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So, the and the I was about seven years old, my brother was about 10. It was well past her bedtime when our mom woke up off of the couch and told us to get to bed.

Our dad worked construction out of town back then, so it was often just the three of us at the

house for weeks at a time. Up the stairs into the

immediate right was our parents bedroom. Going left put you in the middle of the

hallway. Taking another left down that hallway led to my brother's room.

The opposite end was my room, which was also across the hall from the upstairs bathroom.

At either end of the hallway are window doors which we always kept locked and rarely used. The door on my end led to a balcony overlooking our front yard, and the door on my brother's end opened to our back porch.

The house kind of leans into a small hill.

My brother and mom both had a habit of waking up in the middle of the night to use the bathroom.

I only knew this because I was a light sleeper and they just couldn't help flushing with the door

wide open.

This night, however, my brother stopped on his way to his room and came back towards the bathroom.

I'm going to try and pee before I go to bed.

The past few nights, I've been too afraid to walk to the bathroom.

I keep seeing a man wearing stripes at the end of the hallway, he said. I don't know if my mom

wrote it off as my brother telling ghost stories or trying to scare me or if she was already half asleep and didn't catch it, but she didn't react at all to my brother's confession. I, on the other hand, was terrified by it.

The fear of seeing a ghost like that at the end of the hallway or through the windows is the reason I started running from the

stairs to my bedroom at night.

Years later, when I was about 18, my mom and I were having a conversation in her car about a dog we had for a very short time when I was little.

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