The History of the Boogeyman

Hush, Hush, Hush- Here Comes the Boogeyman!

-       Henry Hall

Alright people, I’ve got some good news, and some bad news. For you I mean. For me, it’s all about the good news, I’m like a newspaper’s worst nightmare. Whatever a newspaper is (I’ve heard it’s like a shitty, paper-wasting hipster version of reddit). Basically, the bad news is, I can’t give you a proper essay. I meant to do it over the weekend, but then I started playing Bioshock, which should be all the explanation necessary. I could work on a super long and awesome essay, as per usual, but Batman Arkham City’s coming out, which should also be all the explanation necessary. Fortunately, when I started looking up the boogeyman, back when I still intended to write a full essay, I found out that there’s about two actual links that have anything to do with the history of the boogeyman, one of them is a Wikipedia article, and the other is written by some guy who I’m pretty sure might be the extremely creepy reincarnation of Charles Manson. All the other links were either about that shitty 2005 movie starring Who Cares, or links to some conspiracy site about 9/11. Oh, and porn. Lots and lot of boogeyman porn (oh internet, you rascal). But then I realized, hey, I’ve given these people my heart, twice a month, for like, several months. I’m allowed a bit of a reprieve (go ahead, try and complain in the comments section- IT DOESN’T EXIST). So instead, I’ll be using the Wikipedia article I found, and giving you my top five favorite boogeymen from across the world. Enjoy.

Alright, just to go over what I just said, in case it didn’t leave any impact in you- fucking boogeyMEN. PLURAL. Let me describe to you the idea of the boogeyman, the boogeyman is a monster that lives to terrorize children, it is the sum of all your fears, it eats puppies, shits nightmares, and sweats un-drinkably warm lime Gatorade. You wanna know where the boogeyman lives? Nowhere near you, just IN YOUR GODDAMN BEDROOM. Best case scenario, he lives as far away as your closet, most probable case scenario- under your bed (so the next time you do an under the cover bed fart, remember- he smells them ALL). And now consider the fact that there are more of these terror spewing bastards living all over the WORLD.  And here are, in my opinion, the most irredeemable of the Undead Nazi level scary bunch:

5) El Cuco. 

It's like the great pumpkin, except it wants to devoure your soul.

First off, don’t let the name fool you. The Cuco (or El Cuco in Spain, where the monster originates) is a scary figure that parents sing lullabies about to their children, before they go to bed. Parents tell their children that if they do not go to sleep, then this pumpkin-headed ghostly-ass mofo will come out from under their bed, and devour them. First of all, I’d just like to question the logic behind that- you want the kid to sleep, so you tell him something so tuh-tuh-terrifyingly scary that there’s no way they’ll get to sleep, which said child needs to do if they don’t want to continue pissing their bed every time they hear a cat start meowing at the moon (as Spanish cats are wont to do). Seriously, parents are already telling their kid a lullaby, a form of song that is meant to soothe a child into sleep, why the hell do they need to add in the part about the homeless pumpkin-ghost thing (I’m assuming it’s homeless, as it has decided to take up tenent under a small child’s bed), that at any unspecified time, could up and start snacking on the kid because his/her mother’s a goddamn sadist. Is it because regular lullabies weren’t doing the trick? In which case, get some singing lessons then! Hire a fucking mariachi band if you have to! The only thing you’re doing with this Cuco shit is just terrorizing your naïve little child, who only just learned how to control the whole bladder thing, and isn’t really that good at it in stressful situations. And hey, in case the child just happened to forget, Spain renamed one of the main characters on Sesame Street to Coco, like some friggin homage. Ridiculous.

4) The Abu Rigl Maslukha

It looks like this, except alot less admirable.

Say hello to the Egyptian boogeyman, the Abu Rigl Maslukha, or, for you more non-Egyptian speaking fools out there, the Man With Burnt Leg. Yeah. Let’s just soak in the fact that the super-hardcore badass Egyptian’s scariest nightmare is a cripple. Apparently, Egyptian parents tell their children the story of the Man With Burnt Leg (who I will from now on refer to as ‘Stubby’) in order to get them to behave, and follow their orders. This is because apart from being a twisted scary excuse to cry in public, Stubby is also a cautionary tale. Apparently, as a child, Stubby didn’t listen to his parents, which somehow caused him to light his leg on fire. Now remember, these people lived in the friggin DESERT, the most exciting thing they had in their lives were rocks, and whatever they could make with them. How in the hell Stubby managed to get into so much shit with rocks that his own leg ignited into flame, is beyond me. For some reason this caused him to be pissed off at literally everybody else, which may have something to do with the fact that (and I’m just guessing here), when young Stubby was rolling around in the sand screaming for somebody to help, the rest of his friends and family were too busy being rock hard and emotionless to care. Anyway, he now carries some vendetta against little children who don’t listen, so he carries them home, then just straight up starts cooking and eating them. There is of course a silver lining behind all this leg burning and child eating- the fact that Stubby is able to cook proves that while the fire definitely ruined his life, it did not keep him from doing what he loves. And that’s what being a winner is all about.

