When my parents told me in 2001 that we would be moving to Okinawa, Japan, I knew my life was about to become miserable and change forever. I was wrong and I was right. The island and islanders were majestic and beautiful, the oldest living and kindest souls you will ever experience. We went to see several little villages and shrines, places of power.
Once acquainted with new friends, we started visiting creepy haunted places and telling scary stories in the dark right out of the book while skating around the island. Some places I really shouldn’t have gone and some places I wish I had never seen. Boarded up windows and concrete walled houses on-base where three separate families died in murder suicides since the 1970’s. My best friend lived 6 houses down and we would play kickball in the yard of it, often pinging it off of the house and having to climb the 7 foot concrete wall to retrieve the ball. This place is among many that a small child would forget to be respectful of out of excitement and pure youthful energy.
Then Severe’s Disease hit, which left me in and out of casts and in a wheel chair until i was 12 and suffering from my heels being fractured and pulled apart by altered growthrates until they stopped growing. I put on weight and my brother and everyone else starting really piling on the bullying. Making songs up about me, holding doors then pushing me down, seeing me coming and hitting me across the heels with sticks and tree branches and stomping me while I was down. Still, I was kind hearted and the strongest of them all. My father grew up abused and bullied so he knew my struggles but was too passive to do anything to discipline my brother or sit with me and talk. I really only became close friends with my dad in these recent years.
My parents were toxic at best, with my first memory being my mom crying her eyes out taking me to my dad’s girlfriend’s house while they argued outside and I ate cornflakes with cockroaches crawling in them while watching batman cartoons and playing with his two cats tom and jerry. They gave me nosebleeds. My parents would often throw massive drinking parties that I have seen a therapist about and cannot detail on redditt.
I can’t say exactly when the nightmares started, but only that they did in early 2001 at 7 years old and didn’t stop until I was baptized and saved on July 16th, 2006. Five plus years of living hell then sleeping hell. They would start and end the same way. Me standing up from where I had fallen asleep and walking down the hall to the stairs that were 20 ft high ceilings at the bottom and leveled out at normal ceiling height at the top. As I turned the corner and looked to the bottom I could see in the darkness a faceless, hooded figure much taller than most men. Sometimes he would slowly appear from around the corner at the front door, sometimes he would just be there.
At first I would wake up from just that out of fear, then as time went on he would begin to glide up the stairs towards me. Eventually I would begin to fail to wake up, being forced to watch this terrifying image of this creature slowly coming to me unable to move or scream for help. I often told my parents about it and tried to draw it for them, but they believed it to be related to my reading Harry Potter and Lord of the Rings and imagining the Nine Ring wraith nasgul or dementors. This was neither.
My parents tried to put me in football, Taiko drumming, band, Seidokan Aikido. I excelled and enjoyed the distractions. The anxiety and dread of home and going to sleep was my struggle. I stayed mostly with friends and had much less trouble, yet still had the same reoccurring dream. One night the shadow closed the gap between us with instant lightning speed and was in my face, and my dad shook me away to hear my blood curdling scream echoing the large stairspace. They would let me sleep between them in their bed that night, but eventually them and my brother would refuse to let my 200LB body into their beds anymore.
For months I would sleep with every light and tv on or game until the morning sun saved me, but this made me fall asleep often at school and eventually fall out of all extra curricular activities. I became a recluse to even my best friends who knew what I was going through and began to eat my feelings even further, becoming a 220 lb 11 year old in a wheelchair. Eventually I got so desperate that I would wait for my parents to fall asleep and sneak into their bedroom in order to lay with and cuddle the dog on her bed for comfort. I did this for years and often got in trouble when my mom would step on me when trying to go to the bathroom in the middle of the night. I didn’t care, it meant that when I woke up at the top of the stairs petrified, that Cheyenne the yellow lab would always be laying in the hall watching and keeping me company.
On one occasion I woke up and my mom would not talk to me or let me near her, acting angry and distant and disappointed the whole day. Eventually she admitted to me that I had viciously punched her in my sleep walking and fought tooth and nail to not be taken back to my room from the stairs or woken up. That scared the shit out of me because her face was blue and I had not and still don’t remember a thing.
The final straw came when my dad found me with my mother’s red lipstick in my sleepwalking, writing huge demonic runes on the walls. This was the first time I had lucidly functioned in a dream or had a dream different from the shadow in years, and I knew this language and felt compelled and determined to write it. As if my life depended on it. I only recall a few seconds of the end in the hallway and my dad shaking me out of it, only to see the most fear I have ever seen in a man’s eyes.
Later after being baptized and moving back to the states my dad would admit to me that there were runes and markings in red lipstick in places on the 20ft ceilings and walls in that stairway that were several feet unreachable by him even with a chair or ladder. We did not own a step stool or ladder so He had to borrow one from the neighbor to investigate. 20 years later and I have never sleep walked since, never had the dream or experience again, but my next door neighbor from then moved back to Okinawa at the beginning of 2022 and sent me pictures of the house. Untouched and gloomy as ever. 2577 D, I still have the key. I am going to ask him to stop in one day and ask them to read this or tell him if they have had any similar experiences. Maybe even try to find a way to visit and ask to stand at the top of those stairs again some day, though I still get chills thinking about what might happen to me later that night.
Currently I am still suffering poltergeist dreams and night terrors. Just 4 days ago my wife woke up to me whimpering her name with pure terror in my voice. It was a dream of watching my parents’ cigarette pack slide down the hallway from under their door, for me to follow.