A kid can transform from the sweetest little pumpkin into a frightening messenger of the Grim Reaper in a heartbeat.
Comedian Nash Flynn recently turned to Twitter with a story that perfectly illustrates this dichotomy.
In it, Flynn recalled the chilling time her son told her about wall people. You know, the folks that secretly crawl around your home, keeping an eye on everything you do.
Image credits: itsnashflynn
Image credits: itsnashflynn
Image credits: itsnashflynn
As Flynn's tweets were going viral, other Twitter users started responding to her with similar experiences of their own. From Mr. Boom to the Military Man, continue scrolling to learn about the imaginary (I hope!) creations children come up with.
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We managed to get in touch with Nash Flynn and she was kind enough to have a little chat with us about her son and the now-viral thread he's responsible for.
"He's four, and in his defense, one of his parents (me) is a death historian, so he's a little bit more comfortable about the creepier subjects than maybe most kids his age," Flynn told Bored Panda.
"He spends quite a bit of time in cemeteries looking at gravestone art with me. He's also got a very incredible imagination — currently, he has an imaginary friend called Dude-o who goes on adventures with him — and he is naturally very funny and likes attention."
I heard a reddit story where a lady watched a tiny orb of light enter her pregnant belly during the second trimester, and she said she felt like the baby's soul had entered her body right then. Since she was writing this a few years after the fact, she said that the orb 'felt' like it had the same personality as the kid she ended up having, now that she actually knew them.
The mom said that mainly because her son is a good storyteller, she doesn't find his stories creepy.
"The wall people was a bit of an outlier, but actually I've seen quite a few people in the thread say their kids had also seen wall people before so it sounds like either we've got a planet earth infestation of ghouls that enjoy a good drywall or it's a bit of seeing faces in patterns or shadows, like humans tend to," Flynn explained.
I hope whatever the boy is saying is cap because that is extremely creepy.
The ex & I had just bought a house where the upper story went bathroom-landing-kids' bedroom. My PC was on the landing bc it had the only working phone jack for DSL. Couple months later, the kids (9 & 7) couldn't sleep bc when they did, *something* was in their room giving off a "you don't belong here" vibe, so I told them they could sleep in our room til I went to bed. Couple hours later, my screen went black going into a cutscene so it was like a mirror, and someone walked behind me in the dark. There wasn't an outer stairwell. I noped the hell downstairs. The next week's paper came out, and there was the obit for the previous owner...who'd died the evening of the irritated specter.
From the Grady Twins (The Shining) and Samara (The Ring) to Regan (The Exorcist) and, of course, Damien (The Omen), many horror movies terrify us with children.
There are many reasons why boys and girls are so effective at this. For example, consider the biological level of a kid who is still developing physically and psychologically—it makes them extremely unpredictable.
"In a large part, children are unpredictable ... because adults forget what it's like being children pretty quickly," Flynn agreed. "I think I read somewhere that an adult even with practice can’t effectively imitate the art of children, and I think that's pretty telling."
Flynn finds the creepy kid to be a really interesting cultural phenomenon. "I think a lot of it comes from having very busy brains and an under-developed language that doesn't allow for much nuance," she said.
"Kids often blur the spaces between dreams and reality, but with no ability to understand that piece or to describe it, what makes it out to adults can seem very eerie."
Eek! I heard a story about two kids in the woods, once. One saw an 'invisible' man, like a heat-ripple disturbance in the air in the shape of a person. They got spooked and decided to go home. They got a little lost, and they got separated for a second. The first kid, the one who had seen the thing, then heard someone calling his friend's name in *his* own voice. He started yelling for his friend not to listen to it, that he was over here. Fortunately, the friend joined back up with him, and they made it home.
Who's going to tell what happened after that? Don't leave us hanging
According to Emily Hopkins, a psychologist who studies how small children distinguish between fiction and reality, "Generally, they're pretty good at telling real from pretend, but they can get tripped up in certain situations and circumstances."
