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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.

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."

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Izzy Curer
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1 year ago DotsCreated by potrace 1.15, written by Peter Selinger 2001-2017

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.

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Kate Priestley
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1 year ago DotsCreated by potrace 1.15, written by Peter Selinger 2001-2017

I remember getting a sudden feeling just like this when I was,pregnant. It's really hard to explain but it was,just this sudden feeling of something arriving.

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Tash Wen
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1 year ago DotsCreated by potrace 1.15, written by Peter Selinger 2001-2017

my daughter at the age of 3 told me that she could hear everything when she was in my tummy, when I was laughing and especially when I eating. But she couldn't see anything because it was really dark, but she liked to listen to me talk, and my heartbeat.

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Wick E. Scratch
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1 year ago DotsCreated by potrace 1.15, written by Peter Selinger 2001-2017

Oddly, I suspect my wife does. it would have been nearly 5 years ago, and maybe she wont remember in a few more years... Then again when you do IVF *AND* are what they refer to as 'advanced maternal age' or a 'geriatric pregnancy', you get a lot of ultrasounds - starting with the fertility clinic, and then the 'high-risk' OB docs.

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Avocado Toast
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1 year ago DotsCreated by potrace 1.15, written by Peter Selinger 2001-2017

I wonder if you didn't wave back that you would've had a miscarriage... I'm sorry I am just really curious about this

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Carrie Miller
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1 year ago DotsCreated by potrace 1.15, written by Peter Selinger 2001-2017

Sweet. My daughter was about 3 and kept telling me that she liked me better than the mom she “had before” me 😳 She also talked about a little boy and his mom that she’d play with in her room (when we bought our new house) but after a few months, she started talking about how the “mom of the little boy “ was being mean to him and she was getting scared of her 😳 she hasn’t slept in her room in a year but no longer talks about them.

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SmooshyFries
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1 year ago DotsCreated by potrace 1.15, written by Peter Selinger 2001-2017

Having worked daycares, there are some very articulate 2/3years olds. They talked like they were 5, carrying on a conversation with me using complete sentences.

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The Healer
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1 year ago DotsCreated by potrace 1.15, written by Peter Selinger 2001-2017

last year Niko, 6, grandson, told wife and i " i remember being in my mommy's tummy before i was born" " i wasnt always there, but i could hear everything real good" when he was 3 we met for the first time, family home for Christmas. we laughed and laughed ( parents have never seen him laugh like him and me) he says " you have music in your eyes"he laughs ha ha ha. i'm eye level with him now, ask if he could hear it? "yes" "can you describe what it sounds like? " from laughing face, to a 1000 yard poker face, he leans into me whispering " its quiet". few days later theyre staying with us, and it was chaotic, especially with our st bernard who wanted to eat his brains. i was agitated, but not showing it and asked niko, from across the room, " can you still hear the music in my eyes" " uh huh, yes" " does it sound the same?" " "shakes head" " ITS LOUD " this summer, 7, he tells me "i am filled with light" i approove this message.thehealer.us

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Nezuko_Chan
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11 months ago DotsCreated by potrace 1.15, written by Peter Selinger 2001-2017

Aww it’s good that he’s glad he picked you as his mom

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Nezuko_Chan
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11 months ago DotsCreated by potrace 1.15, written by Peter Selinger 2001-2017

“And yes, when I saw him waving on the screen I waved back” got me

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Cheryl Carter
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1 year ago DotsCreated by potrace 1.15, written by Peter Selinger 2001-2017

I am sorry, but a 2 year old usually says sentences, but not this complicated. You must have a special one.

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Casey McAlister
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1 year ago DotsCreated by potrace 1.15, written by Peter Selinger 2001-2017

I mean, most of those sound fake, but none of them is nearly as obvious as this one.

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The mom said that mainly because her son is a good storyteller, she doesn't find his stories creepy. 

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"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.

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Balso Steele
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1 year ago DotsCreated by potrace 1.15, written by Peter Selinger 2001-2017

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.

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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."

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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."

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Izzy Curer
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1 year ago (edited) DotsCreated by potrace 1.15, written by Peter Selinger 2001-2017

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.

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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."

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Izzy Curer
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1 year ago (edited) DotsCreated by potrace 1.15, written by Peter Selinger 2001-2017

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.

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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.

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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.

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Izzy Curer
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1 year ago (edited) DotsCreated by potrace 1.15, written by Peter Selinger 2001-2017

Omg, I used to do this, too! I was really upset when I realized I couldn't hear them, anymore.

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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.

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