When you read horror – and for that matter, write it – you’re entering your own imagination and reckoning with your personal anxieties and fears, and, most of all, facing what lurks in the darkest recesses of your mind. Especially your earliest paranoid imaginings, dreams, and nightmares, which often prove the most difficult to shake as we grow older and all of which usually feature some incarnation of that legendary, universal scare-mongerer, the Boogeyman. At best, he’s the personification of a kid’s common fear of the dark, but totally illusory; at worst, he’s a living, breathing monster capable of tearing your lungs out.That said, here’s an account of what once emerged from the darkest recesses of my mind, remembered in stark, raving clarity for going on 60 years now, but whether a waking experience or unconscious vision, I still cannot say.
October 4, 2024
When I was 9, my parents and I lived in the house my Dad grew up in during the 1920s and 1930s in upstate Walton, New York. My grandparents had relocated to a smaller house that my grandfather had built next door. Their original place, dating to the late 1800s, was in 1966-67 a ramshackle two-story affair that had seen much better days. We shared it that year with my great uncle PJ, a disabled World War I veteran, my grandmother’s alcoholic brother. He basically occupied the living room, and we took two bedrooms. If I hadn’t experienced what I did directly, it could’ve passed for one of countless tall tales PJ told to local schoolchildren, an aspect of his character that those schoolchildren today, as adults still living in Walton, recall vividly. (I had the privilege of hearing his stories first-hand, told at the kitchen table in that house. Someday I hope to collect them in what I’m tentatively calling BOSCO THE SNAKE-EATER & OTHER MYTHS AND LEGENDS).
The entire second floor of the house was in such bad shape and apparently so unsafe that it had been closed off; the door leading up there was locked. That wasn’t much of a comfort, since at one point I realized that the presumably unstable floors above were actually the ceilings of the rooms we occupied below. But since no one was stomping around up there, I ultimately figured that the whole thing wouldn’t come down on my head. At any rate, at the slightest sound of an imminent collapse, I figured that even asleep I’d hear it, and, as many kids do, believing in some level of invincibility, that I could roll off the bed and under it as fast as The Flash.
One day, in his broken English, my grandfather told me, as his had told him a half-century before, that if I misbehaved that Mommotti – a hooded figure in a black cloak – would come for me. “If you don’t listen to your mother, I’ll call Mommotti and he’ll take you away in his black sack!”
Being all of 9 years old, I was convinced I was well past the stage in which I feared that the boogeyman himself or Mommotti was under my bed. A structurally unsound ceiling was real and those two things were figments (or so I thought). Plus, if ducking under a school desk could protect you from an atomic blast, then ducking under a steel bed could surely provide protection from a few hundred pounds of plaster.
But being 9 also meant that you were prone to your imagination getting the best of you, leaving you wondering what might be lurking upstairs or just behind that locked door after lights out.
The door was not one you’d normally find in a house. It looked like an office door in a 1940s Bogart film. A pane of opaque glass that looked like a thumb had been pressed into it a few hundred times had been set in the top half; the lower half was solid wood. All that was missing was the painted legend “SAM SPADE INVESTIGATIONS.”
Knowing my grandfather, he probably rescued the door from the junkyard during the Depression. No one on upper St. John Street in Walton, on “Wop Hill” as it was called owing to the fact that the neighborhood was populated by mostly Italian immigrants, was competing for a spread in “House Beautiful.” Moreover, the rest of it – all the wood, hinges, and even the doorknob and rather ornate lock had been slathered in what seemed to be a few dozen layers of thick paint, the last one a sickly looking yellow color, though several streaks of green peeked out in a few spots. The keyhole was plugged with dried paint as well.
The only thing that would’ve made me want to go up those stairs behind it more was a red neon sign flashing KEEP OUT. Well, that and a skull and crossbones. How could a kid resist? I still wonder today what treasures that attic may have held. Imagine my dismay when I found out later that there were several small wooden barrels up there, containing dozens of letters my Dad and his two brothers had sent home during World War II.
The color of the walls on the other side of the door must’ve been painted with the same paint, since in the daytime the mottled glass reflected the same jaundiced pallor from the other side.
If the door to my room in was ajar at a certain angle, I could see the door from my bed, illuminated by the ghostly light cast by a lamp my great uncle burned all night long.
Once, when the door was open, I heard something in my quasi-awake state. Or I at least I thought I did.
My eyelids slowly lifted, and my gaze zoomed in on the forbidden door visible to me on the other side of the hall. I peered at it over the top of that very traditional piece of anti-monster armor: the covers. In this case, I was up to my nose under a thick blue comforter and a dark olive wool Army blanket.
I waited a few beats, listening “hard” for the source of the sound. As if squinting improved my hearing, which is kinda like turning off the music while driving to better see where you’re going. I get it now, of course. Limit one stream of sensory input to enhance the processing of another.
Perhaps it had been the noise of the old house settling (a pretty scary proposition considering why the second floor wasn’t being used), or of my great uncle moving around on his “Canadian crutches.” But the sound, to me, didn’t seem to be in either realm. It was metallic, but small and just on the edge of hearing, the tiny squeak of protest that a piece of metal wanting to move makes when impeded by something. Like the guts of an engaged lock when a doorknob is being turned to determine if the door is indeed locked.
