Not so long ago I believed that when I drove my car along a long portion of highway that a mean gnome lived in the hillside. (this gnome is about 6 feet tall in my mind and wears a robe much like Father TIme or a wizard) Anyway, I traveled this road daily from my boyfriends house to my house at roughly the same time each day. I was sure that the gnome would see my car coming and watch me until I was out of his sight and then before the next day he would move to that location on the hillside. I believed that this would go on until he found where I lived and...well, I'm not sure what I thought he would do...he just creeped me out. So, I would change up the time a little bit, I would take a different route, etc. Well, then I got married (yes, I was that old and NOT in a mental institution.) and I felt that I fooled the gnome because I wouldn't be traveling in that direction any more and by then he was surely closer to my parents house and would not find me again. Many of my friends know this story and are waiting for the day that they will create little blockades by all my doors so that I am held hostage by little ceramic men holding gardening tools and smiling that creepy smile. I will forever hate gnomes!

JoAnn

When I was about five or six my friend's older sister told me there was an evil spirit of a girl who had gotten hit by a car that lived on her car's roof. Only the girls spirit was SO evil that she eventually turned into a monster that ate people's heads when they got out of the car she was on.
--at this point she hit the top of the car when I wasn't looking and then told me the girl had just hopped on her car.

It took her mom and mine thirty minutes to get me out of the back of the van because I was so hysterical and simply would not get my head cut off.

Love'

When I was young, my brother convinced me that if I didn't cover up my toes when I went to bed, the toe pirates would take them away from me. To this day, I cannot sleep with uncovered toes.

Zoe

Around age 5 or so, I used to be deathly afraid to walk to the bathroom at night, for fear of monsters. I lived in a large house, and most of my family, including my parents slept upstairs - while I had a bedroom on the 1st floor.

I thought that monsters came out at night, and would be prowling around the house, just waiting for some unsuspecting victim...

I would put on a scary monster mask and dark cape, left-over props from Halloween - thinking that if I looked like a monster too, they wouldn't attack me. I would just be another monster using the bathroom!

I remember being scared to death, peeing, hoping that my disguise was working... lol

MFish

When I came to America after I got adopted, I had never known what fireworks were. So laying in bed one summer night, I thought the big booms were the massive feet of a monster coming to get me!

Liz

My parents told me that if you sleep with your shoes at the end of the bed, with the toes pointing in opposite directions, the monsters who came into your room at night would get so confused by which direction to go that they'd turn right back around and leave again. I sill keep my shoes that way, actally. :)

Anon

When I was young, I used to believe that if I slept will ALL my stuffed animals on the bed with me (and I had a lot!) that no monster would be able to get me because they would just think I was another stuffed animal.

Also, a little later on, when I was old enough to stay home alone while mom and dad went out, I thought if I tured on every light in the house, that would keep anything from getting me!

Wildfire

I used to think that the only way to get rid of the monsters at night was to imagine them away. I would imagine them leaving my house and going down the road, and if I lost track of the route I had to start over. When I figured they were far enough away, I could stop.

Lila

My father was a good pianist and even had his own dance band in the 1930s. In the days before TV he used to entertain me by playing boogie woogie. I never could understand why some of my friends were terrified of the boogie man. I couldn't imagine how anybody could be dumb enough to be afraid of a jazz pianist.

Texas granny

The house where I grew up was in a town near a military base. At times they had drills where they had planes drop shell, the sound of which sounded like loud steps by the time they reached my neighborhood. Until age 12 at least I was convinced when I heard it that it was dinosaurs coming... I grew up in the 90s and Jurassic Park was big, what can I say... The sound and vibrations were IDENTICAL as in the movie!

Gladys

I used to believe that the "boogyman" was short for "booger monster". I had nightmared of a giant booger monster for a year.

Anon

A lot of people were scared of the monster under the bed. Myself, I was specifically scared of this monster I read about in a children's book called the Body, which for some reason sounded really plausible to me. The Body was a like a human being, but it had no bones. At night, it would slither along the floor, and if it saw your foot hanging out from under the blankets, it would grab and suck out all your bones through your toes - and you would become the next Body.

My solution was to make sure my blanket was always tucked under my feet when I slept so the Body couldn't get my foot. To this day, I have trouble falling asleep if I don't have a blanket tucked all around my feet.

Faith

i used to think that the little beating inside your head was a dinosaur that was on the other side of the world and every time it would beat the dinosaur would come one step closer

Anon

When I was younger, my older cousins told me that if you slept with your feet hanging off the bed the devil would pull your toes. I always slept as far up the bed as humanly possible or I would make sure my toes were covered.. I still do to this day and I am 22!

Steph

When I was about nine, my younger cousins and I believed that there were dragons living on our backyard. We made 'dragon food' (mud, rocks, sticks, leaves, and few ladybugs for color) and placed it around all the places we thought the dragons would be hiding. We came out the next morning to look for dragon footprints, and were sure that we saw some.

Colette

when I was about 4 or 5, I saw a cartoon which involved lots of zombies lurching around dressed in rags, + some vampires looking very smart. I assumed that the zombies lived in the graves that said 'RIP', (because their clothes were ripped) + the vampires lived in the others.

Nin

I thought the Boogie Man was made of boogers-all green and slimy.

Boo

I used to believe that the boogeyman was (lol!) a featureless, bald, gray man pushing a shopping cart! I guess it was because when I got told about him the first time, hearing "Boogey" reminded me of "buggy" and I immediately thought of a shopping cart. Still, when someone mentions the boogeyman, I get this mental image of the gray shopping cart man XD

On top of that, I thought he hated milk. This was because my mom's mom (who was a lunch lady) had a bunch of "Drink milk, it's cool!" stickers from work. My mom told me the boogeyman HATED milk and wouldn't come out of my closet as long as she taped the doors shut with one of the milk stickers!

Scary Dream

When I was little, whenever we drove past the airport at night, my mom would tell me that all of the different colored lights on the ground were porchlights for the gnomes that lived there. I believed it for many years...

Anon

In the nearest city to my hometown, there is an old radio tower. I always believed that it looked like a platform with red chairs, and since they were so high up in the sky, I thought they were chairs for giants.

Brittany