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/imaginaryfriendsREAD or DOWNLOAD the full transcript of this episode: https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/yckr4ry4FEATURED 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 Foreboding00:01:22.744 = Show Open00:02:39.239 = Imaginary Friends, Part 100:15:42.835 = 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 breakLISTEN ON PODCAST APPS: Look for this podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, iHeart Radio, Amazon Music, Pandora, TuneIn Radio, and other podcast apps. Get a list of free listening apps here: https://weirddarkness.com/wdapps*No AI Voices Are Used In The Narration Of This Podcast*SOURCES and RESOURCES:Imaginary Friends 01: http://ow.ly/olpf30nQLkPImaginary 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.)WeirdDarkness® is a registered trademark. Copyright ©2026, Weird Darkness.Originally aired: June 2021LIKE WHAT YOU’RE HEARING? WEIRD DARKNESS posts episodes 7 DAYS A WEEK! Listen FREE wherever you get podcasts or visit https://weirddarkness.com/listen. • Paranormal • True Crime • Ghosts • UFOs • Cryptids • Unexplained • Want even more? Become an OFFICIAL WEIRDO for commercial-free episodes, bonus episodes, weeknight live chats, audiobooks & more at https://WeirdDarkness.com/OFFICIALWeird 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 houses at five or six years old describes Sarah, a young Hispanic girl in cut-off tank tops and pastel-orange spandex shorts who waited in the upstairs bathroom of an empty house for a mother who never came home. The house had no silverware, no furniture, and mildewed carpet, and the writer no longer believes she could have been there.Next comes the Green Man, an overly tall figure in a doctor's mask and blood-covered scrubs who attended a small child's tea parties and stood behind the chair with a hand on the child's shoulder. A psychiatrist later traced the figure to long hours in hospital waiting rooms during the grandparents' failing health, an explanation the parents accepted after years of insisting he wasn't real.A boy who called his invisible brother Tom set places for him at the table and talked to him on long bus rides until a child psychiatrist's puzzles and questions ended the conversations. Ten years on, his mother played him a recording of a psychic who described a dark-haired young man watching over him, asked whether the name Tim meant anything, asked if he was a Gemini, and asked about the large birthmark on his side, then suggested the two had been twins in a past life.The lighter stories follow: a sister's imaginary friend Thoup, whom her brother announced he had killed, earning him a long grounding for a murder he argued couldn't count; Charlie, a little man who went everywhere with a four-year-old until the move, after which the family learned a little person had died by suicide in the house before they bought it; and Olean, a gigantic black raven who kept a 28-year-old writer company through age eleven or twelve in an antebellum house on the Ohio River in Kentucky.A writer who had three imaginary friends between ages three and six could only see one of them, a sad blonde girl wearing nothing but her underclothes, dirt in her frazzled hair, who said she lived in the woods behind the house and answered every invitation inside with the same two words: "I can't."After the break, Michael, a dark-haired boy in red shorts, followed a two-year-old home from the beach in Pensacola, Florida and rode in the back seat the whole way, staying until kindergarten and leaving with the news that he had found his family and was going home. A girl named Christine with long pigtails told a nine-year-old in Virginia that she had lived in the house before; the mother later admitted to hearing footsteps and a child's voice upstairs during school hours, and the father to finding an old photograph of a little girl at the bottom of a closet.Two sisters could both sense one friend, a black ball of energy that gave a name and got a place at the dinner table, until their parents forbade any mention of her. Years afterward the family learned a small Native American group wiped out about a hundred years earlier had carried the same name. Becky Reeder, a curly-haired girl of eight or nine, colored and played dolls downstairs for three years and never once came upstairs, until the night she invited her friend to sneak out to a family party by the water and, after the mother stopped the escape, appeared at the bedroom door to say "I hate you" and never returned.Two barefoot girls in white nightdresses with their hair in buns stepped out of the dark to sit on a child's bed nearly every night until age seven, refused offered milk and cookies with the words "we can't", and vanished every time the dog Sophie bounded into the room; the mother later learned two young girls had been attacked by a neighbor's dog in that yard and died fifteen years before. In a pink house on the bad side of town, a man named Tim in a yellow jacket and bright pink helmet talked to a four-year-old through the basement window and kept asking the child to climb inside, and the father says nobody ever lived in that basement.The episode closes out the stories with an evil twin named June who lived in the attic and wrote left-handed apology letters, a poker player who called the writer June twenty years later, and a lonely only child whose dozens of imaginary friends were mostly pigs from the planet Zion, including Good Piggy, Naughty Piggy, a churchgoing pig named Peter, and a pink bird named Sweety, none of whom the child could control and all of whom drifted away once school brought real friends.At the end of the episode Darren includes the song “Funny Man” based on the true story of parents noticing their child has made an imaginary friend in their new home… but once they find out the truth of who the imaginary friend really is, it’s hard to believe.