What I’m about to tell you is a personal story involving my family and I that has been really difficult for me to process in the last month. I can’t make any sense of it and so after all the paranoia this has caused me I am writing it out in hopes that it will ease my mind a little more so here we are.
For context, this story starts about thirty years ago. I lived with my mom, dad, and two sisters. My first sister, Lindsey, is two years older than me, while my youngest sister, Amanda was seven years younger. We lived in a small house in a small town out in the nowhere of Oklahoma. We always as kids joked about the house being haunted, I don’t remember why it started, but now I’m seriously considering it. I think we are tied to a ghost named Alvin.
Alvin was an imaginary friend of my little sister Amanda, and had been an imaginary friend of hers since as long as I can remember her being able to talk. She brought him up constantly until she was six, but even past that age would still never admit to him being imaginary, and would tell you about him as if he was a real person. Even in her twenties I’d bring it up and she would still deny that it was fake. Although, it’s never a defensive denial. I always chalked it up to her not entirely remembering since she was so young, and is simply committed to the bit. I always found it annoying though.
At the time, there was virtually no one her age around town, so we figured it was pretty natural to have imaginary friends. It got a little excessive though and Alvin started to cause problems for our family. Just to name a few, it was impossible to get my little sister to go to sleep because she insisted on staying awake since, in her own words, “Alvin can only come play whenever it’s dark outside,” which is naturally really creepy.
I still remember the exact night that my sister’s “friendship” with Alvin started to freak me out a lot more than it ever had in the past. It was 1990, meaning I was 13 and Amanda was 6. It was three in the morning and Amanda walked into my room. She repeated my name until I woke up annoyed.
She said to me, “Come to my room. Alvin said he’s ready to meet you.”
I told her that I didn’t want to meet him and she started crying. I half heartedly told her that I was sorry I called her friend imaginary, but that I still did not want to get out of bed.
“Alvin needs to meet you tonight. He’ll be really mad at me if he doesn’t meet you,” Amanda had told me through her sobs.
I did not like that at all. I told her to cut it out as it was freaking me out. She grabbed me and kept trying to pull me out of bed to her room but I wasn’t having it. I turned on the lights and woke up my parents, and told them Amanda was scaring me.
From then on my parents and I had enough of Alvin and made a rule that Alvin was not to be spoken of again as it was just making life difficult.
Amanda refused to sleep in her room for the next few weeks but eventually went back and broke the rules, talking about how she was friends with Alvin again to my annoyance, until eventually she would grow out of it.
Years went by, I grew up to get married, and Lindsey did as well. About six years ago next month, Amanda was killed in a car accident, as she passed out behind the wheel on the way to her job. It was incredibly tragic and hurt our entire family.
Around the same time, my older sister Lindsey and her husband moved into our old house to help with our parents who were going through an incredibly rough time. In these six years they have ended up with two children, Bradley and Kate. Still living at my parent’s house, Bradley, who is five right now, took the room that Amanda once had as a kid.
You wouldn’t believe my surprise when I got a call from Lindsey the other day. One day, not unlike any other, she had gone over to make lunch, and came to notice all the knives in her drawer disappeared. The kids were at school so she went searching around the house and found all of them under Bradley’s bed in the same room. It’s was very very strange
When she asked Bradley why on Earth he had all their knives hidden under his pillow he told her, “I need to protect Kate and I from the boy who comes to my room at night.”
When Lindsey was describing this conversation to me, she really emphasized the fact how nervous she was to ask what the name of the boy was. She really did not want to have any hints to this imaginary friend being anything more than that, our late sister’s imaginary friend that we thought we would never have to hear about again. To make things even weirder, Bradley had never even heard of these imaginary friend stories, Amanda had passed on before Bradley was even born, and why would Lindsey try to scare her own kids? Lindsey asked her son if he, by any chance, knew the name of this boy that visits their house.
Alvin. It was Alvin.