            3) The Sack Man

When you think about it, everybody is really going as The Sack Man. And it's HORRIBLE.

This one is especially scary, mostly because it’s believed to have inspired just about every other Boogeyman myth in Europe, not to mention that fact that, oh yea, it’s f-ing REAL. With a name that already makes it sound like some sort of Euro-pedophile, the Sack Man is this guy who spends his nights walking around town, finding disobedient children, and then just shoving them into the sack he carries with him, so he can take them god-knows-where. And unlike other boogeymen, the Sack Man isn’t just some rogue monster that children should be scared of because even their parents can’t seem to control it, no, the Sack Man is, in most places, a psychotic murderer that’s been accepted by the society around him, so much so, that parents actually fucking HAND kids over to him. Like, for example, if you don’t want to eat your soup, sucks, because the Sack Man’ll be happy to have some when he comes over to shove you in his child-bag, and replace you with some awesome kid who’s respectful, and nice, and goes ape-shit for soup. Now remember what I said earlier- this is based off fact. But that’s crazy right? The idea that any society would be cool with some guy just coming and picking up their kid, and taking them away in his evil man-purse/satchel of pure twisted darkness. Well guess what, the idea wasn’t so crazy for 16^th 17^th century Eastern Europe, who had an actual bag-man who’s job it was to find orphan babies, stuff them in his sack, or basket, and then carry them with him while he did his rounds, looking for other motherless and fatherless babies, before he dropped them off at the orphanage. Of course, if you know anything about babies, they’re like little people with bones made of glass and skin made of that shitty tracing paper used in art class. So after being jostled around in a bag slung over some dudes shoulders for a couple hours, they were pretty much dead by the time they reached the orphanage. So yea, even a pedophile might have been better than the alternative.

            2) The New Jersey Devil

Myth Debunked: It's just Sarah Jessica Parker on a trip to Jersey. Duh.

Now the scary thing about the Jersey devil isn’t necessarily the creature itself, but the effect it seems to have on those around it. It makes them stupid. The creature has some legend behind it that has something to do with its mother being a witch who preached to Satan, and asked ol’ Beelzebub for a child, and Satan, being a massive troll, instead gave her some sort of horned, winged, horse looking thing, which before the Witch (ugh) could even properly name (I think she wanted to call it Lucas or something), flew off into the Pine Barrens, to go fuck up some poor deer. When it comes right down to it, it’s the chupacabra for the North East, the difference being that the second anybody catches word of it in the news, literally everybody loses their shit. Take for example the week of January 16-23, 1909, when not one person, not two people, , but actual HUNDREDS of people accounted reports of the Jersey Devil. The newspapers dubbed it Phenomenal Week, and instead of treating it like the silly little hoax that it clearly was, people went nucking futs, schools were closed, workers stayed home, a goddamn church house was set on fire in one case, all this because, in most cases, one person said he saw something, or some goddamn footprints showed up in the snow. Then in 1960, some more spooky animal tracks were found around Mays Landing, which prompted some merchants in Camden to pool their money together and offer a $10,000 reward for the capture for the Jersey Devil. They also offered to build a private zoo for the creature if it was captured, which after the money they’d laid down just to catch the damn thing, I imagine looked a lot like a cardboard box with ‘Jersey Devil’ written across it in Sharpie. Now before you go crazy laughing at those simple people, going wild over such trivial, silly things, over-exaggerating the most minute details to the point of insanity, just remember- Rebecca Black. Yeah.

            1) Der Schwarze Mann

It really isn't helping that this is the only picture I could find of it on google.

The German boogeyman is Der Schwarze Mann, or, when properly translated, the black man. It was apparently created before any German had even heard of the African race, but that doesn’t matter, because the scariest thing to Germans is black people. There is even a game for German children centered around this exotic creature, called ‘Who is Afraid of the Black Man?’ I should probs say now that ‘Schwarz’ isn’t referring to the skin, just the monster’s pension for hiding in black, or dark, places. This does not change the fact that Germany is still, and always will be, That Guy. Thank you for reading, I hope you enjoyed it, now if you’ll excuse me, I’ll be getting back to playing Batman and laughing at Germany for continuing to fuck up at proving they’re not just one big nation of jerks.