The Shadow in the Crayon Box: When Childhood Imaginations Bleed into Reality.

Lily’s crayons smelled like burnt sugar.

She didn’t notice it at first, not when Mrs. Harlow handed her the dusty box on the first day of third grade. “A gift from the lost-and-found,” the teacher had said, patting Lily’s shoulder. “No one claimed them all summer.” The crayons were stubby, their wrappers peeling, but Lily didn’t care. She loved how the colors glided across paper, how the waxy scent clung to her fingers.

But by October, the burnt sugar smell grew stronger.

It started the night she drew Mr. Wiggles.

“He’s my friend,” Lily told her mother, holding up the sketch of a stick figure with too-long arms and a smile stretching ear to ear. “He likes hide-and-seek.”

Her mother humored her. “How creative, sweetie!”

But Mr. Wiggles didn’t stay on the paper.

Lily first saw him in the hallway mirror—a flicker of shadow behind her reflection, limbs spindly and jointed like a spider’s legs. When she turned, nothing was there. Just the hum of the refrigerator and the ticking clock.

“He’s shy,” Lily explained to her goldfish, Bubbles, as she colored a new picture: Mr. Wiggles holding a balloon. The crayon snapped in her hand, leaving a bloody red smudge on the page.

That night, she woke to the sound of scratching.

Skritch-skritch-skritch.

It came from under her bed. Lily clutched her stuffed rabbit, Peaches, and peered over the edge. A pair of glossy black eyes stared back.

“Hello, Lily,” Mr. Wiggles whispered. His voice was like static, crackling and thin. “Let’s play.”

The next morning, Lily’s father found her asleep on the kitchen floor, shivering beneath a blanket of her own drawings. Dozens of Mr. Wiggles grinned up from the tiles, each more detailed than the last. His fingers grew longer in every sketch, his teeth sharper.

“It’s just a phase,” her father told her mother over coffee. “Remember when she swore the closet ate her socks?”

But Lily didn’t laugh. She hid the crayons under her mattress and refused to draw.

Mr. Wiggles didn’t like that.

He began leaving gifts.

A dead sparrow on her windowsill, its wings bent like crumpled paper. A lullaby hummed through the heating vents at midnight. And always, always, the smell of burnt sugar.

“Make him stop,” Lily begged her teacher, tears streaking her cheeks.

Mrs. Harlow frowned. “Who gave you those crayons, dear?”

“You did!”

The color drained from the teacher’s face. She pulled Lily into the empty hallway, her voice trembling. “Those crayons… they belonged to a boy named Samuel. He… disappeared last year. They found his drawings everywhere—strange creatures, shadows with too many eyes.” She gripped Lily’s shoulders. “Throw them away. Now.”

Lily buried the crayon box in the backyard beneath the oak tree, its branches clawing at the twilight sky. She scrubbed her hands until they raw, but the burnt sugar smell lingered.

That night, Mr. Wiggles didn’t whisper.

He screamed.

The walls of her bedroom bubbled like melting wax, and shadows slithered across the floor, knitting themselves into a shape too tall for the ceiling. His smile split his face like a jagged seam, dripping black sludge.

“YOU CAN’T GET RID OF ME, LILY.”

She ran, but the house stretched endlessly—hallways coiled into labyrinths, doors led to brick walls. The air thickened with the stench of scorched caramel.

In the living room, she found her parents asleep on the couch, their faces pale and waxy. Too waxy.

Lily touched her mother’s hand.

It crumbled like charcoal.

The police found her at dawn, curled in the hollow of the oak tree, cradling a stuffed rabbit. The house stood intact, no sign of fire or forced entry. But her parents’ bodies…

The coroner called it “spontaneous combustion,” a scientific mystery.

Lily never spoke again.

She spends her days now at Greenhaven Psychiatric, sketching with stolen pens. The doctors say it’s therapy. They don’t recognize the figure in her drawings—the shadow with spider-leg arms, holding a crayon box.

Sometimes, when the nurses aren’t looking, Lily scribbles faster, her breath hitching.

Because the burnt sugar smell is back.

And Mr. Wiggles hates it when she’s late for playtime.

Author’s Note:

Not all monsters hide under beds. Some hide in plain sight—in a child’s laughter, in the flicker of a shadow, in the innocent stroke of a crayon. Sleep tight.