My brother's dead sisters were trying to warn us...

My stepfather was married before my mom, he was married to this beautiful biologist who caught a weird fungus on her skin and passed away fairly quickly, the tragedy is only worse when you take into consideration that she passed pregnant with twin girls, sadly, none of them made it.

I love my brother, always have; his weirdness, his charm, his inability to say the word ‘factory’ or his even bigger inability to break a promise. But as he started walking and talking, he started to become creepier by the hour.

By the time my brother was 3, we we’re sharing and bedroom with bunk beds, me on the top one and him on the bottom one. He was constantly talking at night by himself, giggling or making weird noises, he would say his ‘imaginary friends’ were asking him to do all sorts of weird noises, but nothing too serious, just a kid being a kid. One night at about 1 AM, I noticed he was not on his bed, instead he was on the floor, leaning down, looking into the dark space below my desk and asking “Nihus” to come out.

“Is Nihus one of your imaginary friends” — I asked him.

“No, I'd never met him before” — he replied.

“Why are you asking him to come outside”

“Because he is just crying, a lot...I think he's hurt”

I was speechless. I asked him to just go back to bed and ignore him, it was the first time I started doubting for real if he was only seeing things in his imagination or if he was actually able to see something the rest of us just weren't.

Over the next few days I asked him some questions about that night's interaction, and started noticing he wasn't talking to his imaginary friends as much.

“So, about Tuesday night, have you seen that friend of yours, Nihus?” — I questioned him.

“No, haven't seen him, but I've been listening to him every night, and he's not my friend” — he answered with clear discomfort by the question.

“What do you mean listening to him, is he like, talking to you?”

“No, he just cries and cries but it's weird to see a grown man crying, he scares me”

“What do you mean an old man?!” — I abruptly asked him.

Up until that moment, all of his imaginary friends had been kids, with one or two adolescent/tween occurrences but mostly just kids around his age.

“And well, how does Nihus look like?” — I asked my brother as I was bracing for what I thought was going to be quite a disturbing response.

“I don't know” — he replied.

“Only my other friends have seen him” — he continued.

“And what have they told you about him?”

His response left me with a cold, uncomfortable chill running down my spine.

“I don't talk to my friends anymore, they all left because they said they were too scared of him”

I decided the best route to take was just to ignore what he was saying and pretend nothing happened, if it was all truly in his imagination I'd let him deal with it. On the other hand, if this was all real, I'd much rather live in ignorance about what was going on than actually trying to make sense of my little brother’s paranormal interactions.

That was until we went to the cemetery...

It was a routine visit, you know the drill, bring flowers, make sure the tombstone’s clean and shiny, and then, following my mom's catholic upbringing weird traditions, we would pray the rosary.

By that time my brother was around 4 years old. Of course he knew we were visiting the grave of family members that had passed away but he was too young to understand the whole concept of death plus I know for a fact that my mom and stepdad had not broken down to him the fact that the grave held the remains of his unborn sisters.

We were in the middle of the rosary, my brother was sleeping in my mom's arms, when all of a sudden he wakes up and staring at the grave, he goes “hey little girls”, then continues to stare at the grave for about 3 minutes without saying a word, then he goes “ok” after which he immediately went back to sleep.

Of course my mom, stepdad and I just sat there gobsmacked.

My mom and stepdad were talking about how big of a coincidence this was, but I knew this was more than just an innocent coincidence.

Back home, at night, I questioned my brother about what happened at the cemetery.

“Who did you greet earlier today when we were praying”

“Duh, it was my two sisters” — he replied to me, with an ‘obvious’ tone to his voice.

“And who told you about your sisters”

“Themselves, they'd been visiting home for a while but they stopped after Nihus started showing up”

— I was already feeling way too nervous, but I really needed to understand what was going on.

“They started coming to me, they said that they too were my dad's children, and that they were happy to meet me” — he kept telling me.

“Then Nihus started coming and he scared them away along with every other friend of mine, that's why I don't have any friends anymore” — he told me as his voice was getting clearly sadder.

“At first Nihus really scared me too because of the noises he made” — said my brother, “but after a while he made me feel safe, he told me that he was my only friend and that I was everything he needed”

“And why are you not talking to him anymore?” — I said to him.

“No, I do. Every now and then Nihus comes around to check how I'm doing, he always asks how much I'm growing and even though I've told him I wanna see him, he always says I should just keep growing until I'm ready for him, I don't understand what he means by that”

“...” — I felt my skin getting more and more pale.

“And what did your sisters tell you about Nihus” — I asked him with a trembling voice.

“They just told me to stay away from him” — he said as his face displayed sadness, “but they just don't understand my friend, he is not bad, he always says I am just what he needs”

“Promise me you will never do anything he says until you talk to me first” - I told him.

“Ok” — he replied.

I just wish I made him say the words “I promise” out loud....