Some parents don’t need spooky stories or horror movies. The real terror already lives within the walls of their homes.
To be clear, I’m talking about little children.
Kids can be incredibly eerie. They seem innocent but sometimes appear highly sophisticated. And when they communicate, it’s often in such a simple, uninhibited way that many adults find it unnerving. Especially when their children are talking about something unpleasant.
Harper, 6, has mastered the art of delivering grim news in a calm, matter-of-fact way, kind of like a newscaster announcing that the stock market just crashed.
“I wouldn’t sleep in your bedroom if I were you,” she once advised her parents.
She and her family live in a creaky, century-old white stucco home in Abingdon, Va., which has been in her dad’s family for generations. Shortly after they moved in, she told her parents about the “skeleton men” who inhabit the house and sometimes the yard, too. They’re dressed like soldiers, and one wears body armor, but she isn’t scared of them. They’re more of an annoyance.
“She’ll roll her eyes, shrug her shoulders and say, ‘Ugh, one of them walked through the wall again,’” said Harper’s mother, Alysia Hoover-Thompson, 40, who is a psychologist.
Harper much prefers her “attic friend,” a nice ghost named Felicia.
This is not the first time Harper has spooked her parents. When she was 2, she declared, “You’re not my real Mom and Dad. My first Mom and Dad died. You’re my second set of parents.”
“I would say she probably brought it up 25 or 30 times over the years,” Hoover-Thompson said, adding that Harper no longer recalls saying that.
These stories might seem unsettling, but developmental psychologists say that it’s normal for children to talk about death or express their aggression during imaginary play.
“It’s a natural part of childhood,” said Sandra Russ, a psychology professor at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, who has studied how children play for three decades. “It’s healthy to have a vivid imagination.”
And yes, she added, most children know it’s all pretend by the time they are 3.
“It’s a way of them expressing their fears,” Dr. Russ said. “Adults talk it out; children play it out.” And when the things they imagine start to feel too scary, she added, they can stop or adjust the story line. “They’re in control of what happens.”
It’s the adults, the ones who are used to being in control, who might suddenly feel unmoored.
Or at least that’s how Ashley Fuller, 33, felt when she emerged from the bathroom to find her son Calvin, who was 3 at the time, standing in the darkness of her bedroom, naked, holding a red, inflated balloon. He roared and lunged at her.
Now she laughs about it — nervously — but at the time, she said, “I screamed so loud. You just don’t expect anything like that.”
Later that year he started asking about death. It often happened while they were driving home from preschool in their Dallas neighborhood, where he loved to go bird-watching.
“I don’t see any birds. They must have all died,” he commented one day.
Or: “The birds look sad, I think it’s because all their parents died.”
And then: “When am I going to die?”
Fuller and her husband took Calvin to a child psychologist, who assured them that all was well. Right around this time, his great-grandmother had died, and so had a relative’s dog. Asking these questions was simply his way of making sense of what happened, though it was unusual for a child his age to ask about his own mortality, his parents were told.
Sometimes, if a child is fixated on something spooky, there isn’t always an easily identifiable reason behind it.
Corinne Johnson, 51, a pharmacist in Portland, Ore., who has 6-year-old twin boys, said her sons are very different. One of the twins has a “very pleasant” imagination, preferring to act out fun things, like hosting a party.
The other twin — we’ll call him Ben to protect his privacy — is a “deep thinker” who is fascinated by many things, including graveyards and death. During one family road trip, he pointed out every graveyard they passed and asked to see the tombstones.
Both boys like to write stories, but Ben’s take a morbid turn. Despite his whimsical titles — a recent piece was called “The Big Pile of Bananas” — all of Ben’s stories end the same way, with someone’s unfortunate demise, and a stick figure with X’s for eyes.
Tamara Torres McGovern, 41, a pastor in Portland, Maine, is intrigued by her 3-year-old daughter’s preoccupation with what she calls her “other family.”
Torres McGovern’s preschooler claimed that before she was born, she was adopted by a woman called “Mama Kit” and lived in New Mexico on a hill where the houses appeared “stuck together.” But when she was a teenager, she slipped and crashed while riding a mountain bike on an icy sidewalk.
“And then I woke up in your uterus,” her daughter said.
Dr. Jim B. Tucker, a child psychiatrist and director of the Division of Perceptual Studies at the University of Virginia, studies children who claim to have memories of past lives.
Dr. Tucker described some of the most compelling cases in his book “Return to Life: Extraordinary Cases of Children Who Remember Past Lives.”
One of the most well-known stories is that of James Leininger, from Louisiana, who started having nightmares about a plane crash when he was 2. He said he was killed when the Japanese shot down his plane, and described the name of a real American aircraft carrier; the first and last name of his shipmate (who turned out to be a real person); and specifics about the crash. His parents later discovered that these details aligned with those of an obscure World War II pilot named James Huston, who died in 1945. It seemed improbable that their son could have known anything about Huston.
Over the last 60 years, researchers from the University of Virginia have gathered the stories of more than 2,000 children, including Leininger, who claimed to have had past lives, raising questions about reincarnation or whether there’s “a part of us that can continue on after we die,” Dr. Tucker said.
But such specific and verifiable cases are rare. If your child recounts something seemingly spooky, like a detail about a deceased grandfather she has never met, it could be that she heard you talk about him at some point, even if it was months ago. Kids can be very observant and they most likely overhear (and understand) a lot more than parents realize, the experts said.
It’s not uncommon for children to explore all kinds of themes in their pretend play, including violence, fear and risk, said Marjorie Taylor, a professor emerita of psychology at the University of Oregon, and an expert on the ways in which children create imaginary companions.
When your child is engaging in imaginary play, you can use that as an opportunity to learn more about what’s on her mind and explore why it’s interesting to her, Dr. Taylor said. Try asking nonintrusive, open-ended questions, like, “How did the skeletons make you feel?” “Why does your imaginary friend like to argue so much?” or, simply, “Tell me more about that.”
“Sometimes the children’s responses can be enlightening for the parent,” Dr. Taylor said.
In general, imaginary play is a safe way for children to explore and understand their world, the experts said.
They added that one of the best ways to promote a child’s creativity, including the use of pretend play, is to give your child unstructured time and simple props like an empty box. You can also offer toys that enable open-ended play like blocks, Legos, action figures or dolls. For younger kids, try asking them to make up a story or showing them how to pretend that an object is something else, like taking a block and using it as a telephone.
Your children will most likely engage in even more pretend play during the pandemic if they aren’t seeing their regular friends as often and also have more down time, Dr. Taylor said.
“There might be a bumper crop of imaginary friends due to Covid,” she added.
Imagine that.
Nighty night.
What’s that? Your children are creeping you out, too? Tell us your best spooky kid stories in the comments.