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I am typing this with a heart that is pounding so hard that I can hear it in my ears. I swear on everything I hold dear, if not that I have no one to share this with, I wouldn’t have said a word. But maybe, just maybe, someone out there will have an answer.

This nightmare started in 2013. Our family used to be six, but by the end of 2012, we had become four. Death took my father and my grandmother within months of each other, and the house felt emptier than ever.

We live in a four-bedroom apartment. My mother has one room, my sister took another, my elder brother had his own, and I stayed in the last one.

There is a tradition in our home: once it is 9:30 PM sharp, we all gather in the sitting room for night prayers. How long it lasts depends on my mother's mood, sometimes just five minutes, other times, one full hour of binding, casting, and fire-fire prayers. After that, everyone goes to bed.

That’s why the morning of August 2013 felt like madness.

We had prayed as usual the night before. There was nothing unusual, no bad dream, no flickering light, no shadow moving where it shouldn’t. Yet by morning, my brother was gone.

And when I say gone, I don’t mean he packed his things and left. I mean disappeared, as in vanished from the face of the earth.

The two doors in our house were locked from the inside. The window in his room had iron barricades, unless my brother suddenly became the size of a house cat, there was no way he squeezed through, and there was the window net which was screwed from the outside. His iPhone, which I have always eyed, was lying on his power bank at the edge of the bed. His shoes and slippers were exactly where he always kept them. In fact, there was no sign that anyone had slept in the room at all. The only odd thing was that the door to his bathroom was open.

That was the moment fear gripped us by the throat.

We called our relatives, our church people, even that elderly man down the street who always had one proverb for every situation. Nobody could explain it. Nobody had an answer.

Let me tell you about my brother.

He was two years older than me, a 200-level engineering student at the time. He was the quiet type. The kind of person who could be in the house for days, and you’d forget because he barely spoke. If you wanted to get along with him, the best thing to do was to leave him alone. He didn’t go out much. He didn’t party. He didn’t even have close friends. Just his laptop, his laptop, and his thoughts.

We never reported the case to the police. After the way they handled my father’s death, my mother swore that we would rather trust in God than go to the police.

One day turned to one month. One month became one year. One year became eleven years.

We placed a camera in his old room, thinking maybe, just maybe, he had played some elaborate prank on us. But deep down, we knew. My brother wasn’t the type to play games.

I have always heard that absence makes the heart grow fonder, but that's only when you know where the person is. Otherwise, absence turns the heart into something else. Something frosty.

Time became the river through which we paddled our canoe. Or at least we tried. My mother stopped mentioning his name, at least publicly. I couldn't count the times she had cried silently, hoping we wouldn't hear, and I pretended along. I learned to push thoughts of him to the back of my mind.

Then came December 2024.

I was in my apartment when my phone rang. It was my mother. Her voice was shaky. She said I had to come home immediately.

I asked what happened. She couldn't string her words together. She sounded like a radio struggling for a signal.

That night, I barely slept. By morning, I was on the first bus heading home, my mind jumping from one terrible possibility to another. But when I saw my sister in flesh and blood, I breathed out like a teenage girl checking her pregnancy test and seeing one red line.

But nothing, nothing, could have prepared me for what my mother said next.

She took me to the police station and introduced me to my brother.

Or at least, a man who looked like my brother.

The same face. The same voice. He even had the same slight gap in his teeth, the same way of adjusting his shirt when he got nervous. And when he was asked to repeat what he said the day before, he knew everything.

He knew all the things only my brother should know. Our inside jokes. The gist we had over my primary school crush. Where we kept important documents. The exact location of the spare key to the back door, where we initially pumped water from, even my sister didn't know that, because she was too young to remember.

But when we asked the most important question, his mouth froze.

"What happened that night?" "Where did you go?" I was almost tempted to ask if he was abducted by aliens.

His face was blank. No answer.

