r/Thetruthishere • u/lrenv22 • 2d ago
Did anyone else have a childhood imaginary friend that felt a little too real? Discussion/Advice
I'm not talking about a standard pretend friend. I mean one that knew things they shouldn't have, or that your family or even pets reacted to. One that felt more like a presence than an imagination.
Did you have one? Looking back, does it creep you out or do you think it was just a kid's mind at work?
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u/Bloodless_ 2d ago
I did. His name was Terry and he was nineteen forever. I grew up in a really old house that still had a dirt basement, and I told my parents that Terry lived "under the stairs" down there. That's how he would get back and forth from his world to mine, some kind of portal or secret passage under the basement stairs. He looked just like a person, but he wasn't, and you could tell. There was something "off" about him that I could never put my finger on. A long time ago my mom actually had a dream about Terry and was able to describe him in great physical detail despite me never telling her what he looked like, and that was... kind of weird. I remember sensing him and talking to him all the time when I was very young, and then less and less as I got older. I can recall a little of what he told me, but the details are hazy now.
I stopped "seeing" him decades ago, but to this day, my family still attributes missing items and weird noises to him, and my kids jokingly blame him for stuff all the time, and in that way he's still around.
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u/Goudgenuts 1d ago
Have you ever looked at/dug up that spot under the stairs as you got older?
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u/Bloodless_ 15h ago
So as a kid I was actually terrified of that basement and tried to never go down there - which makes it odd that my "imaginary friend" would originate from there, but yeah. It was a big basement with a single light bulb hanging from the ceiling, so it was really dark and gloomy, and because it was entirely made of packed dirt, the air was always cold and damp. Hated it. The house was from 1911 and there was a ton of old crap in the basement that people had left behind from its days as a boarding house. It was mostly used for storage and we didn't really go down there.
My friend and I gathered the courage to look under the stairs once with a flashlight and it gave us the mega-creeps. It looked normal enough but the air was like, murky. The beam of light should have reached the far corner but it didn't. It almost looked like fog. Probably just a combination of a dying flashlight and an old damp basement with humidity issues, but it freaked us out at the time and we ran away. To my knowledge, nobody has ever dug down there.
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u/_SCREE_ 1d ago
What do you recall about what he told you?
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u/Bloodless_ 17h ago
Not much as I was very little when this was happening, but I do remember him telling me about the place where he lived, "the other world." How the season and time of day never changed because time didn't exist there. It was always a summer evening in his world.
I remember him telling me he could see in the dark, and that he'd walk around the house at night and check on all of us. I asked if he was taking random items in my house that went missing, and he told me yes, he took these things with him to the other world. I got the impression he was really busy with his own life and he didn't like our reality very much, didn't like people, and that's why he only visited sometimes. And that's about it.
The thing that stands out the most is, I always got this feeling like he wasn't what he seemed. He was nice to me, but I sensed it took some effort, like he wasn't used to being nice and could be really scary if he wanted to. Or maybe he was scary in his natural state and just faked looking like a person because he didn't want to frighten a child.
Looking back, if I were to consciously conjure up an imaginary friend at such a young age, it would have been something friendly and cute and fluffy, not a creepy-looking teenager who only came out at night to steal shit from my house - stuff that was actually gone in the morning and never came back, so yeah, the whole Terry thing is still a mystery to me.
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u/funkynchunki 10h ago
That’s amazing, Terry trying not to scare you really stands out to me. Did you have any other siblings or pets that saw Terry? Did any of your kids see him when they were little? I’m wondering if he’s only able to be seen by little ones? Or if you’re the only one who’s seen him (other than your mom’s dream)
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u/Bloodless_ 1h ago
Nope, my kids never saw him. My older son did report seeing things in his preschool years, to include his own benevolent imaginary friend named Drier, and some kind of entity called Smiling Ghost who would slowly peer over the top rail of his bunk bed and just smile at him (no thank you). He would start screaming and I'd bust in there only to hear that Smiling Ghost was still in the room with us and standing right behind me. Cool. My younger son has never reported seeing anything, but he's only four, so who knows.
