===TRANSCRIPT START===

Astonishing Legends Network. Disclaimer. This episode includes the usual amount of adult language and graphic discussions you've come to expect around here, but in the event it becomes an unusual amount, expect another call from me.

Welcome back to Scared All The Time. I'm Chris Cullari.

And I'm Ed Voccola.

And this week, we're opening the closet and checking under the bed to learn about one of the scariest monsters to ever, possibly, maybe a little bit in reality, but mostly in your imagination, but also may be real, exist the Boogeyman. We've all heard of it and we've all probably stayed up all night when we were kids wondering if this would be the night it comes for us. And each person listening to this probably has their own idea of what the Boogeyman looks like and what it wants, influenced by their family, friends or hometown's telling and retelling of the Boogeyman legend, which is why the Boogeyman will live forever. Because this child eating, shadow dwelling, nightmare creature isn't just your hometown's scary story, this shape shifting beast has been haunting human imagination across cultures and throughout history, like a bad dream that we all share no matter where we come from. And what could be scarier than that?

What are we scared?

When are we?

All the time. Now it is time for, time for Scared All The Time.

All right, welcome back everybody. It's an Ed welcome back, how unusual. We're back with another great episode, a little housekeeping at the top. First off, just wanted to make sure, not make sure, but check in on all of our Florida listeners. That hurricane is pretty fucking wild and hopefully everybody's safe.

And yeah, I mean, we're just, our hearts go out to everybody who's been affected by Hurricane Milton. And we hope that if anything did go wrong in your part of town down there in Florida, that you're able to rebuild quickly and that your family and friends and pets are all safe and that you are safe.

And speaking of things that we hope are safe, check on those area Hooters. Are they all good? I know they're in financial ruin and potentially in a sinkhole at this point, but did they get blown over too? If you've listened to enough of this show, you know that the Sarasota area Hooters are a concern of mine. And every day it seems like it's harder to be a Sarasota area Hooters.

Absolutely. I mean, it's never a great time to be a Sarasota area Hooters. Maybe like 1997 or something was the golden years.

Please.

But assuming that you are well and that you are listening to this podcast, we want to jump in with a couple of five star reviews for Five Star Review Corner. As you probably know from listening, we do five star reviews once in a while to encourage you to leave a five star review, because if you leave one, we might read it. And you guys never disappoint. You always leave incredible reviews. So, Ed, do you want to kick us off with a five star review?

Sure. All right. Title for this five star review is Scary Good Time. Chris and Ed never failed to make me laugh as well as Scare Me Spitless. Kind of gross.

Oh, dry mouth.

I thought Waking Up During Surgery, which I've done, is that's them saying it, not me, is my biggest fear. Nope, not even close. Looking at you, flesh-eating bacteria. If you're looking for an amazingly scary yet funny podcast, this is the one for you.

Hell yeah.

And that is from GMK 1966. Thank you so much.

Hell yeah, GMK. We're going to keep you dry as hell for as long as we possibly can.

That's the Chris and Ed promise.

That's the Chris and Ed promise. Another five-star review here from the very well-named Plague Doc Martin. A pleasant skin crawl. The review says, a fantastic curation of all the things we worry about. The buddy chemistry between the hosts is a breeding ground for endless laughs and easy listening. The episodes are incredibly well-researched and well-appointed, bringing the listener to the brink of wincing about the ghastly nature of our fears while sprinkling in comic relief from the horrors. Worth a listen if you're into spooky, creepy, real takes on what scares us all the time. Keep up the great work, host boys. Cheers from a fellow Connecticut native.

Hey, all right.

There you go, Ed.

Pretty fun. That was a good review from a nutmegger. Let's do one more. We got a five-star review here. Title great podcast, like that title. And it goes on to say, I found you guys through your collab with LGH. Okay, let's get haunted. We love them. It says, I love your vibe and dark humor. Your deep dives into the morbid keep me entertained and scared all the time. Keep up the spooky job exclamation point. And that is from Caravanboy, spelled B-O-I, very fun. We also like our collab with LGH and it's fun to see so many people put scared all the time, like sneak it in to the reviews.

Yeah, if you're gonna leave us a five-star review, let's give the people an additional level of challenge, okay? Leave us a five-star review and those of you who sneak the phrase scared all the time into the review, the best, will go to the top of the list for the reviews that we read.

There's only so many ways you can sneak that in. So, I don't know.

You know what? Surprise us.

See what you can do.

Exactly.

So yeah, that's five-star review corner for the week. And before we get into the episode, we just want to remind you guys, if you haven't signed up for the Patreon yet, please do so. We've got a lot of new faces, a lot of new friends, a lot of new fans jumping in on the Patreon.

Yeah. It seems like people are down with it.

Yeah. So, join us over there. It's a good time. We're getting really excited to do a live show this month. I'm cooking up some good articles to read, and we want to see as many people in there as possible, and we want to send out more buttons.

That's true. My fucking withered hands get work to the bone.

All right, guys. So without further ado, let's jump into the horrifying world of The Boogeyman. I'm really excited about this episode because you know I love a monster, and you know I love a mystery that stretches across time and space.

Yeah, it was actually interesting that you bring this up because I was wondering, like, as soon as you started recording, like, is this a Fear of the Unknown episode, or is it just a fear episode? Because when you said, like, the Boogeyman, yeah, it just feels like it's a catch-all term. Like, the Boogeyman could be that feeling that goes bump in the night, it could be the hair that stands up on the back of your neck. So I almost wonder, like, that's not really a Fear of the Unknown in the sense of, like, a cryptid. It is just, like, a fear.

Correct.

So yeah, I guess this will be just a fear episode. Not a regular Scared All The Time episode.

I mean, this episode will touch on a lot of things that are similar to cryptids, or some people may define as cryptids. Boogeyman is really, it is, it's a catch-all term for a lot of different legends and rumors and monsters, and a lot of what we're gonna do in this episode is kind of take a trip around the world and explore a lot of different Boogeymen that I'd never heard of. There's some similarities to the Christmas Horrors episode in this episode. There's a lot of really great stuff in here and I think it's just a fantastic topic to touch on for Halloween because it is something that pretty much every single person can relate to. So yeah, I mean, where I wanted to start off is just by saying that there's a reason we started this show, the very first episode of this show, with an episode on Hat Man because-

We didn't know what we were doing.

Well, we didn't know what we were doing and it came up first in the Google search results.

Yeah.

But I was drawn to it as a first episode for us because Hat Man is also, for me, the perfect place on the fear tier of a semi-supernatural fear that seems inexplicable, but is also persistent and has also appeared all over the world. And Boogeyman is kind of similar to that. Now, to be fair, dragons also check all of those boxes. And maybe someday we'll do an episode on dragons, but I'm less enthusiastic about dragons because I don't think they're really all that scary. And I'd wager my arm to a flesh-eating virus that dragon legends are really just ancient people's responses to finding fossils before they knew what fossils were.

Yeah. Also in our caves episode, we saw some stuff that I can absolutely see someone thinking that's a baby dragon if they had just caught it. You know, they had seen it before.

Oh yeah. That like salamander or whatever.

Scootalabah, Scootalabahs or whatever. They look like little dragons.

Yeah.

And they were living in dark caves. And yeah, if you're not, if you're just someone in the medieval times or something who was like, Oh shit, we better burn this cave.

Especially as we learned from Homunculus episode or from the Homunculus episode that for a long time, people thought that animals just appeared. They just like grew into existence. So if you found those little dragons in the cave, you were just like, shit, this cave, it's popping out dragons.

This is a spawn point for dragons.

Yeah, it's a spawn point for dragons. So the Boogeyman is right at the center of that Venn diagram. But before we dive into the world wide phenomenon of the Boogeyman, Ed, what is your experience of the Boogeyman? Was there one local to Connecticut?

No, I mean, there are tons of Connecticut lore stuff that we'll, I'm sure we'll get into in a future Fear of the Unknown episodes, like Melon Heads and Drag Drive and all sorts of stuff. But the Boogeyman, weirdly, I have two, you know, real vivid Boogeyman memories of it entering my life through pop culture or whatever. One was the Boogeyman movie, which I remember nothing of. I mean, I'm sure there's plenty of Boogeyman movies. I don't know exactly which one it was. But I remember that they defeated the Boogeyman, if I'm not mistaken, by just like turning a vacuum to exhaust or something and like shooting it with, I don't know, ping pong balls. It was some effect.

So this was not the 2006 Ghost House produced Boogeyman.

No, this would have been the 80s. Yeah, I mean, I would have watched it as a kid on like VHS.

Okay, got it.

And so, or like a VHS on our home, which meant it was just taped off of cable or something. But my other big Boogeyman memory is, you know, one of my all time favorite shows in the history of television, cinema, anything, The Real Ghostbusters, did two Boogeyman episodes. The first one's excellent. And yeah, I think it was Egon dealt with the Boogeyman as a kid. And then these kids call the Ghostbusters and they say that they're dealing with the Boogeyman. And then Egon's like, oh, I have to save these kids because I used to deal with the Boogeyman or whatever. It was real, the Boogeyman is really scary in it. Like it's awesome.

Is it the same Boogeyman in both Boogeyman episodes?

It is.

Whoa, so you're building a little mythology.

Yeah, and I think the episode was called like the Boogeyman Cometh or something, but it's an excellent episode. And it's a great Ghostbusters thing too, where they have to just fight the Boogeyman. And the Boogeyman like can travel between closets and stuff. But it's the same Boogeyman Egon remembers from his childhood.

Oh, I think I might have accidentally stolen some of this for something I'm writing. This sounds a lot like something I'm writing.

Well, I mean, it's a formative episode, for sure. So those would be my two like Boogeyman specific, that's the word and name used. But other than that, in terms of like a common everyday use of Boogeyman, it's a little bit like how people say things regarding certain industries, where it's like, oh, your son wants to be a filmmaker, he's going to be the next Steven Spielberg, like that's always the go-to, or, you know, it's, oh, your kid plays hockey, they're going to be the next Wayne Gretzky, or plays basketball, the next Michael Jordan. There's these like individual names that become the catchall. And I feel like Boogeyman, in terms of scary stuff, like insert whatever here the Boogeyman will or won't. When I was a kid, I would say like, you know, early 90s, late 80s, early 90s, the Boogeyman was being spoken about more than any individual thing.

Right, did your parents ever threaten you with a Boogeyman? Like a go to bed or else?

No, they threatened me with a belt and wooden spoons. You know that like slapping, when you take the belt and you like slap it, you turn it into that like figure eight and you can make that noise?

Oh yeah.

I would say that was the Boogeyman in our house.

Yeah, I had a Boogeyman and his name was Dad. No, I had a few different Boogeyman moments as a kid as well that scared the shit out of me. None of them were specific after I opened this episode, being like, everyone's got a specific one. You don't and I don't, but.

Yeah, but I would say they're not specific because it's that catch all Michael Jordan thing where it's like, what's that noise under your bed? The Boogeyman. There's no one in your closet is actually like the Boogeyman's not in your closet.

No, but some places have like Long Island had Cropsy or I guess some people might consider Melonheads.

We had Melonheads. To get us home before dark, Melonheads was used.

There you go.

But I would say that Melonheads didn't breach my bedroom. I was never like, what's that noise? It's the Melonheads. We're in LA, I might think that weirdly because there's a lot more noises outside my window here. But anything that's internal, the call is coming from inside the house, that's Boogeyman territory.