The last thing he remembered was walking to his room after night prayers. Then, according to him, he "woke up on a school field."

He couldn't remember any of it. But what he could remember was even scarier.

He remembered all the details about our lives since he disappeared. My mother's shop that was built in 2019. COVID-19. The school I went to (I started school in 2014), the time my mother was admitted to the hospital for over a month in 2022, and how I couldn't return to the hospital one of the nights because of heavy rain.

He recalled them as if he were there, not from afar but from inside. But I felt something was wrong, or maybe I'm only overthinking. He was more of reciting the events as if he had read them in a book. His tone was flat, like a Siri reading out the news. No nostalgia in his voice, no emotion in his eyes. It made all the hair on my skin rise as if they were giving a standing ovation at that moment.

He spoke as if no time had passed at all.

But eleven years had passed. And the man sitting in front of me wasn’t the same person. My mother doesn’t believe it’s him. My sister doesn’t believe it’s him. I don’t believe it’s him.

We are now waiting for the DNA test results as I write this.

But even if the results say he is my brother, he will not be setting foot into our house.

For now, he is staying with the police. We are paying for his welfare, but that is where it ends.

Because whoever left that night in 2013… is not who came back in 2024.


Edit:
Treat as fiction.

You're right, who ever left 12 years ago isn't the same person even if the DNA matches.
Nice try op

Things dey xup for this life cha.... Can't believe I read this story of yours to the very end.............E just be like Nollywood movie...

But in all of this, only your brother has the explanation to give by himself.........

@OP did this really happen or just a very good captivating write up..?

I find it xtremely hard to believe you or that it happened here in Nigeria..

JoeRizzla:
You're right, who ever left 12 years ago isn't the same person even if the DNA matches.
That could be a alien/ghost in shape of your brother, I've seen this happen few times in the US and especially Thailand these things happens alot, people disappear and return after many years only to come back and kîll/hunt same people that accepted them back into the family.
Whatever happens don't let him stay close to your vulnerable family members cos it could get bloody

Baba ....na fiction be this naaa
Writer's finesse is all over the text

This thing happened to my uncle. His eldest son disappeared like that without trace. I was a kid then. All efforts to find him proved abortive.

He reappeared after 20 years when his neighborhood had developed much, even the building he knew in their house collapsed and a different design was erected.

He came back around 1:00am and knocked on the right door. They thought it was a thief so no one opened till the next morning when they saw him.

He couldn't say what really happened. And he had become a core hemp smoker. His attitude was too unusual throughout the 1 year he reunited with his family. He had to leave again. It's now two years he left.

He was able to access an alternate dimension, there is another entity in him. Have you asked him why he is in the Police station?

Which Movie be this? Una don carry una Tinubu sponsored madness come torment us for here ba

Which kind story be this one. Do you know what you’re saying at all?

Alien abduction

Yinmu

This thing happened to me in 1999. I don't want to explain where I was taken because each time I tried to I would start feeling a severe headache, so I don't want such an episode today. But one day, I will talk, and I won't mind if my head explodes.

OP, don't take back your brother, don't send him away either. He will come to haunt you people. Send him to an asylum. If you want to believe me, go and check if he can still have an erection.

I know what I am saying

Strange world we live in. After asking Ai this is what I could come up with?

Paranormal experiences. While rare and not scientifically proven, cases of alleged alien abduction, time slips, or other paranormal events have been reported.

My question is since he woke up in a field what has he been doing all the while? How did he survive? Where did he live? What has he been eating and who feeds him?

If you believe this, you will believe anything

louken:
If you believe this, you will believe anything

It's not a must that you believe in something, anybody can choose to believe in whatever he chooses to. The worlds too mysterious so anything can happen.

Your use of words and expressions are top notch

Seems you are all these art students

louken:
If you believe this, you will believe anything

Have you read the book with the title of ur sentence..? "Believe this you'll believe anything"..?

bigpicture001:
Have you read the book with the title of ur sentence..? "Believe this you'll believe anything"..?

