#bogeymen

If they are rudimentary, they generally symbolize the abolition of social and sexual barriers, but also animal and human. Men dressed as women (and vice versa), paper masks, widespread accoutrements, blackening of the face or even part of the body with shoe polish or charcoal (a well-known Celtic tradition), animal adornments (such as animal skins, horn crowns), are common.

In the Vallespir valley (Pyrenees) for example, the bear is honored in a dramatization that depicts its hunt while it tries to capture a woman.

[schembartläufer-nuremberg-facsimile-published-in-1897]

The Cavalcades : Rabelais (in his Quart Livre) speaks of a mannequin named "Mâche-croutte" ~ "Chew-the-Crust" ~ who was paraded in Lyon. This (popular) dragon was a "monstrous, ridiculous, hideous and terrible effigy in the eyes of small children : it had eyes larger than its belly, a head larger than the rest of its body, with large and horrific, very serrated jaws [...] which are regularly snapped in a terrifying way."

A few centuries later (18th century) Mâche-Croute, who no longer appears in the Carnival, becomes a bogeyman used to scare children.

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Realizing with the means to dump raws I could probably keep this type of bogeyman for future modded runs... be it they wouldn't be Crumbledgrowl.

Antjie Somers [South African folklore]

Bogeymen are one of the most common recurring character types among folktales: an evil monster, ghost or undead human that comes out at night and takes misbehaving children. Sometimes to eat them and sometimes just dragging them off to an unknown (yet likely unpleasant) fate. In South Africa, children were told similar tales about Antjie Somers, a local folk character originating from the 19th century. Though she checks all the boxes of a typical bogeyman character, there is one thing that sets her apart from the others: Antjie Somers is human with no clear supernatural traits.

As the story goes, there once was a man named Andries Somers. He worked on a fishing vessel (interesting note: in some variations, he was a slave rather than a conventional fisherman) and was known for his exceptional work ethic: when Andries hauled in his nets, his skill and strength put his fellow fishermen to shame. Aside from being talented and diligent, Andries was also brave and kind-hearted, as he had saved people from drowning on several occasions.

Alas, his diligence bred jealousy in his comrades until one day they decided to teach him a lesson. The fishermen banded together and surrounded Andries on a beach, intending to rough him up. But Andries was a man of exceptional strength and knocked all of his assailants to the ground. When the dust settled however, he saw that one of his attackers couldn’t get up: the man had hit his head falling down and died on the spot. Knowing that he would be charged with murder if he stayed, Andries saw no choice to flee.

He stole a kopdoek (a kind of headscarf) and a dress from his sister and ran away disguised as a woman. After fleeing far away, he eventually found new work in a settlement somewhere over the mountains, where his former comrades would never find him. Andries worked in a vineyard and it wasn’t long until his employer noticed his exceptional work ethic and put him in charge of the other workers. But here his sad past repeated itself, and he soon found himself the target of jealousy and anger from his co-workers. Eventually, they found the dress and kopdoek Andries still kept in his hut, and mocked him endlessly about it. They called him Antjie (a feminine name) and poked fun of him for crossdressing. He endured these childish taunts for three days, before packing his stuff and leaving under the cover of night, full of anger and disappointment.

Andries was never found, but after a while, children who had been sent to the forest to collect lumber started telling stories of a strange elderly woman dressed in a striped dress and kopdoek, wearing a sack over her shoulder. The woman was always angry and would threaten kids with her knife, threatening to kill them and stuff their corpses into her sack. Their parents connected the dots and assumed this mysterious woman to be Antjie Somers, as they had taken to calling Andries. From then on, people would warn their kids to behave, lest Antjie Somers stab them and take them away in her sack.

This story actually has some political context, as it originated in a period of tension between workers and farmers following the then-recent abolishment of the slave trade. I won’t go into the details here, but there is quite a bit of historical context to this tale if you want to read up about it.

Though Antjie/Andries is the protagonist of the story, this character was later demonized further and turned into a demonic monster, a goblin, a monstrous woman with animal-like characteristics or a witch in some retellings. In this last version, Andries quite literally became a woman when he turned evil, which also has some political subtext. In fact, because the character was crossdressing and gender-nonconforming, Antjie Somers is sometimes regarded as a queer character, though I assume this is more of a modern interpretation (he only donned the dress to disguise himself, after all). The moral of the story however remains quite simple: don’t leave children unattended in creepy woods.

