Shortly after I turned seventeen, my parents separated. My father stayed in my childhood suburban home for some time while selling it, while my mother rented a townhouse for me and her to live in. Our new house had two stories, three bedrooms, and it was built in a row house style with several identical houses adjoined. The front of each house opened up directly onto the sidewalk and in the back we had a small fenced-in yard with a little wooden porch, big enough for a couple patio chairs and a barbeque. The neighborhood was pretty nice, but there wasn’t much privacy. The walls were thin, and we could hear our neighbors walking up the stairs, flushing the toilet, and sometimes even talking.
One lady in particular was very nosy. She lived right across the street, alone as far as we could tell, and kept track of everything and everybody, when we came, when we went, when we took out the trash. She didn’t talk much to me, however, but she always seemed to be lurking behind the curtain when I was outside. According to the other neighbors she had lived here for decades, but after her husband passed away she became a bit… loopy.
About a week after we moved in, my mom brought down two big cardboard boxes from the attic crawlspace, seemingly left there by a former tenant. They were unmarked and I watched as she opened them, hoping for some kind of interesting treasure. The first one contained old sheets that had been crisp and clean once but now smelled of mildew, as well as some personal items such as jewelry and an old pair of glasses. The other box was a bit smaller and my interest was piqued as soon as mom opened it – it was filled with children’s items. There were toys – among others a very small and ragged teddy bear, a couple of plastic horses bleached by sunlight, a large doll whose eyes shut when you tilted her horizontally. Then there were a few newspapers, dating back to the 1970’s. Further down there were what seemed to be school mementos – work books, a drawing of a smiling family outside a house eerily similar to ours with oversized flowers and a rainbow (aptly titled “MY FAMILY” in a child’s handwriting), stickers, pages of cursive writing wrinkled by moisture – and a diary. My mom scorned me for wanting to look in it, but I convinced her to let me have it by saying that I wanted to figure out who it belonged to, and maybe be able to reunite the owner, who by now would be an adult, with their long lost stuff.
I took the diary into my room and sat down with it on the bed. It was a rather girly creation, with pages that had once had been heavily scented, and a small heart-shaped lock that was now broken. The front cover was pastel purple, and framed in the middle against a black background was a drawing of a girl in 1920’s era clothes. A tear was running down her face. I quickly flipped through the pages and saw that the diary was about half full. I decided to start at the beginning. The writing was large and childish, but fully legible.
April 3 1976
Dear Diary
Today is the first day I am writing in you. I hope you and I will be great friends! So what did I do today? I was in school. Me Mary and Susan played during break. I don’t know if Mary likes me but she sure is mean to me. When I came home we had meetballs for dinner. They were yumy!
Jessie
The short, innocent entry made me smile as I turned the page. The next few entries were filled with similar stuff about Jessie’s life; piano recitals, a boy at school she had a crush on, how she liked math, notes about her mom and dad, a new shirt she got and how mean Mary said it was ugly, and here and there little illustrations related to the entry or just random little girl stuff like flowers and horses. However, a few months into the diary I came across an entry with slightly different undertones.
September 18 1976
Dear Diary
I have a hard time sleaping. I woke up and there is someone in my room. I told my mom but she says Bogyman isn’t real. I can’t see what he looks like but I don’t like him.
Jessie
I furrowed my brow. Somewhat creepy, yes, but little kids have vivid imaginations. So I shrugged it off and kept reading.
September 26 1976
Dear Diary
Today I think I saw Bogyman at school. I wish he would go away. I told Mary and Susan but Mary said I was ill in the head and needed to be locked away. She is so mean. I kicked her and had to go to detenshun. Mom was angry when we got home. She said I am making it all up.
Jessie
September 30 1976
Dear Diary
Last night I had a very bad dream about a tree. It was scary. The tree came in through my window and ate me. I went to sleap in moms and dads room. Bogyman doesnt go in there.
Jessie
I put the book down. Okay, something wasn’t right with this kid. During dinner I told my mom about what I had read so far, and asked if the knew anything at all about the people who lived here in the 70’s, but she didn’t. Jessie’s diary gave me the heebie jeebies, and when I went to bed that night I could feel it staring at me from my nightstand. That little teary-eyed girl on the cover just wouldn’t stop trying to catch my gaze. Against better judgement, I picked it up and found the place where I had left off.
October 2 1976
Dear Diary
Bogyman keeps moving my toys around. I told him to stop. Mom and dad still dont believe me and said to stop playing with my toys at night when I am supposed to be in bed. Mom is always mad. Maybe she cant sleap either. Tonight I am going to a sleap over berthday party at Susans house. I hope he doesnt come there. Mommy said she is takeing me to the doctor to find out why I dont sleap. She still doesnt believe me.
Jessie
This did little to reassure me, but I kept reading.
October 5 1976
Dear Diary
Bogyman comes almost all the time now. He says I should come with him. I don’t like him because he doesnt have a face and is scary. He told me that he lives in the tree outside my window. I dont want to go with him.
Jessie
Okay, to hell with that. I slammed the book shut and stuffed it in my nightstand drawer. After making sure every inch of my body was safe and secure underneath my covers, and suspiciously staring at the window for about 45 minutes, I fell asleep.
I woke up, laying on my side. I slowly opened my eyes and saw only my white bedroom wall in the dark. I was facing the wall, my back to the rest of the room, and it must still be nighttime. As I was beginning to ponder how long I’d slept and what had woken me up, I realized that something was wrong. I couldn’t move. At first I (silently and motionlessly) freaked out, but then I recalled what I had read about sleep paralysis and I understood what was going on. A friend of mine had it once and we had read up on it online together, as she didn’t know what it was either. Basically, you are stuck in a half-dream state where you are paralyzed and quite often hallucinate. Scary stuff, but it’s all in your head and when you wake up properly everything is back to normal.
