The Real Boogeyman of Staten Island

Energy up. Energy, Energy up up, Energy up all right, stretch it out, energy up. I just ate a popsic call. Is that good or bad? It's good. Welcome to Scary Mystery Surprise, where we talk about scary things that surprised us around the Internet. I'm Edwin, I'm Michelle. All right, Michelle, I got a question for you. Yes, okay, did your parents ever scare you at home in what way? Like intentionally or like accidentally intentionally to try to alter your behavior? Hmmm, if you don't brush your teeth, you'll get false teeth and then like my grandparents will take their plate out, that kind of thing. I'm kind of thinking, Okay, okay, so there. I mean, it's a very common thing that we see, like parents, grandparents, aunts, like they have a way to kind of scare you into acting properly, like acting the way you're supposed to and behaving really well. Right right, Yeah, if you ever have sex, you'll get aids. You know. It's funny because my parents didn't actually scare me, like intentionally. I actually got it from the rest of my family, specifically for my aunt and grandma. My mom was always scared of ghosts. So like there's no way she's gonna try to scare us or you know, my sister and I or whatever. But my aunt was the first one that mentioned the word devil to me, and she was like, if you don't something, if you don't do this, or you don't finish your food, the Devil's gonna come at And I'm like, the devil, Like, I didn't know what that was, right, So I asked my dad. I'm like, you know, I was like, what's the devil? And then he's like, oh, it's something bad. Actually wrote it down here. He said it was a thing that people talk about to scare others. And I remember that because it's like, oh, okay, well he like gave you the power back in that situation, as opposed to being like, yeah, the devil's something really bad that like you got to look out for we have no control over. But no, he's like, no, people use it to scare people. Yeah, I guess it gave you part of a definition because that's kind of true. Still though it gets you, and I know it has different things, like I got to know this evil thing that would get you at night if you, you know, didn't change your underwear or whatever, like elkoko, el kukui, el chamuk. I don't know what any of these mean, right, el chamuko? I have no idea anyway I did. I was trying to find some of some US versions of this type of thing, like fears in the US, and I found the boogey Man. Of course, like this is one of those things where you're like, dah, this is one of those creepy things that's gonna come get you if you hit your sister, or if you if you stay up late. Yep, if you stay up, yeah, lay and watch those Girls Gone Wild commercials that you're not supposed to see at night. The Boogeyman also has a movie, but of course I haven't seen it. Of course we haven't seen it. Uh. But so I'm not talking about the movie here. I'm talking about the actual mythical scary thing that comes to you at night. So here's the story of Michelle, who grew up in the most unfortunate of places, Staten Island. There's gonna be some fighting words from our Staten Island fans. She would walk home from school with her three friends, Mary and Joe, both the same age as her. There were two corners that Michelle didn't like. She had trouble reading because of her terrible eyesight. Plus she didn't care for words back then, so she couldn't identify the street names and the signs, but she knew them kind of. At one end. I didn't have time for words. There was no time. I had no time for this, no time to learn one of them. Joe would turn right and head for his house, which was about half a block away. At the other corner she hated was the one right before the long and boring sidewalk by the lone roads and tunnels, And that's where Mary would turn left and say goodbye to Michelle, who would walk the rest of the way alone. You know, she tried to keep her mind off scary things, so she would opt instead to hum a song to herself. So again, it's the eighties, so I'm assuming it's every Breath you take by the police or something like that. Seems fitting for what's about to happen. As she's about to go through the wooded area on her way home, she suddenly hears someone whispering, hey, little girl, come here. Oh no. She turns around and she sees nothing, But then she picks up the pace and the rhythm of the song speeds up to me. I watched an interview with Sting once and he was like, yeah, people come up to me all the time and they're like, that's my wedding song. And he's always like good luck. Like, can you imagine I'm gonna walk down the aisle, I'll be watching you. I'll be watching you. She hears footsteps behind her, and when she turns around, he's there. Some dude. Some dude. Oh no, I hate some dudes. She freaks out and starts running. Fortunately for her, she was the fastest runner in her class. It was very fast. So she makes it home, the pencils and her notebooks rattling in her backpack. As she finally makes it to her front porch, her mom notices just how stressed out she is. She comes up to her and is all like, oh no, what did you see? And then she's holding onto her, grabbing her by the shoulders to get her to describe the man she had just seen. All Michelle could say was, oh, man, come here, little girl. Some dude, some dude here. So I don't know what to do. Some dude was there when I