The Imaginary Friend

Informant: Male/19/Portuguese Ancestry

Location: Hilo, Big Island

The beginning of this story takes place about six months before I was even born. My parents lived in a small house in a small neighborhood next to a small cemetery. Someone wanted to turn the small neighborhood into a big neighborhood, and so they decided to bulldoze over the cemetery to make way for more houses. The man responsible for the bulldozing, dies of no apparent reason.

And now flash forward about five years.

Most children grew up with a beloved imaginary friend. Someone special, that only they could see. I was no different, or so my parents thought.

First it began with talking to people who weren't there. My parents would hear me having conversations with people in my room. They would take a peek into my room only to discover that I was alone. At first it was cute, their baby boy had an imaginary friend.

Then it escalated to feeding people who weren't there. This quickly turned from cute to annoying as the wasted food began to pile up. My parents would ask me why I was taking extra plates of food to my room. "To feed my friends," I would reply. When my parents would prevent me from taking extra plates of food, I would share my food and hold my spoon up to feed my friends.

Then it went even further with sleepwalking. And it wasn't just any kind of sleepwalking, I'd be sleepwalking and holding hands with people that no one else could see. Every night I would get up and start walking with my hand raised up as if someone taller than me was holding it. I would walk from my bed all the way to the front door until I would bump into it and then wake up. This quickly went from minor annoyance to scaring my parents.

Then everything just stopped. I no longer talked to people. I stopped feeding my food to people who weren't there. And my sleepwalking had ceased. Around the time that all of this stopped, the discovery was made that the bodies in the cemetery that had been bulldozed, were not removed, they were still under the house that had been built over it.

I'm not quite sure what happened to the bodies, I would like to think that they were removed and put into some place they could rest peacefully. However, I do know that creepy things are still lurking in the neighborhood. Old neighbors speak of loud noises coming from an old empty house that was next door to mines. A house that is constantly off and on the market. As soon as it's sold, it seems that it's being sold within a matter of months. That same house will open its windows while you walk past, even though no one is living in it.There's even rumors of a telephone pole that bleeds (not sure how serious one should take that, I'm sure it's just tar or some other dark substance that oozes, yet some people actually feel that it is an ominous sign that warns them that something bad is going to happen).

Now, I live in much quieter neighborhood that has no history of cemeteries, ghosts, or bleeding telephone poles.