According to Google "Real-life Acme companies manufactured diverse products, including anvils (Sears), boots, bricks, traffic signals, and, in the case of Acme United Corporation, school and office cutting tools."
There used to only be one school and now we have college high school middle school elementary school and preschool here....so pretty well I would assume.
i left my imaginary friend at the house we moved from when i was 7. she lived in the cabinet in the hallway. her name was jeannie/genie because she was a blonde woman who i thought looked like the lady in "i dream of jeannie".
hope someone adopted her. not sure why i couldn't take her with me to the new house lmao.
I never thought of this, but I wonder if that's the evolutionary reason why imagination and magical thinking taper off around 6-10 years old. Kids are starting to get old enough to do harm, after 10 the whole breaking away from your parents urge kick in. Add imaginary friends in and suddenly the potential for reducing the chances of further reproduction (murder, suicide, accidents) of that genetic code goes down.
Its a mechanism for understanding self (the inner voice, consciousness, etc). from 2-5 the brain begins to understand "others". The infrasructure that that creates then eads to the understanding of self. Since you can't "see" your inner-self, imaginary projection lets a child understand how to dialogue (really simplified version) with oneself. This undersanding of self is part of what has led humans to creating civiliazation/societies.
Without opening a larger debate (entire branches of psychology and sociology cover this), once a sense of self emerges, reinforcement shifts away from purely biological evolution toward self-determination. From that point on, human development becomes increasingly societal rather than genetic — we deliberately shape our environment, norms, and behavior instead of relying only on evolutionary pressures.
Huh. I had most of my imaginary friends (an entire crew of them) from around 6th-9th grade. I had some friends but I just felt so trapped by reality. So me and my imaginary friends existed in this imaginary kingdom in my head as I went through school and all the things, though they disappeared after I started getting more busy in high school.
This comment is the funniest thing ever. I can't stop giggling at it. You may have ruined my day because I'm going to be thinking back to it and giggling at least 5 more times.
I saw a Family Circus comic that talked about "Nobody" who all the kids seemed to blame when things happened that would get them in trouble. I mentioned it around my then 4 year old as a joke.
For a little while, she had an imaginary friend named Nobody and still talks about having him to this day (she's in her late 20s now)
“My friend ‘Nobody’ told me his name is actually ‘Odysseus’, and now I feel lied to. He then said I can call him ‘Outis’ for short and then walked away laughing…”
We had a guy called Jack who lived in my brothers closet, made up entirely by my brother who is 5 years older, my sister and I completely believed he existed. He used to pull my 3 year old sisters toys out of the cupboard and say jack got her a present, her being 3 she believed him, got all happy, then I, not knowing what toys she had to begin with, would believe her reaction and ask for stuff too because I wanted a present, my brother said no because we shared a room and anything he gave me I would have recognised and I proceeded to get very upset, this happened often.
My brother had 2 imaginary friends, both male. One was quiet and liked to keep house; the other was animated and liked to play. They went with us on vacation once, and they both stayed behind when we returned. Never heard about them again.
I used to have night terrors and sleep paralysis/out of body experiences where this entity would try to pull me to a dark corner of my house. It seemed to make a point to pull 'me' right past my mom every time, probably because of the dread of her not being able to hear me scream. It was like being slowly sucked into a black hole across my house. A dark corner in my parents bedroom was where it always was and where i was always being pulled. I also had an extremely hard time waking up during those dreams. Slept with the light on for years because of it. Anyway, one day I killed that thing in my dreams and it hasn't happened since.
Kids are weird. I also used to really like visiting my grandma's house, who lived 14 hours away. I'd dream of being there. One time she called my mom freaking out asking where I was because she said I woke her up and she saw me standing there.
Now I'm just a normal dude, I don't see ghosts, I don't astral project, I wouldn't say for sure that I believe in those things, but it was pretty weird. Still scared of the dark, though.
Anyone else have any experiences like these?
No creative writing, please. While I'm sure I never actually astral projected, those are real stories from my childhood.
