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The original was posted on /r/nosleep by /u/bohemiancouchpotato on 2024-11-10 00:50:45+00:00.
My family and I have been going through a very strange experience over the last couple of months. It's hard to even put into words or explain what is going on. I guess I can just start off from where it all started to feel off.
A few months back my family had a big get-together. My parents both have two siblings. They all got married and had some kids. Well, all of them except Uncle Matt. He never got married or had kids. That means I have ten cousins. My aunts and uncles all live within two hours of us so we’ve all grown up together.
That being said, we don't normally have all my aunts and uncles in a house at once, this was a rare occasion to have a family meal when they were all free.
I will not be naming every single family member in this post because that seems like a lot of information and honestly, you've already gotten more information about my family than you ever wanted, but I promise this context is important.
Okay, enough with my babbling. Let's talk about what happened that weird night.
My parents and I went over to my Aunt Margo and Uncle Ken’s house for a BBQ in the backyard. The backyard felt loud and chaotic. I tried to stay out of the way and get the night over with. I was honestly just there for the free food.
We were all sitting down at a big table outside. I was so focused on making sure none of the napkins went flying in the wind I wasn't listening to the conversation. My aunt Margo came over to the table with a plate of really burnt hot dogs. My mom immediately started to laugh at the sight of them.
“Is burning food genetic or something? How on earth do you guys always do that to food? The Jensens need to leave the cooking to the Millers.” My mom said with a sarcastic giggle. Uncle Ken looked at her confused.
“What are you on about Liz? Uncle Ken snapped back.
“I mean, Margo burnt the hot dogs and Matt always burns food when he cooks. Remember we had to ban him for months from cooking because we had to order takeout like three times in a row.” Everyone at the table laughed recalling their memories. Sighs of recollection bounced back and forth from person to person when my dad spoke up in Aunt Margos' defense.
“Honey, what are you talking about? Matt is your brother. I really shouldn't have to remind you of that.” My mom rolled her eyes in response to my dad.
I spoke up because I was suddenly confused about which side of the family Uncle Matt was actually on. You would think I would naturally just know that, but all my aunts and uncles act like siblings and call each other their siblings. My grandparents often refer to their son/daughter-in-laws as just their kids so it isn't something I always think about.
“Wait, I'm confused. Whose side is Uncle Matt on? What is the joke? I don't get it.” I asked but was only met with a laugh from all the parents at the table. I finally got an answer from my mom following the silence of the joke that somehow went over my head.
“Don't be silly baby, Matt is your dad's brother.” As the words left her mouth half the table looked confused.
“Liz, what are you talking about? He is on your side. He is a Miller.” My aunt Margo said as she scraped off the burnt edges of her hot dog.
“Okay, Now I’m with Amanda. I don't get the joke.” My mom said while looking at me with narrow inquisitive eyes and then at the rest of the group.
“Wait, wait, everyone slow down.” Aunt June said, speaking up for probably the first time in the night. “This is dumb. Matt is not Liz and I’s brother. He has to be on the Jensen's side of the family.”
I sat at the table watching my family in silence. Their eyes darted back and forth. They stopped laughing and were all just scratching their heads.
After a few minutes, my mom got out her phone. She found an old family photo from when she was a kid. In the photo were her, my grandparents, my uncle Paul, and my aunt June. Nothing out of the ordinary. After looking at the picture, Aunt Margo got out her phone and looked for an old childhood photo.
“Ah ha! Found one.” She stated as she showed off the photo on her phone. Yet again, the photo was normal. It had my grandparents, my dad, Aunt Margo, and Aunt Susan.
The next hour consisted of both sides of the family going back and forth showing photos. None of them with Uncle Matt in them.
I had a few of my cousins there, but they all lost interest once they ate. I on the other hand couldn't be pulled away. I was engrossed in learning where the heck Uncle Matt came from.
They kept talking back and forth. They figured maybe he wasn't anyone's sibling. Maybe he was related by marriage or a second cousin twice removed that I just called ‘Uncle Matt’ because that was the easiest thing to call him. We all have a relative like that, right?
I know an easy solution you might be thinking of is to just call him up. That's also what I said but he was working and they didn't want to interrupt him, but guess what? I needed answers so I decided to call him. However, when I looked at my phone I couldn't find him In my contacts. I looked through it multiple times. I remembered texting him about something a few days back so he should’ve been in my text history. Still nothing.
After being weirded out by his contact being gone, I mentioned out loud that someone should call him. Regardless of him being at work. No one agreed with me, but once I told them his contact was missing from my phone they all got curious and looked to see if he was missing for them too.
We were all in shock to find him missing from all our phones.
The family started to dig through their camera rolls and any digital libraries they had to try and find any photo of him. Uncle Andrew thought he had a photo of the back of him, but we soon found that we all remembered him looking differently.
Uncle Andrew showed a picture of the back of a bald man who looked pretty tall. Aunt June called him crazy and recalled him having long curly red hair.
It wasn’t like we hadn’t seen him in a year or that he was some kind of distant memory. I saw the guy last week. He came over to my house to help me with some homework, and I can tell you he didn’t have red hair or no hair at all, he was, well, shoot... I can’t remember what he looked like now that I think about it.
It was safe to say we were all creeped out. As the sun went down and it got chilly out, the group moved inside. Normally, this is when everyone would go home, but I saw Aunt Margo start a pot of coffee. It was going to be a long night. The air was tense and full of unease. None of the adults wanted to go home until they had answers.
I could tell the adults wanted to talk more but didn’t want to worry the younger cousins. My older cousin Maddy clearly didn’t care about anything that was going on. She just wanted to sleep. We convinced her to take my three young cousins into the basement so they could all get some sleep. But not me, I was invested. Uncle Matt and I are close. We see each other all the time. How could I not have a shred of evidence that he even existed?
As my cousins shuffled downstairs, all the adults huddled around a big whiteboard Aunt Margo slapped on the kitchen island. They started to write down everything they could remember. What he looked like, the last time they saw him, memories of him. None of it was coherent. It seemed he was a completely different person in all our memories. Even if it was a memory where multiple people were around.
One of the only things that we could all agree on was that the Jensens always thought he was on the Miller side of the family and the Millers always thought he was on the Jensen side.
My Mom recalled a story of Matt and my dad going to a lake to fish, but the hook got stuck on Matt’s hat and went flying. My dad told us he remembered my mom telling him the same exact story many times.
Everyone had memories of stories where he was on the other side of the family.
Soon everyone was on the phone with a new family member trying to tell them the situation and asking what they thought about everything. My aunts and uncles were talking to realities on the phone I didn’t know I had. Relatives that probably only met Matt a couple times at best. All I heard was one dead end at a time. No one knew where he came from or where he went.
So the big question was who is Matt? Was he just some random guy who weaseled his way into the family? Telling one side of the family one thing and the other side another? Or was it something so much worse?
As the sun came up that Saturday morning we were all still scratching our heads. The deeper we got into who Matt was, the more freaked out everyone got. I was honestly surprised they let me stay with them all night long.
The more digging everyone did, the farther away we felt. The more rabbit holes we went down the less real he seemed. We couldn’t find any evidence that he ever existed. Some of us searched all over the internet for ‘Matt Jensen’, or ‘Matt Miller’ and a few of us searched for other last names in the family. Of course, it was kind of hard to know who we were looking for given we didn’t know what he really looked like.
After hours of discussion, we compiled a list of attributes that never wavered about Uncle Matt.
He was a man, he never had a mustache, he was tall, he was bad at math, and he loved Jim Carrey movies.
That might seem like a random grouping of facts, but that's because it was. We couldn’t even rememb...
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