This months carnival host is Scot Newbury http://ofdiceanddragons.com/october-2014-blog-carnival-things-that-go-bump-in-the-night/ .

This is a true story……

I shared a room with a monster.

Many years ago when I was much smaller I had a nice inviting bedroom to live in and things were good; it was a happy place for me to live and play with my toys.  The downside was that we lived in a block of flats and my parents really wanted a house of their own to live in.

One day they got their wish and we moved into a new terraced house in a new estate and initially things were good.  Until I got some new posters.

At the time the Muppet Show was a very popular show in the UK and I loved it to bits, so imagine my surprise when my parents got me a Muppet Show poster featuring Dr. Teeth and the Electric Mayhem, with a shot of Animal grinning inanely into space.  I liked that poster and it faced my bed; slowly as time wore on I thought that the smile was merely a façade, I could see the evil grin every night and I became convinced that he was watching my every move.

It didn’t help that his eyes seemed to follow me around the room.  Each night I would stare at this demonic creature convinced that one night he would detach himself from the poster, slowly walk over to me with his three legged gait; before slowly consuming my soul.

As the months wore on I got increasingly frightened by his countenance and made excuses to try and delay going to bed, each time I would peek around the door and stare at this thing leering back at me.  I guess I could have asked for the poster to be taken down but that would have been wrong of me to do so.

The insanity raged for a few more months, I was starting to believe that the image was whole and that Animal was there just holding his head up like you do for those sea-side cut outs where you poke your head through.

Then one day I snapped, I managed to convince my parents that the posters were getting tatty and they replaced them with posters of the A-Team instead.

The real terror was to be had later on after the posters had gone and been rolled up into a cardboard tube.  Our house was relatively new but still had a few quirks.  I became more aware of a ghostly sound; footsteps from the loft.  I was the only one who could hear them each night and they sounded like something was prowling about up there; I imagined it was Animal trapped in his prison seeking vengeance on me.

The whole sage came to a dramatic head shortly afterwards when the water tank burst and that’s when I realised I had heard water dripping into the tank; normality seeped back into my life and I went on being a happy child again.

I even found my stored posters and unravelled them to look at them and reassured myself that they were normal posters; until I got to the picture of Dr. Teeth and the Electric Mayhem, they were all still there looking happy as ever, but where Animal should have been was just a black empty void……………