WHAT IF IMAGINARY FRIENDS ARE REAL?: Can Children See What We Don’t?

What if the imaginary friend you had as a child wasn’t imaginary at all — but something lingering, watching… and very real?

EPISODE BLOG PAGE (includes sources): https://weirddarkness.com/imaginaryfriends

READ or DOWNLOAD the full transcript of this episode: https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/yckr4ry4

FEATURED STORIES IN THIS EPISODE: Most people had imaginary friends when they were younger. These "friends" were usually nice, funny, and even comforting. They took the form of animals, other humans, and sometimes larger-than-life characters that defy classification. And sometimes they were extremely creepy and downright scary, especially when examined in hindsight.

CHAPTERS & TIME STAMPS (All Times Approximate)…00:00:00.000 = The Foreboding
00:01:22.744 = Show Open
00:02:39.239 = Imaginary Friends, Part 1
00:15:42.835 = Imaginary Friends, Part 2 ***
00:25:41.562 = Song: “Funny Man” by Dark Weirdness (about an imaginary friend)
00:30:08.623 = Show Close
*** = Begins immediately after inserted ad break

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*No AI Voices Are Used In The Narration Of This Podcast*
SOURCES and RESOURCES:
Imaginary Friends 01: http://ow.ly/olpf30nQLkP
Imaginary Friends 02: http://ow.ly/obdb30nQLl8
(Over time links may become invalid, disappear, or have different content. I always make sure to give authors credit for the material I use whenever possible. If I somehow overlooked doing so for a story, or if a credit is incorrect, please let me know and I will rectify it in these show notes immediately. Some links included above may benefit me financially through qualifying purchases.)

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Originally aired: June 2021
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Weird Darkness collects fifteen true accounts from adults who look back on the imaginary friends of their childhood and find something other than imagination: a murdered girl buried a mile and a half from the house, a tall man in bloody scrubs at a tea party, two girls in white nightdresses who vanished whenever the dog ran in, and a voice in a basement window where nobody lived.It opens with a toddler named Karen who had to be treated like a real person, a friend so insistent that the child's mother wondered if she was seeing something nobody else could. Decades later, an article about a missing-person case in the same city named a murdered girl called Karen, and a text to her mother for the old address confirmed the body had been buried about a mile and a half from their former home, more than a decade before the family moved in.From there, a Redditor who broke into foreclosed...