My brother saw a ghost as a kid. Two decades later, I realized what he actually saw.

I was about seven years old, my brother was 10 years old. It was well past our bedtime when our

mom woke up off the couch to put us 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 to stairs into the

immediate right was our parent's 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 our upstairs bathroom. At either end of the hallway,

our window doors we always kept locked and rarely used. The door on the 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 my mom both had a habit of waking up in the middle

of the night to use the bathroom. I only knew this because I always 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. He said,

I'm gonna try to 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. I don't know if

my mom wrote it off as my brother telling ghost stories to try and 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 years old, 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. We were sharing stories about Max's

tendency towards destroying my shoes and other unruly behaviors. When my mom learned it out,

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