weight to him or her. This had to be an adult. Great, I assumed, I’d get in trouble now.
I followed the creaking sound as it grew louder. I couldn’t really see the stairs from where I was.
Lying quietly, I watched from my hiding place as two legs strode from the area of the stairs. They were clad in grey dress pants … but the feet were bare and c1awed … big, black claws … and covered with grey hair.
I think I forgot to breathe at that point. I heard a loud “sniffing” noise. I’m not sure where I got the courage to crane my neck and look up, but I did. And when I did, I saw what was very likely, the most unusual sight of my life—even until this day.
It wore a shirt and a bow tie, and its hands were hairy and clawed, just like its feet. And it had a wolf’s head! Swear to God. This thing, whatever it was, seemed to be the living, physical embodiment of “The Big Bad Wolf” from fairy tales. It stood, looming over the bed, and sniffed.
I bit my tongue, because I sure as heck knew what would happen if I screamed. I closed my eyes, tighter than I’d probably ever closed them before, and I prayed silently.
And when I opened them again, it was gone. I didn’t leave my hiding place for a long, long time. And when I finally did, I told no one about this, as I knew no one would believe me. So, here it is for the first time … I’m telling you.
I told Peter that he had shared a really great story. Off the top of my head, I had two thoughts for him to consider:
1 The entity probed your young mind and pulled out the image of the Big Bad Wolf from your knowledge of fairy tales and animated cartoons.
2 The entity, being of a horribly negative nature, may manifest in our dimension in a grotesque appearance. In this case, it manifested as a werewolf, a man wolf, yet with an offbeat touch—the bow tie.
Peter thanked me for my quick reply, and replied that he had given this incident a lot of thought over the years and he realized that there were some odd points:
1 It was an isolated incident (I didn’t spend my childhood seeing The Big Bad Wolf or any other fairy tale denizens, for that matter).
2 The entity certainly wasn’t what I pictured as a “werewolf” at that point in time. Aside from the clothing, this was like something out of the movie The Howling which wouldn’t be around for another decade or more. I’d guess my mental image of “werewolf” would have been of the Lon Chaney variety at that time in my life. So, whatever it was, it either simply looked like it really appeared to me, smashing bow-tie and all (yes, the bow-tie bothers me a tad, a bizarre little detail to say the least). Or, as you suggest, the creature pulled a “Big Bad Wolf” image from my own psyche.
3 If, in fact, it did pull information from my subconscious, that would indicate that it knew I was in the room. If it knew I was in the room, why did it act as if it didn’t? My take on this is it was simply, literally trying to scare the hell out of me. It did its job well, but I’m not certain I understand the reasoning behind this, unless it was feeding off of the fear I was projecting or some such pseudo-scientific babble.
4 I have also greatly pondered the creaking of the stairs and what seemed to be the entity physically coming into the room. Again, as a supernatural entity, it didn’t need to do this, unless, of course, it was building up my inner fear to, essentially, “milk all it could” from me. I don’t, for a second, assume this was something physical, even though it behaved as such.
5 What the heck was it doing in my cousins’ house? It’s not something that, as children, was discussed among us, it was simply “there,” in broad daylight, pretty darned bold for something akin to this thing, wouldn’t you say? And no one ever mentioned seeing anything like it later. Is it possible it was “just passing through”? (Of course, I never talked about it to anyone else, so I probably shouldn’t assume anyone else would have told me if they’d had similar experiences.)
6 It went away when I prayed. I believe my prayer was something very much like, “God, please make it go away… .” I don’t know if this is a significant point or not. Maybe it’d already done it’s duty and simply left when I had my eyes closed, not being affected by the “praying” that my eight-year-old brain could muster at all. But, at that point, I put a real significance on the fact that it was gone after I prayed.
Okay, here’s what I’ve come up with. Could this have literally been a “Boogie 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