James Hadley Chase.

Op, your story is not complete.

Where did you brother say he went to for those 11yrs?

Have you watched the movie PET SEMATARY? I susppect that is what is going on with your brother.

Here is what gpt has to say

What Chatgpt said:

Those two nitwits above can't think without the machine. Now the machine tells us what's wrong or right, true or false. A machine programmed by individuals who are heavy on mind control. I guess by now we all know where the world is heading to As for the story, probably a fiction. Nice try Op

Lol, what’s with people lifting short fiction stories from reddit nowadays.

From all your write up, I can deduce that nothing is wrong with your brother, it's you who needs medical help urgently. Several lies to manipulate your readers

Stranger things Naija

SKhanmi:
Lol, what’s with people lifting short fiction stories from reddit nowadays.

If you can send the Reddit link showing same story, I will send you 50K.

Wait, people are actually asking AI if this story is true? For real? OMG

Op ,na Alien abduction! reptilians don kidnap am for experiment, of course they will wipe his memory so he will not tell remember and tell humans what happened it is not in their interest.

bigpicture001:
Have you read the book with the title of ur sentence..? "Believe this you'll believe anything"..?

Written by James Hadley Chase...😁

Stupid story, iPhone in 2013

Jacktheripper:
I am typing this with a heart that is pounding so hard that I can hear it in my ears. I swear on everything I hold dear, if not that I have no one to share this with, I wouldn’t have said a word. But maybe, just maybe, someone out there will have an answer.

This nightmare started in 2013. Our family used to be six, but by the end of 2012, we had become four. Death took my father and my grandmother within months of each other, and the house felt emptier than ever.

We live in a four-bedroom apartment. My mother has one room, my sister took another, my elder brother had his own, and I stayed in the last one.

There is a tradition in our home: once it is 9:30 PM sharp, we all gather in the sitting room for night prayers. How long it lasts depends on my mother's mood, sometimes just five minutes, other times, one full hour of binding, casting, and fire-fire prayers. After that, everyone goes to bed.

That’s why the morning of August 2013 felt like madness.

We had prayed as usual the night before. There was nothing unusual, no bad dream, no flickering light, no shadow moving where it shouldn’t. Yet by morning, my brother was gone.

And when I say gone, I don’t mean he packed his things and left. I mean disappeared, as in vanished from the face of the earth.

The two doors in our house were locked from the inside. The window in his room had iron barricades, unless my brother suddenly became the size of a house cat, there was no way he squeezed through, and there was the window net which was screwed from the outside. His iPhone, which I have always eyed, was lying on his power bank at the edge of the bed. His shoes and slippers were exactly where he always kept them. In fact, there was no sign that anyone had slept in the room at all. The only odd thing was that the door to his bathroom was open.

That was the moment fear gripped us by the throat.

We called our relatives, our church people, even that elderly man down the street who always had one proverb for every situation. Nobody could explain it. Nobody had an answer.

Let me tell you about my brother.

He was two years older than me, a 200-level engineering student at the time. He was the quiet type. The kind of person who could be in the house for days, and you’d forget because he barely spoke. If you wanted to get along with him, the best thing to do was to leave him alone. He didn’t go out much. He didn’t party. He didn’t even have close friends. Just his laptop, his laptop, and his thoughts.

We never reported the case to the police. After the way they handled my father’s death, my mother swore that we would rather trust in God than go to the police.

One day turned to one month. One month became one year. One year became eleven years.

We placed a camera in his old room, thinking maybe, just maybe, he had played some elaborate prank on us. But deep down, we knew. My brother wasn’t the type to play games.

I have always heard that absence makes the heart grow fonder, but that's only when you know where the person is. Otherwise, absence turns the heart into something else. Something frosty.