Why of course! The camel with a sack or baeer bu kharitah (بعير بو خريطة) is described in detail in Al Musallam (2017) Emirati Superstitious Creatures, and I am eternally thankful for an ABC reader for providing that source!

The camel with a sack appears during siesta time and catches Emirati children who are foolishly playing outside at that time. It traps them in its sack, either white (saliva) or red (the fleshy sack that camels extrude).

It carries the children around and releases them somewhere else after a period of time. They can be heard crying inside the sack at night. When they are released, it is often far away, and they forget their parents, so they cannot return home and they never stop crying.

A bogeyman’s half-life is shortened a tiny bit every time that bogeyman’s name is invoked. Eventually the bogeyman becomes a tired cliché and often can devolve into a farce.

Red-baiting Sen. Joseph McCarthy’s obsessive hunt for alleged communists gradually became a joke about things such as looking for communists under beds.

My life has been tough lately, so I do what makes me happy. Read books about monsters.

141. The Old Snatchengrabber’s Big Book of Child Eating Monsters by Mike Rosen. This is not beloved British children’s author Mike Rosen, or asshole Republican pundit Mike Rosen. This is a different one. This book is a collection of folkloric bogeymen, illustrated in a cartoony style. Most of these are European, but some from around the world do appear. Some liberties have been taken with the monsters at hand, mostly in the art—the yara-ma-wa-yho, for example, is an amorphous blob instead of a hairless monkey-frog, and Krampus is both female and thicc. Brief, but pleasant.

142. The United States of Cryptids by J. W. Ocker. I’ve quite enjoyed Ocker’s Season of the Witch and Cursed Objects, and I quite enjoyed this book as well. The book is as much about crypto-tourism as it is about actual cryptozoology. As such, it takes a pretty broad view of what a cryptid is, including various UFOlogical entities, as well as folkloric entities like the wendigo or Navajo shapeshifters, if they have places to visit or sell merchandise for. It’s also pretty respectful, acknowledging that those aforementioned Navajo shapeshifters, for example, are taboo to a lot of Navajo people still. Ocker has clearly done his homework, and acknowledges that creatures like the Ozark Howler are modern hoaxes, as well as suggesting some very obscure monsters that are ripe for becoming tourist attractions (such as the Derry Fairy, the Prime Hook Swamp Creature and the Kodiak Dinosaur).

143. The Enemies of Rome by Stephen Kershaw. In some ways, this is the best whirlwind tour of Roman history I could imagine, covering events from the mythical foundation of Rome to the last of the Western emperors. It is most interested in what the Romans thought of the various people they fought and usually defeated, and how Romans built their own identity as separate from “barbarian”, even though they themselves were barbarians from the point of view of Greek culture, which they wholeheartedly appropriated. A lot of time is spent in the late Republic era, which I appreciated. Too often, books about Rome written for a popular audience skip straight from the Punic Wars to Julius Caesar. One thing I didn’t like, however, was its constant use of modern neologisms. “Fake news”, for example, shows up more than five times before I stopped counting. It was cute once, but rapidly became irritating.

144. Flying Snakes and Griffin Claws by Adrienne Mayor. This is a collection of short articles written for various magazines and websites by Mayor, collected and occasionally updated. Most of them are on the subject of weird ephemera of the classical world, often times animal themed. Examples include several articles on tourism in Greece during Roman times, a history of Roman perfumes, the use of weasels as household mousers in the Classical world, and of course writings on Greek and Roman monsters. The book includes her original article proposing that the griffin is based on Protoceratops fossils, and the argument is pretty much just “I went looking for a real animal that looks like a griffin, because I couldn’t imagine that it was a symbolic hybrid, and this is what I found”.  In the foreword, she refers to that essay as “embarrassing”, although whether because she has repudiated that (very poorly supported) hypothesis or merely because of its fannish tone addressed to Jack Horner, remains unsaid. I can’t say I recommend this book, but I didn’t consider reading it a complete waste of time.