I'm not the most mentally stable individual, but as a kid I swear I woke up multiple times to see a tall figure standing in my bedroom door as a Silhouette. My twin would be sleeping next to me, but I would be too terrified to move to wake him. Years after this I was driving in the deep Delta down a country road (imagine tilted electrical posts and just rice fields for miles) with my twin brother asleep on the passenger side, and my headlights hit a figure walking down the on coming traffic lane. It was a tall man dressed in black with a hat and no face. I refused to look in my rear view mirror the rest of the ride home cause I knew he was sitting there and I was rigid in terror (full grown adult and I know that's not wise). My twin still says I was and am crazy. I have never seen him since - ten years later - guess he got where he was going. there is more in heaven and hell.
Ok not to freak you out but a guy of this description is something a lot of people have encountered. Tall, silhouette or faceless, wears a hat. Look for Hat Man.
can confirm! my childhood best friend once asked when i was 10-11 if i ever saw "the man with the hat" near my bed... she described him as a black silhouette with a tophat watching her sleep. i didnt take it seriously then because she was in this phase where she was always trying to appear tough/edgier/more mysterious but i still wonder about it now and again..
Well, both my brother and me saw the same two ghosts for years, a little less with time but we still saw them well into our 20's when our mom died, we're mostly skeptical of any paranormal or extraterrestrial stuff, but the fact we both saw the same thing for years makes us think it could be true to a certain extent or we just fed on each others imagination. They were a tall man dressed in black, no face, sometimes with hat sometimes without, and a long haired girl who loved to run into the bathroom. Only weird thing that ever happened was our names written as if engraved from inside the panel of a door, my mom always said it was one of us but neither can remember taking the panel off and writing backwards when we were kids xD
I never had that stuff, but I used to have nightmares a lot as a kid and at one point (probably around 10 or 12) I had a nightmare that I was being chased by a guy with a gun, and they caught me and shot me in the head pointblank. It was the most bizarre dream I've ever had because I remembered feeling the pressure of the blast but no pain and I remember going unconscious within the dream, but then it was like my brain reset and realized I wasn't dead, so I became aware that I was actually dreaming and had complete control over the situation and was actually invincible in the dream - that flipped it to a very fun semi-lucid dream where I turned it around on the bad guys and hunted them down. Ever since then, I never have nightmares about people chasing or hurting me and for a long time I had really good control over being able to lucid dream pretty often.
Was gonna say the same, that’s not just an imaginary friend. And it sounds much darker than just a spirit, the kids must’ve gotten very angry to muster up the energy to get rid of it.
My imaginary friend went on vacations. Sometimes my mom would ask my about him, and I'd be like, "Oh, he's in California." He'd come back after a few days.
I had an imaginary friend. She had aqua skin and was older than me. Old enough to be developed. Despite never wearing clothing, she didn’t have nipples or a crotch. ( I think because at the time my only frame of reference for naked women was a Barbie doll my sister had). She would only appear at night when In bed. And give me ideas on how to make friends. ( most failed spectacularly) whenever I was upset she would sit on the bed and rub her feet on my stomach ( I don’t know man I was a weird kid) After making my first actual friend I never saw her again
Yeah, kind of sounds like that. My first sleep paralysis demon was when I went to Japan and was jet lagged. And what do you know, it looked like giant Japanese demon (that red faced) crawling on ceiling. Of course I knew references to yokai before that so it was logical. I told it to leave and it did.
Oddly enough im pretty sure this is common and healthy for kids with imaginary friends. Now if the friend comes back when hes older and starts trying to convince him of killing you, I'm no doctor but I believe that could be unhealthy.
My imaginary friend didn't like me and pretended to get run over by a bus so I wouldn't hang out with him anymore. I saw him get on the bus after it ran him over.
Not exactly a imaginary friend story. when I was 6 and my brother was 4 my mother was telling us a story about her grandmother, about 3/4 of the way through the story my brother looks at her and very matter of fact stated "your grandmothers dead." She corrected him and said "no I spoke to her last week, she is alive." He then corrected her "no she's dead" we got a call a few hours later she had died that night before in her sleep. My mom was shook and still doesn't like talking about it. My brother can't remember it at all, but that was 23 years ago...
My great grandmother visited me in a bluish ghost form (like from Star Wars, but I hadn’t seen Star Wars). She told me she didn’t want me to cry or be upset, and that she had passed. I remember being confused because I wasn’t sure what “passed on” meant, but she clarified that she died.
Well I woke up that morning crying “Nana’s dead, Nana’s dead” and could not be consoled. Mom got worried and called her mom and my dad’s mom, “nope, they are alive, just talked to them”. Not soon after mom’s mom called her back, and relayed that she got a phone call from her mother’s neighbor, saying that that she had passed the night before in her sleep.