Time became the river through which we paddled our canoe. Or at least we tried. My mother stopped mentioning his name, at least publicly. I couldn't count the times she had cried silently, hoping we wouldn't hear, and I pretended along. I learned to push thoughts of him to the back of my mind.

Then came December 2024.

I was in my apartment when my phone rang. It was my mother. Her voice was shaky. She said I had to come home immediately.

I asked what happened. She couldn't string her words together. She sounded like a radio struggling for a signal.

That night, I barely slept. By morning, I was on the first bus heading home, my mind jumping from one terrible possibility to another. But when I saw my sister in flesh and blood, I breathed out like a teenage girl checking her pregnancy test and seeing one red line.

But nothing, nothing, could have prepared me for what my mother said next.

She took me to the police station and introduced me to my brother.

Or at least, a man who looked like my brother.

The same face. The same voice. He even had the same slight gap in his teeth, the same way of adjusting his shirt when he got nervous. And when he was asked to repeat what he said the day before, he knew everything.

He knew all the things only my brother should know. Our inside jokes. The gist we had over my primary school crush. Where we kept important documents. The exact location of the spare key to the back door, where we initially pumped water from, even my sister didn't know that, because she was too young to remember.

But when we asked the most important question, his mouth froze.

"What happened that night?" "Where did you go?" I was almost tempted to ask if he was abducted by aliens.

His face was blank. No answer.

The last thing he remembered was walking to his room after night prayers. Then, according to him, he "woke up on a school field."

He couldn't remember any of it. But what he could remember was even scarier.

He remembered all the details about our lives since he disappeared. My mother's shop that was built in 2019. COVID-19. The school I went to (I started school in 2014), the time my mother was admitted to the hospital for over a month in 2022, and how I couldn't return to the hospital one of the nights because of heavy rain.

He recalled them as if he were there, not from afar but from inside. But I felt something was wrong, or maybe I'm only overthinking. He was more of reciting the events as if he had read them in a book. His tone was flat, like a Siri reading out the news. No nostalgia in his voice, no emotion in his eyes. It made all the hair on my skin rise as if they were giving a standing ovation at that moment.

He spoke as if no time had passed at all.

But eleven years had passed. And the man sitting in front of me wasn’t the same person. My mother doesn’t believe it’s him. My sister doesn’t believe it’s him. I don’t believe it’s him.

We are now waiting for the DNA test results as I write this.

But even if the results say he is my brother, he will not be setting foot into our house.

For now, he is staying with the police. We are paying for his welfare, but that is where it ends.

Because whoever left that night in 2013… is not who came back in 2024.


Edit:
Treat as fiction.

Can u repeat the question sir??

Jacktheripper:
I am typing this with a heart that is pounding so hard that I can hear it in my ears. I swear on everything I hold dear, if not that I have no one to share this with, I wouldn’t have said a word. But maybe, just maybe, someone out there will have an answer.

This nightmare started in 2013. Our family used to be six, but by the end of 2012, we had become four. Death took my father and my grandmother within months of each other, and the house felt emptier than ever.

We live in a four-bedroom apartment. My mother has one room, my sister took another, my elder brother had his own, and I stayed in the last one.

There is a tradition in our home: once it is 9:30 PM sharp, we all gather in the sitting room for night prayers. How long it lasts depends on my mother's mood, sometimes just five minutes, other times, one full hour of binding, casting, and fire-fire prayers. After that, everyone goes to bed.

That’s why the morning of August 2013 felt like madness.

We had prayed as usual the night before. There was nothing unusual, no bad dream, no flickering light, no shadow moving where it shouldn’t. Yet by morning, my brother was gone.

And when I say gone, I don’t mean he packed his things and left. I mean disappeared, as in vanished from the face of the earth.

The two doors in our house were locked from the inside. The window in his room had iron barricades, unless my brother suddenly became the size of a house cat, there was no way he squeezed through, and there was the window net which was screwed from the outside. His iPhone, which I have always eyed, was lying on his power bank at the edge of the bed. His shoes and slippers were exactly where he always kept them. In fact, there was no sign that anyone had slept in the room at all. The only odd thing was that the door to his bathroom was open.

