Stairwalker

After a program at the local library I was giving on ghost stories, a family of four approached me.  They had sat quietly in the back of the room for the entire program and hadn’t offered to share anything, so I thought they were just there to listen.  I found out I was wrong.

“I hear her every night,” the man explained to me, “We go to bed and at the same time very night, I hear the footsteps coming up the stairs and continuing down the hall.  I always get up and check, but no one is ever there.”
“We hear noises at night when we’re all sitting in the living room,” the mother added.

“Sometimes something used to come into my room at night,” the young girl explained, “I would feel the bed move, like someone was sitting on the bed next to me.  Then I could feel something cold touching my hair.  It scared me, so I would stay still and pretend I was asleep. Then it would go away.”

I could hear the honesty in their voices. And the relief. Relief that someone would listen to them and not judge.  Not tell them it was their imagination. Not tell them they were crazy.

This was real. This family was sharing a house with a ghost.

“I had heard that sometimes you can communicate with ghost,” the mother added, “So, during the day, I would go in to my daughter’s room and ask the ghost to stop bothering my daughter at night because it was scaring her.”
“Did it work?” I asked.

She nodded. “Now the ghost walks along the hallway past the bedrooms and only pauses at her room before moving on.” The mother shook her head. “She almost seems lonely.”

However, this nightly walker is not the only spirit to visit this home.

“One night,” the young son related, “I was home alone doing homework when I started to hear a bunch of clicking over and over again.   I remembered about the ghost, so I decided to just wait in the living room until someone else came home.  In about a half-hour, my parents came home and I told them what I heard.  We went to the back of the house and I turned on the switch in the bathroom and it sounded the same as the noise that I heard.”

After that, the parents decided that it would be a better idea if no one were home alone. 

Of course, they never were really alone – were they?

Like what you read?  Find more stories by Terri Reid here.