Interesting. I think a lot of the research that I did for this episode would categorize it less around it being the call coming from inside the house and more of any creature that is specifically a child torturer, eater, kidnapper, etc. That is used often by parents to make sure that their children come home at the right time or go to sleep or take their vitamins or whatever.

Okay, so that's, yeah, I can see now, I mean, we don't discuss this before we record, so obviously we didn't get our story straight.

No, this is the exploration of it.

Yeah, it's 100%, yeah, I'm just letting people know that yeah, we entered this with very different views of what The Boogeyman even is, but I'm excited to see where you go with this because like the real Ghostbusters episode, children are what The Boogeyman's after. I think it's after fear, it's after a lot of the things people who play in that league are after, but it's not the Santa Claus of cryptids, it's not like at a certain age, the Boogeyman's not real, we're gonna sit you down and tell you, and I might have to cut that, I don't know how young kids listen to this, they shouldn't be listening to it, but if you're young enough to still think Santa's real, I don't know, you shouldn't be listening. But I don't fault any parents who have their kids listen to our show, that's awesome. But yeah, I don't think it's that, but there is a thing where I don't feel like I brought up the Boogeyman since I was like 10.

Sure. Well, my point was that neither of us had super specific Boogeyman legends, even though I said everyone has one. I did have some, there were local legends in Hershey, we had it's stories, as you well know, the house on Waltonville Road was a Hershey legend, that we made a student film out of back in college. There was a woman named Mrs. Snavely, who lived in this crumbling house on Elm Street of all places.

Oh my God.

And she was the local witch, but she never quite rose to Boogeyman levels of Mrs. Snavely will come get you.

Was Mrs. Snavely real?

Yes.

So there was just a woman who had that surname that the children decided to be mean about?

She was, I don't know exactly what her mental illness she suffered from, but she was a real person. And I remember in like third grade, maybe second grade, my class was walking from the elementary school through kind of the center of town to some kid's house because he was having like a end of the school year party. And she came out of her house with a shovel and started waving it at the kids because she thought she saw a kid get on her lawn. And she was, I mean, she was not well. And then I remember when she died, there were stories in the local paper of the township cleaning out her house and how it was filled with like dead cats and like filthy diapers.

Oh yeah, she could just be a hoarder, I guess.

Well, yeah, I think she had a lot of issues, but you know, she was real and she was very frightening if you crossed her, but she never rose to the level of Boogeyman.

Well, that's a little depressing though. I hate that it's, you know, I was kind of hoping for a Sandlot story or something where it's like, we all thought she was mean and, you know, like a home alone situation where it's like, that shovel was to protect me. Like, no, she was just like a raging lunatic.

But, but I do, I-

RIP God bless.

RIP God bless to Mrs. Snavely.

And if you're a Snavely descendant, you know, I'm sorry.

Well, I'm curious if she was, cause she was very old and Milton S. Hershey, his middle name was Snavely.

Stop it.

Yeah, so I assume-

She was a mistress or a sister.

There may have been some connection somehow.

Wow. Wow. His middle name is Snavely.

Milton Snavely Hershey.

That is an insane name. Are there any other Snavelies? It's like someone posted recently, they were like Sigourney Weaver. Is there another Sigourney like at all on the planet earth? And I feel like that, like I never heard the name Snavely. Now you're telling me there's two of them walking around.

Yeah. Yeah. So, yeah, we didn't have, we didn't have a Boogeyman and part of that may have been because Milton was like the opposite of the Boogeyman. He literally opened an orphanage for children who didn't have parents because they were orphans. And so maybe there was like a dark, I like to imagine there was a dark half Boogeyman who was stealing the orphans.

Yeah. Mrs. Snavely or whatever. Mrs. Snavely had some sort of like tunnel slash slide that went from the orphanage directly into her, I don't know, indoor cat cemetery.

So in any case, the first Boogeyman story I remember hearing that had me just absolutely shitting my pants in fear was what?

Just shitting your pants.

Shitting my pants. Well, we're on a pants shitting terror. Mrs. Snavely was shitting her pants and saving all of it.

Was she? Did you say that?

Well, she had, there were diapers all over the shit.

Sure, that's on me. I should have listened.

I assume it was hers and not random babies that she was taking, but who knows?

Yeah, you don't know about this lady.

So the first Boogeyman story I ever heard that really scared the shit out of me was from the show, which is now heavily memed, but at the time was like the third string to Unsolved Mysteries and Sightings, Beyond Belief, Fact or Fiction, which most people are probably familiar with because of the compilation video where he's like, not true, never happened.

Oh yeah, what's his name from Star Trek Next Generation?

Yeah, not Brent Spiner.

It's Riker from Star Trek.

He used to host the show. And so for those of you who only know the not true, never happened, we made it up, a meme, this show is called Beyond Belief Factor Fiction and it was essentially Unsolved Mysteries where they had like four segments per episode of crazy stories.

And we'll put that in the show notes, it is a very funny video. Like that out of context video is very funny.

Yeah, but the hook of the show was that a handful of the stories were true and a handful of the stories were just made up.

Is that true?

Yeah.

It's the original like AI generated response?

Well, and the whole hook of the show was at the end, they tell you which ones were real and which ones were fake.

Oh my God.

So you'd watch the four, you know, and they were all, none of them were, they were all reenacted. So you couldn't really tell the difference. They were all reenacted in like a house style. And they were all done as sort of scary stories with written by and directed by credits. So you didn't know which ones were real stories and which ones were made up.

Oh, I had no idea. Yeah. I mean, my, the entirety of the knowledge of that show is the memes. So yeah.

Well, that's the, what created the meme was at the end of the episode, he would always, he would say, that one, not true. We made it up. And then that's where the meme comes in. But anyway, there was an episode of that that they did about a kid who was afraid of a monster in his closet and he couldn't sleep. And when he did sleep, he'd have all these horrible nightmares and he got made fun of by all these kids at school.

You shouldn't tell the kids at school about your nightmares.

Lesson learned. I probably learned that really quickly watching that episode.

Just go home, let people worry about you because of how quiet you are.

Right, right. You want to be the one that they say, we never thought it would have been him. Yeah, exactly. So he had an older brother who led this band of bullies and in the episode, the bullies and the brother chase him home from school, I believe with a baseball bat at one point.

Wait, it's his older brother?

His older brother.

Chased his own brother home with his band of bullies.

Yeah.

That's a blurred line.

Yeah. Well, what happened was they're chasing him because they're making fun of him. They go up to the bedroom and they're like, they're going to shove the kid in the closet. He's like, if you don't believe me that there's a monster in the closet, how about you go in there? The older brother is like, fine, I'll go in there.

Wow, he turned it around in the bullies.

Yeah. The brother goes in and closes the door and then starts wailing and screaming. I rewatched it. I have the episode, we'll put in the show notes. It's not as convincing wailing and screaming as I remember it being when I was a child. But he sounded absolutely horrified to me as a kid. Then the mom comes in and she's like, what's going on in here? She opens the closet door and the kid's gone. There's just like his shirt and his shoes are left in the closet.

Evaporated.

Then the cops come and they're like, we don't know what happened to him. Maybe he ran away from home. I was so frightened that I never watched the end of the episode to find out if it was real or not. For years, my brain categorized it as a true story. That a boy went into a closet, screamed for help and then was never seen again.

Yeah, but that's nice because it's like, you learn at an early age that karma is real. Your uppams will come if you're an asshole.

Yeah, yeah.

Wait, have you since looked it up? Is it not real?

It's definitely not real, yes.

Well, that's sad, like a man who actually hasn't looked it up.

Well, I-

Stands by a series of convictions you've made since.

No, it's not real. It's one of the fake ones. But I believed it because I was young and my sisters were scared shitless of something that they thought lived in the bathroom attached to their room.

Yes, which we talked about in the show before.

We talked about it in the show and I probably-

Or I cut it and we haven't, I don't know.

My sisters were very afraid of the bathroom attached to their room. And I also was afraid of our house for a lot of reasons. Some stories I may have told in the show before. I don't know if I've told this one or not. It's not even really a story, but one night I got up and went across the hall to go to the bathroom. And then when I was walking back towards my room, I heard a voice from my room just say, Chris. And I was very scared, but I told myself it was just my stuffed animals.

Sure, that's.

Well, I read a lot of Calvin and Hobbes. I thought that that was better in my mind than there being a monster in my room.

Okay, sure.

So there were those, all of that. And then after I saw this Boogeyman episode, I was laying in bed one night trying to fall asleep, and I was looking at my closet, and what I thought happened was the closet door opened very quickly and bright light started pouring out of it.

Oh my God.

And I still remember the feeling of, sometimes when I go back to try to write the description of like a paralyzing fear, I put myself back to that moment because I, for a split second, was absolutely convinced that's what was happening, that the closet was opening, and there was this light coming out of it. I very quickly realized that it was car headlights had come across the front of the house, and had moved the shadows very quickly, and it kind of looked like that's what was happening.

Yeah. But I have a closet story to follow that up with that's unlocked a memory for me. My parents were divorced at this time. I was living with my dad, and I had a very small bedroom. I kept a lot of stuff in the closet because there wasn't a lot of surface area in the little square I was sleeping in. This is a time period where a CD player, like a boom, there was just no small version of this if it had a four disc change or whatever. It's like, well, here's your television size fucking rectangle. I basically was like, well, I have nowhere to put this in my room. I'll put it in the closet and I'll open the closet doors and want to listen to music or whatever. I was listening to RLE. Peace CD, and I think it's Happiness Is A Fish You Can't Catch or something.

It was the album Spiritual Machines, which will make more sense in a minute.

And so that album ends with a secret track that's real after. So for kids listening.

So not even kids, probably people in their late 20s.

Yeah, anyone in their 20s listening. So an album sometimes would end and the last track, the song might be three minutes long, but the actual track would be like 20 minutes long and like 18 minutes into the silence, there would be a new thing that appears. So the album had ended and I'm not gonna get out of bed and then go to the, it was like the album's done, whatever, I'm fucking done here. So I'm just gonna go to sleep, like obviously no more music's gonna come out, but also it's a boombox that has like lights on it. Like, you know what I mean? It shows that the power's on and what have you. And so all of a sudden it's what sounds like two fucking robots or something talking from my fucking closet and there's a light. So basically the closet door closes and so the entirety of the like space between the two closet doors, like the way it opens, like the fold out type of closet, was just this fucking green light pouring out of my closet. And I'm hearing like robotic voices and robots have fucking lights on them and shit. And I was like, what the fuck? And so, and then like, I mean, I have not listened to it since. And I just remember it being like frozen with fear. Like frozen with fear. Like I didn't know what to fucking do. I think I eventually, you know, investigated, but holy shit. I mean, I haven't thought about that in 25 years until you just said this thing.

I had something similar with, I think the new found glory record Sticks and Stones, which had My Friends Over You, which was like their big hit. I think that one, and this is, I'm reaching way back in my memories here. I'm pretty sure that ended with it like an intentionally spooky, like I don't know who's creaking doors or like a cackling girl or something. But I remember being like, oh, that's mean.

Yeah, it is mean.

Yeah, that's a mean trick.

I don't think that early piece was out to like really upset people, but it was just this confluence of terrifying moment where the CD player was, what was being, it was just so crazy, man.

