Another one priginally from my NoSleep account, this one actually has a fair few elements of truth woven through it. See if you can guess which parts!
Whenever I bring a new boyfriend home for the first time, alongside the obligatory embarrassing childhood photos, my mum also likes to bring out the story of my imaginary friend.
See, from the moment I could talk, I would chatter away to someone that only I could see. At first my mum thought it was kind of cute and funny, and of of course, everyone knows that having an imaginary playmate is a normal part of a child's development. Especially if that child has no siblings and an active imagination.
Apparently (I personally have no memory of this early part, being only two or three years old at the time) I would spend hours explaining to my 'friend' about things around the house. How our old red Henry Hoover was an 'animal that eats the dirt off the floor', how mum's lipstick was a 'face crayon' and how the tv was 'magic pictures from the sky.'
Yeah, yeah, I know- adorable, right? The boyfriends inevitably tease me, and I roll my eyes while mum goes to make another pot of tea.
What's interesting is that the boyfriend's are getting the abridged version. Mum never talks about what happened later in the story- we've only ever discussed it between ourselves the one time. I don't know whether she's genuinely forgotten now, or just chooses to pretend it never happened.
Things changed for the worse when I started school.
It was a sunny afternoon and I remember I was wearing my patent school shoes- the kind that were super fashionable during the late 80s; they had a key in the heel and the adverts made out like they were magic shoes. All the girls wanted them and I had been lucky enough to get a pair. Shiny, black, with a Velcro fastening.
I remember the shoes because while I was sitting on the kitchen chair half-listening to my mum, I was staring at them. And I was staring at them because I was trying to pretend to my mum that he wasn't there. Because she'd asked me about him, you see. For the first time, she'd sat me down and asked me about him, properly. And then she got angry.
Looking back, I suppose she was spooked.
"Chloe, we need to have a little chat," she'd said, laying out a plate of chocolate biscuits. "Why?" I said. "Well..." she played with her necklace absentmindedly, "Because I was hoping that you would make some nice new friends now that you're at school, but you haven't talked to me about anyone in your class. Do you...have you made any special friends?" I shook my head, cramming a biscuit into my mouth. He was standing next to me, of course. He always was, back then.
"Don't you want to make friends, sweetie? To go to birthday parties with the other boys and girls, or have someone over for dinner and to watch tv?"
"I've got a friend," I mumbled, spraying crumbs.
Mum sighed. "Chloe, baby, we've talked about this before. You know that he's a pretend friend, don't you?"
"No, he's not!" I protested, insulted on his behalf. "Albert is real! I asked him if he was 'maginry after you said it and he said no, he's not 'maginry, he's a ghost!"
My mum went quiet. (Later she told me that my comment had really taken her by surprise. She had been especially careful to make sure that I had never been exposed to anything to do with death or violence or the paranormal on tv or in conversation, as she had some weird idea that it was damaging to a child's psyche.)
After a few moments she composed herself. "What do you mean, a ghost?" she asked. I helped myself to another biscuit.
"Dunno." I said. I was just repeating what I'd been told. "He's Albert The Ghost."
Like it was his surname. Remember, I was five. When you're five you take everything at face value.
"Sweetie," mum wheedled, "you know, you've never really told me much about Albert. All I know is that he's a boy and that he's your very best friend.What does he look like? Where did he come from?"
I went on to describe, as best my five-year-old vocabulary would allow, a pale skinned waif in ill-fitting clothes; a dirty grey shirt with wide sleeves, trousers that fit just below the knee, and a cap. He had dark blonde hair that hung down just below his ears like it was badly in need of a cut, and dark eyes deep set into his face. His skin seemed tinged with yellow, and he rarely smiled.
He'd lived in our house all his life.
Naturally, this freaked my mum the hell out. She lost it and started yelling at me that I had to stop playing with him and make some real friends immediately.
If I didn't, then I'd be punished. No TV, no sweets, bedtime straight after dinner.
In other words, a childhood devoid of any joy. At the time, I was distraught and I sobbed and pleaded for a good ten minutes before being sent to my room.
Looking back, I know that mum was just worried. It must be terrifying to realise that your only child is either seeing dead people or going nuts. She just didn't know how to handle it.
Problem was, when she upset me and forced me to start ignoring Albert, he didn't like it.
At first it was only tiny things that could have easily been blamed on absent-mindedness (or a mischievous five-year-old, as was more often where blame was placed.) Keys going missing and then reappearing in strange places. Biscuits, cakes and sweets disappearing from the cupboard, and the wrappers strewn around the house.
Carefully ironed and folded laundry was scattered ike confetti shortly after being placed in the basket.
I would be tried and found guilty for these crimes I hadn't committed, and sentenced to time in my room without any entertainment. My mum thought I was acting out, so she removed my toys and books.
Albert would try to get my attention, but I was terrified of getting into more trouble, so I would lie in bed with the covers pulled over my head and try to ignore him as he called my name or tugged at the sheets to uncover me.
