Bogeyman

So I watched Rise of the Guardians a while back. I liked it. It was charming, light-hearted and slightly nauseating—but bearable. The character which I was most interested in was Pitch, who supposedly was the bogeyman. In the movie, he’s to be the embodiment of fear. Like Freddy Krueger, if you in believed him, he would become real, visible, tangible, wreaking havoc in your dreams as well as while you’re awake; making you scared to flush the toilet, close your eyes while you’re in the shower and jumping when a branch scratches your window then screwing your night because you can’t sleep (run-on sentence much?). Just having fear breathes life into his being and strengthens him. Unlike Freddy Kreuger—who still scares the piss out of me, if you haven’t noticed—Pitch just came across as a whiny character (because apparently kids are less scared now or something) with a smooth accent.

Bogeyman. Right. I looked into him because before now, I only had Freddy Krueger because really, he’s enough, and the shadow that sometimes watches me at night. Just kidding. Wikipedia says that the bogeyman is an imaginary being used by adults to frighten children into compliant behavior (I have a few things to say about that, but I’ll save that for later). There’s like a retarded amount of forms the bogeyman can take, so I will only mention the crap that interests me, and the crap that doesn’t sound absolutely absurd. You want to know more? Do your own research.

In the US, the bogeyman is known to manifest in a “green fog”; he hides or appears from under the bed or in the closet and tickles children when they go to sleep at night. Scarey as hell, if you ask me.

Something profound while I doing my perusal of bogeyman. A bogeyman exists in almost every society, but interestingly, there are clusters of societies who seem to call the bogeyman the Sack Man. In this sense, he’s not an amorphic being, but something concrete—a old man who walks around shadowed streets before dark with a sack or bag over his shoulder. The children are told he’s looking for ill-behaved children. Once he finds them, the Sack Man would kidnap these unruly children by putting them into his sack to later eat them.

What I want to know is is his sack magical? Would he take his victims to his Sack Man lair? If he does have a Sack Man lair, what does it look like? Is it an underground den or more appropriately, an abandoned house? Or would he just go to an alleyway and eat his victims? The stories are never clear. But I’ll tell you this, the homeless and the vagabonds were probably never so feared. (Also interesting thought. Funny how Santa is old and also has a sack—not that sack you sick sick person. A benevolent being to counter the fearful Sack Man?)

What I found amongst the plethora of titles (one of which translates to bug), one which was just briefly mentioned was that the etymology of bogeyman could have stemmed from the word bog. The children were told they should fear the men hiding in the English peat bogs, something criminals might do when avoiding the authorities. And as expected, my mind veers completely off course and carries on its merry little path toward a-not-completely separate idea—the “Bog Men” bodies. Specifically, the Bog Men of Ireland.

Did you know that the men may have been aristocrats? And not just any old privileged person, but nobles. Sure, some of them may have been criminals, but not all. Archaeologists mention that some had manicured nails, but from what I’ve read—though I’m no professional, Celts were very attentive to their grooming. So I was not completely surprised. Still, this supports that they were indeed persons who did not toil in the fields. But what did prove their nobility were the occasion that their nipples were pinched and cut because “[s]ucking a king’s nipples was a gesture of submission in ancient Ireland. Cutting them would have made him incapable of kingship.” (Eamonn P. Kelly)

This and having evidence of them being killed a threefold death of strangulation, drowning and wounding (suffered by kings, heroes, and gods) alludes that these nobles were not murdered as initially reported, but sacrificed to the goddess of the land in all her forms. Not all Bog Men suffered the threefold death. Some were indeed murdered.

I go on tangents, alright?

Anyway, back to the bogeyman. Unfortunately, the Irish bogeyman was actually a fairy that kidnapped kids to play with them. …Really?

Circling back to the start of this post, I mentioned how bogeyman was used by parents to scare their kids into submission. Well, I never used any form of fairytale to achieve this. I used a more tangible approach. I was their freaking bogeyman and they obeyed me just fine. What’s interesting is, they created their own bogeyman. A man in the closet they said. For me, when I was a kid, there was a man in wall.

After compiling the various descriptions of bogeyman, I have decided that the above image is what a bogeyman looks like.