The Closet Monster is Alive and Well

My room at age five was a typical child's room.  My bed was in a corner, my toybox in another, and my clothes and everything else was in my closet.  What looked perfectly benign by day, however, became horrific at night, when the lights were turned off.  Even with a small night light in my room, the shadows formed dark shapes.  Shapes that occasionally seemed to move ever closer to my bed.  And the largest dark shape was the doorway to my closet, which inevitably was open when I woke up in the middle of the night.

Children's brains are not machines of logic.  Children's brains are fueled by the imagination, and my five year old imagination was pretty powerful.  That open closet door became a hungry maw of darkness with tendrils of shadow snaking out to snatch a sleeping child's foot.  I would end up screaming for my parents.  If my mom came in, she would just shut the closet door and my problem would be solved.  If my dad came in, he would decide that I needed to toughen up, and he would leave the closet door open.  There was no way that I would even briefly consider climbing from the safety of my bed and shutting the closet myself.  The second that I put my foot on the floor, the Monster Under the Bed would be grabbing at my ankle, and who needed that sort of excitement?  My only alternative was to cover my entire body with my blankets, except my face, and watch the darkness of the open closet door for movement.  At least until I fell asleep again.

As I got older, I got better at closing my closet door before I went to sleep.  If I had watched a particularly scary movie prior to sleep, I would put a chair in front of the closet as an additional warning system.  The night my mother and I watched The Exorcist on television, there were two chairs in front of my closet.  In my late teens, before I graduated from high school, I started to think that perhaps I was being a little silly with my closet concerns.  Perhaps there really wasn't a reason to be afraid.  Maybe it was just all in my head. 

And then I saw the movie Poltergeist.  Have you seen that movie?  Do you know what that closet does to that poor family?   I decided that I wasn't quite as insane as I thought, to be so concerned about closets.  After all, there was a decent chance that there might be a portal underneath my dresses.

And then I read the Stephen King short story, The Boogeyman.  Stephen King basically confirmed everything about closets that I had ever been afraid of in that story.  It was almost as if HE were afraid of open closets too!  (He also said that he didn't like to let his foot hang over the edge of the bed, either, "just in case"!)  If the Master of Horror is scared of closets, maybe there's a good reason?

As if all that weren't enough, my son and I were just watching his current favorite show My Ghost Story: Caught on Camera.  There was a segment about a little girl and her room.  The paranormal team was asking what was in the closet, and they got an EVP of a voice saying "It's a monster." 

Am I still afraid of closets?  Yep.  I have to have all of the closets in the house closed up tight before I go to sleep.  That's not so bad, right?  There are probably worse things to be afraid of.  Like cockroaches.  




3.) Something that scared you when you were young…are you still afraid?

Midnight Creepies

The TV in our bedroom is creeping me out.  Every night it has been turning on by itself and running through the channels.  Even though the screen is dark, you can tell that the television is on, and that is probably what wakes me up.  In the upper right hand corner there is a countdown rolling as it runs through channels. When it gets to the end of the channels, it starts over, counting down.  I have to get up and turn the television off manually.  Sometimes, the television doesn't want to turn off, and it takes several instances of me emphatically pushing the 'off' button before the power actually cuts off.  (No, I do not know where the remote is, but the remote never works in horror movies, so it's irrelevant.)

I wouldn't be so freaked if it wasn't happening around the same time every night, but around midnight, there it goes.  I saw the movie Poltergeist--I know what happens when a television turns itself on!  I would likely be even more concerned if the television was all static instead of dark.   I would also be freaking out if there was a video showing some girl with bad hair climbing out of a well.  But I would be especially hysterical if there was static with a child's voice calling for her mommy AND a video of a girl climbing out of a well.  That would just be too much.

Source: blog.broadcastengineering.com via Tina on Pinterest

Yeah, I've seen way too many horror movies. I stopped watching them awhile ago, but the ones that I did see are still floating around in the back of my mind, ready to jump out and scare me when I least expect it.  Stupid memory. 

I can't help but think that the television is counting down to someTHING.  Except what the heck would the television be counting down?  The hostile takeover of the machines in some sort of Terminator event?  Alien invasion?  Certainly not a zombie apocalypse, as zombies would be more likely to eat a television than follow a countdown. I can cross that one off the list.

My husband laughed when I told him that I was creeped out.  Of course he laughed.  HE sleeps through the whole thing!  I've unplugged the television, but my husband relies on the clock that is on the cable box, so he plugs it back in.  All of this means that I'm awake around midnight, watching the television for signs of life.  And if the television turns itself on...I must screw up what little courage I have, get up, and turn it off as quickly as I can find the button in the dark.

And Larry wonders why I am so tired.