Family Trauma

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_02/09/26

It had been quite a while since I last visited my aunt's place. In fact, it had been more than five years. I wondered what my cousin, who was just a week old the last time I saw him, looked like now. I decided to travel over to see how my mother's elder sister and her children were doing. It felt like a glorious idea when I pictured it at first, but now, I just wanted to go home.
On the first day of my stay, the atmosphere was incredibly lively. I was welcomed with warm family gestures and a beautiful view of the neighborhood. Tunde, my aunt's firstborn, was already seventeen years old. He was a few inches taller than my already tall self, taking perfectly after the stature of his dad, Mr. Ayodele, whom everyone called "Commander." Speaking of the Commander, he wasn't able to come home that day because he had some urgent business to take care of at the barracks.
"You, this small boy who loved trying to scare me back then, you've grown up so much... How time flies," I said, smiling as I playfully scratched his head like a dusty school desk.
"Don't worry, Senior, we won't disappoint you this time," he replied in a funny, cryptic tone.
I couldn't stop laughing, but I would soon realize how wrong I was to underestimate the little fella.
It was late midnight when the wind began to howl loudly. I woke up, staring at the dark window as it banged open and shut against the frame. Looking closely outside, I could see something moving, though not very clearly. I squinted, tracing the borders of the shape, only to see a smiling cloud that looked exactly like the face of the devil. I wasn't easily scared, so I turned to pick up my phone to switch on the torchlight, but it was nowhere to be found.
"My little prankster cousin is already making me hallucinate things," I muttered to myself as I forced the window shut and drew the curtains.
I should have just closed my eyes and gone to sleep, but I decided to stare at the window for a bit longer. Suddenly, a flash of lightning struck, exposing a dark silhouette behind the curtains that looked exactly like a ghost.
Heart racing, I crept closer to the window, grabbing the mop stick from the corner of the room. As I got within arm's reach, I used the stick to fling the curtains open. There was nothing there.
"When did I start hallucinating things as weird as this?" I thought.
Desperate for comfort, I unlocked my phone to read my Bible app—something I usually only did on Sundays with my large physical Bible just for show at church. I opened to Psalm 23 and began reciting, "The Lord is my shepherd..." I quoted the entire chapter before I finally managed to drift off. Even as I fell asleep, I couldn't shake the feeling that God was up there laughing at a guy who had kept his Bible app frozen for months, only to open it the moment panic set in.
The next morning, I told my aunt about what I had seen. She looked puzzled and remarked that it sounded new. Then, she asked if I had offended anyone since arriving, which made me wonder why she was being so serious. I told her no, and eventually, I laughed it off, assuming I was just projecting scenes from the horror movies I loved to watch. Even the younger kids seemed shocked, claiming nothing like that ever happened in the house, though the elder cousin joked that the youngest one often mistook the mop stick for a scary monster in the dark.
The morning and afternoon passed uneventfully, and soon, the night of the second day arrived. This time around, I made sure the windows were locked tightly and the curtains were drawn. I checked the weather forecast, and it showed clear skies, a relief after the heavy downpour of the previous night.
I went to bed with my phone placed safely right beside me. Since I was convinced the previous night was just a hallucination, I fell into a relaxed, heavy sleep.
Later that night, a sharp creak jolted me awake.
The bedroom door, which I was certain I had locked, had swung wide open. I quickly switched on my phone light, and the beam illuminated a long, looming shadow that looked like a person standing right by the bathroom. Panic setting in, I scrambled toward the toilet door and grabbed the mop stick again. Strangely, the closer I moved, the more the shadow seemed to disappear. When I angled my phone light downward, the shadow moved upward, but when I reached out to feel the air, I met absolutely nothing.
I lowered my hand, completely confused as the shadow vanished entirely. Suddenly, I felt something creepy crawling inside my sweater. It moved rapidly up toward my armpit. In a split-second panic, I violently ripped the sweater over my head.
A large cockroach dropped to the floor. I let out a massive sigh of relief, but I still wondered where that massive human shadow had come from. I looked around for my phone, which I had desperately thrown onto the bed while stripping. Because modern phones automatically turn off their torch when shaken violently, the room was pitch black again. I turned the light back on and pointed it toward the door, but the shadow was completely gone.
"What on earth is going on?" I thought, closely inspecting the back of my phone to see if a cutout or a toy had been taped to the flash to project that shape. Seeing nothing, I decided to just get back to sleep.
I pulled the heavy blanket entirely over my head after double-checking that the doors and windows were securely locked this time. I closed my eyes, but the moment I shifted, my foot brushed against something cold and limp.
I threw the blanket off, stood up, and shone my light on the bed. There lay a dead rat.
"Jesus!" I screamed, jumping completely off the mattress.
Dark liquid was oozing from the rat's eyes. It looked exactly like a gruesome scene from a horror film, and I was genuinely on the verge of peeing my pants. I whirled around, and there on the wall was a shadow that looked exactly like the Chucky doll. Shaking violently, I fell to my knees and began to pray at the top of my lungs.
"Out of this house, you demon!"
I scrambled to my bag and pulled out a bottle of anointed water that had been heavily prayed over during a Mountain of Fire and Miracles Ministries Wednesday program. I began aggressively sprinkling it around the room.