Yeah.

So nuts. So that's a long winded story. I guess technically nothing to do with Boogeyman, but it was like a memory unlocked in front of you.

Absolutely. I mean, we both have these closet stories.

We didn't have a lot of space. Sounds like either of our houses.

No, no. Here's the kicker to the closet stories. So I then took this fear I had of the Boogeyman living in my closet and around seventh or eighth grade, I'd started writing a series of short stories inspired by Clive Barker's books of blood.

He's gay, right?

Yes.

So it's interesting that that was the man who inspired you to write things coming out of the closet stories.

I literally named my closet monster story coming out of the closet. And then I named the entire collection of short stories that I gave to my grandfather as a birthday present coming out of the closet.

Wow.

But I had no idea what the, I'd heard it, you know, like I'd sort of heard the term out.

Probably from Clive Barker.

Maybe.

I don't know.

I don't know. But I, well, probably, yeah. And then I probably was like, oh, it's a horror term, you know? Like I didn't really know what it was.

Depending on the decade you ask someone, it might be.

Yeah. And I never, I would love to know. I wish my grandfather hadn't passed. I never.

Did that kill him?

No. No. But, oh man, I'm sure there was discussion in my family of like, so should we, do we, do we talk to him? Like, do we, is there?

Was this Pennsylvania in the 90s? I feel like the discussion wasn't love is love.

No, no, no. My grandfather was, he was a Massachusetts liberal.

Oh, okay, good to hear.

Well, sometimes he had, he was all over the place.

I mean, he started it with Massachusetts. So, yeah, it's a plinko ball any day of the week in terms of where they land.

On one of our live episodes or something behind the paywall, I will find the coming out of the closet collection and read some stories or something from it, but-

It's important to keep that to the smallest audience we can.

Yeah, we don't need to put that out there. But outside of my semi-close, but not too close encounters with The Boogeyman, I think my real obsession with the mythic idea of The Boogeyman really kicked off when I discovered It and Halloween around the same time.

Wow.

And Michael and Pennywise are two, I think, of the scariest, most visceral personifications of a Boogeyman-type figure.

Well, one's a book and one isn't, so I imagine you found the It miniseries and Halloween at the same time, or did you find the It book?

No, I found the book.

The book is phenomenal. One of my favorite books.

I was a reader at a pretty young age, so that was like the one little superpower I had was that I read a lot and I read voraciously. As I've said on this show probably every episode, I was afraid of pretty much everything, but there was a point where I saw Jaws and Halloween, probably a little bit too young and those really scared me. I discovered It probably around the same time because I had dipped my toe into Goosebumps books and somehow found It through Goosebumps and was like, well, I had read Jurassic Park at that point and I was like, well, I'm looking for another grown up novel to read, so I'll read It. I don't think I really understood a lot of it, but what I did understand was that it took place in Derry, which is actually the real name of Hershey. Hershey is actually Derry Township.

Really? Holy shit.

There's no mayor of Hershey, there's no governing board of Hershey. Hershey is just sort of, it is a real place, but the governing board of it is Derry Township. So everything, the public library, the public pool, it's all Derry, Derry, Derry, Derry, Derry. So when I cracked open it, I was like, oh, this takes place in Hershey, basically.

And you're a kid, and the first half of it, it's not all that surprising if you were like, this is a kid's book. I'm a kid, this is about kids. This is about kids and Derry, I'm a kid and Derry. Like, this is a book about me. Until you're like, this better not be a book about me.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. So there was that, and then Halloween, which even though it was shot in Pasadena, which is where I live now, it captured the small town America vibe so well that I also felt like that basically took place in Hershey. And so I started being drawn to these figures that represented this ancient, unstoppable, evil, corrupting, otherwise pleasant people and places. And I started drawing Michael on everything at some point.

Jesus Christ.

I figured out how to draw his mask.

The rest of us were doing that weird S.

Yeah.

That like weird pointy S.

Yes.

And you were drawing William Shatner's death mask or whatever.

Yeah. I would draw Michael's face on a lot of things. And I would also just draw him standing, holding a knife with the symbol of thorn over his head, which was only introduced later in the mythology and in some of the lesser Halloween films.

And that's what you said to the principal?

Yeah. Well, I never, I, thanks to my, God bless my mom for not being too concerned about me doing that. I think she understood that I was more fascinated with, yeah, I was working out some kind of fear or like at no point did I went, I went to Halloween as Michael Myers with a homemade Halloween mask that was made from Saran wrap and white tape that my dad wrapped around my head.

That sounds like you can't breathe based on what you just described.

We cut some holes. I breathed a little bit.

But for the listener at home, you're wearing a Halloween t-shirt.

Yes, I am. I'm wearing my Halloween 2 shirt that Ed bought me at Ross's or something.

It was at Marshall's and I was, I think you were on a call with your therapist or something. In every episode into this show, I now know why that's necessary. You were on that call and I was like, well, I'll give you some privacy. I'll go for a walk. We were actually editing or just finished Hat Man. It was like we had just done the first episode. It was about a year ago. I was like, I'll go for a walk. I went to Marshall's and there was weirdly a Halloween 2 shirt and then some slides. I bought some slides for myself.

Yeah, it's a great shirt. I love it. Anyway, I started drawing Michael Myers on everything. I didn't want to be Michael Myers. I was absolutely terrified of him, but I was drawn to his, and I still am drawn to his-

Riz.

Yeah, that je ne sais quoi that Michael Myers has. No, his liminality, if that's a word, like he's almost a liminal space as a person. He's not a man, he's not a monster. He's part of our world, but he's not. And even though obviously Pennywise is much more ancient evil kind of Lovecraft coated, both of them had that similar thing where it's like they're humanoid figures, but there's clearly something wrong about them. Michael couldn't just be a man. And if I had to guess, there's probably something in there about the contradiction, or I guess they call it the mystery of faith that I was raised in that Christ is all man and all God at the same time. And so this man who is all man, but all the devil or evil at the same time, I think was maybe extra interesting to me. I also realized just in the past five or 10 years, probably that I think the reason I drew Michael was because he represented something that I didn't understand at the time, which was anxiety. I think Michael represented my feelings of anxiety, this feeling that there was this nameless, shapeless thing lurking around every corner, that everything was about to go to hell at any given moment.

And no matter how fast I ran, it doesn't change its pace and it's always right there with you.

Yeah. I've actually, I've since developed a theory that the three main slashers each represent a different primal human emotion. Michael represents anxiety, Jason represents rage, and Freddie represents revenge. And I think they're like three core emotions that in the best of those movies drive those monsters. Don't steal that.

It's going on to the world. We're going to have to write this article first.

But anyway, drawing Michael, I think, really just helped me capture that fear. Not so much express that I wanted to stab anybody.

This show is sponsored by BetterHelp.

It's almost Halloween and I don't know about you, listener, but here at Scared All The Time, we like to go all out. Ed, do you have any Halloween plans? Any costumes lined up?

I think we're going to wear the pumpkin masks, the ones from our promo photos we did.

Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, that's right. The promo shoot that no one saw. We could do that. The only problem with masks is that they're stifling and they're hot. They make it hard to breathe. They kind of make it hard to be yourself.

Who wants to be themselves on Halloween? Or pretty much ever?

Ever. It's okay to wear masks on Halloween, even if they are gross and sweaty. But if you feel like you're wearing a mask most days and hide more often than you want to, whether it's at work or social settings or around family and friends, then therapy can help you learn to take the mask off and accept all parts of yourself.

Because masks should be for Halloween fun, not for our emotions.

That's right, Ed. I've heard you say that a hundred times. I agree. I've been in therapy for more than a decade. And the difference between me before therapy and me after therapy is like night and day. Man in college, I was a depressed, anxious mess. I mean, Ed remembers he was there.

I do. College Chris was a very different guy.

I was. I had trouble feeling comfortable around other people. The sky constantly felt like it was falling. And therapy helped me work through those emotions to find a happier, healthier me.

Now the only reason you won't come out of your room is because I make you stay in there researching episodes.

Something I likely will bring up to my therapist.

So if you're thinking of starting therapy, give Better Help a try.

It's entirely online, designed to be convenient, flexible and suited to your schedule.

All you gotta do is fill out a brief questionnaire to get masked with a licensed therapist and you can switch therapists anytime for no additional charge.

Yeah, so don't be scared. You won't get stuck with a bad therapist.

Oh hell yeah, dude.

See what I did there?

I did, hopefully the audience appreciates it.

So take off the mask with Better Help.

Visit betterhelp.com/s-a-t-ttoday to get 10% off your first month.

That's betterhelp.com/s-a-t-t.

Which is the initials of the show you're listening to.

Scared All The Time. So that's where my story with The Boogeyman begins. But where do Boogeyman stories begin in the world? That's the question that I came in this episode with. And the answer is about as hard to pin down as a description of what The Boogeyman looks like. The best answer is pretty much the very unsatisfying, we don't really know. That won't stop me from gathering answers from a bunch of different sources and presenting them to you as options for what you'd like to believe.

This is why people show up.

So according to the Myth and Folklore Wiki at mythist.fandom.com, The Boogeyman, also known as Boogeywoman, Boogeyman, Boogeyman, Boogeymonster, Boogeyperson, Boogeyperson or Boogeywoogie.

Boogeywoogie, that's just-

That's just them throwing one more thing in at the end of the list.

Well, Boogeywoogie isn't, yeah, it's not a great name.

So according to that wiki, all of those names are the same term for a monster in English folklore that is often pulled out to scare misbehaving children.

I do like the idea of finding the boogeyman's apartment, and it's like a Jason Bourne lockbox discovery where it's like, he's got 30 passports, we got boogie oogie, we got boogie woogie out of Denmark. It's just like, what was this guy?

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, and I would also say this definition is inaccurate in the sense that it is not just English folklore, it is folklore all over the world. But Wikipedia generally agrees with this description of the boogeyman adding that, boogeymen have no specific appearances, and conceptions vary drastically by household and culture, but they are most commonly depicted as masculine or androgynous monsters.

Oh shit, I'm gonna end up falling in love with one.

The punished children for misbehavior. The boogeyman and conceptually similar monsters can be found in many cultures around the world. Boogeymen may target a specific act or general misbehavior depending on the purpose of invoking the figure, often on the basis of a warning from an authority figure to a child.

So that's the thing we were talking about, where it's like, clean your room with the boogeyman's in a cup, which also, yeah, I could see how there's similarities between like the Icelandic, the Christmas witches and stuff.

Yeah, oh, and there's similarities with some other creatures. We're gonna get into a second here. But the etymology of the word boogeyman tells us that it may have derived from the middle English words bug, B-U-G-G-E, or bog, B-O-G-G-E, which means frightening specter, terror or scarecrow, which in turn might have derived from the old Welsh word boog, B-W-G.

Is that how we got boogins, the movie?

Probably, but B-W-G, boog.

Yeah, that's disgusting spelling, word. You can't see what Chris' face when he does it.

It feels muddy.

It's a, yeah.

Boog.

Yeah, that's a word who got caught in a fucking, in slime trying to get out of your mouth.

But boog means evil spirit or hobgoblin, and this old Welsh word is likely the origin of the modern word for bug, which, you know, isn't too surprising because two of the three letters are exactly the same.

