Nightmare On London and Maddie Street: The Kid Stealers

Kid Stealers. You'll find them in a lot of popular literature and/or movies for older children: Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, The Golden Compass...the nightly news.

And lately I've been finding them in my daughters' nightmares. We don't watch a lot of television, and haven't read any scary bedtime stories in the past month (unless you count, as London did, "Dogerella" a doggy version of Cinderella), so I don't know what triggered it, but first Maddie, then London, started to have nightmares over the past few weeks about someone ("Hunkle Phil") coming into our home, or their camp or playground, to steal them.

Childhood nightmares are nothing new... growing up, my family lived in a ranch house with a dank, dark, unfinished basement in which I imagined a man lived, clanking around in chains (making all of the noises I heard late at night) with a Freddy Krueger face, waiting for someone to make the mistake of going down to do some laundry or get some ice cream out of the freezer at night. I can't even claim to have outgrown these childish thoughts... my mom still lives in the same house and I still don't like to go down to her basement!