What child has not had a million nightmares about creatures bursting out of their closet door or crawling out from underneath their bed? While the threat of a horrible creature is a fairly simplistic fear for a child, understanding the exact reason for the bogeyman’s existence is more complex. In this post, we will look at the origins of the bogeyman and how it has been used to keep children in line for centuries.
The Origins of the Bogeyman
The bogeyman is entirely entrenched in multiple folkloric cultures. After all, there has always been something in the dark that will come and get you for various reasons. Nevertheless, our understanding of the bogeymen appeared as early as the 1500’s as a Middle English term meaning “a frightening spectre.” Furthermore, as there are references to hobgoblins and other malevolent creatures, the term is synonymous with The Devil as well.
Similarly, the word “bogey” is actually a reference to “ghosts” or “bug” in many languages, which, in contrast to hobgoblins, could also be a reference to bugbears. Building off of that, the term generally stands for something evil or dangerous that individuals should watchout for when in strange or unknown locales.
Here are a few examples of different bogeymen from around the world:
- Wewe Gombel: A spirit in the Semarang area of central Java who kidnaps neglected children from their parents until the parents understand the responsibility of raising children.
- Babaroga: A Croation boogeyman. An ugly, horned lady who hunts for unruly children at night to kidnap and eat.
- The Night Hag: An evil spirit that favors paralysis and “sits on the chests of her victims while they sleep” to cause nightmares.
The idea of the bogeyman is worldwide, but it means lots of different things to a lot of different cultures. So, regardless if your bogeyman was a horned lady or an evil spirit, it still lurked somewhere just beyond in the darkness.
Why All the Horror, Though?
Back in olden times, humans couldn’t just put on a horror movie at too-early an age for children to remind them of what’s scary in the world. No, humans had to tell children stories—an oral tradition of storytelling, really—to get them to understand morals and how to act right.
As stated by one source, there was a commonality between the bogeyman story across cultures. The commonality was discipline. As stated: “Creating compliance in children is something parents long for, but it is sometimes difficult to do with compliments and candy. Scaring them by telling them that a monster would come and eat them if they disobeyed is much more effective in that case.”
Therefore, there is a bit of old time parenting to contend with as compliance, obedience, and communal thinking were (and are) important functions to stability in a household. Wisdom contends: children must be compliant and obedient for the purposes of helping with chores. Naughty children didn’t help with the animals and the crops. The ones who knew their role in the household did. Those bad seeds, meanwhile, faced the prospect of being dragged off by a horrible creature that only existed in the nightmare projections of their parents’ minds. While childrearing has changed, the threat of the bogeyman has not.
Conclusion
In a way, the bogeyman is very real. True, it is not some creature that will come from dark pits of nightmares. As such, it won’t come eat you because he “just feels like it”; nay, he will come eat you because you’ve done something bad. This idea comes from folkloric notions of explanation in a world that is sometimes hard to explain.
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