A few minutes passed in utter silence. Did I actually hear anything? Whether or not I did was immaterial, since in the vacuum that forms in periods of enforced uncertainty when the child mind concocts crazy causes for things that go bump in the night, I convinced myself that it was the sound of someone – or something – trying to turn that stubborn paint-caked doorknob. As if that old piece of hardware, locked and painted over numerous times, was attempting to be turned, or to turn, since I hadn’t yet considered it was doing so by itself. Trust me, the thought did occur to me.
Suddenly, the glass seemed to gradually brighten ever so slightly, as if a light was shining down from the top of the stairs on the floor above. Was moonlight coming through a window up there? Perhaps there was indeed a window at one end of a decrepit hallway with the stairs at the other, through which the moonshine poured into the house. Unaware of the layout, I had no idea if that was even possible. And I didn’t yet fully understand “tricks of the light” even though I’d heard the expression.
Suddenly, the upper part of a vaguely man-shaped shadow, distorted by the rough surface of the glass, slowly appeared, growing taller in the window. It was as if whatever it was that had been crouching behind the lower half of the door was slowly rising to its feet. It must have crawled down the stairs below the level of the window and waited. But for what?
Then I heard it again. The sound of that stubborn paint-caked doorknob being turned slowly but not yielding. Then the sound of it being gently rattled. As if gradually shaking it would release whatever stubborn bit of iron inside the mechanism that kept it locked. As I focused on it from my bed, I could see the knob jiggling barely perceptibly in its socket.
I thought, without knowing what I even meant by the word “it,” “Why doesn’t it just break the door down?”
Suddenly, the shadow moved closer to the glass, becoming less blurred and more tangibly a vaguely human form, but still grossly undetailed, standing upright. The shape then raised a hand and pressed it against the glass, spreading its fingers wide.
Wide-eyed now, I counted six splayed fingers, all ending in long, sharp claws, tented on the pane. Then came the sound of one claw tapping on the glass. What was the head bent forward and put what only could be described as the thing’s open maw on the glass surface.
In that instant, I began to invoke the monster-proofing protocols I’d assimilated from repeated readings of copies of EERIE and WEIRD comics.
First of all, just assume “MONSTER!” No time for internal debate or waiting for it to say “I come in peace.” Or you might end up in pieces!
Second, pull the covers – as good as Captain America’s shield in such encounters, completely over your head.
I began silently counting some number of Mississippis. I prayed that I would end on the number required to force a monster of any type to disappear. As if closing my eyes for that amount of time would repel the boogeyman or whatever it was because somehow not looking at the thing was key to disappearing it. Shut your eyes so it can’t see you! If it can’t see you, it can’t get you! Kid and fairy tale logic of the highest order!
At the last whispered evocation of the Magnolia State to dispatch this particular twelve-taloned threat, “sixty-six-Mississippi,” I slowly lowered the covers to my chin, took a deep breath, and opened my eyes.
Everything was quiet. Even the small rattles made by the knob being jiggled were gone.
I watched that pane of now dark glass and that doorknob for a while longer, with a level of focus usually only reserved for watching Barbara Eden in I DREAM OF JEANNIE.
The shadowy shape and its clawed hand and gaping maw didn’t return. But I kept staring at the glass for what seemed like a long time to make sure.
My eyelids got increasingly heavy and I eventually fell asleep. When I woke up a few hours later, the sun was streaming in through the window next to my bed.
I’ve never told a soul about the incident. They would simply say it was a nightmare. I’ve just never been sure.
I’ve driven past that house several times in subsequent years, and noted some exterior changes. I’ve haven’t considered stopping and telling the current owners that I lived there when I was 9, and ask to come inside for a look-see. I’m not sure I ever would.
And I’m still not sure what the encounter I’ve described ultimately was. It’s easy to assume it was a nightmare or waking dream. Almost comforting, as most delusions offered in the face of the unexplained are designed to be.
Perhaps it was just an … idea. A thought-form that entered from the other side of a door in my imagination. I just placed it in familiar surroundings: on the other side of a real door in a house that looked like it was in search of something to haunt it.
Had I created what manifested behind the door that night all those years ago, based on an unconscious fear of what I simply imagined could be lurking in the dark upper floor of the house, or behind that locked door waiting for …? Was it a dream, or something real that masqueraded as one.
I wondered if millions of other children across time that have thought the thing in their closet or under their bed to be the boogeyman, might have actually thought him into existence. Can a real monster be summoned by thinking? Does the boogeyman exist if no one thinks about him. Or if no parent ever creates an image of one to coerce their kids to behave.
“Stay out after dark and the boogeyman will get you!” Well, some boogeymen – like the one in THE ISLAND, Book 1 of THE CLIFFSIDE CHRONICLES – have no intentions of staying in the dark on the off chance you’ll come to them. Some will come looking for you.
I do know that it’s precisely what’s on the other side of a door in the human imagination, even a metaphorical one, that horror fiction seeks to grant access to. To tap into what we fear, fear being the price we sometimes pay for imagination. The boogeyman just seems to exist to ensure that price is paid.