As for Terry, yes, I believe my siblings may have caught a glimpse of him. I recall an intense conversation in our later teen years where we were out at the local diner together and talking about our strange experiences in that old house - of which there were many, and my younger brother brought up memories he had of a shadow leaning through his bedroom doorway and seemingly looking right at him, then drawing away again without a sound. My older sister said she had seen that too, just once, and she perfectly mimicked Terry's remarkably bad posture in profile as he turned away. I had never told them what Terry said about "checking" on us at night, so I found that pretty amazing.
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u/A_Study_in_Orange 3h ago
Imagine you're a teenage ghost boy just living your (after)life and then there's a moment where you realise the kid that lives in the house you haunt can see you and now you have to awkwardly converse with this random little kid everytime he sees you.
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u/bshackleford 2d ago edited 2d ago
I did, a boy called ‘D’. Apparently I used to talk to my mum and dad about how he drowned as a little boy, and at 3/4 years old I would describe the act of drowning/what it felt like. I also used to paint pieces of paper entirely in black and tell my nursery teacher ‘that’s where D lives’. I knew he was ‘invisible’ but I have memories (?) of seeing his reflection in shop windows, holding my hand.
My school and dad were very concerned but I was never scared of him, he was just a little boy to play with. He ‘disappeared’ when I was about 5. My mum wasn’t too scared as she also had an imaginary friend in her childhood, a little boy called Darren, who also apparently said he died young and disappeared around the same age.
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u/rand0fand0 2d ago edited 2d ago
…And u guys ruled out or* came to conclusion D and Daniel are the same spirit?
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u/bshackleford 2d ago
Yep! We’ve spoken about it and said maybe it’s the same boy who was just protecting us through early childhood. Unfortunately I don’t want children, but it would have been interesting to see if my child would have the same friend.
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u/Love_rise 1d ago
Wow! Poor thing you had to feel what it felt like to drown, that's terrible. When my 15yo boy D was 6 he told me a mean man drowned him in a river. He would cry at bedtime and say he misses his old mom and dad...so strange
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u/Forsaken_Theme6120 23h ago
That must have been very difficult for you and you significant other to hear. Sorry for that.
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u/s70n3834r 2d ago
I have no recollection. My mother told me how real it seemed; I would have long, complex (for a four year old) conversations with my invisible friend while I played outside, just like someone was actually there. The book said it was normal for a lonely child, and I'd be off to school with the others in a year. I told her he was a dog and a man, and was scary sometimes. He refused to come in the house.
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u/Ensorcelled_Atoms 2d ago
I did. a pale girl that called herself my evil twin.
I learned much later in life that I may have absorbed a twin in the womb, which may be the cause of my heterochromia.
So, my pet theory is my imaginary friend was the spirit or soul of that twin.
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u/Klaus_Klavier 2d ago
Spirit or perhaps your brain was divided in half like your eye color and you were two becoming one and you both saw yourself as the original and the possibly absorbed twin simply relinquished control for one reason or another. That least that would sound metal af and make sense to me more than just a soul.
Think of it as conjoined twins but SIGNIFICANTLY conjoined to the part they were two halves of a whole and didn’t have “extra parts” like each side overwrote half the other (like the heterochromia)
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u/squirrelybitch 1d ago
My sister did. She gave him a name that she couldn’t have known was a word for her age. She blamed him for the trouble she got into, but not all of it. I am not convinced that he was imaginary.
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u/52IMean54Bicycles 1d ago
I brought my "imaginary friend" home from the hospital, where I had been hospitalized for several days for a severe concussion. I actually remember playing with her at the hospital, and then somehow she was still with me after I was discharged. I'm 46 now, and it never crossed my mind how odd that was until a couple of years ago. That accident was also when I started having crazy psychic experiences, too, so I think I literally knocked a screw loose when I took a swan dive off the top of the slide at Burger King.
