Where does evil come from? I think it's an externalization of our own fears and unconscious thoughts. Anything we find horrendous is probably going to be evil to us. Some are going to say Hitler, some paedophiles, etc.

I was raised on the bogeyman:

"The bogeyman is a legendary monster. The bogeyman has no specific appearance and conceptions of the monster can vary drastically even from household to household within the same community; in many cases, he simply has no set appearance in the mind of a child, but is just an amorphous embodiment of terror. Bogeyman can be used metaphorically to denote a person or thing of which someone has an irrational fear. Parents often say that if their child is naughty, the bogeyman will get them, in an effort to make them behave. The bogeyman legend may originate from Scotland, where such creatures are sometimes called bogles, boggarts, or boggers." From: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bogeyman

When we were at my grandparents beach cottage in Southern Maryland and would leave to drive home to the Washington, D.C. suburb late on a Sunday night in summer, we would leave the open water, the Chesapeake Bay, and travel on small country roads through dark, wooded areas in our station wagon. My three brothers would threaten to roll down the station wagon rear window and force me out where the bogeyman would get me. They would pretend to see him too, in the woods, keeping up with the car. I still remember a dream I had when I was about 6, perhaps my first nightmare, I was alone in a station wagon, could see home across the way, but there were wolves all over the top of the car and "dripping" down the sides, trying to get in the windows.

I was born an anxious child and I'm sure some of my upbringing didn't help :-)

Bogeymen aren't real. I don't think evilmen are real either. Yes, there are individuals who do horrendous, selfish, despicable acts but I don't believe there is a class of humanity that one can throw such individuals in and say, "this" is evilness, all else is not and it has nothing to do with me and mine.