The Bogeyman Resurfaces in Japan as a 58 Year-Old Woman
A homeless woman in Japan moved into a man’s apartment and lived there for a year without his knowledge… hiding in a closet.
He only became suspicious when food started disappearing.
Story by Mari Yamaguchi on Associated Press (via Yahoo) — click here to read.
Brilliant. A real live Bogeyman… bogeyperson? Bogeywoman. Forget Lost in Translation or The Terminal — this story has it all.
Best quote of the piece:
She had moved a mattress into the small closet space and even took showers, Itakura said, calling the woman “neat and clean.”
Yes. On one level, the story has me giggling away like a kettle lightly on the boil… on the other hand, there’s an element of sadness (you don’t need to embellish the story with metaphors for big city anonymity, loss and isolation) and then there’s the creep factor: holy shit — she lived there an entire year before she was discovered. Would have made a great Ghosthunters episode… Jason & Grant debunking the myth by finding the woman who would be a mouse.
For your further edification, here’s what Wikipedia has to say on the Bogeyman:
The bogeyman, boogyman, bogyman, boogey monster, or boogeyman, is a folkloric or legendary ghostlike monster often believed in by children. The bogeyman has no specific appearance whatsoever, and can in fact vary drastically from household to household within the same community; in many cases he simply has no set appearance in the mind of a child, but is simply an amorphous embodiment of terror. Bogeyman can be used metaphorically to denote a person or thing of which someone has an irrational fear. Parents often say that if their child is naughty, the bogeyman will get them, in an effort to make them behave. The bogeyman legend may originate from Scotland, where such creatures are sometimes called bogles, boggarts, or bogies.
You can read the entire article on Wikipedia by clicking here.
A lot of the articles I saw (turns out there’s a helluva lot of stuff online related to Bogeymen… can’t quite figure that one), suggest that Bogey may originate from bog… bog man. Silly, as we all know that bogeys are nose jelly.
Sean