The Man in the Black Hat and Suspenders
As many stories here on Creepy-Pasta start off, cliché or not; I have never told anyone these stories. This will be the first time I document them anywhere. I may have mentioned an event or two to a few buddies and lovers, but never the full story. I don’t expect anyone to believe me, or even read this, or for it to get posted in general, but as others say, “it’s worth a try”. I’m going to start off this document saying I am a 20 year old Psychology student, ironically enough, huh? I am completely sane, as anyone would defend themselves to be. I am not a writer, not a story teller, and definitely not someone who is going to get off on people reading this. I am just someone passing along an experience. As a child I witnessed some very traumatic events being that my father would abuse my mother; nearly took her life while I sat crying in the next room. I’ve always felt that after surviving a situation like that, I could deal with just about anything, but now I know I’m wrong. When I was five years old, I started to experience what many Spanish heritage mothers would call “guardian angels” watching over me. It began with animals, seeing puppies hop around my bed at night, and horses trot through my room. The best were when I saw roaches that weren’t there crawling up my walls. Many kids would think this was cool, but it freaked me out because I knew they weren’t there. I’d tell my mother, and she’d chalk it up to over imagination and early signs of being a veterinarian. Did I mention I major in Psychology? By the time I turned 7-8 years old, I was only seeing the puppies, but they were much calmer. They’d sit in corners of my room or at the edge of my bed and hardly pay me any mind, so I stopped paying them any mind. The new experience was floating skulls and bones. You know that fuzzy vision you experience when you’re about to get a killer migraine? Well that’s what these floating skeletons looked like. They were just out of my field of vision and they floated from the ground to the ceiling. Now before I go any further, I lived in New York in a 6 story high apartment complex. This story isn’t going to end with “I discovered I was living on a pet cemetery that my house had been built on”, no. I am just telling you what I saw. I’d tell my mother about these experiences and she’d just say a prayer and send me back to bed, never thought much of it besides “over active imagination” and bad headaches. That’s when it all stopped, or at least I think. I can’t remember having any experiences from the age of 8 to the age of 13. By the time I was in my last year of Junior High however, I was going through a pretty dark phase in life. No I wasn’t painting my nails black and dying my hair even darker, but I wore dark baggy unattractive clothes, and lost myself in the sounds of screaming music. My eyes had bags no matter how much I slept, and the word “tan” was not in my vocabulary. I was pale and dead looking and I couldn’t understand why. This is when it began. I started waking up at night feeling as if my step father had come into my room, and I say step father because I would distinctively sense a male in the room. I thought “maybe he’s just checking up on me and my younger sister” and I’d peek over the bunk-bed and I’d see him scurry out of the room realizing he had woke me up. Some nights he’d just stand in the door way, cross his arms and watch us while we slept. I found it annoying but I got used to it and I would just turn over and fall back to sleep. I’m sure you can guess where this is going, but for those of you who can’t, I’m going to continue. It began to get on my nerves, being woken up at such late hours just because he wanted to make sure we were resting and not staying up all hours of the night, so I decided to complain. Being that he was just my step father, I didn’t have the confidence to corner him and tell him to knock it off, so I went to my mother. She thought it was strange immediately and asked me to explain. “Mom, he comes in in that tacky black hat, and those black suspenders, and just stands there for who knows how long…” “Jess, he’s a construction worker, when do you ever see that man in suspenders or wearing a hat that isn’t yellow and hard?” And that folks, is when it hit me. She was completely correct.  