So, quick note, this is a story that I remember to the best of my recollection and it kinda gives me chills to think about so I figured I would post it. Something happened today that made me think about this and it’s nagging at me so I had to write it down.
When I was maybe 7 or 8, my little brother was 5; old enough to be coherent but still innocent and naive. For the sake of anonymity, I’ll call him David.
So my dad was in the military and he was on temporary leave for something at the time, I don’t know what for. But he wasn’t home and only my mom was. We lived in a somewhat large house with three rooms and a master bedroom. There was a hall in the back near the kitchen that led to a bedroom we used as an office, a bathroom, and a bedroom that my two younger brothers and I both slept in. (My youngest brother was only 2 at the time and he isn’t really involved with the story.)
Anyways, normally my dad would have been upset if I was up late (past 8:00) but my mom was less strict so I got thirsty and got up in the middle of the night to go to the kitchen which was to my right when you left the hallway.
My mom was up drinking water and eating a sandwich or something. She was in the kitchen. Most of the lights were on, and being a kid, I was pretty scared of the dark so I was enticed.
When I asked my mom for a cup of water, she obliged and prepared a glass of crisp water for me to drink. We had a bar-type thing that you could sit at that attached to the outside of the kitchen. I sat there and was talking to my mom while drinking my water.
I vaguely remember it being about 9:00 pm so that you can have an idea of the time frame, but that’s beside the point.
My two brothers proved to have opposite sleep habits. My youngest was always the hardest to go to sleep but slept very late. My other brother would fall asleep hard and fast but get up early. However, he was very hard to wake up if he didn’t wake up by himself. So when he got up about seven or so minutes after I did, it was sort of strange.
Of course, I don’t think either of us thought about it at the time. My mom was most likely just annoyed she would have to put another boy to bed.
But everything seemed fine. David asked for some milk and my mom got him some. After he drank his milk, he got up and left to go back to the room we all shared.
He went to the door of our room before entering and I heard the creak of him getting in bed. However, soon after, he was back in the kitchen to ask our mom a question: “Mommy, who is that reading in our room?”
Being the child I was, I didn’t pick up on anything strange going on, but my mom later told me that her eyes widened and she got really scared.
“What do you mean, who’s reading in your room?”
My brother pointed toward our room and reiterated himself. “The boy—who is that boy reading in our room?!”
“Mommy needs to know what you mean,” my mom said.
“The boy!” My inarticulate brother said. “There’s a boy in our room reading a book out loud in the rocking chair.”
Now, there was a rocking chair in our room that my grandfather had made for us, so I knew what he was talking about.
“There’s no boy,” I said.
My mom, obviously spooked, got up to go look in the room. She was unsatisfied when her search proved no one was in the room except my youngest brother, still sound asleep. I went after her and saw a book in the rocking chair. It was Where the Wild Things Are, a book our mom would read to us sometimes at night as a bedtime story.
The chair was curiously rocking, but it soon slowed and came to a stop. Nothing peculiar there, I have to admit.
Fast forward many years later, my parents divorced in that house. I asked my mom recently (I’m an adult now in my own house) what she remembered about that whole situation and she said she was really scared because later, a bunch of Christmas presents that our mom had stashed in her closet for us spoke that night when we were sleeping and she had to remove the batteries (they were talking toys that were supposed to talk when interacted with). The whole thing was just bizarre and really random. I don’t even know if it’s related.
But the weirdest part is that my brother doesn’t remember any of it. And I mean any of it. He doesn’t remember Where the Wild Things Are or the rocking chair at all. But he said something that really scared me the other day. I tried to get him to remember but he claimed the only thing he remembered from that time period was our Aunt Margaret coming over and helping him learn how to read.
We don’t have an Aunt Margaret.
I begged him for information and tried to explain this to him but he just wrote me off as crazy. I told him that we didn’t have an aunt Margaret and he said that was who taught him to read. He went off on a rant about some other kids that she would also teach how to read, but I wasn’t paying attention.
Am I going crazy?
I’m going to have to get my brother and mom together so that we can talk about this sometime. But here’s why this has been on my mind to begin with: I was going through my storage and I found the old Where the Wild Things Are book. I remembered the whole thing today but I noticed something in the book I had never seen in the book before. In the front, there was an inscription. Would you believe it, it was from damned Aunt Margaret. I don’t know how we didn’t notice it before or what it meant.
I haven’t told my mom about it yet but I think I will soon. I’m starting to get even more scared, because it’s getting in my head. And now I don’t know if I’m making it up, or if I can really hear the sound of a little boy reading indistinctly in another room when I’m going to sleep.