"Even when kids start to pretend at about 18 months or so, they seem to understand the difference; if they’re pretending that a block is a chocolate chip cookie, they don't try to take a bite out of the wooden block."
This reminds me of a story I heard once. This kid would tell his parents about the nice old lady who would watch him sleep at night. They actually figured it might be a ghost. Or imagination. Then, one day a neighbor came by to apologize that they'd found out their elderly grandparent had been breaking out of the house at night.
By 3, 4, or 5, kids can usually say whether impossible things happening in a book are real or not. "If there’s magic, or things that violate what they know about the real world, that’s what helps them to understand that those characters are probably not real. If a character in the book flies or something, they’ll say, 'That person can’t really exist in real life,'" Hopkins explained.
But if an adult tries to confuse them on purpose—Hopkins mentions the fact that a lot of kids believe in Santa Claus—they can be confused.
Kids use information from adults to find out if things are real.
Omg, I used to do this, too! I was really upset when I realized I couldn't hear them, anymore.
Hopkins also mentioned that kids use play to think through things that they feel are difficult or scary. That way kids can "work through it in a low-risk way, process it without having to actually experience it themselves."
So there may be something that the little ones mentioned in these tweets haven’t been able to express and resorted to witches and vampires to get their point accross.
Note: this post originally had 64 images. It’s been shortened to the top 30 images based on user votes.
My son is actually my foster I'm in the process of adopting. He came to me straight from the hospital after his bio father beat him. I was with him every step of the way through being questioned by lawyers and police and doctors, and we found out that so much more stuff happened. One lawyer asked "weren't you scared?" And I'll never forget, at five years old he looked at the lawyer and then at me and said "only a little cos before i came to earth they said i was going to be loved and be happy." It was his second day with me and it was then i decided to adopt him. Three years later I'm still waiting on the stupid courts but i can't wait.
I'm convinced children and animals are much more attuned to what we adults teach ourselves not to notice.
More like they're just at an age where every experience is new and exciting, they don't have a good grasp on the separation between reality and their own imaginations, their brains are very under developed and have zero filter when it comes to articulating these things. If children were generally capable of perceiving things adults were not, we would definitely know it.
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When I was little under the age of 5 we lived in a trailer park on the navy base. I remember waking up one night to see a green glitter man walk down the hallway. He glowed. He was not much taller than I was. Another house we lived in was a two story out in a rural area. I was in elementary then. My sister and I had twin beds in the same room. One night I heard footsteps in the room come between the two beds then to the window then stopped. I was so scared I had the blanket over my head. I talked to my sister about it the next morning. She described it exactly the way I remembered it after I just asked if she heard anything last night.
My son is actually my foster I'm in the process of adopting. He came to me straight from the hospital after his bio father beat him. I was with him every step of the way through being questioned by lawyers and police and doctors, and we found out that so much more stuff happened. One lawyer asked "weren't you scared?" And I'll never forget, at five years old he looked at the lawyer and then at me and said "only a little cos before i came to earth they said i was going to be loved and be happy." It was his second day with me and it was then i decided to adopt him. Three years later I'm still waiting on the stupid courts but i can't wait.
I'm convinced children and animals are much more attuned to what we adults teach ourselves not to notice.
More like they're just at an age where every experience is new and exciting, they don't have a good grasp on the separation between reality and their own imaginations, their brains are very under developed and have zero filter when it comes to articulating these things. If children were generally capable of perceiving things adults were not, we would definitely know it.
Load More Replies... When I was little under the age of 5 we lived in a trailer park on the navy base. I remember waking up one night to see a green glitter man walk down the hallway. He glowed. He was not much taller than I was. Another house we lived in was a two story out in a rural area. I was in elementary then. My sister and I had twin beds in the same room. One night I heard footsteps in the room come between the two beds then to the window then stopped. I was so scared I had the blanket over my head. I talked to my sister about it the next morning. She described it exactly the way I remembered it after I just asked if she heard anything last night.
