Hide and Seek

When I was a kid, my parents would sometimes bring me down to my aunt and uncles house in Arizona for the weekend. I would mostly spend time playing with my cousins, Ray and Blake, who were around the same age as me. They lived in a small farm house with a large amount of open space. We would run around and basically do whatever we wanted.
If we thought we could get away with it, the three of us would sometimes cross over to the neighboring house which was about a half mile away. It had been abandoned for decades, with lots of scattered belongings of the people who last lived there. It was just begging to be explored, and was a goldmine for three adventurous young boys such as ourselves, especially because of the stories my cousins had told me about the old house being haunted. It was a pretty classic fare; man goes crazy, axe murders his entire family, hangs himself, returns every night as an angry spirit, looking for more victims. Being so young, I allowed myself to believe it.
One afternoon, we decided to play hide and seek. When it was my turn to hide, I ran off to the old abandoned house. Inside the house, I noticed there was still old furniture on the inside with white cloths over every piece. I had to maneuver myself around broken dishes and crumbling books lying on the ground. The old floor creeked with every step. I went upstairs to find an old bedroom with a closet. Score. There were even long black dresses left from the previous owners still hanging on the rack that I could hide behind.
I stepped inside the closet and found a way to close the closet door shut so it was almost pitch black. My only light source was a slit of sunlight from a nearby window. I crouched down on the floor, and waited. Some time passed and ther...

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...ere were police cars lined up. I watched all of the men in blue uniforms talk worryingly on their radio. My parents were also there. Everyone demanded to know where I was, but my story didn't make sense to them. Since I was still a little kid at the time, they let the case go. I never dared to even go near that house, ever again.
Not until years later, at a family dinner, did Ray and Blake fill in a piece of the story. When they were looking for me, they thought they spotted me in the window of the bedroom I was hiding in. When they got closer, they saw that it wasn’t me.
An old man, who seemed he was carrying something on his back, neither of them had recognized was smiling and waving at them, gesturing for them to come upstairs. That’s when they went back home to tell their parents I was missing, not daring to tell the truth.
All this, while I slept in the closet…