I used to live in Hawaii. My mom joined the military and left my abusive father when I was just a baby, and one of her first duty stations was Hawaii. More specifically, Oahu. There, she met a man whom we will call John. John was a very playful person. He was 4 years younger than my mom and only 16 years older than me. He liked to play a lot of pranks and joke around, and he was very happy all the time. My mom started dating him, and blah blah blah. I was only 4 at the time, so I don’t remember the specifics, but we ended up getting an apartment in Salt Lake City, Honolulu. The apartment building was old and smelled like a mixture of a trash chute, bird shit, and laundry that had been left wet in the washer a day too long. It wasn’t unusual, though, because most places on Oahu smelled that way. I was 6 by the time we got that apartment, so I didn’t notice or even care about the unpleasant smell. I remember specifically that our apartment number was 912. I remember whenever I walked out of the elevators on the 9th floor and towards my apartment door and looked out over the railing to my left, I could see John’s white Saturn sedan on the top level of the parking garage collecting bird shit. I remember always opening the door to the apartment and looking behind me to the neighbors on the other side of the hall, who always had their door open, and a young Japanese woman in the doorway staring at us.
The actual apartment was decent. We had a cockroach problem, but that was common in many apartment buildings in Hawaii. Fruit and bread went moldy really quickly all the time, but we blamed it on the humidity since we didn’t have working AC and always had to leave the windows open. When we moved in, the curtains were tattered and torn, but the landlords said it was because the wind blew so hard on the ninth floor.
When I took my evening baths, I could sit quietly in the hazy, slightly brown water and listen to the whispering I thought was on the other side of the bathroom door. I’d expect it to be my mother and call out to her, but often times either no one opened the door or my mom would hear me calling her from the living room and blame the whispering I heard on the thin walls and our loud neighbors.
John was a happy-go-lucky prankster when I met him two years prior. But he changed when we moved into the apartment. He became irritable and would snap at the smallest things. Eventually he started beating my mom and would lock me in my room so I wouldn’t see him hurting her, but I could still hear my mom choking out my name for help. We became scared of John. My mom had another child, a boy. John lightened up. He still had his bouts of uncontrollable anger, but sometimes we saw moments of his old self. Happy, playful. But his jokes became more morbid. One time, when my mom had just given birth to my brother and was resting at home, we could hear John’s faint voice calling for help. My mom and I got up and looked around the apartment for him, but we couldn’t find him. Still, we could hear his voice somewhere, sounding desperate for help. My mom was still tired and fragile from giving birth, but after a while of not being able to find John, she became frantic and anxious. We didn’t have working AC, so we had to keep the windows open, and we had come to the conclusion that John must have fallen out of the window and was hanging on to a palm tree somewhere. My mom, sobbing and leaning halfway out over the open window, dialed 911 and cried to the dispatcher that she didn’t know where her husband was and suspected he had fallen out of the window. Just as the dispatcher was about to send the police, John sauntered out into the living room, grinning. He never told us where he hid all that time.
Most of John’s jokes were like that. Which brings me to the point of this entire story. I’m sitting in a hotel room 14 years later (right now) in Kentucky after a day of visiting my grandmother at her retirement home and was thinking about that apartment and my experiences there when I came to a sudden epiphany. Do you know how sometimes you suddenly wake up in the middle of the night? And there’s no reason for it other than you probably just came out of REM, but you just lay there until you fall back asleep? One night in that apartment, I woke up in the middle of the night and lay in bed, waiting to fall asleep. I was scared of the dark at the time, so I always left the hallway light on. Across from me was my closet. It was a sliding mirror-door closet, and the mirror door was slid open. I stared out into the darkness of the inside of that closet until I saw what I thought was John walk in front of my doorway. I looked over at him, confused. Why was he coming into my room this late at night? He smiled mischievously at me and walked to my closet. He pulled apart my hanging clothes and stepped behind them into the darkness. I smiled and giggled to myself. John was pulling another prank on me, but I saw his hiding place, and I was going to get up and scare him before he could scare me. So, slowly and quietly, I crept out of my bed and walked slowly towards my dark closet, my arms outstretched in front of me. On the count of three, I pulled apart the hangers of clothes and yelled “BOO!” as loud as I could. What waited for me behind the hanging clothes was a wall. Just a wall. John wasn’t in the closet. Nobody was. I went back to sleep that night, having no explanation for the weird occurrence and thinking nothing of it.
John and my mother shortly thereafter got divorced, and she, my brother, and I moved on with our lives without him. 14 years later, though, I’m sitting in this hotel bed thinking, “Maybe John’s weird personality change and all the weird occurrences in the apartment had something to do with each other? And the person I saw walk into my closet might not have been John after all, and my six-year-old self naively walked straight into the face of some freaky paranormal shit, and I never realized it until now. Nobody was in my closet. Nobody I could see anyway. And that is what scares me the most.