OK, so it was probably nothing...
When I was about ten my parents took my sister and I on the “holiday of a lifetime” to Oz, not being of the rich persuasion we stayed with distant relatives,- the kind where you rarely talk to one another accept when you need somewhere cheap to stay on holiday (this explains the entire reason why our extended family keeps in touch).

After a full day and a half of travelling we finally arrived in kangaroo country and were picked up from the airport by some distant relations. We made the two hour journey to the house of the actual relatives we’d be staying with-an uncle and auntie and their two young children, my parents last saw this family a decade earlier but my sister and I had never met any of them. We arrived in the early hours of the morning and so only saw our uncle-everyone else was asleep and our family all settled down for the rest of the night in the room we would share for the next couple of weeks.

I woke up at 6am-ish. There was a little boy standing at the bottom of my bed staring at me. He was pale and a bit gaunt looking. I said hello to my cousin before promptly dropping off again.

Later on in the day we were introduced to our cousins properly…yep, unsurprisingly seeing as this is a tale of the unexplained, both cousins were podgy looking sods, the kind used to taking full advantage of “eat as much as you want” meal deals that we saw everywhere in Oz. Neither of them was the skinny little kid I saw earlier on in the day and who I never saw again.

Looking back now I don’t know if it was a dream, the strange hallucination of a knackered and jetlagged child (in which case why could it not have been something more interesting?) or if it’s entirely common for strange children to come into other people’s houses at 6 in the morning in some parts of the world.

*insert spooky music here*

I guess I’ll never know.
(Ella Mentree, Thu 3 Jul 2008, 11:58, Reply)