I’ve never posted anything like this before, but I seriously don’t know what to do and I don’t know who to talk to about it. To start I need to give adequate background on how I grew up, sorry if this seems tedious, I’ll try to make it brief. When I was nine years old my mom up and left my dad, leaving him responsible for me and my two siblings. My Dad ended up having my grandma move in so there would be someone at home while he worked. My grandma always loved my little brother but seemed to dislike my older sister and hated me. I have no idea why she was like that but from then on, she was our primary guardian. My dad, who used to be super involved in our life became distant and eventually absent. If he wasn’t working, he was out drinking or off doing God knows what, leaving my grandma in charge of everything. I won’t get too detailed about the abuse, but I’ll just say she herself was a violent and vindictive drunk. She was also a chain smoker and went through a carton of cigarettes a week. If my siblings or I were in trouble she would scream in an awful shrill voice, “Come to my office!” but her “office” was our backyard where she’d smoke nonstop and scream at us in the Arizona heat for hours.
My grandma passed away around two years ago from lung cancer, my brother called me that day crying but I felt nothing. She didn’t have a funeral and even if she did, I believe no one would have shown up. My dad and extended family members found it disturbing that I wasn’t really mourning her, but they didn’t know the extent of the abuse that me and my siblings endured or if they did, they didn’t care. My extended family often talked about me behind my back calling me callous or cold, or even a sociopath. After this I distanced myself from my family and ended up going low contact with them, I ended up moving to a different state for a fresh start and currently I’m working at a café while I attend college.
I think about a month ago I had been having strange nightmares where I’m in an unfamiliar house, and in the last week I’ve been experiencing weird things when I’m awake. The nightmares are vivid and always have me in the same house, it’s one I’ve never seen before. The walls are white and flat, and it smells like feces and rotting food even though the house seems spotless. The whole house is empty; drawers, cabinets, fridge, and freezer, all except the master bedroom. The house is all white and marble, appliances and all which gives me an eerie vibe. The master bedroom is upstairs and is not only decorated with white, marble, and gold, but is also seemingly where the foul smell is coming from. I never make it far into the room before I can’t take the smell, but also when I get closer to the bed a sense of dread and fear encapsulates me. It feels as though my life is in danger and like whatever will happen to me will be long and torturous. The nightmares always end with me scrambling out of the room, tripping over myself, and falling to my knees outside of the room. That’s when I feel something breathing on the back of my neck, I slowly turn to see what sort of looks like my grandmother. It resembles her somewhat, but I never really able to get a good look at her I just know that something is off about her in an uncanny kind of way, like she’s almost human but not quite or more accurately that it’s almost her. At first this nightmare only happened once, but after about a weekish or so it started happening more frequently and she’s started calling my name, but she doesn’t sound right like her voice sounds off.
Lately I have been seeing her in my peripheral, out my windows or I see her shadow darken my door, but no one else seems to see her. After I started seeing her more frequently my apartment has begun to smell like feces and rotting food and some of my neighbors have complained and no amount of cleaning will make the smell go away. I don’t want to tell anyone in fear that they would dismiss this or call me crazy, but I know I’m not and I know this is real. She’s no longer hiding in my peripheral; she’s watching me while I type this. She won’t go away and the smell is getting worse.