something that is scaring them but we will be helping the child to grow up more open to the wonders of the supernatural. This will allow them to continue to see more than we do if that is what they want and can handle. If they can’t handle the supernatural then you can tell them that everything they see is only in their imagination and there is no reason to be scared of the Boogeyman.