Of Boogeymen and Dirty Old Men

The Boogeyman. To children everywhere, his name is synonymous with fear and the unknown. I can still remember the first time I heard about the boogeyman while growing up as a young lad in Minnesota; at the time it scared the shit out of me. It's kind of interesting that there is no set image of the boogeyman, which probably encourages kids' imagination to imagine the worst possible incarnation of evil. For me, my image of the boogeyman was that of the sleestacks (lizard-like creatures who wandered around making hissing noises on "Land of the Lost", one of my favorite TV shows), probably because that was the scariest thing I could think of at the time.
Interestingly, I recently found out that most cultures have their own version of the Boogeyman. There are even theories that the story of the Boogeyman represents an evolutionary adaptation by human beings to scare the bejeezus out of their children into staying close to the rest of the group and away from danger at night (hey, I read it on wikipedia, okay? it must be true...)

In France, The Boogeyman is called "Le Croque-Mitaine", which is translated literally as "The Mitten Biter". As if nibbling on your mittens wasn't f'ed up enough for you, there is another haunting figure of childhood legend in France named "le Père Fouettard". le Père Fouettard, as best as I can tell, is kind of like an evil, sadistic version of Santa Claus (also known here as "le Père Noel"). If you are a misbehaving child, you are scooped up in le Père Fouettard's sack and then mercilessly beaten with a whip. Okay, I added the word "mercilessly" myself, but basically, this is some pretty disturbing stuff.

In a semi-related vein, the French word to describe a "dirty old man" (like the ODB) is "un vieux cochon" (literally: "an old pig").