The Truth about My Family's Odd Behaviour

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This is an unbelievable story that really happened to me.

It all happened when I was fifteen years old. I was living with my mum, dad and my little brother.

On the new year's eve after we finished watching TV I went to bed hoping to have a nice dream, but instead I had a nightmare (I can't remember the content of the dream) and woke up quite suddenly during the night.

I could hear my heart beating very fast and my whole body was drenched in cold sweat as if someone had poured water down my back. I sat bolt upright on my bed and stayed that way for a while.

"This is just great - a nightmare on the new year's day!" I thought with irritation, and as I didn't feel like going back to sleep straight away I went to the sitting room to get a drink (we had a refrigerator in there).

And when I entered the sitting room somehow all my family were there sitting on the sofa, huddled together in front of TV, even though it was well past midnight (I didn't check the clock but it was probably around 2 in the morning). Also there were usually no programs on TV around that time of the night but they were showing some news (this part is also vague) on it.

What's more, there was no sound coming from the TV...
And every single window was open wide leaving the room as freezing as the outside.
Obviously something strange was going on. I went cold all over.
"What the hell are you all doing?? What's got into your heads??" Trembling, I yelled at them.
Then my little brother replied:"But.....ah....(the voice was too quiet to make out)" and he started crying. When my parents saw that they shut all the windows and turned off the TV, all the while not speaking a single word and showing no emotion on their faces; and they gestured to my little brother, who was still crying, like they wanted him to go to bed, and they all went back to their bedrooms.
Witnessing such a creepy incident on the very first day of the new year disturbed me, and I no longer felt like sleeping. I stayed up until the morning reading a comic book in my room.

In the morning I asked my parents what they were doing in the middle of the night and they both looked at me like: "what the hell are you talking about??" There was a huge difference between the disbelieving faces I saw then and the emotionless faces I saw the night before that I became a bit panicky thinking: "was that ghost thing that I saw last night??"

Well I knew my friends wouldn't believe me if I told them and, as I had just been dumped by my girlfriend in the previous month, I concluded that I saw hallucinations due to stress.

Some days later I again woke up during the night because of a nightmare. This time I sort of remembered what had happened in the dream; it was about getting hit on the back of my head. Strangely even after I woke up my head still hurt. And somehow I was thinking nonsense like: "I will be safe in the convenience store..."
I also got obsessed with the thought "I've been attacked by a ghost," and in panic ran to the sitting room but no one was there. The room smelt like something had been burning in it, maybe because we'd had some meat for supper. And remembering the strange incident that happened in the room on the new year's day I ended up spending a sleepless night yet again.

And then around the beginning of February my body started to itch all over.
I thought at first I just had a dry skin condition, but I felt a strange burning sensation especially around my back and head, and I kept scratching at these places. It seemed to only get worse and I went to the dermatologist and got some ointment. I was going to rub it on after bath when my brother said, "can I do it for you?" I showed my back to him but suddenly he hit me with his palm really hard in the middle of my back. It hurt so much that I shouted angrily at him, saying, "bugger off!!"

My little brother always cried when I shouted at him, so very soon his eyes became watery. Just when I thought, "oh.. he's gonna cry, he's gonna cry," tears started streaming down his cheeks.

Then strangely his face sort of began to lose its colour and in the end he was crying but without any expression on his face...

It was so creepy and when I looked at my parents they too were crying without expression. Now I was totally lost... When I looked at them closely they seemed like they were trying to say something to me but I couldn't understand what. 'Ahh.......ee,' was about all I could make out.

Just then everything around me turned red and gradually it faded into sepia colour, and I felt my consciousness leaving me. That was what I thought but the next moment I found myself transported to a completely different place. But the place, however, was familiar to me, and after some hard thinking I recognized it as my cousin's house.
My uncle was looking down at me with a worried face.

"Huh..? How did I get here??" I didn't know what was going on. Soon people started coming into the room.

I made a guess that up until then everything had been a dream but I didn't understand why I was in my uncle's house or why my grandparents were there, or why I was bandaged everywhere. I began to panic.

"Maybe we shouldn't tell him anything because he doesn't remember what happened," I heard my granddad say. But my uncle replied, ' But we must tell him. The offender hasn't been caught, and the police is going to come and ask questions.'

Then my uncle told me everything. Someone set fire on my house on the 1st January and the house got completely burnt down.

I survived by pure chance because I was in a convenience store at the time when the house was set on fire. But it seemed I encountered the arsonist after all and I was attacked with a kind of bat and got hit on the back of my head and my back, and on many other places on my body, which resulted in loss of memory. After the attack I was immediately admitted to hospital and for sometime my life hanged in balance. When I got better I was moved to my uncle's house.

And now it was already March. For the last two months I suffered amnesia and had been undergoing rehabilitation, and it seemed only now I had fully recovered my memories.

I cried and cried: because I lost all the important things in my life, and I had spent the whole two months not knowing it. My grandparents were looking at me with pained expression. My uncle just looked away, but my grandparents finally began to cry as well, and we just kept crying together.

My body was covered with bruises, I was bandaged like a mummy, and everytime I bent my limbs a stinging pain went through me.

The windows which were somehow wide open on a cold winter night; my family huddled together on the sofa with expressionless faces; the nightmare in which I was hit by a strange man; everything around me turning red - all things now fitted together like pieces in a jigsaw puzzle.

The arsonist hasn't been found. And when they took my bandage off, there was one place on my bruised back which was left unscarred, and it was in a shape of a small hand.
It has been five years since the incident occurred and as my bruises began to fade, so did the hand print.

I'm sorry this story was too long and badly written. The memories of the incident will stay with me forever. The story itself may not be scary but I think the fact that the arsonist is still at large is very scary, at least for me.
Thank you for reading my story.