Mine was not un-cheerful, just gothic as all hell a lot of the time.
I used to lay in a room that was more a maid’s closet, our playroom dark beyond the doorway I faced, and watch as a scintilla of light grew to a circle, from which came a small rat-like man in boots and overcoat of the sort Puss In Boots is often depicted as wearing. Bucklers, gauntlets, floppy hat and so on.
He’d approach me, striding along as if covering much more distance than my playroom contained. Took him a slight while of walking before he stepped into the room, where I could hear his boots on the floor.
Sometimes he’d hop up on the bed, sometimes onto my chest, and sit there making faces at me. Terrifying? I was fascinated, weird little kid that I was. My parents figured, when I finally told them, that it was rats, and we moved that night.
Truth is, the playroom was what we’d now call haunted and things came through it, and played there. My toys shifted in their toy box; this happened even in daytime, and I knew something was hiding in there. It was not just the little man thing. Other little beings used the playroom, all the time, and it was always shadowy in there. It had no window, being part of a parallel duplex house. My little sister and I would spot them, sometimes chase them around in play, all the while never quite seeing the little things. Some glowed, some were more like a ripple in the air.
At night, some of these little beings, hopping, flying, skittering, and moving in ways I cannot describe, would come through the doorway from the playroom in order to leap out my bed-chamber window, which was tall and narrow. It overlooked a gravel courtyard backed by a wooden garage we never used and, on the left, a low brick wall beyond which was a huge stack of old tires from the Flying A gas station that occupied the adjacent property. To the right, our dirt driveway that led around the house from the front, then a swath of grass, a large drainage ditch, a raised railroad track, and then a large empty field. In that field a Goodyear Blimp once performed an emergency landing, and my father helped them find the parts they needed to repair their engine; he ran a Mobile gas station at the time, directly across the street from our duplex house apartment. Many odd things happened there, from him leaving us once, to the six foot helium balloon slowly dying on the ceiling in the week after I was molested by a Barnum & Bailey’s clown at age 3 or 4.
I know some will seize on this to explain my hallucinatory strangeness but the experiences were real and affected everyone. We’d be sitting there at night watching Jackie Gleason or Lucy and the sounds coming from the playroom would be so loud and insistent my parents would periodically get up to investigate. Never found a thing, except occasionally toys that had obviously been moved around. I recall being scolded for not putting my toys away, when in fact my sister and I had loaded up the trunk; they’d be scattered now and then all over the floor, for example.
Behind the couch as we watched Jack LaLanne and so on there was a wall in which we’d hear coded knockings, footsteps, stairs creaking where there were none, etc. It was eerie and yet we ignored it most of the time, and my parents would say, “Squirrels,” probably thinking “Rats”.
We never caught a rat in any of the indoor traps, although one of the Flying A station owners now and then would with a bb gun peg rats as they scampered through the tire pile. With the field, drainage ditch, tires, and so on, vermin were inevitable, but mice and rats and squirrels and even raccoons don’t do all the things we experienced.
So gloomy, gothic, but not un-cheerufl as a childhood goes. Just weird, I guess you’d say.
