I remember when I was about eight years old I had an imaginary friend. I never saw it, I only talked to it. I wouldn't remember what, but I know we would have conversations about games and end up playing them. I soon realized that I was speaking to another girl and she shared my room with me, I just never knew about it until she mentioned it.
Around that time, small things around our house would move – cups, figurines, sometimes plates. I even remember my entire bookcase had been emptied and the books laid in stacks on my floor, only one picture book open to the middle page. My imaginary friend was reading, I recall.
One night, I had woken up from sleep and decided to get a glass of water. I went down the hall to the bathroom and turned on the light. I reached for our plastic cups in the corner before something in the mirror caught my eye.
It was me – or, really not me I should say. My reflection was another person – a girl. She was weary red pajamas that looked splotched and wet. She had dirty blonde hair and black eyes. It didn't bother me for some reason. I was intrigued. I turned my head to the side, the girl that was my reflection followed. I raised my arms, touched my knees, and poked my face. The reflection did the same. Then she smiled, and faded until my own sleepy reflection was once again as it always had been.
I had always watched horror movies and ghost hunting shows. I had read scary stories and listened when my dad tried to scare me. It never really worked. I was a pretty naïve child, I barely got scared. The supernatural wasn't really something I was afraid of, more of losing my family and bring all alone.
I had dreams for about two weeks. They weren't bad or scary. I was looking out eyes that surely weren't my own and walking through our house. At first, I thought I had been sleepwalking, but I realized that the rooms in my dreams weren't the same. They were the rooms, but they had different decorations and add-ons. I would sometimes look down, but all I saw were my hands, the rest just a nonexistent nothingness.
I didn't tell my mom what I was experiencing, but I did ask her questions.
"Mom," I asked. "Who lived in our house before us?"
She gave me a surprised look. "Who? Why?"
I shrugged. "I was just curious."
"Well," she said. "A man lived here."
"Just a man?"
"Yes, he had committed suicide in 1968."
"Why?" I asked.
She pursed her lips. "Well, he had kidnapped a girl for about two months before the police finally decided to search his house. They found him, but they never found the girl."
"A girl?"
"Yes," My mom said, looking uncomfortable. "She was about your age, I believe."
"Ten?"
"Yes." My mom's voice had become tight, and she didn't look away from the road, only glared at the cars in front of us.
"I don't think she left the house," I said.
My mom didn't say anything after that. I had a suspicion that she got what I was hinting. If she thought I was crazy, she didn't say or do anything. She used to ask me about my imaginary friend when she first showed up, but she had always assumed it was my child mind making her up.
But my mom did take precautions. She tried to act nonchalant, like they were normal. She would tuck me in and make sure I said my prayers before she left and I went to sleep. She wanted me to text her every time I got home walking from school every day. At first, I thought I was ridiculous; I was in the sixth graded and walked with my friends to the end of my street, but I could see where she was coming from with strangers and kidnappers. It was something that every mother worried about, and she worried even more than others when my dad had passed away when I was six years old.
