My very early life is a joyful haze. Some of my first memories are happy times, if a bit lonely, with plenty of toys in a larger-than-average home, two very loving but hard-working parents and babysitters of varying levels of quality and attention-span. Around the time I hit five, the preparations were finished for our big move - to stay in my father's Kawano family home, more of a manor really, nestled in the rural Japanese countryside. I had already begun to learn both languages, two words for every little thing, and little Jimi took to Japanese like a fish in water.

When we arrived my parents were able to stay around more. I got to see my father in daylight hours more than once a week, and my mother was learning the domestic trade and loving it. As a bonus, I got an extended family full of curious but kind kids around my age, not to mention a plethora of doting aunts and uncles, and my very favorite ba-ba, the grandmotherly matron of the entire family, always smiling with her big old masonry drinking jug. We'd sit and talk together about nothing very important for hours, her patient hand rubbing my back. My new friends found my fluffy blonde hair and features strange at first, but ultimately decided they were more interesting to look at than anything else and quickly accepted me into the fold. No signs of my "problem" at this point either - life was ideal. I still feel blessed for those years, as strange as that may seem.

Those times weren't meant to last, and things took a turn for the worse as I entered my preteen years. Not in the usual ways. I began to have a recurring nightmare shortly after my eleventh birthday, fading to sleep only to find myself paralyzed stiff as a board, eyes staring into the darkness. The sound of a dog barking in the distance, at first - then several dogs, a dozen, growing closer every night. I kept running to my mom, and she got concerned, but seemed to think it would pass. After a few straight weeks of these night terrors, I finally woke my father instead, but when I told him what had been happening he hugged me tight, set me back to bed, and stumbled off in a hurry, his face stricken.

The very next night, I wasn't awakened by my nightmares, but by the feeling of hands clasped on my neck. Cold, shaking hands choking me - I flailed, hitting at the dark as my eyes adjusted, only to realize that my attacker was one of my aunts. She shoved her face up against mine, eyes eerily wide, and whispered onto me shittai, shittai, "disgrace, disgrace," over and over again. I managed to choke out a loud enough noise and my mother stirred in her kakebuton, and as she did the woman released my neck and ran away on four legs, vanishing into the night like a ghost.

I told mom what happened in the morning and showed her my neck. When we asked around, it turned out that aunt was missing. She hadn't told anyone where she was going or why, and as the family convened there was confusion and unease. Now, looking back, I can reconcile that a few of those faces were worse than unease - the grimaces of my father and ba-ba, as if they already knew the reason. That night my mother held me tight, but I couldn't dare sleep, and I saw my father slip away. I escaped my mom's grip and followed him into the night, laying outside as he went into my ba-ba's solitary bedchamber.

I couldn't catch everything, but I heard enough to feel sick. My father defended me, but she repeated that phrase - shittai, mistake, disgrace, and insisted he remarry. Hafu wa shittai, she insisted, that my half-blood was the mistake. I was "rejected." She sounded awfully sad saying it, not fierce or cruel, but neither would she budge from my father's protestations. I had no idea why all of this was happening but it hurt deeply nonetheless. I ran away in tears, slipping back in with my mother, and cried myself back to sleep before my father even got back.

Things went on fairly normally for some time after this - rural Japan can be quite private for myriad reasons, and it wasn't seen as necessary to involve "outsiders" with my Aunt yet. I even began to sleep better, my night terrors vanishing. Over time, however, I could tell that people were viewing me differently. The kids my age started calling me hafu more and Jimi less, in a tone I didn't like, and they began to exclude me from games or avoid me. I got the feeling they were hearing it from their parents, and a pit settled in my stomach.

When one of my uncles vanished about a month later - the husband of the aunt who had throttled me - things went from bad to worse. Their three children surrounded me and beat me, shouting terrible things. They said that their father had told me he would be next to go, and that if he vanished it was all my fault. They left me bloodied and bruised on the mat. In some ways children are many times more cruel than adults without meaning to be.

I finally caved and told my mother and father about what was happening, and my father took my mother away for a long discussion. They returned to me later that evening with ashen faces and told me that for reasons I was too young to understand, we would be moving back to the States. They quietly began the preparations, but the situation worsened. We tried to get the police involved, but ba-ba insisted that it was a family matter with only one solution.