Not to mention, I had never even seen this man’s face or his clothes exactly. It was far too dark at night. Yet I was able to completely explain what he was wearing and how he stood with his arms crossed. “Maybe I’ve been having bad dreams. I’m stressed out a lot lately. Never mind it.” I remember telling my mom. But she wouldn’t brush it off so easily. She began asking questions and talking to family members about it. So I stopped telling her that it was happening. I’d still wake up in the middle of the night, and without even looking over at the corner of my room where the door was, I could tell it was there, whatever it was. I’d just roll over and force myself to fall asleep, but I was scared. I couldn’t take it anymore. For an entire week, the air in my room was heavy with anger and darkness that I just couldn’t shake off. My younger sister never experienced any of this, it was just me. I did mention I was on the top bunk right? Well one night, I was in a deep sleep, but was quickly awoken by the sensation of someone climbing onto my bed and sitting themselves at the edge. Funny side note: the ladder to get onto my bed was to my left, this sensation came from my right, the right side in which the bed was propped right up against the wall. As I felt the entire corner of my bed sink in as if someone had just sat down, I freaked. I lost it and freaked. I sat up with my eyes wide open, trying to absorb as much light and make out what was in the dark, but there was nothing. I could still feel something leaning against my leg and within a second, I felt as if it leaned right over into my face and I threw myself right back down onto my pillow. I was “pooping” bricks, for lack of better terms. I threw my blanket over my head and held my breath. I assumed whatever had been occupying the corner of my room had gotten bold and tried to join me in bed, but that’s when I realized throughout the whole event, I still sensed him in that corner of my room. That means that whatever had made its way into my bed was not the same entity I had grown used to staring me down at night. No, this was something else. Now I use the words “entity”, and “sensed”, because it is the only way I can explain it, however, I never felt that it was a “ghost” or “spirit” or “demon”, in fact, I never got a bad vibe from any of it until that night. I was always just annoyed by it. The next morning, when I was finally brave enough to get out of bed, I told my mother what had happened. She did the motherly thing (Hispanic motherly thing anyways) and called in “clairvoyant” to cleanse the house. She even bathed me in some type of cleansing bath that looked a lot more like soup than anything else. Honestly, I don’t entirely believe in that stuff either. I believe it is just about negative energy and positive energy, like if you wake up and say I’m going to have a bad day, then you will have a bad day, or if you wake up smiling and say you will have a great one, then chances are you may still have a terrible one, but you will handle it with a much more positive attitude. However, this bath worked. I gained color in my skin almost instantly, I was more comfortable in pinks and yellow and blue clothing. I was much more alive and everyone could see it. Not much besides that changed. I stopped seeing this man in my room, but he was still around the house, on the couch when I came home, or walking through the kitchen. I learned to deal with it until it finally just stopped. It all stopped. I’m not sure how this tied into the puppies I saw as a child or the skulls and bones floating in my field of vision, but it happened and I have no explanation for it. Now you may be wondering why I am writing about this since it all stopped, like what’s the big deal then anyways right? Well, I found a photo today while cleaning out some things at my mom’s place now that I’ve got an apartment with my fiancé. The photo is of a little girl who looks a lot like me when I was younger, and a man in a black hat and suspenders standing behind her with arms crossed. She looks to be waving at the camera and they are positioned in front of a large building titled “The New Jersey State Lunatic Asylum”. This hospital is real, and is now called the “Trenton Psychiatric Hospital”, still operational, however this photo is old, and on the back of the photo are the words “He was never there”. The photo was in an envelope with “You Asked” written across it”. Now I don’t know what to think, but I am going to do some research on this place and see if I can figure out why someone who looks exactly like my younger self is in this photo with a man I know but have never physically met. I am looking for all the help I can get. I know this story isn’t your average scary tale, but it is real. I need answers. I need to know why I went through this as a child. I need to know what sucked the life out of me so many years ago, and what made it so easy to get back, and why it all just stopped. I wouldn’t care anymore if it wasn’t for this photo. Also, I can’t be the only person who has experienced something like this, can I? I, like many other users on Creepy Pasta, will use this as a way to document what I discover. Until then. Credit To – Jesh UnSolved Copyright Statement: Unless explicitly stated, all stories published on Creepypasta.com are the property of (and under copyright to) their respective authors, and may not be narrated or performed under any circumstance.