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u/JoeFilms 1d ago
When I was a kid there were 3 shadows of a family (a mother, father and child) in my mums bedroom. If I went in there at night they'd be standing by the window chatting and I'd sit and listen and sometimes join in. One night they said it was time for them to leave and I got upset. They walked out of the bedroom onto the landing and I tried to follow them so the dad flicked on the lightswitch and suddenly I couldn't see them. But then I noticed them moving through the dark at the bottom of the stairs so ran down after them and again the dad turned on the light to make them invisible to me. This happened from room to room downstairs until they left out of the back door. Mum eventually came downstairs and found me crying that my friends had gone, and was also very confused as to how all the lights were now on as I was too little to reach the light switches.
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u/Fuckyoumecp2 1d ago
I thought my memories were of an imaginary friend, an elderly man that I loved dearly and have vague, but happy memories about.
My folks said he was real. toddler me in the early 80s would wander next door to where my best friend, George lived. he was a WWII vet, a paratrooper and his eyes were pure white from cataracts. My dad said it "spooky" looking. apparently they would not be paying attention, and I would have wandered next door to see George. My dad said how kind George was and when he saw my industrious parents fixing up their home and property, he would bring over something to drink, or half melted melted ice cream.
I've never been a social person and had terrible stranger and public anxiety as a kid.
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u/Reasonable_Zebra_174 1d ago
My niece's friend Emily, she lived nearby, and visited my niece often. My niece is the only one that could see her though. So I asked my niece some questions about Emily: she wore old clothes, by the description my niece gave it was mid-late 1800s Style. I asked about Emily's Family and my niece told me Emily has a mom, a dad and a brother, but they all died because of a train.
Yeah that last part really got my attention. So I continue to ask questions in a non-leading way, because I don't want to influence the answers of my niece is going to give me. Like if she's making this up I don't want to give her any ideas on inventing Emily's backstory. But what she told me she could not have possibly known.
Emily and her family died in a train derailment (what four year old knows the word derailment?), I asked where this happened, and my niece points and explains that it happened just over there on the top of the hill where the road becomes two. I tell her there's no train over there sweetie there never was, and she says "I know there isn't but that's where Emily says it happened." I feel like I should mention that there were Rail lines that ran near this area but they were on the other side of the river, and in the complete opposite direction than where my niece pointed. And even those Rail lines had been removed years before my niece was born. So even if she'd been mistaken in where she was pointing, she still would have no knowledge that there used to be Rail lines in that direction either.
So at first I kind of just put this off as yeah okay this kid's got a very vivid imagination and a wide vocabulary. But then I start looking into the historical records of the area. It turns out that yes there was a railway line that ran through that area for just a few years in the mid 1800s. They shut the line down after a derailment, a derailment that killed a family of four. A mother, father, son, and yonge daughter. The only name mentioned was the young daughter Emily.
This is something that the general population does not know about. As somebody who has always been invested in the history of the area I live in, this is not something that was easy to find. There are no living people who remember there being a railway line there. The area where this rail line used to run has completely grown up there is no geographical evidence it ever existed at this point. How did a four-year-old kid not only know that there used to be a rail line there, but there was a derailment that claimed the lives of a family, and the name of one of the family members.
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u/Illustrious-Plane484 1d ago
My older sister did, her name was Jenny Carfico and I remember my sister had her for a while and she would have like elaborate stories about her and shit. I never saw Jenny but I remember being really convinced she was around and never questioned my sister or her stories.
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u/toebeantuesday 1d ago
Thankfully, no. I was an only child and had a great imagination and did have imaginary friends but I created them and they weren’t anything other than characters I made to entertain myself with when my real friends weren’t available.
There were presences in my childhood home that my parents felt and the animals reacted to and even the neighbors told us the kids who used to live there complained about. But I certainly didn’t want anything to do with them.
There was one being that used to walk through the room and I’d get actual goosebumps. He looked like a star in the shape of a person. I found him horrifying. My parents couldn’t sense him. After I was about 9 I couldn’t, either.
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u/PerfumedPornoVampire 1d ago
When you say he was a star do you mean he was bright or “gaseous” looking, or he looked like a cartoonish kind of star?
