make-believe: monsters

After my mother very sternly warned me never to detach the vacuum cleaner bag from the vacuum cleaner, I thought doing so would release the monster that lived inside.

I believed that if you made shadow puppets, the animals would come alive and be live shadows. That's why some shadows move and scare you, and where shadows where you don't know what they are come from.
I grew out of this fairly quickly.

I always hated turning off the lights before I went upstairs. I imagined things coming out of the dark behind me, coming to get me. Needless to say, I always sprinted up the stairs so they couldn't get me. I am 26 years old, I know there is nothing behind me, but I still sprint up the stairs at night after I turn the lights out.

I used to believe that my Dad's snoring was a tiger in my parent's room. I was too afraid to get up and walk down the hall because I knew it would get me. I had some tough nights sitting on the edge of the bed having to pee but too afraid to go to the bathroom.

As a young child, living near a highway, The Boo-Boo-Boo Monster would come to terrify me at night. As a two-year-old it was hard to articulate my fear and describe to my concerned parents why I simply couldn't be left alone in my bedroom. Alas, eventually I would be left alone and once again the Monster would come to visit me. 'Boooo B-B-Boooo B-B-Boo Boo Boooo' he would cry, and soon after I would be crying too.

Several years later, while stopped at some traffic lights, for the first time I saw a motorbike take off, accelerating quickly. And riding it was the Boo-Boo-Boo Monster.

When I was young (really young) my mother and father would always say things like 'Quick shut the door there's a draft coming in' or 'There's a draft in here I'll close the window'. Now I didn't know what the word 'draft' meant, but I knew what a dragon was and the two words had a similar beginning. So I thought that a smallish invisible(but not to my parents) dragon type crawling thing would come into our house when it was cold or dark out. A few years in school sorted that belief out. Thankfully

I live far up north in Norway, with midnight sun in the summer and northern light in the winter. I, like every other child, used to believe that trolls and ghosts would appear if I whistled under the northern light.

When i was around the age of five i used to believe that my older sister mutated into a zombie in the dark...seeing her in the morning didn't help much either...

when i was about 6, i used to believe the bottom drain of our club swimpool connected it directly to the ocean. that's what my older cousins told me, because they knew i was dead afraid of sharks ever since i had watched "jaws". they told me a shark could swim through the drain into the pool any time. i spent months without going into the pool.

I used to belive this: If I saw a stranger man and spoke to him, he would become a monster. This was because my mother told me not to speak with strangers. And because she said this I belived that strangers were dangerous.

My grandma told me that if I was being mean or if I didn't listen to her a skinwalker(a navajo evil wizard)would come up and get me. I was so freaked out by this little bit of news.

When I was about 5 or 6 years old, I spent a lot of time with my neighboors. One night when they had a babysitter, he told me that I had to hurry home, because my parents were kidnapped by monsters, and only I could save them. Of course I ran home, and I was terrified to go into the livingroom where my parents were sitting! It took me a long time to be with my neighboors again when the babysitter was there too!

When I was about 6 I went into a Doctor Who' exhibition on my own - I was so scared that the monsters were going to get me that I went around it in about 90 seconds flat. The proprietor of the exhibition noticed this and asked someone just entering the museum to go round with me...

Once when I was little I asked my grandma if I could go to the park at night.Since I was scared of monkeys she told me that there were monkeys that went to the park at night.

I live in Norway. On a mountain that we could see from my granmothers window, there were two satelite dishes. My father told me that they stood there because the trolls who lived on that mountain had just eaten dinner, and now their dishes were clean, and set out to dry. I asked my father why they were always there, evenin the morning..? he replied that "the trolls eat a lot".
Of course, I did belive him..

For months I was terrified of going into the narrow passage behind our garage because I thought there was a spider that lived there who's body was made out of one of those cubes of potato you get in a meat 'n' potato pie.

Why this scared me I do not know.