"I cover myself with the blood of Jesus! I command you to leave!"
As I prayed, a sudden revelation hit me: it was only Wednesday, and there was no way I was surviving here until Saturday. I decided I would rather sleep on the bus back home than die before my time. I swiftly swept the rat off the bed with the mop stick, dragged the extra blankets to the floor, and slept right there. Sleep eventually took over, and morning came.
The next day, I didn't notice anything unusual in the family's behavior, but I was highly suspicious. I planned to spy on the two boys that night to see if they were the ones pulling the strings. I kept my mouth shut, acted completely normal, and even spent the afternoon watching comedy movies to regain my sanity.
By nighttime, I felt a bit better, but the closer I got to my bedroom door, the more I felt my heart trying to escape my chest. My soul was practically begging for the rapture to happen that very instant.
I went inside and firmly stuffed earbuds into my ears to block out any creepy noises. Yet, right after midnight, I woke up to a strange, rhythmic vibration. Resolving not to look around, I turned over to face the wall, only to find the terrifying Chucky doll lying right beside me on the floor.
That was the exact moment I thought I died.
The next thing I knew, I was at the door, trying desperately to turn the handle. I was in my underpants, and the front of them was already completely soaked with pee. In the darkness, the doll on the floor actually started to move. I finally forced the door open, sprinted straight into my cousins' room, and slapped the light switch. The light wouldn't come on. I had left my phone back in my room, and as I bolted toward my two cousins' beds for safety, one of them sat up like a zombie. The second one rose a second later in an eerie, inhuman synchronization.
I lost my mind. I sprinted out of the house into the compound, screaming, "Blood of Jesus!" at the top of my lungs.
Suddenly, the two boys burst out of the front door, completely dropping the act. "Senior! Senior, calm down! It's a prank!" Tunde shouted, holding his stomach.
"A prank?! I am seeing literal demons in your house and you're telling me it's a prank? You people are possessed!" I yelled back, frantically wrestling with the locked padlock on the compound gate.
My aunt finally walked out of the house, calmly tying her wrapper. "So you can fear like this?" she laughed, shaking her head. "Calm down before you end up looking crazier than that neighbor you wrote about in your last Steemit post on social media madness."
Hearing her mention my blog finally brought me back to reality, though I was still furious.
She walked over and explained the setup. "Don't forget, you were the one who introduced these kids to science and art years ago. Your big cousin is a real tech pro now." She pulled out her phone to show me Tunde’s YouTube channel, which I never knew existed.
Tunde stepped forward, still trying to suppress his giggles. "Senior Dave, it’s just pure optics and psychology. I read your posts, so I knew exactly how to trigger you. Remember that clear liquid silicone I bought for my school project? I used it to paint the Chucky outline on the glass pane of your bedroom door. It dries 100% transparent, so you couldn't see it during the day. But when you shone your sharp phone torch directly at it, the light rays passing through the silicone layer bent sharply outward instead of going straight. It’s an optical illusion called focal shadowing. By scattering the light away from that exact shape, it projected a pitch-black shadow onto your bed, even though the glass itself is completely clear."
"And the sounds?" I muttered, wiping the sweat from my forehead.
"I hid a Bluetooth speaker under your bed frame," Tunde grinned. "It was playing an infrasound loop at 19 Hertz. Humans can't hear it consciously, but it triggers your body’s survival instincts, pumping out adrenaline to make you hyper-anxious and giving you cold chills. Even crazier, 18.98 Hertz is the exact resonant frequency of the human eyeball. The subtle vibration distorts your peripheral vision in low light, making you hallucinate that the curtains or the mop stick are moving."
"And the dead rat with blood?" I pressed, looking down at my soaked boxers.
"A flexible rubber toy from the market," Tunde chuckled. "The blood was just highly concentrated Zobo tea mixed with corn syrup to give it a thick, clotted texture. Because the cockroach in your sweater already put your brain into high-alert survival mode, your brain completely bypassed logical analysis. It just saw blood and panicked."
My aunt pointed up toward the ceiling. "They used the access hatch to the roof ceiling right above your wardrobe to drop the fake doll onto the floor while you were asleep, and they used it on the first night to fiddle with your window latch from the outside."
I stood there in the midnight breeze, clutching my arms, looking at my family who were thoroughly entertained by my sudden midnight deliverance session. All of my spiritual warfare, the MFM anointed water, and the frantic recitations of Psalm 23 had been entirely defeated by a seventeen-year-old with a Bluetooth speaker, some Zobo tea, and a bottle of clear silicone.
I thought about everything. In my previous writing, I had explored how digital culture shapes our minds. I've seen mad people blow up and go viral on social media, I've seen some literally run mad on social media, and now, I had almost become a psychiatric patient myself all because of social media-inspired stunts.
"Eii, God," I sighed, frowning deeply once everything had finally calmed down. "Tunde, oya come and remove these your cameras and gear from my room. Don't ever try this again, you hear me?"
"Oya, go inside and change your clothes," my aunt said, turning back toward the house. "Before the neighbors actually think the madness from your blog has moved into our compound."
I followed them back inside, muttering every prayer of protection I could remember under my breath. I made a firm mental note never, ever to underestimate a quiet teenager with a science textbook again. A scary week it was. Who knows what my next story will be on my diary of fictions? Saturday morning truly couldn't come fast enough.

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