turned around. So when Michelle's mom hears the description, her face turns pale and she looks off into the distance in the most dramatic sense. You can imagine, Oh God, just imagining my mother doing that. She then stands up and says Cropsy, the boogie Man, and then she grabs Michelle and pulls her inside and then shuts the door. Michelle can't believe her ears. Is her mom afraid of the boogie Man? And even you, by the way, Michelle, And the story is you, Michelle eight, after eight short years of age, you know that this thing can't be real. Before you know it, your mom's on the phone with the police. And then you realize that this thing is real, it's the boogie Man, that it's terrible. But that's what freaked out kids back then. There was there was a real boogieman. Back then. They would call him Cropsy. And this is a very famous thing that would lurk around at night in Staten Island. Cropsy was his name, And that's what freaked out kids back in the eighties. Parents would say that Cropsy was an escaped mental patient who had a hook for a hand and would kidnap you and take you back to the asylum at night. I love it. Oh my god, why does he have a hook for a hand? I don't know. It just makes it more like, yeah, it's gonna like hook you and then just bring you like that like fishing. Oh, like a meat hook. He's gonna just drag your little child body like a fish over the gravel to the insane asylum. Of course, the children of Staten Island would share these stories around and would run home just like Michelle. But soon things became real. More and more children were disappearing without a trace back in the eighties. Now this is where we get into actual cases. Alice Parreda and her brother were at the lobby of a building in Staten Island back in nineteen seventy two. Alice was only five years old. While they were there, her brother looked away for just one second, oh no, and his sister was gone forever. In nineteen eighty three, an eleven year old girl went to buy groceries for her mother and never came back. This CROPSI the boogiey man of Staten Island on the hunt with his hook, with his hook hand, and I imagined, for some reason him with a like a scarecrow like straw hat, and maybe they're straw coming out of it, but he's human, so it doesn't really make any sense. But and then he's got a hook hand and it's like, why are you dressed as a scarecrow man. In nineteen eighty one, the police were investigating the strange disappearance of Holly Ann Hughes. They had been questioning employees of a convenience store because it was the last place she had been seen. Her task was simple, just to buy a bar of soap. That's it, and that's what she did. She got the bar of soap, paid for it, and that was the last time she was ever seen. Ugh. However, this case left behind and a few hints a man had been seen out with her on the street when she went missing. So they found the guy, but they had no evidence, so they let him go. Filling in the blank. It gave me chills. Yeah, it's messed up, and you know. It took around twenty years for the man, this guy named Andre Rand, to be arrested and imprisoned for the disappearance of Holly. He was charged with kidnapping, but not for murder because it couldn't find any evidence of that. Super creepy though, according to the Charlie project dot org website, Andrew Rand admitted to playing hide and seek with her and giving her money to buy soap because she was dirty. Ugh yeah, ew yeah. And this guy, Andrew Rand is the one who became known as the Boogeyman of Staten Island, like the real life one. Now, this guy has the craziest story. If you look at his image, his picture, you're gonna be like, oh, yeah, it makes sense not to judge, because we shouldn't judge people based on what they look like. But let's judge him. My therapist is like she does this all the time. She's like, they have cruelty in their face. And I'm like, you're right. I always countered with that too, But she's now she's like, they look like they can be mean, and I'm like, you're right, they are mean. How I don't know. I guess you can judge a book by its cover, that's all. That's all I'm saying. Did you find a picture of Edie Rant? Oh no, I forgot I was looking. Okay. I want to get you. I want to get your avid, just to see if you will judge this guy or if you'll be like, huh, he well number when he has no fucking teeth, he's he got that weird mouth where you got like the thing going on like this, Yeah, like does he look like a serial killer though? Yeah, And then there's just one photo where he's like drooling or something like that. What is it? Oh, yeah, he's being where he's being carried or yes, druling or has a straw in his mouth. I don't know why is he drooling? He's trying to come off as like I don't know he kidnap to girl with down syndrome, telling you this guy has no aboubt like his story. He has an actual documentary it's well it's not his documentary, but a documentary mentions him. It's called Cropsy and they actually talk about, you know, him being the boogey Man of Staten Island. I mean, yeah, if this crawled out from under your bed. Yeah, if anything crawled out from under my bed, even like anything really that would. But this guy like a panda, If a panda crawled out from under your bed, he'd be freaked out. But like this guy, I think he just be done, you know, Like I think like i'd just be like shut down some dude who has no