But also Welsh, kind of like Celtic and stuff, it's just never what you think it would be. So if anyone knows Welsh, let us know what the actual pronunciation is. I'm sure it's gonna sound like, like it's gonna have a crazy, we couldn't even guess, like, oh, well B in Welsh is actually a Z sound.

Or it's just bug.

Fuck, well.

It might just be bug.

Let me have, let me enjoy.

I think it's kind of cool that bugs, boogie men, and apparently scarecrows, which are sometimes portrayed as boogie men in fiction, all share a similar history in terms of the word that we use for them.

Well, a scarecrow is an invention by like corporeal beings who are not of a different world to just be like, I need this to scarecrows. The scarecrow is the boogie man of the crow community.

True.

And so like basically that's just human beings being like, we need a boogie man out here. Like the crows won't listen to our like, stop eating our shit or else the boogie man will come. We need to just lay a boogie man out there.

We didn't have guns yet.

But I think hay and old clothes were less expensive than musket balls or whatever. I don't know how that works.

True. Well, these terms evolved into boggarts and Bugbears.

Barely an evolution.

Which are two creatures from folklore, each of them similar to boogie men, though each with some important distinctions. So let's tackle boggarts first. boggarts are somewhat generic troll creatures. Though I found at least one book that gives a little more specificity to their behaviors. The 1867 book Lancashire Folklore by Harland and Wilkinson.

Two people? Is that one crazy name?

Two people. Harland and Wilkinson.

Sure.

These two folklorists make a distinction between house boggarts and other types.

Well, they had a page count they had to hit.

Yeah. The house boggart seems closest to the Boogeyman, though he's a little bit more mischievous than dangerous. The book tells us how boggarts crawl into people's beds at night and put a clammy hand on their faces.

Wow, that's the-

So they're basically just frat bros hiding in the closet. Sometimes the boggart will strip the bedsheets off of you.

That's what my dad used to do. We've discussed this.

What? Did we?

Yes. Absolutely discussed it. That's why I don't sleep naked. Chris just fits very well.

And here I thought it was just because you were ashamed of your body.

That's the other, that's the subcategory. If you drop down menu of my issues, that's there too. But yeah, no, I told you the story of the show. I'll quickly say it. It's that my dad would come in and be like, wake up, it's time for school. And I'd be like, yeah, I'll be up in five minutes. And then he'll come back in five minutes and be like, you're not up, get the fuck up, it's time for school. And then after like two of those, if he comes back a third time and I'm not up, he just comes in, takes all the fucking blankets and everything off the bed and just takes them out of the room so that I'm just like sitting there cold in the winter. And then I'd be like, fuck, now I'm uncomfortable, I have to get up. And so that would happen enough that yeah, I don't ever, I just, in my mind, there's always a boggar, a house boggar or whatever, like gonna come in and take all my fucking, my sheets.

Yes, this is familiar now. In my mind, because I was in Boogeyman land, I thought you meant that you told me a story about your dad coming into your room in the middle of the night and just taking your sheets and I was like-

No, not in the middle of the night, there was like a-

Yes, in the morning to get you going.

It's a punishment, it's not a like a, hey, guess what?

Interestingly, Harlan and Wilkinson tell us that if the family flees their house, boggart, it might follow them, which reminds me a little bit of poltergeist activity.

Sure.

That's the whole like, we have a nine-year-old daughter who's like throwing plates around with her mind, or maybe it's a poltergeist kind of thing. That feels, so this is the first dipping the toe in the evolution of Boogeyman really touching on like every other paranormal thing. And that's the first place that I see it. One Lancashire source reports the belief that a boggart should never be named. If the boggart was given a name, it could neither be reasoned with nor persuaded, and would become uncontrollable and destructive.

Oh my God.

Again, very poltergeist. Although, I mean, the uncontrollable and destructive, not so much in naming it, but Boogeyman seem to be uncontrollable and destructive whether they have a name or not. That doesn't really seem to stop them.

Well, I guess at a certain point, people don't name you because they know about this rule. You have to say, fuck that rule.

Yeah. Bug bears are different. Bug bears are usually depicted as large, frightening, and or ugly humanoid beasts with sharp teeth, claws and horns, sometimes with thick tails and shaggy fur. In medieval England, bug bears were described as being an actual bear, although a hideous and evil one. In almost all cases, bug bears were said to be monsters that lurked in forester caves that would kidnap and eat children who misbehaved or wandered off. These stories, like those of The Boogeyman, were primarily told to scare young children, encouraging them to behave and listen to their parents, as well as stay away from dark and dangerous places.

I got to say, the more we talk about this, The Village might be the greatest Boogeyman movie ever made.

Kind of. Yeah. I mean, you could have called The Village Boogeyman, and I think it would work basically. 100%.

We won't give anything away about that movie, but I love that movie. People don't like it, but fuck those people.

It's very good. The only, well-

We're not getting into it.

I won't get into it. I have a knock on it, but I won't say it.

Yeah, it's probably wrong.

It's correct.

It's 100% correct.

We'll talk about it off mic.

We'll fucking end this relationship off mic.

So the word Boogeyman has equivalents in many European languages, all of which I am about to boogie bungle.

Oh my God, that's good. No, you definitely will.

And I will say this is the beginning of what is going to be me boogie bungling a lot of words in this episode because we're going to take a tour through a lot of different languages, many of which I could not even find pronunciation guides to on the internet that I could understand.

Yeah, this is normally, I would say, drink every time you think he's fucked up a word, but we probably legally can't tell you that. It'd be a bunch of dead people.

You'll be whacked by the end of this paragraph. So here's Boogeyman.

I'll do it for you.

Here's Boogeyman equivalents in different languages. We've got Bogle or boggle, which is Scottish.

Right away you had to redo the, yeah, it's a mess.

I don't know which it is.

No one knows.

It's boggle or boggle in Scottish, Puka in Irish, Puka, Boga or Bogwan in Welsh. Those are all BWG words.

Sure, oh my God.

Bucka in Cornish, Bus or Busaman in Norwegian.

And again, we are reading this with a romantic language. English is our fucking native tongue. So any kind of shit, just recognize that. If you're like, hey, if you understood the Cyrillic alphabet, you would know that that wouldn't, you know what I mean, but we're not those people.

I'm just trying to give you a sense of how many of these creatures are out there in all these different languages.

Yeah, so fucking, save your emails for people who tried.

So, Buse or Buseman in Norwegian, Puke in Old Norse, Boman or Buseman in Danish, Buseman in Western Frisian, Boman in Dutch, Bobolas in Surinamese Dutch, Butsman in German, Bokan or Bogu in Slav, Buka, Babay, Babiaka, Buka in Russian, Bauck in Serbian, Bobolas in Latvian, Baubas in Lithuanian, Bobo, Babak or Bebak in Polish, Buba or Gogol in Albanian, Bubak in Czech, which is also the same as Bubak in Slovak, Bebak in Silesian, and this is now reaching the point where I feel like I'm just making robot noises.

You fucking idiot.

Papau in Portuguese, Bampolas in Greek, Babaj in Ukrainian, Baubau in Romanian, Papu in Catalan, and Mumus in Hungarian, and I assume Babadook in Australian.

Yeah, man. Listen, if you're from any of these places, let us know how we did.

Ed, I noticed Italian wasn't on this list.

We have our own, we have that fucking, that witch with her fucked up foot, or is that, which one's that?

That's the Christmas witch or whatever.

Is she Italian, though?

I don't remember, I don't think she was Italian.

There was an Italian one, though.

There was. Italian, I looked up because I was like, well, what's the Italian Boogeyman? And I immediately wish that I had not.

Oh, good.

Because the Italian term for Boogeyman is-

Witch Dago?

No. The Italian term for Boogeyman is Lomonero, or Black Man.

Oh, no.

And I know, I thought the same thing. Our people aren't exactly known for their racial tolerances. But I will say, this is a modern sort of liberal perspective we're bringing to it. Throughout history, the description of Lomonero is of a tall man wearing a heavy black coat with a black hood or hat.

Hat man!

Which hides his face.

Holy shit.

He's basically hat man, which there's probably a whole other episode there.

And they really could have just called him Hat Man and not Black Man.

They put us in this horrible position. Anyway, because Italian parents are assholes, something that they apparently like to do is knock loudly under the table and then pretend that they're hearing someone knocking at the door and say something like, Here comes Lomonero. He must know that there's a child here who doesn't want to drink his soup.

Wow. Drink your soup.

So drink your soup, kids.

Kids are like, why don't we get some shit in this soup? Why don't I eat this soup? It's just a broth-based piece of shit.

Don't feed me hot water with two bay leaves soaked in it.

Yeah, maybe Hat Man's coming to check on the damn soup. You ever think about that?

It's not Hat Man, it's Child Protective Services. They're here to take these kids.

Yeah, because they have what we call broth body, which is very thin, very thin, brittle bodies. These are kids who can't go three bars on the monkey bars because they're eating soup every night.

Lomonero is also featured in a popular nursery rhyme in Italy, which goes like this.

Go to sleep, eat your gruel.

Yeah, no, it goes like this. Nina nana, Nina oh. Cesto bimbo, a ki lodo. Lodaro aluomonero. Ce lo tiene un ano intero. Which in English means lullaby lullah. Oh, who do I give this child to? I will give him to the boogeyman who's going to keep him for a whole year.

So this is, again, this isn't a lullaby, it's a threat.

Yeah, now it is a threat. Lou Monero is actually not supposed to eat or harm children, though. He instead takes them away to all I could find in the description of it as a, he takes them to a mysterious and frightening place.

Oh, good. So every country is in dire need of, I guess, better daycare situation, but like, fuck, dude.

Germans actually also have a very similar legend in their language, it is Der Schwarzmann.

I thought you gave a name for German earlier and it wasn't that.

No, I don't.

It wasn't Bart Simpson or the fuck you just said.

Der Schwarzmann. No, I had Dutch, Russian, Serbian, Czech, Slovak.

You had German for sure.

Polish. Oh, no, you're right. In the list, they have Butzmann. So maybe Der Schwarzmann is a little bit different. Yeah.

Everyone always assumes I don't pay attention, but I listened. And normally I would cut something like this, but you know, I need to win.

I couldn't find any specific references to Der Schwarzmann dressing in a coat and hat. It seems like he was more of a generic figure of death and cruelty that children were warned about.

I mean, they would be using Germany from 39 to 45. Is that for the rest of time?

Well, they I think Der Schwarzmann is is much earlier than that.

No, I know. They had to then transition into the black coat and hats. Oh, I see.

I see. I see. So he is one of the few figures on this list who also had a whole game based around him. I don't know, Ed, have you ever played Red Rover?

Yeah, yeah.

As a kid?

Yeah.

So basically, from what I've found, Red Rover actually has its roots in a game called Black Man or Boogeyman.

What the fuck? This is in Germany that also equals Black Man?

Yes, Der Schwarzmann.

Well, you didn't give the translation on that one. You just said Der Schwarzmann.

I'm just used to Schwarzbeers or like dark beers. So.

I'm not that level. I'm not at your level of like I'm not a booze hound. I'm not a learned booze hound. I drink a lot of Coors Light.

Yeah, you drink a lot of light beers. This game is one of the oldest games in the line of what is known to, I guess, people who study games. They call these Western European chase games.

I mean, we have a lot of reasons for our parents to be disappointed, but at least we're not people who study games.

