I love the elastic quality of time. I was driving north on Lincoln Drive, in the great and lovely City of Philadelphia yesterday. I passed the Police station on the right, and then just past the lovely yet still-after-39-years-not-working marble fountain on the right, is an incredibly high overpass.
Immense arched supports, and the way it disappears into the high rocks on either side is just mesmerizing. SO much so, that in a flash, 35 years of life peeled back for a split second, and I remembered everything.
Down deep, in the darkest interiors of where that bridge meets the rocks, is where the big monsters live. The ones that can find me when I’m asleep. The ones that toy with me with that slow molasses lumbering whimpering overwhelming strength and yet somehow flee back to their subterranean labrynths like lightning each time they’re finished torturing me in my sleep.
They have lived down there since long before that bridge, long before Philadelphia, long before the Native Americans, long before the great animals. They owned the place, and became trapped as the earth shifted. When that bridge was built and pilings were driven, finally after time out of mind, they were given flight again. Out of the earth, and straight into my subconscious.
I laughed all the way to Mt. Pleasant Street from the memory that a split-second glance unleashed. I never used to laugh. We’d drive by when I was a child, and I had to look. I had to, although it terrified me.
Where do the monsters live in the town of your childhood? I wish I’d been able to laugh at mine as a 4 year old, but I was too busy being deathly terrified…
The mundane one: behind the house I grew up in, there was a big, wild field of long grass. After being told that snakes live in long grass, and how poisonous some of the joe blakes living in our area could be, I drew the natural conclusion and wouldn’t walk through that field for quite a while. I was considerably happier when dad put up a proper fence, too.
The other one, less specific but far creepier was Gin’s Drop[sup]1[/sup] near Boggabri. That area is, in the main, very flat, but there’s this mountain/monolith rising up out of the plain. Driving past it as a kid always used to give me chills; even on a sunny day, it seemed to brood. I had no trouble imagining awful things happening in its shadow. I drove past it again a year or two back and it still makes me cold.
[sup]1[/sup]A very politically incorrect name, but that’s what it used to be known as when I was living in the area at any rate.
I’ve had very few visions of actual monsters as a kid. Mostly it was nature that was out to get me.
Waves which would come up and just suck you out. Terrifying feeling for a 5 year old.
Lava was also a really cruel monster. Once it tricked my little sister, of whom I was very protective, into putting her head in it. And then she pulled it out and it was all black and melted shudder
I didn’t really think of the monsters as having a place. They would just come from nowhere once the lights were out in my room. So I figured I could be protected if put my head under the covers. The problem with that was it became difficult to breath, so I would arrange the covers such that just my nose was sticking out, but the rest of me was safely under the covers.
Ain’t no way them monsters were getting me, let me tell you!
Cartooniverse, you read Steven King as a child didn’t you? Everyone knows all the really evil monsters live in Derry, Maine. Why anyone would want to live there I don’t know. I’m never going to Derry, it’s the evilest place in the world.
The house I grew up in had a beautiful panoramic view toward Philadelphia. The monsters that didn’t live under your bridge, Cartoon, lived in a tall, eerie-looking tower I could barely make out from the living-room window. It was on a hill just beyond what appeared to be a meadow. I figure the monsters grazed in the meadow or somethin’ . . . On their way to live in my bedroom closet and under the bed, of course.
Poor, deprived children–reduced to imagining monsters in holes under overpasses, shadows, and open fields.
I had swamps. Well, mostly bayous, but there were very swampy sections–full of snakes and slime and Spanish moss hanging from the ancient cypresses like the tattered shreds of a burial shroud. The trees loomed over land and water alike, casting everything into eternal gloom. We all knew there were real monsters in there–we had seen alligators (my father helped his father trap them when he was a boy) and snapping turtles big enough to bite off a (small) child’s leg. We also knew that there were things in there that couldn’t be caught–things so huge and monstrous that they tore right through the nets and broke all the lines. Things that never showed themselves by day, lurking until darkness fell so that the sun wouldn’t dry their slimy skin.
And they surrounded my house–all but one road leading out, which sometimes flooded and cut us off completely…
Of course, in the Great Lakes region, the really scary monsters all lived in Lake Michigan. Sure, the shoreline was always crystal-clear blue water, but you go out far enough and it’s as dark as any ocean.
As a kid, I was always wary of boat trips or swimming out too far. The smaller monsters stayed in close to shore to nab lone swimmers, but the really big monstrosities were out in the deep, waiting for little 20-foot boats to come along…I was forever seeing their looming shadows under our hull, just about to tip our boat over.
Lucky I saw them in time-they’d swim away if anyone caught a glimpse of them before they were ready to strike.
"The house I grew up in had a beautiful pornographic view toward Philadelphia . . . "
—Well, actually, we couls see Manayunk in its pre-gentrification days, so it WAS kinda pornographic . . . Grew up in Penn Valley, near Belmont Hills and Bryn Mawr.