teeth and it's probably going to kill you. Oh yeah. But see, this guy had a difficult childhood, right, And of course he did not as an excuse or anything, right, but like I mean, they all do. This guy actually ended up in a mental hospital later on in life. It was at Pilgrim State Hospital in Brentwood, New York. And probably from that chapter in his life, he decided to work at Willowbrook State Mental Facility later on. This was from let me see, nineteen sixty five to nineteen sixty eight somewhere around there. And that place was terrible by the way Men show I looked it up. It was. It was famous for treating people like the patients, which is cruel tactics, like experimenting on them with like just just the worst, the worst thing some of them, you know, the experiments were like torture. Some of them were living in cages. No, yeah, it was. It was bad. And when the news actually got out, the place was shut down, like immediately, it was just like nope, you guys are done. But Andrew rand who used to work there, felt attached to the Willowbrook Statemental Facility and he would even camp out there even after he stopped working it is like a real cropsy, Like that's like the legend. And then yeah, and you know some say that, you know, you don't want those stories to be really true, and that is one that's turning out to be really true. Yeah, it's terrible. You know. Some people say that he may have been conducting experiments on children in there. Yeah, and that's why, like you said, like, that's why they compared him to cropsy, like the mythical ebo man who looked at lurked at night after escaping a mental asylum and kidnapping children. Andrew rand also used to have a strange habit of going around the abandoned tunnels underneath the Willowbrook Hospital thing, scurrying around from place to place like a rat. Yeah, no, god, that's oh my god, that's so creepy. That's that. And every time I look at those things on Instagram where it's like people exploring abandoned places, like what why? Why why? Because look who could be in that? It's terrible, you know. And in the documentary for Cropsy with just the Andrew rand Uh, they interviewed this homeless man who said that Andrew would take advantage of the homeless, that lived in those tunnels and also said that he had actually grown a following inside of the tunnels, kind of like a cult of darkness of the underground, like yeah, followers and stuff. So some of them may have committed crimes for him or helped them do things, you know, is it true? I don't know, but still Andrew was also accused of some serious, serious accusations with teenage women, teenage girls, and adults. He was also the same guy who took an entire bus of children from the YMCA in nineteen eighty three for an entire day. This is bizarre. Wait where did they go? He just kind of took them on a trip, like they even stopped at White Castle for food, and then took them to the airport to watch airplanes land. And that, I mean, that's almost wholesome, except we remember who did it, you know, like it's almost sweet, and then you remember that it's terrifying. It's like want to be like magic school bus, Like just I'm gonna take you guys somewhere, let's go watch your planes. That only thing, the only thing that it landed for him was the you know, he got ten months in prison, uh for doing that, which is weird. It was weird. It's a weird situation. That's weird because it's kidnapping. I mean, think about if that happened now, Like think about like if somebody took a school bus of kids now, it would be all over the news. It would be on the news cycle for weeks. That person would be in so much trouble. Anyway, In nineteen eighty seven, it was July ninth, actually there was his girl, Jennifer, but Jennifer was lasting night store and witnesses claimed to have seen Rand walking with her down the street. People in the community were pissed by the way, like they hated this guy. They called him a monster, a perver, like, you know, they just hated this guy because Steaten Island. I mean, even though it's it's it means it's relatively small, right, like as in people would probably you know, there's a community, so they know each other and stuff. So volunteers after Jennifer was last seen she disappeared, volunteers went on a search through Willowbrook's grounds, which is a mental you know, asylum thing, and one of them found this just a gruesome scene out on a patch of dirt. They saw a tiny human leg sticking out of the ground. No. Yeah, and it was Jennifer, So like for me, when I reached that, I was like, that's enough. Like, that's enough. So I'll end with this. Andrew Rand wrote this creepy letter from prison on Mother's Day twenty eleven. Oh my god, Wait is he still alive? He's not still alive? He might be, I mean he's supposed to. He won't be eligible for parole until twenty thirty seven. Let me make sure. Let me see you actually right now. It doesn't say he's dead, but let me check Wikipedia. It says age seventy nine. Jesus, how did they end up staying alive for so long? You know who else is randomly alive? Henry Kissinger still a lot? Yeah? Does that blow your mindser is also still alive. Weird fact that guy's like super old though I know, I don't understand he's a hundred. Yeah, it's pretty fucking weird. Andrew RAN's Wikipedia thing his rap sheet, sexual abuse, unlawful imprisonment, first degree kidnapping, attempted