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10-28-2007, 09:14 AM
By Marc Ramirez
Seattle Times staff reporter
For Cambodia's Lee Lim, he was a giant with long hair, red eyeballs and a serpentine tongue. For Italy's Cosetta Grossi, he was a man with no face, shrouded in a black coat.
For Somalia's Hindia Hussein, he was half-human, half-animal, a strange beast with long teeth and tail. And for New Zealand's Lisa Washington, he was simply the boogeyman — that proverbial thing lurking in the shadows, or under your bed, or hiding in the closet, or hovering over your shoulder as you read thi ... . (No, wait — that's your boss.)
"It was like, be careful or the boogeyman will get you," says Washington, now a full-time mom in Seattle. "You just kept running away from it. But you never saw it."
Meet the Boogeyman — frequent frightener, worldwide disciplinarian, international man of mystery. While he might seem to slink locally, he actually scares globally, in all shapes and forms — in some cultures a bag-wielding man who takes miscreant children, in others a monster feeding on kids who don't eat their dinner or, as with the Australian bunyip, a walrus-fanged, emu-headed, um ... beast-thingie.
Guam may have the world's greenest boogeymen. No, not literally: The taotaomo'na are doppelgangers irked by harming of the environment.
Thanks, Dad
No one's sure where the term comes from. Some link it to the Middle English bugge, often taken to mean "scarecrow," and the word now is sometimes spelled "bogeyman" or even "bogyman." But the notion of an unseen, malevolent creature beyond control is one that transcends cultures, especially for kids.
So if your parents conjured up thoughts of the boogeyman to get you to eat your dinner, go to bed on time or otherwise behave, you weren't alone. And come to think of it, you didn't want to be, considering you were probably freaked enough to wet your pants.
"My dad used to tell us there was this man who lived in this house we grew up in, and if we weren't good he was gonna come get us," says Spanish teacher Heidi Suarez. Once, Heidi and her siblings went to check out a mysterious shuffling downstairs, shrieking when they saw the figure in the darkness: It was their 6-foot-5 father, who'd put on his long, blood-red smoking jacket and pulled a woman's nylon stocking over his head.
"My dad's kind of a character that way," Suarez says.
For kids, the boogeyman is "a way of preventing fear that you don't have language for," suggests Pam Keesey, who publishes and edits Monsterzine.com, an online magazine devoted to horror films and society. "It's a way to deal subconsciously with the anxiety that children feel about the world around them. The boogeyman is the thing that will hurt us."
As a child of 5 or 6 in a Somalian village, Hussein heard tales of the strange beast who would devour children and small animals caught wandering in the dark. Nighttime jaunts to the outhouse were carefully considered. "You cannot go by yourself," she recalls, "because you're really scared of that monster."
Lim and his Cambodian family lived near the local temple, where he would hang out in his free time. When the sun set, the monks would tell stories about Akrouk, the giant who would come looking for children at night, his legs so long he could walk over the temples.
"Some bad kids he knows — at night, he would come put his hand in their house," says Lim, a job counselor for limited-English speakers in Seattle. "Your windows and doors cannot stop him. He would come and pick them up and drop them on the ground. It happened to me, too — I go to sleep on the bed, and when I woke up I was on the floor. The story was that the guy could do that."
El Cuco's out there
For people in Spain, there's El Cuco (aka "El Cucuy"), who colonized his way into the thoughts of Latino kids everywhere from Albuquerque, where West Seattle's Victor Elizondo grew up, to Puerto Rico, where Teresita Curry-Grable was terrorized by her older brother.
"It's when kids misbehave, you know," Elizondo says. "Your parents would say, 'If you don't behave yourself, the boogeyman will get you.' "
El Cuco existed in his mind as a ghostlike character covered in a sheet. Curry-Grable, founder of Seattle's Hispanic Seafair celebration, had a different image entirely — a dead man, more like a mummy, "like when they take people to the morgue."
For that, she blames her older brother, who tried constantly to scare her, even taking tree branches and scratching outside her bedroom window at night. But it was his play-acting as El Cuco she recalls most, wrapping himself in white, with black holes painted where his eyes should be.
"He'd say, 'El Cuco's coming tonight — better be careful!' " Curry-Grable says. "I was probably 3 or 4, and I remember running to my mother's skirt and holding on to her and saying, 'Mommy! Is there such a thing as El Cuco? And is he gonna get us?' "
As a boy, real-estate agent Rich Tao had seen Chinese horror flicks with white-faced dead men hopping around with bloodstained mouths and aristocratic burial garments, Chinese "vampires" that Monsterzine's Keesey guesses were likely a mix of legendary Chinese hopping ghosts and the undead monsters of Dracula films that enjoyed a revival in the 1950s and 1960s.
As kids," Tao says, "My sister and I used to scare each other by sticking our arms straight out and hopping around."
La Befana lurks
Cosetta Grossi grew up near the Italian town of Rimini, where she heard of La Befana, a witch with wrinkled skin and big nose who would come in through the fireplace, à la Santa Claus, on her January feast night. But La Befana wasn't as bad as L'Uomo Nero, the Dark Man who would come for misbehaving children. She remembers a song elders would sing when putting misbehaving children to bed.
Roughly translated, it went:
To whom will I give this baby away
If I give him to La Befana, she will take him for a week
If I give him to L'Uomo Nero, he will take him for a year
But if I give him to his mom, she will keep him close to her chest and put him to bed.
