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Listen now, wherever you get your podcasts. Hello, kids. This is Risk, the show where people tell true stories they never thought they'd dare to share. I'm Kevin Allison, and every Thursday, we release these special episodes that we're calling Classic Risk Singles.
Each of these episodes features just one story from years past. Now, if you're new to Risk, you should know that the podcast can be very uncensored. This week, a story by Alan Weber that he first shared on the podcast in 2016. It's called The Man in the Top Hat.
I had to be about six, and I was playing outside in my front yard. We had a little white picket fence around our house. I started hearing yelling from inside. I couldn't quite make out what was going on, but I could tell it was frantic.
It was loud. It was definitely coming from my brother. When I approached the front steps, I started hearing my parents yelling and screaming as well. When I finally turned the doorknob and I entered, I saw my mother on the phone, and she was frantically dialing a number, completely in tears.
And my father was leaning over the kitchen sink, grabbing paper towels off the roll. He rushed into the living room, and I followed right behind. That's when I saw my brother. He was, at the time, only about seven years old, and he was looking right at me.
His face was red. There was tears streaming down his cheek. But that wasn't the most shocking thing. The most shocking thing was there was a big pen sticking out of his chest.
There was blood that was pooled around it. My father grabbed paper towels, and he was dabbing the wound. My heart was pounding. I had no idea what was going on through my brother's head, what happened, you know, if my parents stabbed him, if he did this to himself.
I soon realized that he had done this to himself, and I don't know where it came from. That was the first time that I've ever seen my brother in this state, but it definitely wasn't the last time. Andrew and I were very close. We played together all the time.
It was always sort of like I was the younger brother that kind of tagged along. There were three bedrooms in the house, and we shared a room because we were that close. We just wanted, like, I could have had my own room and spread my wings and it would have been fine, but me and him, we shared a room, and it was every day, all day. We always kind of knew where each other were.
You know, I really looked up to him when I was younger. You know, I kind of wanted to be like him in many aspects, but as I got older, that completely changed and I wanted to be just the complete opposite. But that all kind of came from the events of one night. I feel like his changes in his behavior and his mood and his temper all changed after one night that we shared together, you know, a couple months prior to seeing him with a pen in his chest.
It was a night that still haunts me today. Our bedroom was rather small. We kept all of our toys in the other bedroom, so we had a little bit more room. We shared a bunk bed.
I was on the top bunk. He slept on the bottom. There was only one window which faced the street. I was always facing, my feet was sort of facing the window, so I could kind of look outside of it.
I remember watching the cars as they drive down the street slowly, you know, going to their houses, and their headlights would shine through the window and sort of light the room just for a couple of seconds as they passed. That activity of just watching the cars was what got me to sleep most nights. I found it somewhat soothing, you know. It was a night like any other.
I was watching the cars and, you know, I drifted to sleep. It was the middle of the summer, but it wasn't quite hot, you know. It was sort of a breezy night. It was nice, you know.
We didn't have to have the AC on or any fans. We just had the window open. I just remember waking up to this unnatural cold temperature in the room. It was this ice-cold, freezing temperature.
It chilled you to the bone. It was, for the middle of the summer, it just, it was unreal, you know. It was kind of strange in the room. There was this different air about it.
It was still, almost, as well. There was no breeze coming through the window anymore. And I was lying on my back, facing out towards the rest of the room. I was looking straight at the dresser and the window.
And that's where I saw this sort of shadow form start to develop. I started to make out something. It was almost like shaping. The very top was just above my mirror on my dresser.
So it had to be at least six feet tall. And it appeared to be the figure of a man standing in my room. His head seemed to be in a cylinder shape. It appeared to be a hat.
There was a hat brim. And then I noticed the man's head underneath. It was relatively featureless. I couldn't make out where his ears were, his nose was, but I could see his eyes.
I could see the white of them, you know, around where your pupil is. And he was staring directly at me. At this point, I was completely frozen. I couldn't move.
I do remember just that feeling of someone staring, looking through you. That's when his mouth started to form. He parted his lips, and I saw his teeth. They were white compared to the rest of his body.
I mean, they weren't pure white, but because he was so dark, it seemed that way. And he was staring at me for what felt like minutes. And then he blinked. And as soon as his eyes opened back up, his eyes seemed to turn red.
And he started growling like a dog. It was similar to when you pet a new dog and they kind of growl at you because they're uneasy. They don't know who you are yet. You know, you got to get comfortable.
That's what it sounded like. Although I was terrified, my heart was racing. I was still frozen with fear. I could not yell.
I couldn't say anything. I couldn't even move. I just stared. I started having these racing thoughts.
I was, you know, thinking, you know, am I still asleep? Is this a nightmare? Am I really seeing this? But from the bottom bunk, I started to hear my brother.
He was crying, and his crying gradually started to turn into a yell. And it was at that moment when he started making that noise that I felt like I could move. You know, my mind was still racing. I was like, is this real?
Like, are we both seeing this? You know, that was the question that I sort of asked. And I remember peering over the top bunk, and I saw him lying on the bed. And he was almost hiding his face with the pillow.
He was terrified as well. This was real. This was happening. There was someone standing in my room.
So I shot back to the wall. At this point, I was looking at the man who was still growling. He seemed to be growling louder to sort of match our cries, yelling for my father. The man, he wasn't moving.
He stood in the exact same spot. He was looking at me, and then he was looking at my brother. And I couldn't tell what he wanted, what he was going to do. And that's when I heard the sound of footsteps running down the hall.
You know, it was my father rushing to our room. And he opened the door. And as he did, the light painted a line across the room. And as if the man didn't want to touch the light, didn't want to be in the light, he ran.
It was almost sort of like he flew, you know. And he jumped out the window. Our window had a screen. It was on the second floor.
There was no roof underneath. So it would have been a straight drop. It was almost like he went through the screen, but it was still there. The screen was still there.
As my dad entered the room, he flicked on our bedroom light. He went over to the window. And he looked out, and there was nothing out there. You know, we were at this point completely in tears, my brother and I.
And when my dad was done looking out the window, he turned to us, and he was asking us what was going on. You know, why we were crying, why we were screaming. And my brother just started, he explained exactly, you know, what he had seen. He said, I saw a man standing in the room.
He had red eyes, and he was tall. You know, it looked like he had a top hat on. His mouth was open, and I could see his teeth. He was growling at me.
He was really loud when he was growling, too. And that's kind of when I realized, like, we saw the same thing. You know, he didn't just happen to wake up from a nightmare. You know, like I had initially thought was happening to me.
And I kind of had this thought that that invisible force was something that was trying to tell us that there was something going on with my brother, something that medication and therapy and things of that nature couldn't help. That's all for this week's Classic Risk singles episode. Now, don't miss out on our regular full-length episodes. There's a brand new one every Tuesday, and everything you might want to know about us is at risk-show.com.