That was the moment fear gripped us by the throat.

We called our relatives, our church people, even that elderly man down the street who always had one proverb for every situation. Nobody could explain it. Nobody had an answer.

Let me tell you about my brother.

He was two years older than me, a 200-level engineering student at the time. He was the quiet type. The kind of person who could be in the house for days, and you’d forget because he barely spoke. If you wanted to get along with him, the best thing to do was to leave him alone. He didn’t go out much. He didn’t party. He didn’t even have close friends. Just his laptop, his laptop, and his thoughts.

We never reported the case to the police. After the way they handled my father’s death, my mother swore that we would rather trust in God than go to the police.

One day turned to one month. One month became one year. One year became eleven years.

We placed a camera in his old room, thinking maybe, just maybe, he had played some elaborate prank on us. But deep down, we knew. My brother wasn’t the type to play games.

I have always heard that absence makes the heart grow fonder, but that's only when you know where the person is. Otherwise, absence turns the heart into something else. Something frosty.

Time became the river through which we paddled our canoe. Or at least we tried. My mother stopped mentioning his name, at least publicly. I couldn't count the times she had cried silently, hoping we wouldn't hear, and I pretended along. I learned to push thoughts of him to the back of my mind.

Then came December 2024.

I was in my apartment when my phone rang. It was my mother. Her voice was shaky. She said I had to come home immediately.

I asked what happened. She couldn't string her words together. She sounded like a radio struggling for a signal.

That night, I barely slept. By morning, I was on the first bus heading home, my mind jumping from one terrible possibility to another. But when I saw my sister in flesh and blood, I breathed out like a teenage girl checking her pregnancy test and seeing one red line.

But nothing, nothing, could have prepared me for what my mother said next.

She took me to the police station and introduced me to my brother.

Or at least, a man who looked like my brother.

The same face. The same voice. He even had the same slight gap in his teeth, the same way of adjusting his shirt when he got nervous. And when he was asked to repeat what he said the day before, he knew everything.

He knew all the things only my brother should know. Our inside jokes. The gist we had over my primary school crush. Where we kept important documents. The exact location of the spare key to the back door, where we initially pumped water from, even my sister didn't know that, because she was too young to remember.

But when we asked the most important question, his mouth froze.

"What happened that night?" "Where did you go?" I was almost tempted to ask if he was abducted by aliens.

His face was blank. No answer.

The last thing he remembered was walking to his room after night prayers. Then, according to him, he "woke up on a school field."

He couldn't remember any of it. But what he could remember was even scarier.

He remembered all the details about our lives since he disappeared. My mother's shop that was built in 2019. COVID-19. The school I went to (I started school in 2014), the time my mother was admitted to the hospital for over a month in 2022, and how I couldn't return to the hospital one of the nights because of heavy rain.

He recalled them as if he were there, not from afar but from inside. But I felt something was wrong, or maybe I'm only overthinking. He was more of reciting the events as if he had read them in a book. His tone was flat, like a Siri reading out the news. No nostalgia in his voice, no emotion in his eyes. It made all the hair on my skin rise as if they were giving a standing ovation at that moment.

He spoke as if no time had passed at all.

But eleven years had passed. And the man sitting in front of me wasn’t the same person. My mother doesn’t believe it’s him. My sister doesn’t believe it’s him. I don’t believe it’s him.

We are now waiting for the DNA test results as I write this.

But even if the results say he is my brother, he will not be setting foot into our house.

For now, he is staying with the police. We are paying for his welfare, but that is where it ends.

Because whoever left that night in 2013… is not who came back in 2024.


Edit:
Treat as fiction.

Omo this was an amazing read ! See as I dey fear and panic as I dey read am, good job ! Your writing skills are on point.