Forgive the formatting etc. First time, and I’d love advice after you hear me out.
I’m 20(M). This all started back with my grandmother when I was about 12. My family is Hispanic, and very superstitious. My grandmother would probably be the main reason for it, but events that everyone in the family went through supported whatever she would say so we ended up not doubting her after enough situations. My grandmother wasn’t particularly old school. She was a normal immigrant who came to the US for a better life, leading to my parents, aunts ect and then my generation. I don’t want to bore you with this much backstory so I’ll cut straight to what the issue has been for my siblings and cousins.
There is something tying our conscious together when all 5 of us are asleep at the same time. It started out as kids. We would all have fun hanging out together playing games and growing up together, and we never thought anything of it until around our 7 to 12 year range. I’ll introduce us here, (fake names to not expose our family to nonsense) My cousins, Maddie (12) Joy (11) Peter (9), and I Andrew (9) and sister Gabby(7). We all become aware of what was happening around those ages, when we would all be together for family gatherings like holidays or birthdays and we would continue games or discussions we had already had, and our parents would over here and question us like; “When did you tell them this happened? How do you know that? When did you guys hear about specific event only one family knew of?” To us, we just had a bunch of hangouts/play with eachother growing up, but all of us thinking back, our parents were never there. We only remember playing games and doing things together with the 5 of us. Moving on..
It wasn’t just us 5, we just don’t remember our adult family members ever being there. There were adults walking around the street, cars being driven etc. We live in a small town in northern California for context. A lot of forest around us, not far from the ocean, but far from a major city. There was someone who was always with us growing up, and we always thought he was a part of our family. I’ll call him Joseph. Joseph wasn’t someone we ever had a reason to think negatively about. He was one of us for years. He would talk with us, about whatever we liked, or was happening in our lives. We talked about our favorite shows, what we were going through at school, what we wanted for our birthdays and Christmas, all while we played together, board games, video games, tag, water guns, normal kid things. There was never a reason for any of us to even think something was going on until..
Whenever Joseph wasn’t around, our parents would be.. we would actually never have as much free time or freedom I guess. That’s probably when we all started thinking something was a little off, but we were just dumb kids. We never brought it up until one Thanksgiving with my grandmother who we all adored. Maddie and Joy were crawling onto her chair and Peter and I sat with Gabby at her feet when she was taking a break from cooking. Joy was the one to ask her about Joseph and when would he be joining us. That was the first time our grandmother showed us anything but a smile, and probably why all of us became alert and listened to her carefully. She asked Joy to tell her who Joseph was, and to describe him, but before Joy could answer, she noticed all of our faces and asked the question again, but to all of us..
I can’t exactly speak for everyone, but the way my grandmother’s face looked when she was asked about Joseph and when she asked us about him made my blood run cold. Joy is the only one I think that was left unaffected considering she began to explain all of our adventures and conversations with Joseph. Every sentence visibly draining the color from our grandmothers face. To this day I’m still haunted about the way hearing about what we had been doing affected her..
After she heard all that we had to say about Joseph. She stood silent while looking back into all of our gazing faces. I think she was trying her damnedest to figure out a way to not accept what we had just finished conversing with her about. “Okay, I’m glad you guys have been having so much fun!” is what she came up with as she removed Joy and Maddie from her lap and scuttled towards the kitchen where she gather my parents and my aunt and uncle and walked out the backdoor into the yard. They were out there for a few minutes before they all came back inside stone-faced before looking at us and changing their expressions back to normal. We all noticed that, there was no way to keep that hidden..
Thanksgiving continued as if nothing was different and all of us kids wrote off the weird situation because we couldn’t comprehend deeper. Our adventures with Joseph between that Thanksgiving and Christmas continued as if that entire event didn’t happen. None of us even brought it up with him or asked him anything. It was just like every other one of our hang outs. Our families decided to rent a cabin for the week of Christmas, and that’s where we finally learned more about the situation that we were in..