We managed to get in touch with Nash Flynn and she was kind enough to have a little chat with us about her son and the now-viral thread he's responsible for.
"He's four, and in his defense, one of his parents (me) is a death historian, so he's a little bit more comfortable about the creepier subjects than maybe most kids his age," Flynn told Bored Panda.
"He spends quite a bit of time in cemeteries looking at gravestone art with me. He's also got a very incredible imagination — currently, he has an imaginary friend called Dude-o who goes on adventures with him — and he is naturally very funny and likes attention."
The mom said that mainly because her son is a good storyteller, she doesn't find his stories creepy.
"The wall people was a bit of an outlier, but actually I've seen quite a few people in the thread say their kids had also seen wall people before so it sounds like either we've got a planet earth infestation of ghouls that enjoy a good drywall or it's a bit of seeing faces in patterns or shadows, like humans tend to," Flynn explained.
From the Grady Twins (The Shining) and Samara (The Ring) to Regan (The Exorcist) and, of course, Damien (The Omen), many horror movies terrify us with children.
There are many reasons why boys and girls are so effective at this. For example, consider the biological level of a kid who is still developing physically and psychologically—it makes them extremely unpredictable.
"In a large part, children are unpredictable ... because adults forget what it's like being children pretty quickly," Flynn agreed. "I think I read somewhere that an adult even with practice can’t effectively imitate the art of children, and I think that's pretty telling."
Flynn finds the creepy kid to be a really interesting cultural phenomenon. "I think a lot of it comes from having very busy brains and an under-developed language that doesn't allow for much nuance," she said.
"Kids often blur the spaces between dreams and reality, but with no ability to understand that piece or to describe it, what makes it out to adults can seem very eerie."
According to Emily Hopkins, a psychologist who studies how small children distinguish between fiction and reality, "Generally, they're pretty good at telling real from pretend, but they can get tripped up in certain situations and circumstances."
"Even when kids start to pretend at about 18 months or so, they seem to understand the difference; if they’re pretending that a block is a chocolate chip cookie, they don't try to take a bite out of the wooden block."