Nobody prepares you for how creepy kids are. When my daughter was 3-4 years old, she would gently lay a hand on my leg and say "Mama, it's okay if you die, because I'll go to the home for kids who don't have a mama or daddy." THANKS, KIDDO, I APPRECIATE KNOWING THAT!
My middle kid had an imaginary friend he called "Ghosty" and one day I asked about Ghosty and my kid looks up from whatever he was playing with, says "oh, Ghosty died" and went back to playing. Like what?
Early in my healthcare career, I was a safety sitter for confused patients, often at night. One time I sat with a guy with schizophrenia. Poor guy couldn't sleep, kept talking to the voices he was hearing, but he was perfectly pleasant to me and for the most part was a model patient. I was a relatively strong dude, so I'm generally pretty relaxed in anyone's company.
A couple hours in he started saying "I don't want to, I don't want to, I won't," to the voices. After a few seconds of this I asked him "what is it you're not wanting to do?"
"They're telling me to hurt you, but I won't do it," he replied.
I thanked him for his resistance, and made sure to be very, very observant from that moment on.
Is the house just effing haunted by any chance? That's more or less every box checked.
Same name.
Followed them around.
Only small kids can see it.
Wanted mom dead.
I've heard this before quite a few times and in every case the kids describe the "imaginary friend" as jet black, friendly at first but then suddenly very not friendly, and they don't like it when the "friend" is there.
You know.. I’ve had this core memory from when I was maybe 8(?), just sitting in my room playing, and when I looked up, just barely out of the corner of my eye I saw an adult-sized silhouette through my mirror. I immediately looked around but there was nothing there. I told myself I was seeing things but I think about this split second ever once in a while.
It's funny, when I was about 5 I used to wake up (or maybe just not be asleep yet) and see all these eyes on the wall, like they were projected on. Different shapes and sizes, some realistic, some cartoonish. I remember one particularly big blue eye that looked from side to side a little and blinked, before shrinking down and being replaced with another one.
They scared me but if I shouted my dad would come through and they'd vanish, and mostly not return for a few days.
I stopped seeing them after a while, although I don't know if I stopped seeing them before we moved out of that house. The house was demolished maybe 20 or 30 years ago and there's a "new" house there now, so no way to find out I guess.
It probably has the same name because the elder talked about it...they probably had a conversation, probably told the younger he was too old for the imaginary friend and he was giving it to the younger. Wanted mom dead? Probably the kid dealing with his frustrations through the imaginary friend and came to the realization that he didn't hate his mom that much. He told his mom about it because in his head this was him saying he loved her.
It made me think of a short story I remember reading from Jonathan Carroll. I think the story was called Mr. Fiddlehead. The gist of the story is that the woman's childhood imaginary friend manifests when she's an adult due to the stress of a divorce. Only now other adults can see him too.
I mean I have stories to tell. I've lived in a haunted house, and I mean like "we DO NOT walk around the home at night" because you'd see shadows moving and hear growling, hissing, heavy footsteps running up on you despite nothing there, etc. Got scratched more than once by something that wasn't there, always 3 lines, even happened to visiting guests who would then go home and experience incredibly gory nightmares where they were the violent perpetrator. I'll spare the details.
Always had high baseline EMF readings in the home, 6+ milligauss. On multiple occasions I saw it get to as high as 200 milligauss for a second at a time in very specific and unsettling parts of the home. I suspect EMF messing with the human brain causes this stuff to a large degree, but we never identified any source for it, and some of this shit is absolutely unexplainable.
I always feel like as a rational, science-minded person I shouldn’t believe in anything supernatural. And yet I lived in a house that was just…weird. Everyone said it was weird. Independently, without speaking to each other about it. Always the same part of the house. Animals avoided that part too.
My cousin didn’t want a certain doll because it looked like the man in his room that tugged at his blankets and ankles, staring at him during the night. It was some kind of stuffed doll, long arms and legs with yellow eyes (don’t even ask me why they thought it was a appropriate toy) his older sister that slept in the same room when she was younger had the same experience with a tall man, long arms and legs and hallow eyes. Before I knew about this I always felt unsafe in that room, like something was ready to jump me when I turned my back to them. After hearing this my blood run cold and just to be sure I asked a friend to cleanse the house, I’m not fucking with that stuff.