I know. That's true. This game was described in 1796 by a man named Johan Christoph Friedrich Gutzmuths.

I have a friend named Johan.

Does he have all those other names, too?

He's got a couple. I don't want to get into him, but you can tell he was definitely part of the colonizing of South Africa.

Sure. Yeah. It's clear which side of the line he was on. Well, this game also has lines. All the players, it's just like Red Rover. All the players line up on one side of the field, except for the player who's chosen as the Boogeyman. That person calls out, are you afraid of the Boogeyman? And one by one, each kid says no, and then they try to run past the Boogeyman. And if the Boogeyman tags them, then they become part of the Boogeyman's gang.

Okay.

And then it becomes harder for each person to get past the line of defense.

So Red Rover.

Red Rover. But what's really kind of creepy about the version of it that is Boogeyman is that according to these well-socialized and surely rich and successful game studiers, it draws on ancient plague games in which the catcher epitomizes the Black Death. Everyone he touches becomes a bearer of the plague. And in a broader sense, the character in the game represents death itself. And of course the game ends in the triumph of the Boogeyman whose power increases with each new capture.

That's interesting. And entomology-wise, I'm more comfortable with Black entering the conversation that way.

Yeah.

One less likely story about the origin of the term Boogeyman is that it evolved from a fear of pirates.

Oh, that black flag, there's that.

Not quite, not quite.

Blackbeard?

Good guess though. No. I kept running into this theory.

Gunpowder Boys?

Nope. I kept running into this theory and I kept dismissing it because the places that I was reading about it were pretty poorly sourced. But after the third.

Poorly sourced.

They were. They were just like, literally I found one web page that looked like maybe some kid's high school project that was like the origin of the term Boogeyman was this specific thing about pirates. And I was like, this just seems made up. But then I kept finding it. So I dug into it and it turns out there's an interesting bit of history connected to this, if nothing else. So the predominant ethnic group on the southern peninsula of the Indonesian island, Sulawese, is the Boogies. Okay. B-U-G-I-S. They're also known as the Boganaisen, Boganaisay, To Boogie, To Oogie and To Woogie. They are one of the most well known seafaring people in Southeast Asia. For centuries, they've traveled all over the map. They've colonized numerous coasts and they have a long association with piracy, which is where they enter this story. Because starting in the 17th century, the Boogies built giant sailing ships and used them to sail as far as Australia. These ships were also big enough to overwhelm European ships, even with their firepower.

It's just kind of like, we're not even making a dent on this fucking ark they built.

Yeah, I guess. And so from the 17th to the 19th century, Boogie pirates often preyed on ships belonging to the Dutch East India Company, who at the time were busy colonizing Indonesia. The Boogies became so well known that both Joseph Conrad and Herman Melville wrote about their adventures, and the East India Company feared them so much that supposedly the phrase Boogie Man became a slang term for pirate. And soldiers began to joke, that The Boogeyman will get you.

Oh, so it's like, wow, that's actually, this all came from a child's angel fire website?

No, no, no. So this got-

But that is an interesting-

That's the first place I ran across it. And I was like, that doesn't sound right.

Cause that kid should win a Saturn Award.

There's a lot of places that have written about it. Now-

But that is cool. I do like that, like, you know, hey, we don't take this route across the seven seas because you might run into The Boogeyman.

Yes. So all that said, etymologists generally disagree with the assertion that the Boogies were the source of the word Boogie Man because as we just talked about-

Because they hate fun?

No. As we just talked about, yeah, actually, to be fair, I don't know, etymologists, they don't seem like the- Well, who's more fun, etymologists or, like, game scientists?

Game scientists.

Probably game scientists.

Yeah, because at least they have to, like, test them and can invite people over.

True. They generally disagree with the idea that that's where it came from because as we just talked about, words relating to Boogie Man were in common use centuries before anyone would have run into the Boogies as pirates.

Yeah, but I kind of like the pirate story the best.

It would make a great sequel to Captain Philip.

I worked on Captain Phillips.

Oh, yeah.

I have the fucking cruise shirt.

Pitch from Captain Phillips 2, The Boogie Man.

Captain Phillips 2, Electric Boogie Man Lou.

I guess so.

That's a joke for no one.

As far as specific Boogie Man behaviors go, child eating does seem to be one of the most consistent features, whether it's monster in the closet or baguul and sinister, The Boogeyman always seems to have a taste for the innocent, especially a taste for the innocent who are misbehaving. So I wanted to try to find the oldest stories I could that specifically relate to these mythic child eaters. I started back as far as I could go, poking around Sumerian and Mesopotamian culture and myths. They have a number of demons and monsters kicking around in their writings, but nothing that felt specifically Boogie Man to me. There is a fascinating article I've found about the practices of exorcisms in Mesopotamia and how they're trained and how some of them would live together. And it's too long of a tangent to get into here. It's probably another episode. People just want to hear about Boogie Man.

But the exorcism frat is pretty fun.

Put a pin in it. There's some really interesting stuff there. For my money, the best and oldest Boogie Man story I could find is that of the Lamia, an ancient Greek monster made even more intriguing by the fact that this Boogie Man is one of history's few recorded Boogie women.

Oh, wow. Greece is so impressive. Like Hellenistic Greece. It really makes the economic collapse that much harder to swallow. But if-

Whose? Ours or theirs?

Ours. They're famously, I don't know, like a decade ago. But it is, it's just so wild. Like everything you'd, any kind of, if you're ever taking classes in high school about it or just researching your life, it's just like, man, Greece had it together for a while.

They did. Well, get this. The story goes that the Lamia started life as a beautiful woman who, like so many women in Greek mythology, made the mistake of having an affair with Zeus.

I don't think it was their mistake. It's, he's a fucking god. I feel like he's just probably.

True.

He's like a.

I'm not blaming the woman. I'm just saying it never ends well.

No, no, it definitely doesn't. But it just seemed like, I wouldn't be surprised if he's playing with that like divine Cosby sauce a little bit.

He is a little bit, yeah. In any case, Hera, his wife, reacted by kidnapping Lamia's children. And depending on which version of the story you go with, either hiding them from Lamia, killing them, or forcing Lamia to kill and eat them herself.

Sure. All three seem like viable Greek options.

Yeah. Really intense escalation, I would say from hiding to forcing a person to kill and eat their own children. But Lamia was also, I think, unfortunate enough to have the name Lamia to begin with, because scholars think that this name is derived from the Greek word limos or throat. The general consensus is that this was a reference to Lamia's consumption of children, but that doesn't make sense to me because her children were taken. Well, she did evolve to eat children.

We'll get to in a minute, but you're saying that the choose your own adventure of misfortunes for this person included being tricked into eating your own children.

Yeah. I mean, it would be like if you're, her name was Bomb and your family died in a mad explosion. That's, you know, like.

That was a stretch.

No, it's not. That's what this would be.

That's not even a myth. That's like a what if.

Well, anyway, to ensure that Lamia got no respite from her grief, Hara then cursed her with insomnia and without sleep, Lamia quickly went insane.

Lamia insomnia, it rhymes.

That is a diagnosable condition, I think. She also began snatching.

You can't sleep because you're wrought with worry over the fact that you ate your own kids. That's Lamia insomnia.

Lamia insomnia, and that is Button of the Month Club number eight.

Oh, fucking shit. That's a long thing to put in a button.

She also began snatching and eating any child she came across, and these monstrous acts caused Lamia to undergo a physical transformation from a beautiful queen into a monster.

I mean, that's drug abuse. You see anybody on these here streets, after a while, they're like, you used to be somebody, but you're fucking ruined now.

As with all of these legends, descriptions of what she looked like vary, but more often than not, she's described as having the top half of a beautiful woman, but the bottom half of a lizard or a snake.

I gotta say, if you get to choose just one, she came out pretty okay on that deal.

Yeah.

Top half beautiful woman?

I mean, that's the little mermaid, right?

Yeah.

So.

Yeah, yeah. Things change when they breach the water, I guess, but we also saw this with the Christmas story. Beautiful woman on top, busted ass foot in the bottom.

You're really hung up on the goose foot lady. I forget what her name was.

Seems a little bit like the one that got away.

Yeah.

And that's why I hung up on it. But yeah, I think it's, you know, in terms of the coin flip of what side would be gross, I think you get top half monster. Yeah, there's no amount of booth in a Mexican restaurant that's gonna cover that for you.

That's true. I've also seen some descriptions of Lamia that claim she has the mouth of a shark to better consume the flesh of children with. Zeus, in what seems like a really misguided attempt to make things right for Lamia, gifted her with the ability to remove her eyes from her head so that she could rest, so that she could beat that Lamia insomnia.

And you think it was just the eyes that were keeping her awake?

Well, Zeus, I think, seems to think that because that's the gift that he gave her so he could put them in a box or whatever and sleep. But he also gave her the ability to see the future, which doesn't seem like a gift you want to give to a child-eating monster because.

I don't know exactly what time these kids get out of school.

Exactly, it seems like a real bad idea. According to ancientorigins.net, an ancient Greek historian named Deodorus Siculus attempted to give a more rationalized, realistic, grounded account of the Lamia's story. So in his version, Lamia was a Libyan queen who was driven mad by the loss of her children and ordered her troops to kidnap children from their mothers and kill them. This is a more realistic version of the story and in this version, her blindness was caused by her perpetual drunkenness. She was so blind that it was like she could not see.

I mean, there's only two things that make you blind, as we know, drinking and masturbating. So this could have only gone two ways.

That's true. And well, never mind. The Lamia soon became a kind of boogeyman to the ancient Greeks. If a child was misbehaving, a mother or nanny could invoke the Lamia to scare them straight. A handful of ancient historians, including Deoderous, recorded the name of the Lamia being used as a threat in this way. In the original story, Lamia killed and ate the children, but sort of like the Italian story of Lomio Nero, the details seem to have softened over time. In newer versions of the story, the children are swallowed alive and they can be retrieved. So it's sort of, if you're caught by the Lamia, it's sort of like a time out in hell.

Okay.

It's not a end of life situation. In the later classical period, the story of the Lamia changed once again, this time from a story used to frighten young children to a story used to frighten sexually adventurous young men.

Oh my God, what?

In these stories, the Lamia is kind of a phantom who seduces young men, fucks them and then eats them.

Oh, wow. And at what point do they realize that they have it in for them? Is it after they discover the bottom half?

At some point after they discover the bottom half, they figure out something's-

They go, fuck, this is it for me.

Yeah. But in a strange way, I think it's interesting that like, so we're talking about the idea of Lamia as child eater, and then Lamia evolves into this sort of more sexually threatening creature, and in that way, I feel like she's almost functioning like an 80s movie slasher. Like, Jason and Michael weren't doing the fucking, but the threat of them was often tied to sexual misadventure.

You don't want to be on Lovers Lane alone.

Yeah.

Because these people or the Zodiac Killer will show up.

Yeah.

So-

And interestingly, John Carpenter has said that he never meant to suggest that Lori Strode survived because she was the only one not having sex in the original Halloween.

Oh, is that kind of the beginning of the Virgin, Final Girl as a Virgin?

