A child’s imagination is an incredible thing. They need very little prompting to come up with an entire narrative story with a plot, characters, and motivations — even if none of it makes sense to us adults.
It’s kind of sad that we lose that as we grow up.
Part of it is simply lack of experience.
As adults, we know that there’s nothing in the closet. There’s never been anything in the closet besides clothes and whatever junk we hid last time our mom came to visit.
But combine a child’s vivid imagination with the dark void of a closet and it’s no wonder so many kids think there’s a monster in there.
See also: the monster under the bed.
Parents have different ways of dealing with their kids’ fears.
Some install a night light, some let the kid sleep in their bed, and some go through the pantomime of checking each shadow for the monster.
That’s what parents Caitlin and Bryan Burch thought was happening when her daughters said there was a ‘creature’ in their room.
The girls are six and ten, and described the creature as looking like a big rat.
A rodent the size they described seemed unlikely, but the 7-year-old refused to sleep in the room.
The parents checked the bedroom, but weren’t able to find anything. They let the 7-year-old sleep in the guest room that night.
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Caitlin thought that maybe it was just a mouse.
They live in a rural area of Ohio, just north of Columbus, so mice wouldn’t be out of the question. She set up some traps in the room and they went back to their normal lives.
Until a couple days later when the older daughter insisted again that there was a creature in their room.
Bryan went to check again and this time he found a possum chilling in the girls’ closet. At the time he discovered it, it had slipped down into a dress and was peaking out of the sleeve.
It had been living in their house for three days.
With hindsight, they realized that things like missing dog food and knocked over toys had been a sign that the possum had been wandering around.
Yes, they have a dog. Apparently, it is not a very good guard dog.
They managed to catch their guest and release it back outside.
It was just a funny family story, until Caitlin decided to share it in a comment for a tweet by Chrissy Teigen, whose family hamster had gone AWOL.
When the comment went viral, Caitlin shared the whole story of how her daughters got to enjoy an epic “I Told You So.” If I were those girls, I’d be milking it every time my parents questioned me.
h/t: BuzzFeed