"There's something out there that can do you harm," Keesey says. "It's just fear of the unknown."
source: http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/living/2003974146_boogeyman28.html
Seattle Times staff reporter
For Cambodia's Lee Lim, he was a giant with long hair, red eyeballs and a serpentine tongue. For Italy's Cosetta Grossi, he was a man with no face, shrouded in a black coat.
For Somalia's Hindia Hussein, he was half-human, half-animal, a strange beast with long teeth and tail. And for New Zealand's Lisa Washington, he was simply the boogeyman — that proverbial thing lurking in the shadows, or under your bed, or hiding in the closet, or hovering over your shoulder as you read thi ... . (No, wait — that's your boss.)
"It was like, be careful or the boogeyman will get you," says Washington, now a full-time mom in Seattle. "You just kept running away from it. But you never saw it."
Meet the Boogeyman — frequent frightener, worldwide disciplinarian, international man of mystery. While he might seem to slink locally, he actually scares globally, in all shapes and forms — in some cultures a bag-wielding man who takes miscreant children, in others a monster feeding on kids who don't eat their dinner or, as with the Australian bunyip, a walrus-fanged, emu-headed, um ... beast-thingie.
Guam may have the world's greenest boogeymen. No, not literally: The taotaomo'na are doppelgangers irked by harming of the environment.
Thanks, Dad
No one's sure where the term comes from. Some link it to the Middle English bugge, often taken to mean "scarecrow," and the word now is sometimes spelled "bogeyman" or even "bogyman." But the notion of an unseen, malevolent creature beyond control is one that transcends cultures, especially for kids.
So if your parents conjured up thoughts of the boogeyman to get you to eat your dinner, go to bed on time or otherwise behave, you weren't alone. And come to think of it, you didn't want to be, considering you were probably freaked enough to wet your pants.
"My dad used to tell us there was this man who lived in this house we grew up in, and if we weren't good he was gonna come get us," says Spanish teacher Heidi Suarez. Once, Heidi and her siblings went to check out a mysterious shuffling downstairs, shrieking when they saw the figure in the darkness: It was their 6-foot-5 father, who'd put on his long, blood-red smoking jacket and pulled a woman's nylon stocking over his head.
"My dad's kind of a character that way," Suarez says.
For kids, the boogeyman is "a way of preventing fear that you don't have language for," suggests Pam Keesey, who publishes and edits Monsterzine.com, an online magazine devoted to horror films and society. "It's a way to deal subconsciously with the anxiety that children feel about the world around them. The boogeyman is the thing that will hurt us."
As a child of 5 or 6 in a Somalian village, Hussein heard tales of the strange beast who would devour children and small animals caught wandering in the dark. Nighttime jaunts to the outhouse were carefully considered. "You cannot go by yourself," she recalls, "because you're really scared of that monster."
Lim and his Cambodian family lived near the local temple, where he would hang out in his free time. When the sun set, the monks would tell stories about Akrouk, the giant who would come looking for children at night, his legs so long he could walk over the temples.
"Some bad kids he knows — at night, he would come put his hand in their house," says Lim, a job counselor for limited-English speakers in Seattle. "Your windows and doors cannot stop him. He would come and pick them up and drop them on the ground. It happened to me, too — I go to sleep on the bed, and when I woke up I was on the floor. The story was that the guy could do that."
El Cuco's out there
For people in Spain, there's El Cuco (aka "El Cucuy"), who colonized his way into the thoughts of Latino kids everywhere from Albuquerque, where West Seattle's Victor Elizondo grew up, to Puerto Rico, where Teresita Curry-Grable was terrorized by her older brother.
"It's when kids misbehave, you know," Elizondo says. "Your parents would say, 'If you don't behave yourself, the boogeyman will get you.' "
El Cuco existed in his mind as a ghostlike character covered in a sheet. Curry-Grable, founder of Seattle's Hispanic Seafair celebration, had a different image entirely — a dead man, more like a mummy, "like when they take people to the morgue."
For that, she blames her older brother, who tried constantly to scare her, even taking tree branches and scratching outside her bedroom window at night. But it was his play-acting as El Cuco she recalls most, wrapping himself in white, with black holes painted where his eyes should be.
"He'd say, 'El Cuco's coming tonight — better be careful!' " Curry-Grable says. "I was probably 3 or 4, and I remember running to my mother's skirt and holding on to her and saying, 'Mommy! Is there such a thing as El Cuco? And is he gonna get us?' "
As a boy, real-estate agent Rich Tao had seen Chinese horror flicks with white-faced dead men hopping around with bloodstained mouths and aristocratic burial garments, Chinese "vampires" that Monsterzine's Keesey guesses were likely a mix of legendary Chinese hopping ghosts and the undead monsters of Dracula films that enjoyed a revival in the 1950s and 1960s.
As kids," Tao says, "My sister and I used to scare each other by sticking our arms straight out and hopping around."
La Befana lurks
Cosetta Grossi grew up near the Italian town of Rimini, where she heard of La Befana, a witch with wrinkled skin and big nose who would come in through the fireplace, à la Santa Claus, on her January feast night. But La Befana wasn't as bad as L'Uomo Nero, the Dark Man who would come for misbehaving children. She remembers a song elders would sing when putting misbehaving children to bed.
Roughly translated, it went:
To whom will I give this baby away
If I give him to La Befana, she will take him for a week
If I give him to L'Uomo Nero, he will take him for a year
But if I give him to his mom, she will keep him close to her chest and put him to bed.
"There's something out there that can do you harm," Keesey says. "It's just fear of the unknown."
source: http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/living/2003974146_boogeyman28.html