CROSS-GENERATION IMAGINARY FRIEND
Christi Smith 5/13/20
. What I’m about to tell you is a personal story involving my family and I that has been really difficult for me to process in the last month. I can’t make any sense of it and so after all the paranoia this has caused me I am writing it out in hopes that it will ease my mind a little more so here we are.
. For context, this story starts about thirty years ago. I lived with my mom, dad, and two sisters. My first sister, Lindsey, was two year older than me, while my youngest sister, Amanda was about seven years younger. We lived in a small house in a small town out in the nowhere of Oklahoma. The town cemetery was around the corner from our house so we constantly joked around as if the ghosts came to our house every night when they were bored. The jokes had always been in good fun though and were never serious. However, I have reason to now believe my family has a connection to one of these ghosts named Patrick.
. This Patrick didn’t actually fit the traditional meaning of the word friend. You see, Patrick was an imaginary friend of my little sister Amanda, and had been an imaginary friend of hers since as long as I can remember her being able to talk. She brought him up constantly until she was six, but even past that age would still never admit to him being imaginary and would tell you about him as if he was a real person. Even in her twenties I remember bringing it up and she still would deny that it was fake.
. We originally wrote it off as normal, as it’s healthy for a child to have an imaginary friend especially at her age, along with the fact that in our small town there was virtually no one to hang out in her age range. It got a little excessive though and Patrick started to cause problems for our family. Just to name a few, it was impossible to get my little sister to go to sleep because she insisted on staying awake since, in her own words, “Patrick can only come play whenever it’s dark outside,” which naturally seemed really creepy to my family but still we didn’t overthink it as it was an imaginary friend.
. I still remember the exact night that my sister’s “friendship” with Patrick started to freak me out a lot more than it ever had in the past. It was 1990, meaning I was 13 and Amanda was 6. It was three in the morning and so I was naturally asleep until Amanda walked into my room. She repeated my name until I woke up and I simply told her to go to our parent’s room if she had a bad dream. She denied that she had a bad dream.
. “Come to my room. Patrick said he’s ready to meet you,” she said.
. I told her that I didn’t want to meet her imaginary friend and she started crying. I didn’t know why that upset her so much, but in fear of being yelled at by my parents I tried to take it back immediately so I wouldn’t be “charged with making my little sister cry.” I halfheartedly told her that I was sorry I called her friend imaginary but that I still did not want to get out of bed. It was then I realized my comment wasn’t why she was upset.
. “Patrick said he needs to meet you tonight. He’ll be mad at me if he doesn’t meet you. Patrick really scares me when he’s mad,” Amanda had told me through her sobs.
. That freaked me out more than ever and I told her to cut it out with this imaginary friend game as it was freaking me out. She grabbed me and kept trying to pull me out of bed to her room but I wasn’t having it. I turned on the lights and woke up my parents, and told them Amanda was scaring me.
. From then on my parents and I had enough of Patrick and made a rule that Patrick was not to be spoken of again as it was just making life difficult. Amanda refused to sleep in her room for the next few weeks but eventually went back and broke the rules, talking about how she was friends with Patrick again to my annoyance, until eventually she would grow out of it.
. Years went by, I grew up to get married, as well as Lindsey did. About six years ago next month, Amanda was killed in a car accident as she fell asleep on the way to her part time job. It was incredibly tragic and hurt our entire family. Around the same time, my older sister Lindsey and her husband moved into our old house to help with our parents who were going through an incredibly rough time. In these six years they have ended up with two children, Braxton and Kate. Still living at my parent’s house, Braxton, who is five right now, took the room that Amanda once had as a kid.
. I still keep in touch with Lindsey so I still know the details of what’s going on in her life, and I can tell you she is very paranoid. One day not unlike any other, she got up to make lunch for our parents, and came to notice all the knives in her drawer disappeared. The kids were at school so she went searching around the house and found all of them under Braxton’s pillow in the same room. It’s very strange especially knowing that my nephew Braxton is a sweet kid.
. When she asked Braxton why on Earth he had all their knives hidden under his pillow he told her, “I need to protect Kate and I from the boy who comes to my room at night.”
. When Lindsey was describing this conversation to me, she really emphasized and nailed down the fact how nervous she was to ask what the name of the boy was. She really did not want to have any hints to this imaginary friend being anything more than that, our late sister’s imaginary friend that we thought we would never have to hear about after the 90s. To make things even weirder, Braxton had never even heard of these imaginary friend stories, Amanda had passed on before Braxton was even born. Lindsey asked her son if he by any chance, knew the name of this boy that visits their house.
. “Patrick.”
. Edit: My parents, sister, along with her husband and kids still live in the house. Arrangements were made however, and Braxton and Kate now share a room while his old room is off limits. This has helped ease our minds and he has not brought up any “Patrick encounters” since.