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The bogeyman. The creature under the bed. The shadow that is death in disguise. The kind stranger who kills.

Childhood is a wonderful world of the imagination with extremes: at one end, the fantastical and joyful landscape of lightness and hope; at the other, a frightening and jittery underworld of darkness and fear.

When I was a child, my mother told my sisters and me a story from her youth. It was when she and her siblings had experienced the mythical bogeyman who became a reality. Of course, our mother did not tell us this real-life tale to scare her children. She was at all times a fiercely protective and loving mother, despite having dealt with a lifetime of bad nerves and mental breakdowns. It seemed to me that our mother told us this story because it was still on her mind after all those years; that she could not be rid of the memory of that night decades before when the bogeyman appeared as the man in the doorway.

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It was in the waning days of the late 1930s. The Great Depression was receding in the distance, but still being felt by many. In particular, there were still drifters, hobos, and men of all ages and descriptions riding the rails and wandering the roads as the 30s wound down. In the farm country of southwestern Ontario, it was common for these men to try to find temporary work from  farmers. Men often stopped by a farmhouse and asked the housewife if they could speak with her husband about doing some odd jobs or being a hired hand for a time. More often than not, there was no work to be had nor even money to pay for wages, or the farmer already had a hired hand. If their husbands did not require any hired help, the housewives would usually provide any drifter with a meal or some food for the road.

At the time, parents would leave older children in charge of younger siblings when necessary. On that particular evening – just days before Hallowe’en – my mother and her siblings were at home alone. Their parents had gone to a local function, possibly a school or township meeting. In my mother’s family, the two oldest boys would have been responsible for their four younger sisters and brother. Their ages at that time ranged from eleven to four years old. At a certain point that evening, the children went to bed upstairs at the old farmhouse in Tuckersmith Township; in each respective room, three children slept in one big bed. The three boys were in one bedroom, and the three girls were in another one nearby; both bedrooms were located near the top of the stairs. No doubt to save energy, no lights were kept burning in the house. It was in darkness. I recall my mother commenting on how dark and quiet that night had seemed. Perhaps she and her siblings felt the absence of their parents, with the knowledge they were on their own.

Creak. Creak. Creak.

The children in their respective bedrooms heard the old wooden stairs give a whispered warning that someone was at the bottom of the stairs. That someone was coming upstairs.

Groan. Groan. Groan.

The worn floorboards at the top of the stairs sounded a hushed alert that someone was now just outside the bedrooms.

“Who’s there?” called out one of the boys from his bed. No answer came back.

In the other bedroom, my mother and her sisters lay in the big bed with the blankets up to their noses, peering into the darkness. From both bedrooms, the children could just barely make out a shape in the inky darkness. An apparition. But not a ghost. A man.  They could hear his breathing as he moved from one to the other of the opened doorways of the two bedrooms.

“Is that you, Harry?” one of my mother’s brothers asked the voiceless shadow in the corridor. He was no doubt hoping the figure in the doorway was their neighbour from down the road who was often at their home, and sometimes helped their father on his farm.

It must have felt to the children that the bogeyman had come to life and decided to visit their home that night. My mother and her sisters lay in their bed, hearts beating faster with rising fear. Who was the man in the doorway? Why was he not saying anything?

Then the man turned from the door of the boys’ bedroom and came back to the doorway of the bedroom where the girls were trembling under the covers.

Squeak. Squeak. Squeak.

The timeworn floorboards in the girls’ bedroom murmured their soft but urgent alarm. The dark shape stood beside the bed. The silence in the room was overwhelming.

Suddenly the bogeyman turned and started to walk back into the hallway. He paused outside the boys’ bedroom door one last time, and then began his descent down the stairs.

Creak. Creak. Creak.

Groan. Groan. Groan.

Squeak. Squeak. Squeak.

When the children knew the apparition, the bogeyman had left the house, they all bounded from their respective beds. All of them had been scared within an inch of their lives. They discussed who it could have been, why he had come, and why he had not spoken. When their parents returned home later, the children excitedly informed them about the nocturnal visitor. As parents, they would have wanted to allay fears, not wanting to alarm, or upset the children further. One wonders if they were worried that something terrible could have happened to their children that night. They assumed it was a drifter or a hobo, who had entered the unlocked farmhouse, perhaps in search of food.

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Who was that man? What were his intentions? Why did he not speak? Were my mother and her siblings in danger?

One thing seems clear to me: sometimes the bogeyman is real.