Yeah. I mean, that was the- I don't know that we can say that it is the first movie to have ever done it, but it was certainly the movie that popularized it and every slasher that came in its wake, The Good Girl was the survivor. I kind of wonder if that's a little bit because it's almost inevitable. If you're telling a scary story about teenagers who come under threat of some vicious killer, it seems to me that you almost fall into telling a story about a good girl hero because the things that get you into trouble as a teenager, the things that would distract you from seeing a killer coming are sex and drugs. Yeah, are coming and drugs like there's, you know, they're not knitting, you know, like, so in a way, I think what happened with Halloween and with Carpenter and Debra Hill, who co-wrote that screenplay with him, RAP got blessed Debra Hill, you know, in the original Halloween and less so in ripoffs of Halloween, who figured out what worked best as the formula, was just that that's what teenagers do when they get in trouble. And in a way, I think that's sort of what this Lamia story probably evolved from, was like, you know, both the idea that horny kids shouldn't be out there having sex, but also just a sort of general hate behavior.

Well, I think it also extends the myth where, hey, go to sleep, make your bed or Lamia is coming, stops around 14, 15.

Way before that.

If you want to extend that, then it's like, don't go to Lover's Lane, don't, you know what I mean? Like if you add the sexual element, because like, well, why is the kid acting out to begin with? Well, now it's like there's hormones involved, their puberty is done and all this shit. So yeah, you have to extend it. It's just crazy that so many of these stories, even going back to ancient times, it's still just like parents being like, I don't have the fucking time to watch these kids. Like everything is born of like, I gotta fucking lay bricks on this ziggurat or whatever.

When you would have thought religion would have been enough, the idea of heaven and hell or whatever.

Well, hell is not in every religion.

That's true, that's true.

For that, they got fucking Lamias.

They do. By the early Middle Ages, Lamia had become a general term for a class of phantoms that stole children and mutilated them. In a fourth century Bible translation called The Vulgate, Lamia is used as a translation of Lilith from the Hebrew Bible. And in Judaic mythology, Lilith was Adam's first wife, a primordial she-demon banished from Eden for not listening to Adam.

I'm gonna be honest with you, man. Adam, he had to go, huh? It was just a bad decision buffet from that guy.

He didn't make the bad decisions, the women did.

I think that's a misogynistic view of it. I don't know. I feel like he probably was like, we should do this. And she maybe just was like, yeah, maybe definitely do it.

Well, he kicked out the first wife, Lilith.

You get that in old, that wedding?

I think you probably could take that back to the elders and say, hey, this was, I was misled.

She wasn't a she demon when I met her.

She wasn't a she demon when I met her. She's often portrayed as the mother of all monsters. So yeah, once you combine Lilith or once you entwine Lilith with Lamia, now you're pulling in a whole other branch of a major world religion that gets tied up in the Lamia lore. So it continues to evolve.

Yeah, it's not safe to have a name that starts with L in this world.

No, not at all. During this period, the church used the Lamia to warn its followers against certain behaviors. Pope Gregory I claimed the Lamia represented heresy and hypocrisy. In the 9th century AD, Hinkmar, Archbishop of Reims, described the Lamia as a female reproductive spirit, a demon that caused divorces by tempting the husband away.

When did divorces, like, I feel like you had to go to, like, fucking Nevada to get a divorce in the 50s, but you're saying divorce back then?

In the 9th century, well, you know, I assume it was probably, you know, like royals or like, you know, people who had the money and the clout to get divorced. I'm sure it was heavily frowned upon for the peasant class.

Gotcha.

But as with everything, I'm sure if you were, you know, in with the church, you could probably get a divorce if you needed to.

Sure, somebody who writes a lot of parchment.

9th century AD.

That's a raise back. It's cyclical, right? It's like there's the pendulum swung the other way, I guess, for a while.

Richard Martin, a professor at Stanford, notes that the Lamia was really just one of several boogie women in Greek folklore.

There is, they're vilifying women again.

There was also gorggo, Mormelike and Empusa taking the form of beautiful women and then sucking the blood of their victims, which seems to have been a common feature in tales about these demon types.

I will say demon, I mean, you just, if it ain't broke, right? Like even if you only get half a body being a beautiful woman, you're gonna draw in some flies. You know what I mean? That's pretty good. No demons like, hey, I think we should show up as Ed and see how many people we get.

Right. No, yeah, I mean, these women feasted on weak-willed men and even modern Greek folklore, according to Martin, still preserves traditions about Lamia as a scary boogie woman, boogie man type figure. So she's been around the longest as best I can tell. Martin also adds that a multi-form of the childless woman and or crazy child stealer figure exists in various parts of the United States through legend and myth as well. In the Southwest and in Latin America more generally, La Llorona, the Wailing Woman, supposedly drowned her own children or they drowned on their own and she's mourning them, now haunts places at night crying and stealing other children.

That was in an episode of Millennium. There's a direct reference to this character in Millennium.

La Llorona is all throughout pop culture and this is the only mention of her in this episode because there's so much mythic and cultural history there that I think she'll get her own fear of the unknown someday. She's also, I would say, more of a, and this is where we get into those sort of Venn diagrams, fuzzy lines, I think La Llorona is more of a Banshee than a Boogeyman. She's more of a, like, if you hear her, something horrible is going to happen, more than a, if you don't do what I say, she will come for you.

Do you remember the day before you got to me in Connecticut, there was a guy who took his kids to the beach to drown them?

Oh yeah.

Like down the street from her house? That's some her level shit.

Well, yeah, that is...

I mean, she's still out there persuading people.

But yeah, I think she's more of a banshee than a boogeyman. But again, your mileage may vary. You may very well have grown up in a place where La Llorona was a do what you're told or she's going to come for you type of figure. But anyway, there's a lot of blurred lines in the definitions of these creatures. And that's what makes boogeymen so interesting. A more traditional boogeyman figure in many Spanish-speaking cultures is El Cucuy, descended from Spanish and Portuguese legends of a creature called El Coco. According to an article I found called The Synaptic History of Halloween by Christopher Patrick Kelly, El Coco was, quote, a hairy-faced creature that invaded children's bedrooms and doled out punishments, usually by devouring any unfortunate victims. When Spanish explorers came into contact with the large brown hairy nuts, pause.

Okay, what the fuck?

Growing in the tropical lands they invaded, it brought to mind the terrible creatures that haunted their childhoods, hence the name they gave this nut, coconut.

Oh shit, they are hairy.

And this is true. One of the first great Portuguese historians, Yao de Barros, wrote that, quote, this bark from which the palm receives its vegetable nourishment, which is through its stem, has an acute way which wants to resemble a nose placed between two round eyes from where it throws the sprout when it wants to be born. By reason of such figure, it was called by our men, Coco, a name imposed by the women on anything they want to put fear to the children. This name thus remained as no one knows another. So essentially what he's talking about there are the three holes in the top of the coconut that looks a bit like a skull or like a monster.

Well, this guy might have what we talked about in Dolls. He might have, what's that word for when you see a face and everything?

Oh yeah.

I'll have trivia bot put it in.

Peridolia.

In Portugal, the Coco is also the name given to a vegetable lantern carved from a pumpkin with two eyes and a mouth left in dark places with a light inside to scare people. And we have an episode coming up later in this season about the history of jack-o-lanterns.

Yet doesn't mention this.

Yeah, it doesn't. Well, I never heard of this. This didn't come up in my jack-o-lantern research, but.

Very Anglo jack-o-lantern research, that's why.

Well, yeah, we went down the, yeah, you'll hear the rabbit holes you went down in that episode. Interestingly, in terms of Halloween history, Portugal not only has the Coco, they also practiced the ritual begging of Paoa Pordu on All Saints' Day. This tradition, first mentioned in the 15th century, is a ritual begging for bread and cakes done door to door by children, though in the past, poor beggars would also take part.

Wait, so this is like trick or treat?

It's trick or treating.

But with also bums?

With bums, yeah, it's trick or treating.

Fucking hobos coming out with you?

Well, the purpose was to share the bread or treats gathered door to door with the dead of the community who were eagerly awaited and arrived at night in the shape of butterflies or little animals.

I will say, my mom and other people I know, butterflies come up a lot in the afterlife of it all, to like, is someone still with us? Oh, I saw a butterfly at my grave, I saw a butterfly in my garden, that must be my father or my sister.

Dragonflies too.

Yeah, well, interesting.

But yeah, so the idea for the kids was they would gather these treats from everyone's homes and then you'd leave them out and you'd share them with the dead who come back, which is similar to the idea of...

Thanksgiving?

No, no, no, Dia de los Muertos.

Oh, yeah.

The idea that you share your gifts with the dead is very much tied in with Dia de los Muertos, which I don't know if the Portuguese were specifically celebrating Dia de los Muertos, but there's similarities throughout here.

100%, yeah.

Anyway, point is the history of the Boogeyman in that part of the world is closely intertwined with the history of Halloween, which is really cool.

Yeah, that was surprising to hear, surprising to learn.

But the Coco did not stop there. The article tells us that this nightmare creature spread quickly throughout Latin America and the-

Until it got to Miami and the Coco made-

And then it did some Coco.

Yeah, Coco is another term for cocaine, so.

This nightmare creature spread quickly throughout Latin America and the Caribbean and blended seamlessly with local lore. In Brazil, the Cucca was a cloaked figure, but under the hood, she was a female alligator who attacked unlucky children.

What half of her was an alligator?

I assume the mouth.

Okay. That's the worst place for it to be. You want people to find out too late you're an alligator. You don't want to lead with an alligator.

That's what the hood was for. That's why I assume she's wearing the hood. You pull it back. Oh, no.

Oh, shit. Alligator. I thought this was just a big nose.

She's got a BBL, nice hourglass figure, but you pull back that hood. And then it's Alligator City.

It's Izzy in Captain Hook's hand.

Yeah.

She's pretty cool, but there's a ticking clock. I keep hearing in her. I don't know if it means she has somewhere to be.

Elsewhere in the Spanish-speaking world, children huddled in fear of a visit from the dreaded Hombre del Saco or Bagman. This grim figure came to collect naughty children and bring them off to some distant place, either to be enslaved, eaten, or subjected to some terrible fate they could not even imagine.

Yeah, I don't go with this guy. He's not one of those was bringing you a better family.

No, this particular guy, though, could help us get an Expedia partnership on this podcast. I'm ready. Because he seemed to do a lot of traveling. In India, in India-

Oh, El Kayak?

Yeah, in India, Bori Baba, or Father Sack, was always ready to come to homes of children that didn't show proper respect to their elders. And the Vietnamese feared Ong Ba B, Mr. Three Bags, who was clearly sacked up and ready to dole out punishment to groups of kids. Sri Lankans have Goni Bila, or Sack Kidnapper, a monster who probably, according to folklorists, has its roots in a group of historical marauders who as far back as 2nd century CE raided Indian village to abduct children to sell them to slavery. And they were famous for wearing sacks over their heads to hide their identities.

Not where I thought that was gonna go. I thought the sacks were for scooping up kids. And putting them in a sack.

The bag elements, the sack elements of all four or five of these is really interesting to me. It's a little bit like Hat Man, where they do all have this one specific detail.

Like Santa.

Like, also like Santa. That feels like there's something, there's some root truth to that. And in the Goni.

No matter where they are in the world, there's like, it's a sack based economy.

They're pulling kids in sacks, they're putting sacks over their heads.

You got a sack, you got to use it. It's just like. Yeah, it's pretty wild.

I would say for anyone who's enjoying this episode, if you haven't listened to our Christmas horrors episode, I know we've mentioned it a couple of times at this point, but the crossover between like, Boogeyman stories, misbehaving children, Christmas monsters, men with sacks.

