Night Fright …Finale …Testing a Myth

There were two kinds of monsters, the kind that hunted the streets and the kind that lived in your head. I could fight the first, but the second was more dangerous.
― Victoria Schwab

All Hallows Eve

As cops, we have to follow a lead regardless of personal feelings. Frankly, this whole monster business was dredging up in me a slew of repressed childhood fears.

Anyway, Lainey and I were staring down a dead end. We had no leads on our perp and because of conflicting reports we had no idea what to look for.

So, I decided we needed professional help.

The next morning I was with Paul Keene, our profiler. He’s got a background in psychiatry and criminology—and I can tell you, not much shakes him up.

He was looking through his huge owl glasses at the two scrawled letters we received through the mail.

“An older man—maybe in his seventies—probably somebody living on his own and feeling powerless, alienated. He’s invisible—or so he feels—so he strikes back, playing out his childhood fears of the Bogeyman.”

I look at him, wondering what he’s been smoking—I mean where does he get this stuff?

“You don’t agree,” he says

“Busted,” I smirk. The guy’s unfazed.

“My mother didn’t use the Bogeyman,” Keene says, “she had Mrs. Cruel. If I gave her lip, she’d send me to my room—sometimes knock under the table or at the front door and call up to me, “Was that Mrs. Cruel knocking? Has she come to sew up your mouth?”

“Nice. I wonder how kids survive.”

He just smiled.

Me? I didn’t feel as confident even now as an adult, The whole business was creeping me out.

“You have the Green Man or Bogeyman and these spectres rise up out of the ancient peat bogs, out of the Celtic mires and come searching for unruly children—at the behest of their parents, of course—Great fun—keeps us all in line.”

“Yeah, I’ll be sure to use it on my kids, if I ever have any.”

“C’mon Reg, these things have endured since the Iron Age—except in this case, someone is taking the folklore seriously.”

I didn’t want to ask, but I had to. “What are the chances of these kids being found alive?”

“It’s possible, if the perp’s following the myths. The Bogeyman takes the children and doesn’t eat or harm them—just imprisons them for a while in a mysterious and frightening place.”

“Any ideas of how to catch him?”

Keene thought for a moment.

“I noticed in the two cases where we were able to roughly guess a time, it was early evening. The Quebecois have their own form of the legend, the Bonhomme a Sept Heures—literally, the seven-o’clock man.”

“So, you figure that’s our window of opportunity—concentrate our efforts at that hour?”

“Exactly.”

I smiled at him as if I agreed. But when I got alone it was a different matter.

I’ll tell you what I figured.

I thought this was all pie in the sky. But, lacking another plan, I decided to go for it—after all, that’s why Keene was making the big bucks—at least, that’s the myth I told myself.

The next night was Halloween and it seemed unlikely many kids would be out trick or treating.

Once again, my hunch proved wrong.

Trying to pry a kid away from a bag of candy was like separating iron from a magnet.

Now instead of just kids out walking the streets, we had hundreds of adults as well, carrying bags and sacks abetting their kids’ gluttony.

This whole Bogeyman myth was giving me bumblebees in my head.

Why would parents perpetuate a frightening fiction about giving their children over to a deranged psychopath to discipline them? It seemed insane.

Whether or not there actually was a real-life psychotic copying the myth, this whole business of scaring the hell out of children in the first place, struck me as being kind of sketchy.

Anyway, if Paul Keene was right, we might get lucky.

Sure enough, just a few minutes before seven, one of out patrol units apprehended an older man attempting to abduct a six-year old boy.

We took him to the station and found out his name was Chaim Boggart.

A warrant was issued and his house searched and the three missing children were found unharmed, caged in his basement.

I expected Keene to gloat, but he didn’t. His profile was right down to the smallest details.

This Boggart fellow was given a psychiatric assessment and found mentally incompetent.

His case didn’t even go to trial—he was placed in a high-security mental health facility.

Everyone was satisfied with the outcome, except me.

I’m still wondering why we do the things we do. Do we create our own monsters and then spend our lives hiding from them?

What are the spectres rising up from our collective unconscious—are they our fears or our deepest desires?

As Keene said, these myths are very old and go back to our primeval past.

Maybe we’ve physically put the ritual killings in ancient peat bogs behind us, only to have them resurrect again in myths and haunt us, punishing us for our guilt.

© 2025, John J Geddes. All rights reserved

Photo