When he couldn't get me to acknowledge him, the tapping started. Just light tapping sounds in the playroom and my bedroom, not too loud at first, just faintly irritating; but at night they would build to a crescendo, ending with a deafening 'boom!' that would inevitably wake the household. "What the hell are you doing in there?!" mum would shout, slamming my door open, "it's three in the morning!" No amount of bleary-eyed protests could convince her of my innocence.
After it happened for the fourth night in a row, she lost her temper, dragged me out of bed and spanked me. After she went back to bed, I lay in the darkness, my behind burning with the imprint of her palm, and my pillow soaked with tears. Nothing hurts a child more than an injustice, and the pain of being falsely accused hurt more than a thousand beatings. He came to me, then, I suppose to try and comfort me, but I was furious. "Go away!" I hissed, trying to keep my voice down and avoid another smack, "This is your fault! Why do you have to be so naughty?"
"I'll stop being naughty if you play with me again," he said, wiping a dirty hand across his face. "No." I said petulantly, "You're horrible. I don't want to play with you ever again!"
He looked at me then, unblinking. "I'm. Your. Best. Friend." he said, each word through gritted teeth.
"No, you're not!" I cried, "You're bad, Albert The Ghost, and I hate you!"
I pulled my covers over my head, expecting him to fight me and pull the covers like usual. Only this time, he didn't. This time, he went away.
For a few days, things were back to normal. I really thought Albert had given up on me and gone to find another friend. I missed him, of course, in spite of all the problems, but I'd finally started making friends at school, so that softened the blow.
I even had one girl, Annie, over for a sleepover. She brought me a little teddy bear as a token of friendship, and I was so pleased to have a new best friend, one who would play Barbies with me and liked the same music that I did. I put the bear on my pillow when we went to bed, but in the morning I couldn't find it. Mum bundled us off to school, saying that the teddy had probably just rolled under the bed and we'd look for it later. "I'm sure it'll turn up," she said.
And she was right. It did. It turned up, blazing, in the middle of my bed not long after I got home from school. That was just the first of the fires. They'd break out in random places around the house. Most often it would be a piece of mum's clothing that was burnt; set alight and left in the middle of the floor. Mum had to replace most of her favourite clothes, plus the living room carpet.
But even that didn't convince her that something strange was going on. Instead, I was referred to a child psychiatrist to deal with my supposed pyromania.
It took far too long for her to accept that I might actually have been telling the truth all along.
She had just put me in solitary confinement for the umpteenth time and was heading back downstairs to clean up the bag of flour that she believed I'd emptied all over the new living room carpet. About three steps down, she says she thought she saw something moving out of the corner of her eye. She whipped round to look, to reassure herself that it was just her imagination, her eyes playing tricks. And that's when she was pushed.
That's how she recounted the story to me, the one and only time we talked about those couple of months, years later and miles away from the home of my childhood. "It felt like hands on my lower back," she said, "like someone pushed me."
Luckily she was able to grab hold of the banister as she fell, and only sustained a few bruises. Our house was Victorian and the stairs were very steep, so if she had fallen all the way she would likely have been quite badly hurt.
"The worst thing," she told me, "was that as I fell, I could have sworn I heard a little boy laughing."
The decision was made there and then to sell up and move away, and things have been reassuringly normal and uneventful ever since.
I'm 22 now, and at University in a town a few hours from home. Everything's been great. I've been living in the Halls of Residence with 8 other people and we all get along really well. Everyone's super normal and our lives are pretty run-of-the-mill. The weirdest thing that's happened here was some idiot playing Knock-Knock-Run at 3am during our exam week, Hardly fodder for Most Haunted.
Yeah, everything was going really well, and I'd all but forgotten about my spooky childhood.
Until the other night, that is.
I'd gone out on the town with some of the girls from my course, to celebrate the end of exam week. We'd had a really good time, drunk lots of cheap shots, danced til our feet ached so much that we had to take off our high heels; flirted, laughed. So much fun.
We were waiting at the taxi rank, exhausted but happy, when a man about the same age as my mum approached me. He was tall and wiry, with a five o'clock shadow and unkempt hair. I thought at first he was trying to hit on me, and gave him the brush-off, but when I turned my back on him he grabbed my arm, his brow furrowed, his voice an urgent whisper.
"Please! I need to tell you something!"
Within seconds my friends were shouting and trying to pull us apart, but he held on for just long enough to quickly blurt out what he wanted to say. Then he was gone, striding off into the night while my friends shouted abuse after him. I just stared at his retreating form in shocked silence, as the taxi driver got out to check if we were all ok.
I haven't seen that man since, though I've kept any eye out for him everywhere I've gone- I need to talk to him, you see. I need more information...answers, reassurance, something; because right now all I can think about is what he said.
"Your best friend, the blonde boy, he's looking for you. He's been searching for a long time, and he's finally getting closer. I can see him, he's running up and down a corridor with lots of identical doors, and he's knocking on each in turn. For God's sake, don't let him find you!"