By Ambria Richardson
For as long as I can remember, I have been afraid of the dark. In hindsight, “afraid of the dark” isn’t the right phrase: a more accurate description would be that I am afraid of what I see in the dark.
The first time he appeared, I was four years old. My parents had gotten a divorce a year prior, which is why my mother thought it would be best to start my sister and I on therapy right away, as if she were playing a game of “beat the clock” with any disorders that might arise. Of course, I told the pediatric psychologist about him, The Gingerbread Man. The name came from the general outline of his figure, which resembled a gingerbread man to me. His whole body was a dark shadow with rounded edges, always darker than anything he was standing in front of as if he was swallowing the color from everything around him for sustenance. There were no details in his form, at least none that I could identify at the time. He was always at a distance.
For some unknown reason, The Gingerbread Man scared me. He had never hurt me. In fact, he made no effort to come into contact with me. Sometimes, I wondered if I was the apparition, not him. Even so, he instilled such an outrageous amount of terror in me that I wouldn’t get up at night for any reason. Before I closed my eyes for the night, I would scan my room, analyzing every shadow and object the best that I could, waiting for my eyes to adjust so that I could see more before my eyelids fell for the last time.
I found no solace in my dreams. I would sometimes wake up out of breath, drool running down my chin, and my eyes crusted over with eye boogers. Frantically, I would look around my room, searching for The Gingerbread Man among my stuffed animals, near the bookcase, in my open closet, by the door. If I could just lay my eyes on him, I would feel more at ease; there is power in knowledge. Every night, for years, he and I would play our game of “I Spy”, and sometimes, I would lose.
Although my sleeping habits got worse as I got older, I never mentioned The Gingerbread Man to any of my other psychologists after that first one, as a toddler. I was afraid that I would end up in an insane asylum; my sister has her own battles with mental health which exposed me to the truth that mental and behavioral health care is limited, and the stigma of “disconnecting from reality” is dangerous. So, I kept it a secret. Not until my sophomore year of college did things really start to take a turn for the worst.
That year, I began experiencing severe insomnia: on average, I slept between 3-5 hours a night, not including the nights I simply didn’t sleep at all. After a bit, I began to feel as though I were in hell, stalked by an intangible being at all hours. I experienced severe migraines, vision problems, dry eye, and general fatigue. I became a husk of a person, unable to function normally. I grew paranoid: I started seeing The Gingerbread Man during the day. He would lurk in the corner of my eye. When I was alone, I felt him behind me, his breath fanning the back of my neck. The dark silhouette followed me everywhere; I got no peace from him.
As the days wore on, they began to blend together: I would spend so much time awake that my concept of time all but collapsed. The only thing that kept me on schedule was class. My eyes turned red and puffy, my face and figure became disheveled, and my demeanor grew more and more discombobulated; my speech began to jumble the longer I stayed awake. I would lay in bed every night, with the covers pulled up to my chin, my eyes darting around the room, cycling frantically between each corner, taking in each piece of furniture to identify every shadow. I developed somniphobia, a fear of sleeping: I spent the time that I was awake worrying about sleeping, I would find things to do to lengthen my day, shortening the amount of time I would spend sleeping in a futile attempt to keep him away from me.
In my junior year of college, I had a nightmare that changed everything. I was lucid dreaming, but the setting of my dream was my dorm room. I was still laying in my bed, everything was as it usually was. At least, until my eyes came to rest on my bedroom door, facing the foot of my bed. There stood The Gingerbread Man. Because my body was still asleep, I could not move, could not scream. The only thing I could do was close my eyes and pretend that I had not seen him. I mentally counted to ten, and when I opened my eyes again, he was closer, standing next to my wardrobe, along the side of my bed. Still, I couldn’t scream, even though I desperately wanted to. I had the feeling that if I did scream, something terrible would happen to me. Again, I closed my eyes, hoping that when I opened them he would be gone. He wasn’t. This time, he was standing next to the head of my bed, bent at the waist, with his face inches from my own. We had never been this close before; I didn’t even know that he had facial features. Up until this point, he had been a faceless silhouette, and somehow I preferred that more. I can’t describe his face: his eyes were somehow an even darker black than the rest of him, like a black hole, completely devoid of light, of hope, of anything. I kept my eyes trained on his in an effort to assert dominance, ignoring everything else.
I don’t know how long we stared at each other like that. I still couldn’t move, and to make things worse, I couldn’t hide behind my eyelids this time. He opened his mouth and let the jaw hang slack and open far wider than any human’s. For a few moments before he said, “it’s not safe for you here.” I immediately knew what he meant: ever since I was a child, the spiritual world had been seeping into this one, and because I was a child, I had seen it. Hence, I had learned of his existence. Perhaps that is why children have imaginary friends; they can see what adults can’t. But at that moment, that night, I myself had crossed over, instead of the other way around. I’ve read stories about people who practice witchcraft and voodoo, who lucid dream and cross over to the other side. I’ve read about how unsafe it is for your soul. Still, this theory didn’t explain why I, a 20 year old at the time, was seeing these things. A better explanation would be that I was sick, and I was having some kind of attack.
After he said that, my eyes felt extremely heavy, and I fell back asleep. When I woke up, I felt normal, albeit tired. I got up to take a shower and start my day. The hot water hitting my back stung immensely; it took me by surprise. I immediately got out and went to look in the mirror, and there I saw a long scratch down the length of my spine. It was centered perfectly, and it was perfectly straight. Some parts of the scratch were deeper than others, but at its deepest point, at my lower back, I could see some dried blood. Suddenly, I recalled what had happened the previous night, with The Gingerbread Man. I knew they had to be related in some way. But what really scared me was that I couldn’t chalk it up to mental illness anymore; for the first time, I had physical proof that The Gingerbread Man was real, even if he wasn’t the one who had scratched me.
For days, the scratch burned hot any time I laid in my bed, a further reminder of what had taken place. But I never saw The Gingerbread Man after that night. I still suffer from somniphobia, spending most of my nights searching my room from my bed for him, hoping that I never spot him.