I never had imaginary friends. I have an overactive imagination that takes shadows and turns them into people. They are like imaginary friends except they aren't friends. They live around my house. They often resemble characters from horror movies. They crawl out from under my bed. They stare at me through the mirror.
The first one happened to be a silhouette of a man. He lives in my father's office, in the basement. He would sprint at me when I would go up the stairs. He made me run for my life from him. I don't remember when he appeared but he has been there for as long as I can remember. He isn't there when other people go into the basement with me. None of them are.
The second one lives in a coat closet up stairs. She has unnaturally long fingernails and a blurry face,she has a wicked laugh which I hear when I open the closet. When I need to get a coat or put something into the closet, it is a constant game of don't freak out because no one else can see her.
I don't quite remember the order of the next few because they come and go so often. There is a little girl with a scary, wide smirk and she only crawls. She likes to crawl to my bedroom doorway but if the door is shut she doesn't come in. She only looks like she is seven or eight.
There is also a person with muddy hair and a sad looking stare ,he always has blood dripping down his face but I never know why. This person stands a distance away and stares at me through the mirrors. Nothing is there when I turn around, just in the mirror.
I only see them when I am alone. They make me feel like I'm going insane. When I am at school, or a friends house, or anywhere besides my house, I don't see them. If I tell anyone about the shadows, the person I'm telling thinks I'm insane. So I keep it to myself. I am already living in fear of them at home I don't need to add humiliation at school.
That is how my life has been for the last thirteen years. Until school started again for eighth grade. When eighth grade started I felt more stressed than I usually am. I really wanted to succeed this year. The weekend after the first week of school my parents went grocery shopping. I sat on my bed waiting for them to return, when I felt like I was being watched. I looked around but nothing was there. I thought I must just be paranoid so I picked up my favorite book and started reading it for the third time. I continued to have the feeling being watched for about fifteen minutes when I looked up again.
I saw the little girl climbing up my bed very slowly, and looking very sinister. She inched closer and I sat there, frozen in fear. She finally reached out, and screamed the loudest scream I have ever heard. My ears felt like they were going to explode. She disappeared the second her scream ended.
I couldn't tell my parents about this or they would put me back in therapy. So I decided not to tell them. the scene of her crawling up my bed , was replaying in my head all night. I didn't sleep that night because I was too afraid she would come back.
The next week at school was the same as the first. I was a bit jumpy on Monday but by Wednesday I was back to mindlessly sitting through my classes. By the next weekend I had pretty much forgotten what had happened only a week before. I had volunteered to help my friend teach Sunday school so I woke up before my parents to shower and curl my hair.
I was in the middle of brushing my hair when I looked in the mirror and I saw the man with the sad looking stare. He came closer than usual so I shut my door and sat on my bed. He somehow was already in my room and grabbed my arm with a grip of steel. I was about to scream when he disappeared and left me only with what would soon be a hand shaped bruise on my arm. I was so frightened I didn't sleep that night or the next.
I felt jumpy all week. I finally slept again on Tuesday. After that incident nothing happened for almost two months. It had been the week before Halloween when I needed a hat. I went to the coat closet but when I opened it the lady wasn't there. I quickly grabbed a hat and started to walk away when she appeared in front of me and scratched my shoulder with her disgustingly long fingernails. I started to bleed so I ran to get a paper towel or something to clean up my shoulder.
That night I sat in my room and cried myself to sleep thinking, why me? What did I do to deserve this? The next week the little girl came to my school. I didn't know what to do so I ignored her all day , even though she had been behind me.
In math I asked to go to the bathroom, and when I was in the hallway she grabbed a sixth grader. I turned around to look for help or anything, because i knew her intentions weren't good. When I looked back they were both gone.
When I returned to math I heard a scratching coming from inside the wall followed by a familiar wicked laugh. No one noticed it so i figured as usual no one else could hear it. This happened everyday for about two weeks. One of the pipes had a leak so a maintanence person had to take out the wall. I notices that some of the dry wall looked strange, when I looked closer I realized that there were scratch marks all over it.
I finally told my supposed best friend about what I had been seeing. She laughed in my face and started spreading a bunch of lies, throughout our school. A few days after I told her, I couldn't walk down a hallway without hearing someone whisper about me. I felt isolated.
A new one started to show up, but this one only showed up in pictures. She was a woman with gray hair, that is always draped over her face. She wears a white night gown and never speaks. Every time someone took a picture of me she inched closer, and closer. In one picture she was right behind me, I didn't want to see what would happen in the next picture.
During school a photographer was in our classroom, he had been taking pictures of the teacher, and the room. He said he wanted to take a class picture so we were all shoved into place. He took the picture, and the woman, reaching towards me in it. He said " Ok guys lets take one more!" I screamed for him to stop. I saw the flash from the camera, and felt something cold grip my neck. I couldn't breathe, I knew it it was the woman, and yet I still couldn't see her. I started to see spots and then everything went pitch black and all I only felt numb.
I hadn't dead even though that's what I thought. I woke up a few days later in the hospital. I had large bruises on my neck. Everyone thought that I somehow had done it to myself. My parents put me back in therapy, I am not allowed to watch scary movies anymore.
The little girl who screams, does not scream anymore. The scratch marks that were on the wall ended up just being mice. the scratch on my shoulder turned out to be from a painting that was hanging on the wall in my house. i must have walked by it too fast and bumped into it. Everything that i thought was going to kill me, turned out to be my imagination, turning shadows into things they weren't.
