Is He Asleep
I've posted this in r/nosleep previously, this is the shorter version.
When i was about 4 (in 1978) i suffered from horrible night terrors. My bedroom was between the kitchen and the lounge so there were 2 doors. The kitchen door always stayed closed because i could see down into the dark corridor which crept me out alot. The other door looked through the lounge and onto my parents room which provided a little comfort.
The toilet was at the end of the corridor. it was a small shoe box with weird patterns on the wall that you could turn into horrific faces if you stared at them long enough.
The way the house was designed was a long corridor with rooms coming off each side. the toilet was conveniently situated right at the back, and the bathroom in the middle.
There were only 2 lights in the corridor, one at the front and one at the middle which only lit up so much until the next light.
Every night, i mean, EVERY night i'd hear voices in the kitchen when everyone was asleep. I was an only child then. The voices sounded like 4 men but i called them the bad boys in the kitchen.
They'd say shit like "is he asleep? no, he's just pretending, go check" then i'd hear the door move, it was loose when it was latched so even a slight breeze moved it. After the door moved, i'd hear footsteps running around the other way, down the corridor to my room. Then i'd hear the floor boards in my room creak.
I used to shit my pants at that point. fairly regularly, then i'd hear laughter and they'd discuss what nightmare i'd see that night by name. They had weird names.
My parents thought it was all in my head, i wasn't allowed to watch certain shows etc but it wasn't. no matter how much i pleaded with them, i'd hardly sleep and when i did, i'd wake up screaming as the voices laughed in the background.
It escalated. After the first few occasions they (the bad boys) used to call my mother. then my mother would walk into the room, her hair all messed up with a horrific twisted smile on her face. She'd stand there in the darkness swaying slightly, and when i'd call out to her she'd leap at me and scratch and claw and bite at my face. I know i was awake because i was too scared to sleep.
So inevitably i became terrified of my mother. Every night was the same, the voices, then they'll call my mum, then she'd walk in, I'd get beaten, poop my pants, rinse and repeat.
My parents got worried and installed an intercom in my room but they soon grew tired of me buzzing them 3 or 4 times a night.
They sent me to doctors and psychiatrists to no avail, i was normal. scans revealed nothing out of the ordinary. And so it went on. and on. i was a skinny pale kid with dark rings under his eyes because i couldn't sleep.
It got to the point where i wouldn't answer my mum when she called out to me. I heard her call out from various rooms, when i'd go there the fake mum would jump out at me. This was during the day. I got in trouble alot for not answering.
When my son was 4 he told me that his friend, i forgot his name now, told him that he used to make me poop my pants when i was a kid.
It sent shivers down my spine at first, but i figured that it's just kids poking fun at each other. So i told him it was nonsense and that his friend was a liar. I assumed my son must have told him that at the child care the next day, because when he came home he described my old house accurately and said his friend lived in the kitchen and used to scare me.
I learnt that his friend was imaginary, and then my son started having night terrors. The bad boys in the kitchen he said and grandma. My mum is alive and well so it wasn't a ghost.
My own wife didn't know this about me so no one could have told him. No one. My mother swore to high heaven that she'd never spoken about this to anyone especially a toddler.
Now my son is 8, i've been sleeping in his room since the day he mentioned the bad boys. Now he sleepwalks.
He says sometimes the badboys call 2 girls to come to him, but 1 of them is actually good. The bad one tells him to walk down the hall into the darkness where grandma stands, but the good one tells him not to listen to her and wakes me up.
He's a normal kid in every way, no bipolar, no tumours or chemical imbalances, nothing.
you know, i always thought it was all in my head, and i resigned myself to believing it was just me, i was just a weird kid, ok fine. But how the fuck could he know?
#Unexplained/Paranormal #Sounds/Voices