The Boogeyman is a scary story told to children, along with being a superstition in some parts of the world. The Boogeyman is often portrayed as a tall spindly figure around ten feet tall, often hunched over, with pitch-black skin, thin, long limbs, clawed fingers, a round face, often with a gaping maw and razor sharp canines. A few throughout history have reported seeing the Boogeyman while they slumbered, though these claims have often been dismissed as either insanity, sleep deprivation, aftereffects of magic use, or the results of other mind-affecting actions or circumstances.
Those in the room at the same time of those who have claimed to see the Boogeyman have reported that the person seeing the figure is asleep at this time, and that there was no creature in the room with them. Multiple studies by the Arcanum and other credible sources of knowledge have denounced the Boogeyman as meaningless superstition or the aftereffects of fear from childhood fairy tales. However, sightings of the Boogeyman by individuals are often followed by instances of Mindrot, without fail, leading many to correlate the two, using this statistic as evidence.
Common legends regarding the Boogeyman either cast it as a creature that steals away naughty children in the dead of night, or hunting the unsuspecting or innocent of small villages, or as a witch the curses both the young and old with Mindrot as it feasts on their dreams and ambitions.
In reality, the Boogeyman is a creature that exists within the collective human consciousness, invisible to even the gods themselves that moves from creature to creature, being the sole cause of Mindrot. It slips in while people sleep, when their mental defenses are at their lowest and slowly eats their memories and sense of being in a process that ranges from either mere days or years, causing many to be driven to insanity by both Mindrot and repeated glimpses of the Boogeyman in the corner of their eye in their waking moments.
No one, not even the Starchildren know what the Boogeyman is, or how to root it out of its hunting grounds without literally killing all sentient life. It seems to have existed before or as long as sentient life has existed.