I was haunted by one of the Muppets as a child.

I've had this story for a while but no one to tell it to.This isn't going to be a horror story or one that will need updates because all of this ended about five years ago. It's more of a recollection of stuff that happened to me as a kid.

The story starts when I was young. I'm still in a crib, to indicate how young I am. This is when I first was able to "memorize" things and where a lot my first memories come from, so I'm going to assume I was three years old.

Like any three year old, my parents tried to entertain me with cartoony figures. But we didn't have Yo Gaba Gaba or anything modern like that as a kid. We had the Muppets. I still really like the Muppets, and I'm sure a lot of people do too. But the issues following this point were less than fun.

My first nightmare, or more correctly, the first nightmare I can remember, featured a member of the Muppets. Now, I should say right now. The subject of this story is not Muppets. Not plural. This story revolves around a single Muppet.

This guy. [img3.wikia.nocookie.net]

My first nightmare was about Gonzo. He was standing over my crib, staring at me. I could see his silhouette in the moonlight through the window. He was wearing a red robe, like one you would wear as you sat by the fire and said "Indeed, ol chap."

The creepy part about my dream was not the muppet staring at the baby with murderous intensity, but that the ceiling of my room, the room around me, and the crib all looked the same as they did in reality. I'm calling this a nightmare for the sake of my sanity.

Just before the "nightmare" ended, his eyes widened, his mouth opened, and I heard a groaning exhale as he brought his hands closer to me, like he was going to pick me up. But you know, stupid baby me, I'm so used to my mom leaning down to pick me up that I giggle and I raise my hands up too. Next thing I know, it's past dawn and I'm awake. About five minutes later Mom comes into my room and picks me up.

Next up. I'm five years old. My bed is now in the back corner, but still in front of the door. My headboard is against the parallel wall to the door. This was the dream that is the reason I still sleep with my door open at night. Everything was dark, creepy, and a radiant energy of foreboding filled the air in my room. I pulled the covers over my head, which didn't seem to help that much. You know that sensation you get when you're being watched, or that premonition of something bad about to happen? Mortified was an understatement, made even worse by the fact at this point, I was entirely unaware I was dreaming. Once again, all my room looked as it did in reality. Same sheets, same pajamas, same toys in the corner of my room... The most notable difference was everything felt hyper realistic. Like a very smooth stop motion animation.

I peeked my head out from under the covers. The door slowly creaked open.

I'm now too terrified to even move. Thoughts raced through my head. If I moved now, I would be seen. Best to just play possum. Or that I was paralyzed from fear. Because the head that pushed its way into the door crack was not my mom's or dad's that had just given me a slight spook in the night when they came up to check on me. My parents didn't have a nose like that...

"Hellooooo..."

The dream ends there. I scream as loud as I can and my body fills up with those danger hormones you get after waking up. You know the kind, where you squeeze your eyes shut, it feels like you're suddenly in a lot of pain or dead, and then you wake up in a cold sweat with a pounding heart, too scared to even swallow because of how loud it might be to anything still lurking in your room.

I stayed frozen like that for what felt like hours. Eventually I got up the nerve to shout for my mom to "come and get me" because I was too scared to make my own way to their bedroom.

So far we've gone over two childhood nightmares. Is this too spooky for you yet? Relax, it gets much worse. Specifically, when we moved out of the house and into a condo when I was 13.

As I said before, I was 13 when this happened. So, let me try to describe this...
The nightmares returned like it was the Jedi in Star Wars Episode VI. Guaranteed once per week. And you know how, in the dark, if you close your eyes and relax, you can see images on the inside of your eyelids? It was always a silhouette of Gonzo laughing. Even if the dream wasn't related to Gonzo, I'd wake up in a cold sweat and say. "Oh boy, that was a terrifying dream. I wonder what---" and then I'd see his laughing silhouette and my mind would curse in a low, angry voice. "Gonzo."

One day I'm home alone. What does a teenager do when he's home alone? Look up porn. So that's what I did for about ten minutes, until I heard a large slapping noise coming from the dining room. I turned off my monitor just in case anyone saw what I was looking at (hint: it was porn) and walked towards the dining room. Sure enough, it was him. Sitting there on the chair. Mouth wide open. Legs and arms limp. Eyes fixated forward, like it was staring at me. It was propped up against the back of the chair. Nightmare Gonzo.

Everything was red. The entire floor space from the legs of the chair Gonzo sat on, to the end of the table, was just covered in gore. Bodies. Literal bodies and corpses. They didn't even look like they had faces. Everything was bloody. The wall had a red streak of blood across it. The credenza was speckled with it, and one corner was completely bloodied. Everything had blood on it.

Except Gonzo.

I freaked out. Clearly, this was not an antiseptic environment. I lost my ♥♥♥♥ completely, and I called my Mom and told her to come home as soon as possible. She told me she would be home when she finished her errands. I gingerly paced away walking backwards, and as my eyes remained locked forward I got a terribly haunting feeling that the more I stared at it, the more it would hurt to look at.

The pressure inside me boiled over and I couldn't take it any more. I started screaming. As loud as I could. And I didn't stop. While running up the stairs, I didn't stop. When I lunged for the door and slamed it shut, I didn't stop. And while I cowered underneath the bedsheets for what felt like hours, I still didn't stop.

Mom came home, I was still hyperventilating. Gonzo was gone.

The last dream happened when I was 15. It started out as a nightmare. But then it sort of... Disappeared. Like someone said "Okay, okay, that's enough. Cut!" And the creeping darkness around me dropped away.

I was in a green room. It looked like a factory. They had conveyor belts, and shelves, and little kiosks. It looked like a toy store in a way. The actual Gonzo was there. Standing there in a red robe, like he'd been wearing in my first nightmare. His mouth was closed, something I'd never seen before in a dream. His brow looked like he was confused. He was squinting, or at least uncomfortable.

We had a conversation. There was no screaming, no trying to kill me, no horror. We were standing in this bright green room floating in an infinite white space, having a casual discussion. The general gist of the dream was that he was saying he was done with me, and how he had "more valuable customers" to worry about.

I couldn't help but feel like an old rival was surrendering. He dismissed me by pointing to the door. On the way out, he just shook his head and smiled. When I walked into the whiteness, I woke up. What seemed like something that happened in two hours had taken eleven hours in the real world.
And then there was no Gonzo anymore. And there were no nightmares.

I'm just glad it's over. But I can't help but wonder what he meant by "more valuable customers."