So I calmed down and concentrated on wiggling my toes to try to snap out of it. No luck. I decided to just try to go back to sleep. As I waited to drift off, I became aware of a presence in my room. Now, I knew that this stuff was a very common hallucination with sleep paralysis, but it did not make me any more comfortable with what happened. I was now frightfully aware that there was something else in the room with me. I couldn’t see it or hear it, but it radiated an aura of… evil, lacking a better description, and I couldn’t turn around and face it. Never in my life have I felt so vulnerable. I could feel my heartbeat in my ears – a strange, almost sucking noise – and then I heard whatever-it-was slowly move around the opposite side of my room, from the window towards the door. Suddenly, quick footsteps ran up to the side of my bed and something started to hit the mattress behind my back, with absolutely furious, inhumanly quick fists. I could feel the assault sending my body bouncing. Suddenly I was on my back, or at least I think I was, and I saw a dark figure looming above me. I couldn’t see any features other than the black shape, but it leaned down close to me and put its goddamn hands on my face. They felt cool and hard, like really thick leathery skin, or wood. I felt more than saw those wooden fingers sprout and grow really long and thin, and snake their way into my mouth. I tried to keep it closed while feverishly trying to remind myself that none of this was real, but tears streamed down my cheeks and I felt like I was fighting for my life. The fingers wedged themselves in between my upper front teeth. My whole head reverberated with sickening cracks as it pried my teeth apart. There was no pain, but I could feel them shatter.
I snapped out of the paralysis and sat up, wild-eyed and sweaty. Whimpering, I ran to the bathroom mirror and naturally, my teeth were fine. There was no sign of the intruder. I ran so fast downstairs that I almost fell, turned all the lights on and sat on the couch for the rest of the night. My mom found me there, finally asleep, at 7 am. We agreed that I’d had nightmares due to the stuff I’d read in Jessie’s diary. A perfectly rational explanation, which I was quite comfortable with.
However, two days later I was about to have second thoughts about that. I went to take the trash out and the nosy old lady across the street was also outside, getting her mail. Our eyes met and I gave her a short, polite nod. She gave me a really funny look and said;
“You’ve seen him too, haven’t you?”
I stopped dead in my tracks. “What?”
“He knows you know about him… and now he’ll be coming for you too!”
I stared at her in disbelief as she gave me a triumphant snort and shuffled back inside, dressed in an old nightgown and ragged slippers. Yeah, this was discomforting.
I went back into my room and took out the diary from my nightstand drawer, weighing it my hands, unsure of what to do. From the descriptions Jessie had supplied in the diary I knew that her bedroom had been the third one, the one that neither me nor my mom slept in. It was the smallest one, had one side with a slanted ceiling and there had at one point been a large tree outside it, but it had been cut down years ago and now only remnants of a mossy stump remained below. At least that gave me some comfort. I took Jessie’s diary and went into her old bedroom and sat at the computer desk my mom had set up in there. I looked around, trying to imagine how it would have looked back in the 70’s when Jessie had lived in there. I was almost at the last of her entries, and I have to admit I was a little bit nervous to see what they had to say.
October 12 1976
Dear Diary
My dad and mr Richards next door cut down the tree outside my window. He said it was full of beetles and was gonna fall over. I’m glad, maybe now the Bogyman cant come back. I went and looked at the beetles in the tree, there sure were lots of them. My mom is baking cinimon rolls and Im gonna go eat one now.
Jessie
I turned the page.
October 15 1976
Dear Diary
Bogyman came last night. He was very angry that dad and mr Richards cut the tree down. He grabbed my arm and said I had to come with him. His fingers are really long and they hurt my arm. He wears a suit like dad. I didn’t go with him but he said that he was coming back. Im scared. I dont want to live here any more.
Jessie
That was the final entry. Below it there was a drawing of a figure that must be Jessie’s Boogeyman. It was a tall human-like figure with long arms and legs and long snaky fingers. I closed the diary, firmly set on never opening it again. I went to put it back in the cardboard box (while toying with the idea to burn it) when my eyes fell on one of the yellowed newspapers that had been packed away with it. It was dated October 1976, the same month as Jessie’s last entry. I held my breath as I carefully took all the newspapers out of the box and went through them in search of… well, anything.
My heart sank like a stone when I read about a little girl being abducted from her bedroom in the night. She disappeared on the night of October 18th. Her window had been opened but the police didn’t have any clues. I looked through the other articles and learned that due to Jessie’s diary, which the police had found when looking through her room, they believed she had been kidnapped by a child predator. However, there were absolutely no tracks outside, and to get into the room the perpetrator would have needed a ladder. Plus, the window in her bedroom could only be opened from the inside. In an issue dated about a month later there was a notice that they had found Jessie’s nightgown in a ditch a few kilometers from the house, near the woods. There were no other traces, and that was the last newspaper article I found.
A couple of days later I asked the lady next door, whose name I can tell you was Rowena Richards, if she remembered that day when her husband had helped the people across the road cut down the tree outside their little daughters room, and if she could tell me anything about them. She just shook her head and said,
“Poor little girl. The tall man in the suit took her. They’ll never find her.” I couldn’t get anything more out of her.
A few months later, I was very relieved to find out that I had been accepted to a university out of state. I moved as soon as I could, and now here I sit in my dorm, telling you this story. I still wonder what happened to poor little Jessie, and I hope I will never find out for myself.