Yeah.

There is a pattern here that is bigger than anything I've had the time to sit down and discern.

Yeah, take out the red yarn and start fucking figuring this out for us.

I'm missing those dots, because there is a really interesting, you know, maybe someday if this show gets a little bigger, we can have like an actual accredited folklorist on. But I do feel like there's something really interesting here that just, you know, would require an actual research project to kind of put the pieces together.

Or to tell us like, you're idiots.

Yeah, or to tell us we're idiots, because we might be seeing patterns where there are none, but there's definitely something interesting going on here.

I mean, look, how uninteresting would it be if those people didn't see patterns in those coconuts and saw faces?

That's true.

And now we're talking about it 3,000 million years later.

If we bounce further around the world, the fate of children preyed upon by boogeymen don't get any nicer.

Oh, good.

In North Africa, parents sometimes warn their children to watch out for a creature whose name is so strange that I searched the internet to find out how to pronounce the name, and most of the pronunciation guides I found were written in Arabic. So I have no idea how to pronounce the name of this thing. It's going to sound like I'm making a disturbed joke. It is spelled H-A-W-O-U-A-H-O-U-A. Which is definitely the sound from the beginning of Down to the Sickness.

I know. I understood what you were saying. I've been to Africa and no one mentioned that band once, so I don't know if that's where their minds are at.

No, it's not where their minds are at.

Yeah.

But this creature was a beast that keeps itself warm in the cold desert nights by wearing a cloak made out of either the clothing of naughty children or their sewn together skin.

You know what? You gotta just go Buffalo Bill on this. You gotta just get plus sized people. It just takes less to make a coat.

That's true. I did find a more detailed description of the creature on Reddit. It has the tail of a scorpion, one leg from a donkey, one leg from a panther, the claw of a lobster for its right hand, the hand of a monkey for a left hand, the chest of a turtle, the horns of a mountain goat, the face of an ape, and eyes of flaming spit.

Okay, so if you're built from 300 different parts, I guess in your mind you're like, I might as well use 300 kids to make a jacket.

It sounds like somebody forgot to design a Pokemon for a meeting. Yeah, and they were like, how about this?

And they're looking at stuff?

Yeah, it's long dangling hair is in fact not hair, but live poisonous snakes waiting to strike and poison anyone unwary enough to enter within striking range.

Wow.

It's long patch coat is made up of the clothing from the children it has devoured. This creature might not be attractive enough to lure children to their unsuspecting demise, but it is more than fast enough to scoop up those children who travel lonely roads at night without caution.

It's a quick idiot. It can't lure them in with any.

I guess, but one leg from a donkey and one leg from a panther, one of those legs is fast.

Yeah.

The other leg sounds like a...

Yeah, you're hearing the donkey leg gumming.

Yeah. In the Arab world, there is the burned leg man who was himself a disobedient child who got scorched in a fire, but now wanders the night looking to cook children who don't listen to their parents.

I don't like that. You know what I mean? Just fucking take your trauma and turn it into something good.

You of all people should be like, let's leave the kids alone. This guy should have gone into stand up.

No, he should have gone into protective services. He shouldn't be like, let me do, I don't know, I don't like any of that where it's like, I was beat, so let me beat up, whatever.

The Haitians have the Master of Midnight who hides in the shadows.

That's fucking the best name we've heard so far.

Oh, there's a couple of other good names coming up, but the Master of Midnight's a good one. He hides in the shadows at night waiting to wrap his horrifyingly long arms around any kids who dare sneak out of the house.

Wow. You have so few options as a person with very long arms, so I'm glad he found something.

Yeah, it's pretty much this or the Lakers. In the mountains of Nepal, an ogre-like giant called Gurumapa feasts on any people he could find, but a holy man named Keshchandran pacified the monster and convinced him to only eat children who misbehave.

Okay, you did half the job there.

Yeah, it would be like if St. Columba, when he faced the Loch Ness Monster, was just like threw a baby in the river. He was like, here, eat this.

It's tough to go off what you just said. I only said it's half the job because it's like, you didn't want to negotiate a little further into just not snatching up anybody?

Well, that's what I'm saying. That's what St. Columba did at Loch Ness. He told the Loch Ness Monster, go no further and you won't eat anyone else. But this guy basically was like, go no further and eat only babies.

I'll give you the smallest of us. Okay, I see now what you're saying. Yeah, you were right.

A similar legend from Pakistan says that a creature named Mamat dwells in a dark cave waiting for any children foolish enough to wander into the mountains.

Stay out of those mountains, kids.

The Synaptic History of Halloween article also takes us a little closer to home with Boogeymen on both sides of the Atlantic. It notes that many English Boogeymen found a home in the Americas where they took on lives of their own.

It's like Barlow and Salem's Lot. They got a ride over here and now they're setting up shop in Maine.

These creatures include Black Annus, a green skinned hag with iron claws.

Sounds like you should have called it Green Annus.

Well, the name is Black Annus, but if they're looking for alternates, Green Annus, acceptable. A green skinned hag with iron claws who waited in the branches of trees for wandering children or would sometimes pluck them straight out of their beds.

Wow, that's just, what do you think that is? What do you think it's like, I'm going to wait three hours before I just go in?

I mean, if she gets hungry enough.

I guess. Shit, dude.

Bloody Bones was an English beast that might dwell out in the wilderness or maybe in the cupboards or under your cellar stairs. He either way had an appetite for children who told lies.

That's a great name.

In the Southern United States, he was known as Rawhead and Bloody Bones.

Oh shit, gross.

Or Tommy Rawhead.

Rawhead shows up in horror movies. That's the term.

Well, there's Rawhead Rex, which is a Clive Barker short story that got turned into a movie sort of very loosely based on this legend.

Okay.

It's probably on your schlock list.

It is, yeah. I know about it.

Insane monster design. French settlers in Quebec concocted Mr. Seven O'Clock, which I also think is a great name.

God, there's so many good like Mr. and Mrs. names in this.

Hugh is a twisted old man wearing a hat, a cane, a cape and a bag.

Oh, wow.

So he's hat man, bag man, sack man, he's got it all.

This is Belt and Suspenders territory.

Depending on the region, this bag would contain sand that he would throw in the eyes of children or in other places, the bag was to put his victims in.

Okay. Sack has two.

Mr. Seven O'Clock had a lot of options and he was named Mr. Seven O'Clock because he was the creature that would come get you if you weren't home by 7 p.m. Which is, I guess, probably no matter what time of year it is, it's probably close to sundown. Get in the dark, yeah. Native Americans, of course, had their own boogieman traditions to keep their kids safe and scared. Inuits had the Kalyapalik, which was a monster that lurked in frigid waters waiting to grab anyone who gets too close to the edge, which of course makes sense for Inuits because you want to keep your kids away from frozen waters.

Sure.

Children in Algonquin nations had to look out for the Chibulacqua, a phantom bird-like creature who would swoop in from above and carry them off. Although the creepiest thing about this to me is I'm not sure what it was supposed to be protecting them from. Like if the Kalyapalik was designed to keep you away from the edge of cold water, this thing was designed, I guess, to keep you safe from something in the skies. But what else did they think was up there? That's kind of creepy.

Yeah, no, we run into this a lot. You know, we ran into this recently with the like, oh, the uncanny valley may just exist to, you know, remind us that we once had to deal with something that wasn't quite human.

Yeah.

That's what this feels like. Yeah, where it's like we have a whole, like thunderbirds are real and they're aliens and we need to keep the kids inside.

Yeah, so yeah, keep an eye out above and be home by seven. In the American South, the Choctaw warned their children to beware of Nalusa Phaliah, whose name means long black being. Like some versions of the black man creature that we discussed earlier, Nalusa Phaliah forms out of shadows itself, attacking children who go outside too late, sometimes taking the shape of predators like snakes.

Okay.

But as far as I'm concerned, none of these creatures are the world's scariest boogeymen. That title is left to the monsters operating in the real world. Humans so vile and twisted that their very existence spawned legends that lasted long after they died.

I don't like this. I don't like where we're going with this.

Yeah, this gets grisly.

Oh, Chris, what have you done? I'm getting a call from Mr. Disclaimer here. One second, jeez. Yeah, hello?

You know if Chris says it gets grisly. You can expect to hear from me.

Yeah, that's what I figured. So what's up? What's the disclaimer?

Your standard child harm stuff. So, disclaimer, the following story includes the occasional description of child harm and murder. Please consult the chapters provided in this episode's description if you would like to skip past it.

Perfect, thanks, bud. Chris, you shall proceed.

Perhaps the earliest documented real life boogie man was the 15th century Breton nobleman Gilles de Rais, who was a Frenchman. And the best I can describe Gilles de Rais is basically a version of George Washington with Elon Musk's money and John Wayne Gacy's hobbies.

Well, George Washington, when elected president, was the richest man in America, I think. So George Washington already had Elon Musk's money.

I think this guy may have been even richer, because this is real old school French royalty money.

I'm just saying that rich people are out here with their fucking wooden teeth, their donkey teeth.

It's the best they could afford at the time. This guy was a real rascal. Let's just put it that way.

He's a real neuro type.

He is insane. And I was completely unaware that this guy even existed until I started researching this episode.

You started researching like guys to be like?

No, I was researching real life boogeymen.

Okay, sure.

Gilles was a bright child born to a prominent family and was raised to speak Latin and study military tactics. His charmed life was tainted by the tragic death of both his parents around 1415, when he was around 10 years old.

The year was 1415 and he was around 10 years old?

Yes.

Okay, because it just kind of felt like you were saying they died, he was like around 14, 15 years old.

Oh, no, no, no, no, no, yeah, yeah. The year was 1415, he was around 10 years old. His mother, Marie de Crone, died of an unknown cause.

She has a real get me out of their disease. I've seen what we've made, let's get the fuck in, let's scram.

Or he just pushed her down the stairs maybe. Yeah. And his father, Guy de Laval, was killed in a gruesome hunting accident that DeRay may have witnessed.

I knew a guy named Guy once.

You knew a guy named Guy?

I knew a guy named Guy.

Was he French?

Belgian guy, but they speak French and Belgium, so.

I couldn't find any details on the hunting accident that killed Guy.

No, Guy's kid covered that shit up.

We'll have to leave it to our imaginations. I think it may have been some sort of an animal attack because it seems like rifles were very, very new at this point in time. So, I doubt it was like a-

A dickchaining?

Backfiring gun, yeah, or a dickchaining like someone shot up in the face. In any case, Gilles was then put into the care of his maternal grandfather, Jean de Crayon. According to britannica.com, as a young man, Duret seemed to have been impetuous and hotheaded, characteristics that translated well to the battlefield, where he was by all accounts a skilled and fearless fighter.

Shit, dude.

When Joan of Arc appeared on the scene in 1429, he was assigned to be her official protector to watch over her in battle.

I don't like that. It kind of just diminishes her role in history a little bit.

The two fought together in some of the major battles of her career, including the lifting of the siege of Orleans. And in 1429, the same year that he was assigned to become her protector, he was appointed to the position of Marshal of France, which was their highest military distinction. His military career began to wind down after Joan of Arc was burned at the stake in 1431.

Yeah, well, when your boss gets burned, all your references get burned up with him.

