Up to a couple of months ago, I always regarded imaginary childhood friends in the same light as pickpockets: I'd heard about them, but never had any direct or indirect experience of them. I never had an imaginary friend as a child. None of my friends had, that I know of. I never met any adult who told me he had had one as a child, or that his children had one. Indeed, the only references to imaginary friends I had ever read were in fiction. Then, I came across the Fortean Times publication, It Happened to Me!, volume 3, in which ordinary people told of their extraordinary experiences. (I reviewed volume 2 previously.) Here, several people described their own, or their children's imaginary friends. Significantly, they all recognized them as imaginary, and invisible. (One did say that she saw her "friend" briefly, but I suspect that was with the mind's eye.) Then, squirreled in among them, on page 36, was a story of something quite different, and quite weird.