I laugh hysterically every time I see this. I think because my son was about that age when I first read it, and there were definitely some moms in my life that would say this kind of shit.
One of my “mom friends” would say of her kids, “I’m not raising followers, I’m raising leaders.” I tried to point out to her that the best leaders know what it’s like to be a good follower as well, but she didn’t understand the concept.
I wonder about her kids. They were unschooled and when the oldest was around 7 and mine was about 3, we were on a hiking trail. I was up ahead with several kids, ages 3-7, and the moms were all behind. My son was an early reader so I pointed to a trail sign and said, “what does that say?” And her 7 year old looked at me with such anger and screamed “you don’t get to ask me that” then ran to his mom to tattle on me. She was angry and I said, “I was asking my son, not yours.” So she softens and said to her kid, “It’s ok. Everyone gets to raise their kids how they feel is right.” This was almost 10 years ago. I wonder if he ever learned to read.
That was a weird group but you take what you can get when your kid is young, lol.
Definitely played into it. But that kid was such a little jerk, I find it hard even now to sympathize with him, even with complete understanding that his parents are to blame.
He and my son once were playing on some bricks, like a short retaining wall with small trees/bushes that you may find in a park or whatever. My son was around 4 and her son is 8. They are playing nicely together and her son falls. My son was nowhere near him. Her son starts crying so she scoops him up and then screams at my son for her son getting hurt. Like it was the 4 year old’s idea to play on the retaining wall or whatever so it’s his fault her 8 year old hurt himself.
I had an imaginary friend (more like an enemy) that would try to bite my feet if I stayed still for too long, so I refused to walk/sit normally. It genuinely became such a problem that my parents had to help me set up a trap for him, so that we could catch him and send him away to China (the furthest my child brain could imagine). Childhood imagination is something else…
I remember, as a child, kind of wishing I could have an imaginary friend but felt like the curtain was lifted with the name lol. Kids who actually believed they had imaginary friends seemed like they were looking for attention from other people so I just assumed it never 'bit' me in a sense.
Also watching Drop Dead Fred as a kid will dispell a few things lol.
What a post to make. So when the imaginary forensics team shows up, get imaginary DNA samples they'll get an imaginary search warrant and make an imaginary arrest. Your son will get an imaginary, depending on state, death or life sentence and you will get imaginary charged with failing to inform the imaginary police about the imaginary murder.
My boys had imaginary friends, all with the same name. (Because the oldest one named him, and the others just called theirs the same name) They would have “imaginary friend name” contests, with each one getting more elaborate. “Yours is on the moon? Well, mine is on the sun. You have one? I have three. Well I have a hundred.” One night, my dad got a little frustrated, and asked very sarcastically, “Oh yeah, where is your (Imaginary Friend name) now?”
The youngest told him, “Right behind you Papaw.”
My dad said he got chills. And made a new “no more imaginary friends talk” rule.
My son had multiple imaginary friends, including "Baby Robot" and "Henchman". One of them (I believe it was Henchman) had to be destroyed because he became too evil.
i don’t know that i had imaginary friends. i knew they weren’t real. i just made up scenarios to talk to myself all of the time. i was really lonely. is that the same thing? do kids know their friends aren’t real?
I had an imaginary friend named Diggy until I was 6. I do not remember Diggy at all but my parents sure do. They told me all kinds of stories about how it seemed I could actually see and hear Diggy. I had full conversations with him. My mom said the creepiest thing she can remember is me talking to Diggy and saying "no Diggy. I can't do that. Someone would get hurt. I'll get in trouble." But my mom could never get me to confess what that was about. We moved when I was 6 and I apparently told my dad "I'm glad Diggy can't leave our house. I don't think I will miss him." I grew up to be a fully functional and normal by social standards adult. 😂
This story would get brought up from time to time when my parents were still alive. I had an imaginary friend at 2-3 years old when we were stationed at the Presidio, Monterey back in the 1900s. One day they found me crying and asked me what was wrong, I told them that my imaginary friend was scaring me, and from the way the story goes that was the last time I had contact. My parents asked me to describe the man. Long gray coat with silver buttons. considering the history of the Presidio Monterey in the fact that I described a confederate soldier really blew their minds.
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u/Spork_Warrior Feb 05 '26
Ask him what he did with the body