Yeah. And he started spending more time at his estate, which was among the richest in Western France. Gilles spent his fortune recklessly, paying enormous sums for decorations, servants, and a large military retinue, and commissioning music and works of literature. His sale of family lands to finance his extravagant lifestyle sparked a bitter fight with other members of his family, especially his grandfather, Jean de Creon, who pointedly left his sword and armor to Gilles' younger brother, René, when he died in 1432.

Wow.

Around this time, Gilles seems to have been increasingly concerned with religion and his own salvation.

Well, yeah, he was best friends with Joan of Arc.

Well, he had other reasons, I think, that he was worried about his salvation. In 1433, he financed the construction of a chapel, quote, for the bliss of his soul, which he called the Chapel of the Holy Innocence and staffed with a boys' choir selected by himself. One guess what happened to those kids.

Oh, no.

He also started to practice the occult as a means to save his rapidly collapsing finances and employed a succession of alchemists and sorcerers. And this is where shit really started to go downhill.

How many boys' choirs do you need to make gold?

Well, it sounds like maybe about 150 children because that's how many kids he murdered over the next seven years. According to trial documents, he used secret rooms to sodomize the kids before bludgeoning them to death while staring into their eyes.

Oh, my God.

He would then decapitate their bodies, cut open their stomachs to marvel at their glistening organs and keep their severed heads on display so he could return to kiss his favorites from time to time.

I don't like that. Also, how many? You can only marvel at so many insides.

When lawmen interviewed Gilles' servants, they admitted to abducting children for him and that he would masturbate on and molest the boys before cutting off their heads. Two French clerics testified to Gilles' engagement in alchemy and obsession with the dark arts and that he used the limbs of the victims in his rituals.

I don't know, I gotta just round up all the people that work for him, right? Like, you're all accomplices in a horrific situation.

Well, get this. It came out during his trial that all of this was sort of an open secret in some circles.

That's how the rich operate, man.

Multiple witnesses had seen his servants disposing of the bodies of dozens of children at one of his castles in 1437, but the families of the victims were restrained by fear and low social status, so they couldn't take action against him.

This is coming back. This is something like this is coming back.

Very Epstein-y. And that's not the only thing that's kind of Epstein-y about this guy. He had at least three other people helping lure in new victims. The first, most prominent servant was Etienne Correlo, or Poitou, as he was better known.

Known as the ye olde Maxwell.

This guy met Gilles when he was 12, and was likely seen as a potential victim, but was spared because of his boyish good looks.

Wait, hold on. Wait, so the good looks can get you captured, but it can also get you spared?

The research on this was a little bit tricky, because there's only a handful of sources of people who have written in depth about this guy.

No, I feel like you put your job on the line when you do.

And this is one of those where a lot of the reading I was doing was all tracing back to really the same like two sources, and those sources didn't have a lot of details on some of this, so all I know is that it does seem like he, Poiteu, basically was kidnapped to be a victim and possibly because of his good looks, joined Gilles' ranks as a full-fledged accessory and lover.

You know what it is? I bet you it's like, listen, I'm just handsome enough that I can lure people into me.

Yeah.

Then once they get to me, we pop off some of these hoods and clothes we've made. Like, we start hitting them with the sacks.

Yeah.

Now, you got yourself something to marvel at when you cut them open.

I guess. There were others though. There was Henriette Griart. Henriette Griart was a long-time servant of Gilles. He seems to have been a little less enthusiastic about all the death and debauchery, but participated nonetheless.

I mean, that economy, yeah.

Often killing the victims that his master lost interest in.

Oh, okay. You don't need to go that far.

Finally-

You can just say I lost him.

Most creepily, there was Perrine Martin, who was essentially Gilles Gislain.

Okay.

We don't know much about her, other than a handful of mentions about her in these court documents. She was allegedly an older woman who lured children to Gilles by flattering and caressing them, and she wore a black veil over her face while she did all of this, which gives some really intense Angel of Death vibes. Yeah, I feel like-

It's like, how did you lure them in? Well, interesting, you say lure them in, I say I moved closer to them. Because I don't know who's coming to hang out with a black veiled creep.

I guess it's possible that maybe she wore the black veil during the trial, and maybe she wasn't wearing the veil in the enticement. In the enticement.

Sure.

In any case, Gilles was sentenced to death by simultaneous burning and hanging.

I love it, honestly, not enough.

Not enough. Probably should have drawn and quartered him too.

You got to do a couple of things to this dude.

He was killed on October 26th, 1440.

Should we release this episode on October 26th?

No. We should release this episode next week because that's when it has to come out.

Okay. Coming up on the anniversary though.

Because he was contrite and composed in the face of his execution, Gilles was considered a model of Christian penitence after he died.

That's stupid.

To make matters worse or maybe not worse, but ironically terrible. A tradition was formed in which parents in the area where Gilles lived and died, commemorated the anniversary of his execution by whipping their children, perhaps to impress upon them the gravity of the sins for which Gilles had repented.

Okay, so they're victim blaming future generations.

This practice survived for more than a century after his death. So for more than a hundred years after this guy was put to death for murdering, raping, you know, chopping up children, parents would then beat and whip their children to remind them to be penitent like Gilles.

He had a long reach.

He had a long reach.

Wild scene, dude.

That sucks. To put the cherry on top of this Boogeyman shit Sunday, in 1992, a French Freemason who I guess decided not enough people believed in child murder conspiracies organized a trial to retry Gilles more, quote, fairly. This trial was comprised of French ministers, parliament members and UNESCO experts and the court investigated all available evidence and came back with a verdict of, wouldn't you know it, not guilty.

Okay, this is with 92?

92!

So this was within a couple of years of French doing away with birthright citizenship. And I do wonder if it's just like, listen, we've lost it here. You don't want to be part of this group. Just fucking have your kids somewhere else.

I don't know, man. I mean, it I will say in some of the reading that I did, it does seem like there is some genuine thought that some of this may have been a political prosecution. They did get his confession to murdering all. There was no physical evidence. They got his confession by threatening him with torture.

Okay, that's the same thing.

So there seems to be some genuine precedent for the idea that perhaps he wasn't as guilty as it seems. But there's also, most historians agree that he did that shit. He did some version of this. Maybe it wasn't 150 kids. Maybe he didn't cut all their heads off and kiss them when they were dead. But he did this. And I just think it's very weird that 500 years later, somebody is like, I don't know, man, we gotta get this guy off. We gotta get him off the hook. It's unfair.

Yeah, we gotta get him off because he might not have been getting off as much as we thought.

Yeah. There were other historical boogie men throughout the years. Elizabeth Bathory, the infamous Hungarian countess.

Potential inspiration for Bloody Mary.

She spent 20 years bathing in the blood of girls who she abducted to try to keep herself looking young and vital.

She honestly never looked better, so I guess it makes sense.

In 1750, Paris experienced a rash of child disappearances that led to rumors among workers and peasants that King Louis XV was kidnapping children in the streets so he could drink their blood as a cure for leprosy.

France needs to get this under control.

And that story became so powerful that riots broke out in the street of Paris during that year and had to be put down by the King's soldiers.

And in 2018, he was exonerated.

Yeah, in 2018, they were like, hey, look, he wasn't really that bad. The 19th century streets of London were alive with boogeymen from the terrifying supernatural Spring Heel Jack to the very real but unidentified serial killer Jack the Ripper.

Spring Heel Jack, famously inspiration for Batman.

Oh, no shit.

I didn't know that. Yeah, Spring Heel Jack in its comic book form wasn't comic book yet, it was like 1904.

When I was reading Spring Heel Jack's stories, I was like, oh, this guy seems like he should be like a super villain or something. Like he had, he seemed to have a weird suit and a cape. And it's all a little vague. Some people said he breathed fire. Other people reported that he would like knock on the doors of people. When they answered, he just kind of like rip their clothing up and jump off into the night. Like there were all kinds of stories about Spring Heel Jack.

Yeah, but he is at least aesthetically. There's an argument to be made that Batman was directly inspired by the Penny Dreadfuls.

Penny Dreadfuls, the stories of the...

Yeah, they were of the Xhosa Penny. He was directly inspired by like the Spring Hill Jack Penny Dreadfuls or whatever.

Huh, I had no idea. That's really cool. Perhaps one of the last great real life boogeymen was the infamous American serial killer Albert Fish, who is a special guest in hell for his heinous acts of child rape, torture and cannibalism. I think the Gilles de Rais story kind of maxed me out on child rape and murder for this episode. And honestly, some of the shit that Albert Fish got up to was even worse. So we'll save him for a different episode. Maybe we'll do a Fear of the Unknown or a Fear of History or something about Fish because he was a fucking psycho and there's a lot of history there. But I bring him up because he became known by a couple different nicknames. There was the Werewolf of Wisteria, the Brooklyn Vampire and most simply the one given to him by a near victim named Billy Beaton. Fish kidnapped Beaton along with another Billy, Billy Gaffney in 1927. Beaton managed to escape Fish's clutches but Gaffney wasn't so lucky. And when the police later asked Billy Beaton what had happened to his friend, he simply replied, the Boogeyman took him.

Okay, so this is not Fish from Barney Miller.

No, this is Albert Fish, a serial killer. Okay. So that is our tour around the world of various fictional and real life Boogeymen.

With a potential second chapter delving into the truly heinous Fish crimes.

Yes, but I think that is a good place to put a pin in it for today and say, Ed, where do you place the Boogeyman on your fear tier?

Oh, I'm an adult so low.

Same.

I got past all the shit where he would, like I don't see a sack getting put over me anytime soon.

I put Boogeyman low on my fear tier, but very high on my could read another thousand pages on this tier.

Yeah, he'll take up huge portions of your day if you let him. It's a lot of interesting stuff we just discussed. I mean, I have a lot of questions that I'll save for those future episodes. I do stand on the idea that he won't be or isn't necessarily qualified to be a fear of the unknown because it is just like a lot in a boogie man all over the world is very catch-all-y, but it got very interesting when we got into the very specific French stuff.

And I would also say something keeping Boogieman from Fear of the Unknown for me is that Fear of the Unknown episodes I feel like are for more traditional monsters, cryptids, that kind of thing. Whereas to me, the boogie man on the right night, the right thunderstorm outside, laying in bed with the closet door open a crack. Boogieman is something that I'll still have trouble falling asleep wondering what's in my closet that I can't see but can see me.

Yeah.

So I think it's up there. I'd say maybe Boogieman is like a three.

I put him as a three. I put him as a two or a three. Yeah. Because I can't shoot him.

No, you can't shoot him. You can't shoot him.

Unless you use some sort of a vacuum cleaner on exhaust. If I can find that clip, I'll put it in the show notes.

Yeah. So that's the Boogieman for us.

Fun episode.

Fun episode.

I had a fun time. I'm also drunk, but I had a fun time.

I hope you're having a good Halloween season, listener. We've got more scary episodes for the season lined up. We've got plenty yet to come. But for now, this has been Scared All The Time. I'm Chris Cullari.

And I'm Ed Voccola.

And we'll see you next time.

Bye.

Scared All The Time is co-produced by Chris Cullari and Ed Voccola.

Written by Chris Cullari.

Edited by Ed Voccola.

Additional support and keeper of sanity is Tess Vifel.

Our theme song is the track Scared by Perpetual Stew.

And Mr. Disclaimer is ****.

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Together.

Together.

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