I HAD a surprising piece of news a few days ago which left me feeling sorrow, and something else too. The news was of a death, not of a relative or an old friend in the normal sense, but of a childhood bogeyman.

Does everyone have a bogeyman? As kids in the Dales we used to scare each other with imaginary ones, who usually lived in particularly dark and menacing old barns. Then there are the horror film kinds, like Michael Myers in the Halloween series.

But I’m talking about real human beings who achieve bogeyman status. The most famous literary example is probably the mysterious Boo Radley in To Kill A Mockingbird. Well, my bogeyman was no Boo. His name was Peter and he was an intimidating figure, well over 6ft tall and often sporting long, black, shaggy hair and a beard to match.

He came into our lives when the big former farmhouse next door was bought by a couple from London as a weekend retreat. After a while a tall, dark man would occasionally turn up. This was Peter, the woman’s son by a previous marriage. He’d worked as a journalist in London, but lost his job due to unspecified “problems”.

We local children, all pre-teens, used to go swimming in the river in summer and would afterwards chat, still in our swimwear, on a corner near the big house. One day Peter joined us, which seemed fine, until the conversation started veering in odd directions.

There was nothing too overt, but you could feel the unease growing among us. All I can specifically recall now is that he asked one girl if she had started wearing a bra yet. Afterwards our parents said we weren’t to hang around there any more. No one argued.

Peter’s mental health worsened, as did his already precarious relationship with his mother’s second husband. This exploded one night when Peter was ordered out of the house and roamed round the village yelling threats and leaving residents cowering in their beds – all except the Hitchons.

My mother thought this was because we had shown Peter a certain amount of kindness, but maybe we were just heavy sleepers.

Some time after that I walked in our house to find Peter with my obviously worried mother. He was talking nonsense, very loudly, while my mother tried to keep chatting as normally as possible. I was small and terrified and didn’t know what to do. Eventually my father arrived and ordered Peter out. He went without a murmur.

But by now Peter scared adults as well as children, and he wasn’t above using that fear to get his way.

Relatively minor acts of disorder and violence acquired semi-legendary status; in a neighbouring village they called him “the axeman”, and, to my horror, I discovered many years later the inappropriate chat with the children had been transformed by gossip into something far worse than what I recalled.

Almost inevitably, Peter’s path led to police and prison. His mother bought him a house some distance away, but he drove his new neighbours so frantic they brought a private prosecution against him. The case was so bizarre, with evidence including his habit of playing the same piano key, continuously, all night, it made the national newspapers. He went to prison again.

Eventually a psychiatrist at a local hospital decided he needed treatment rather than punishment, but enforced the treatment toughly – if Peter didn’t cooperate and take his medication he was taken into a secure hospital unit until he did.

He lived with his now divorced mother, and stayed in the big house after she died, letting it become a tip and increasingly hitting the bottle.

A neighbour found him dead at home the other day. I felt sad for him, though I suppose his last few years were better than they might have been, and it seemed to be how he wanted to live. I also had a sense of personal loss – why? Maybe it’s the feeling you get when you lose another link to your past, even if it’s the bogeyman.