rape, first degree kidnapping again, first degree murder, first agree kidnapping in two thousand and four, four years in prison into nineteen sixty nine, ten months in jail in nineteen eighty three, well, that was probably for the bust thing, and twenty five to life in prison in nineteen eighty eight and two thousand and four. For all the stuff that happened. They must have found new things to charge him with in two thousand and four. It's not like he got out and did more stuff. He probably just got recharged for stuff. Jeez. Yeah, because this is two confirmed victims and six more than six suspected victims. You know, in a way, it's like, why didn't he just embrace the whole cropsy thing and like just get a hook hand kind of like benefiting off that legend anyway. I wonder if he did it intentionally or if that was just an accident. I don't know. But you know, when I was researching of like more info on this stuff, there was I found items for sale, like his notes from the court cases and signed things. You know, there's this letter that's like really creepy, really really creepy. By the way, he never confessed to any of these things, right, he still says he's innocent, like he'll say it. But on Mother's Day twenty eleven, he wrote a creepy letter. Now I try to look for the actual letter. I'm pretty sure it's out there somewhere. But I didn't want to like dig too much into this. But this is a little Yeah, you didn't want to go on the dark web for it, You're not like going out. I get it, I get it. I did find an article about it, though, that kind of talks about what it said, and it said, Happy Mother's Day to all the ladies on Staten Island who supported prosecutorial vindictiveness against an innocent person. Exclamation point. Should I become a millionaire, it would be my true nature to grant all of you with each and full of seeds to plant and cultivate a rose bush that produces roses every season as a token of my heart felt forgiveness, rather than bouquets of rosebuds which blossoms and shortly dies out ew you. This guy, Screw that guy, man, I mean he does have a very punishable face, you know, and knowing that he doesn't have any teeth, you know, you can just go, ah, it goes deep, it'll go through his through his face, like, oh yeah, he's pretty disgusting. And that letter really just amplifies how disgusting he is. Yeah, Oh well, I guess. I guess I'm approaching it from a branding point, branding standpoint of like why not just go full in and get a hook hand or even just like a like one that you could hold, you know, like the way they do Captain hook or whatever, which is a long sleeve and yeah, just a long sleeve and then you have your hook to really emphasize to your minions, I guess, and to really hook all those children you need to like take back to your insane asylum ruins, yep. Or you could just like charge charge parents al scare your kids for one hundred bucks. Yeah. I mean that's like that's like, you know, capitalism at its finest. I think that's like a smart business. Yeah, I mean it's why not you know that would have required someone who was less of a pervert I think, and you know, less of an actual predator and more of an actual entrepreneur. That's true. Yeah, I think, like, uh, that letter really just drove it and I was just like, ah no, this guy, Yeah, he's nuts. I'm trying to like do a timeline of like when was stranger danger, Like that campaign about stranger danger because he's like he is the epitome of stranger danger, Like this is a perfect example of stranger danger. Yeah yeah, I mean that's a whole purpose of Boogieman, like just to scare you into doing something or not doing certain things right, just to behave otherwise boogie Man's going to come and get you. So then to see that and to see adults and everybody just freaking out over it, like it's just an entire generation right there. So but you know, the Boogieman isn't that common, Like I said, we don't say that the boogie man anymore, Like I mean, at least I haven't heard it. I think I think parents, I think parenting has had to evolve from being like, oh, the Boogeyman will get you. You know. The Boogeyman just kind of encapsulates all the like things that like anxieties of like oh it's in my closet, Oh what's under the bed? I actually don't want to go to sleep yet, I'm actually upset about something else and I don't want my parents to leave the room. That kind of thing. Yeah, now, I guess I would think about it. Huh. That would be like, yeah, he's kind of like, oh, there's there's a thing under your go to sleep for the Boogeyman is going to get you. Good night. I close the door good night and make sure it stays closed. But anyway, if you don't want the Boogieman to get you, leave us a review and uh follow, please subscribe. Yeah we're not above it. We're not parents, so we're not above using the Boogeyman to manipulate you. If you don't want the Boogeyman under your bed tonight, you gotta leave a review, a good review, do it? Do it? Well, that's the end of the Boogieman. If you have any ideas for creepy things that like this. I didn't know the story of the boogy the Boogieman before. Yeah, I didn't really know it either. I didn't know a cropsy, I like, like we just talked about earlier. I thought it was a scarecrow. So, yeah, what are we going to talk about next week, Michelle? I don't know, but I'm sure it'll be a surprise. Bye bye, guys,