The Bump in the Night

Ahhh, the seventies, that crazy and anti-halcyon time where the TV censors were drugged on the job, and let lots of things slide through the airwaves during prime time…

I devoured those Scholastic books, and plunked in front of the TV for all the PBS I could. Society should not have done that to an impressionable child, but here we are.

My days were filled with books like The Cat From Outer Space, The Boy Who Saw Bigfoot, and Escape to Witch Mountain. My nights were filled with Project: UFO, The Search for Bigfoot, and the Disney movie of the week. Apple Dumpling Gang, anyone? Real science was Don Knott’s character being allergic to degraded TNT, surely.

I can still remember the “re-enactment” that put me on my path to horror: a family, in a cozy cabin, watching TV. One of the kids screeches, pointing at the window. There is a face! Staring at them! Mother gathers children like a human-sized hen, Dad reaches for the trusty gun, flings open the door – and there’s Bigfoot, standing in the doorway!

Enough to give you the nighttime shivers, yes?

Only, my seven-or-eight-year-old brain overlaid Bigfoot, likely from The Boy Who Saw Bigfoot, onto an alien “documentary.” I think. Look, it’s been fifty years since my childhood terrors.

Suffice it to say, I was certain that Bigfoot would come and kidnap me.

I was also terrified the sun would explode. See, this is what happens when you allow innocent kids to watch both Mutual of Omaha’s Wild Kingdom, and Disney’s The Black Hole. On. The. Same. Night!

If you were a kid with an overactive imagination – and that would be me – you were doomed.

So, yeah. Imagine li’l ol’ me, in a cold sweat terror, terrified that I would wake up in some unplotted cave.

With fifty years now layered onto those fear-soaked sheets, I have a few questions:

Like they would put up with me? Like they wouldn’t throw me back? That I wouldn’t give them the secrets of armor, gunpowder, and guerrilla tactics, and we’d take back the forest? That a Bigfoot would travel from… upstate Pennsylvania, I guess, through all the civilization between here and there, not check in at the Poconos’ honeymoon hotels, and kidnap me? How would they even know I exist, to pick me out of a sleeping-child lineup?

And if the world melted because the sun went nova, well, I wouldn’t notice in my sleep, now would I? Not that the world would notice, either, given the state of things today…

Remind me again – why was I terrified about being kidnapped by a cryptic, and forced to live away from “civilization"?