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One night I woke with a start, only to find my father gone. When went searching, a door slid open. I hid and watched as out came ba-ba and my father - still in a state of undress - scrambled from one of my aunts' rooms.

I shudder to think what would have happened to us if not for the fact that ba-ba was next to vanish, less than a week later. I never spoke of what I thought I saw that night to anyone.

When the family discovered she was gone, any hope of salvaging the situation went along with her. It was all my parents could do to keep me safe as the conversations in the family hall grew ever more hostile. Our plans to leave were expedited and we decided to fly out in the morning.

On that final night, I never went to sleep. I was much too stricken for that. Instead, I snuck out of our room by my own volition, to ba-ba's rooms, to cry by my self over how it all went wrong, and how miserable and worthless I was. By this time I was only just nearing twelve, but my life had already turned into such a mess I could hardly reconcile it. When I pulled myself together and stood to leave, I happened to notice a shape in the dim moonlight - ba-ba's big old water jug, sitting alone in the middle of the mat.

I don't know what compelled me to do it, but I stumbled over to the jug and popped the cap, gazing deep within.

The jug still had a small puddle of water, but the bulk of the space was filled with the decapitated head of a dog. Wrinkled, charred, and old, older than anything I'd seen, certainly older than ba-ba. I stared down in horror, and I swear the decrepit dog-head stared back, and growled at me.

When I scrambled back to our room, father was gone. The screen door to the gardens was shredded - long, gouging streaks of torn paper and fabric, with a hole just large enough for a person to fit through. I woke my mother, and she decided we should sleep rough at the airport for the night. Nothing and no one followed us. I had never felt so cold in my life.

We never found dad - or the rest of the missing family members, for that matter. We flew back to the States and I stayed with my mother, living as ordinary a life as we could. The only reason we came to know that the situation got worse in our absence is because she left a letter with our new address behind - for father, as a last ditch effort, in case he ever returned. That was a terrible idea in hindsight, but the rest of the family never came after us. Instead they wrote letter after letter, increasingly deranged as more members of the family vanished, spilling vitriol about how we had killed them all and how I personally was to blame.

One day, instead of a letter we got a call - from Japanese police. They discovered the body of one of the missing kids my age, mauled by "wild animals." When they found the manor empty and couldn't find anyone to talk to, they tracked our contact details as possibly the only living inheritors and requested to transfer the deed. Mom hung up and spent half an hour over the sink, vomiting.

Things were fine for about a month after that, but one evening after school, I began hearing the howling of dogs again - not in my dreams, but while I was wide awake. Within days I was struck sick, awfully sick, and I spent several years mostly laid up in bed, my physical and mental state worsening. It was like the night terrors but a hundred times worse, and there was no escape - just me laid out in misery, my mother at my bedside when she could, reading to me or teaching me what she thought I'd need when I was "back to normal."

Until one day, years later, the illness vanished. Gone, without a trace. I didn't even feel sickly or weak from all my time in bed.

I got up and went to find my mother to celebrate, only to find out that my illness wasn't the only thing that disappeared.

I haven't seen my mother since that day. If she's alive at all, she doesn't want to be anywhere near me.

It was around then that I decided I was the unluckiest person on Earth, but I didn't know how true that thought was until I started trying to live alone at fifteen - and realized that, no matter what I did, it always went for terribly. I thought it was just a fluke, life kicking me while I was down, but I quickly realized that some of the things happening to me on a daily basis were mathematically impossible, on the magnitude of quintillion-to-one. It turns out you can monetize such horrific luck (with varying degrees of safety and success), so I'm doing OK for myself these days, but it made my life absolutely catastrophically miserable for most of the past six years until I learned my current trade.

Oh, and I also realized that dogs were the enemy. I avoid them as much as humanly possible. They never seem to do anything to me, they just silently turn and stare wherever I go. It's unnatural. Have you ever seen a nippy little chihuahua stay perfectly still and quiet for longer than five minutes, just staring at you all the while? Truly terrifying. If not for the deep set childhood trauma and potential moral peril, I might have made for a good pet-sitter, though.

All that to say this damned blog even with its garish color scheme has struck a chord with me, somewhere deep inside.

HAPPY STARTER GUIDE - SUPER HAUNTED EDITION KIT TIPS & TRICKS

Haunted?

Yeah, I think I just might be.