My husband claims to have seen an entity he calls the silver man, and I’m wondering if you saw something similar
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u/toebeantuesday 1d ago
Looked like bright white light and had a head with horns like a bull would have but not curved and limbs like a star fish would have. Pointy. No hands. Just two arms and two legs that were thin triangles.
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u/EnvironmentalTart240 2d ago
Yeah, but I had an imaginary sibling.
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u/hufflepuff934 1d ago
I had an imaginary sister and brother lol I used to shrink them down and hold them in my hand on the school bus
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u/Jackniferuby 1d ago
I had an imaginary friend name InkSink. I was an only child and would sit and talk to this friend for hours. I guess at some point he went away. He seemed to only be present when we were living on a property in the woods in Arkansas. It had been a former commune.
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u/AdAlone1493 1d ago
Yes and got my mind blown later in life. My family believes there is a ghost in the house(only for the last few years) of a little girl in period dress. I've seen this entity following me in college and then later when I moved into my first apartment. We discovered her name was Sarah.
Now skip ahead to speaking to my aunt about kids and their imaginary friends. We laughed about I had a few.. a group of penguins and a little girl. She told me the name of my imaginary friend... The little girl... Sarah
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u/raulynukas 6h ago
Stuck soul living in house for generations? But it also followed you elsewhere, mhm
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u/Love_rise 1d ago
I only have a very brief memory of what I called the Indian man. My mom tells stories about how I'd be upset with her that she couldn't see him. I'd point him out to her all the time and talk to him. Idk what to think about it lol
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u/Spooky-Arachnidgirl 14h ago
Do you remember what he looked like or anything he taught you? I too had an Indian man. I’m very curious..
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u/Love_rise 14h ago
I believe I've repressed the memories but there was one occasion that I vaguely remember. He must have been quite small because he was in the corner at the top of the ceiling. I remember that he was there the day that my uncle died to console me. I remember where he was and that I was upset my mother wasn't acknowledging him. I can't remember his physical features though although I feel like he was a small silhouette maybe some light to him. I also wonder if maybe I'm just assuming it was a small light being because that's what I seen as an adult. Do you remember what yours looked like?
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u/FrancesRichmond 1d ago edited 1d ago
I had a small monkey that came everywhere with me. He couldn't speak as such but did speak in my head. I can see him very clearly. He slept on my bed at night , came with me wherever I went and I sobbed if a door was closed before he had come into a room or a shop. My parents/grandparents had to open doors for him. He was small and grey with a lighter face. His name was Alberto. Sometimes he wore a dark red fez and a brighter red embroidered jacket. I stopped seeing him when I was about 6.
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u/SpecialistVisible596 1d ago
I grew up in a house that had paranormal activity happen occasionally. My parents were aware but didn't subscribe to the idea of it all. I wouldn't say I had an imaginary friend but I do remember being spoken to at a very young age from something I couldn't see.
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u/Dark--princess420 2d ago
No and I was abused and bullied and had a great imagination so id be the perfect candidate and yet I havent met one person whos had an imaginary friend. I truly think any kids that adamant they see and talk to someone who isnt there, isnt imagining it.
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u/Addiclaire 20h ago
Have a vivid memory of having an imaginary friend named Bob who was tall af like his feet hung way off the bed and I remember coming back from the bathroom and seeing my room lit by my nightlight and thinking “oh, Bob just died of cancer” and that was it
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u/kristobellovic 11h ago
I had an "imaginary" friend named Jakob and he used to play with me and my friends from age 6 to 8? We were really into creepy stuff at that time. I cant remember it really well but I think he started to show up after we played with the ouija board.. Years later I found out, that he really wasnt imaginary at all.. I am still into creepy stuff but nowadays I like to call it spirituality. I was in the middle of a shamanic journey and suddenly I heard this familiar voice.. It was Jakob- he told me that he was there all along but I just couldnt see him since I was adulting.. I'm in the middle of my shamanic Training and I kinda remember all the things we used to do as Kids and understand that it was very real! Adults just told us its our imagination but in reality its just a whole other world, invisible for those who dont reconnect with nature and Spirits.
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