Writer’s Block: Spirits

Oh, a chance to tell my ghost story!

When I was around 11 or 12 years old, I finally got my own room after sharing with my sister (who is six years younger than I am) ever since she was born. I moved into the smallest bedroom in our house, in the back corner of the house. Well, a short while after I moved into that room, I started seeing things. I would walk by my room and see a little boy standing in the middle of the room, sitting on my bed, or standing by a window. The first time I thought I was just crazy or sleep deprived or whatever. But the second time, and then the third, and so on and so on, I kind of got the feeling that I was sharing my room with someone or something.

If I’m remembering correctly, it was my brother M, the older of my two younger brothers, who mentioned seeing the little boy to our mom before I did. M would have been 9 or 10 at the time. The little boy he described was the same one I had seen–blonde hair, around five years old, wearing overalls, and barefoot. Relieved that I wasn’t going crazy, I told my mom that I had seen the boy several times. And it turned out that my mom had also seen him.

My mom saw the little boy one night when my dad was working late. Us kids were all in bed asleep and my mom was in the living room. She saw someone move down the hall out of the corner of her eye. Thinking it was one of us out of bed, she got up to check and found all of us still sound asleep. She saw the boy a few other times, once in the middle of the night when she woke up and saw a little blonde boy walking by her bedroom door. I have only two brothers and both of them have dark brown hair.

The sightings freaked us out, but the boy never caused any trouble. He would appear some nights, but most of the time we didn’t see him and it gave us a pretty cool story to tell to friends.

Then in the summer of 1996, my family moved to Florida. My grandparents moved into our old house. They knew about the ghost, but they never saw him. In late 1997, I moved back to NC and moved in with my grandparents. If anyone would recognize the ghost, it would be me. But I lived there for another three years and never saw him at all.

We thought the ghost had gone away or something, but this June, while I was waiting at the airport to board my plane for ALA, my grandmother started talking to me in a low tone so my young cousin wouldn’t overhear. She said my cousin K had come over one night to get something. K’s mom S stayed in the car with K’s four kids while K came inside my grandparents’ house (my old house). Grandma and K moved to the door and were standing there talking. Grandma looked outside and saw a child standing next to the car, looking in the window. Grandma said, “Looks like one of your kids got out.” K said, “Yeah, looks like it.” Grandma and K talked a bit more and when they looked back, the child was gone so Grandma figured he had gotten back in the car.

Grandma followed K outside and she said jokingly to S, “All right, which one of the kids got out?” S looked at her like she was crazy and said no one had gotten out, they had all been in the car the entire time. K told her mom they both saw one of the kids standing next to the car. S swore no one had gotten out and she hadn’t seen anyone outside the car. She never saw anything, the kids never saw anything. Grandma told me if K hadn’t been there to see it too, she would have thought she was just imagining things. But K described the same little boy Grandma had seen. A small, thin blonde boy.

We have no explanation for who he is or where he came from. The house was built in the 1970s. It had one owner before my parents bought it and we’ve never heard about any little boys dying at the house. The land was farmland before the neighborhood was built, so who knows what might have happened on the land long ago? As far as ghosts go, the little boy was fine and not a problem to live with, thankfully. And it makes a good story to tell whenever people start talking about ghosts.