Ghost Boy

Visitor Article

Submitted By: Anonymous
Submitted On: OCtober 2, 2005

Late one night, I sat up in my bed reading. We had only lived in the house for a few weeks. Our teenage son, whose room was adjacent to ours, liked to stay up late, reading or listening to music.

I looked up to see a young man with blond hair, dressed in tee shirt and jeans walking past our bedroom's open door toward the bathroom. I assumed it was our son, Johnny, and thought nothing of it at the time. An hour later, I realized he had never come back from the bathroom.

I got up and looked into our son's bedroom; he was sleeping soundly. He couldn't have passed by without my hearing his footsteps, so it was strange. Who had walked past our bedroom door?

A few nights later, my daughter was taking a shower in the upstairs bath. I heard her yelling, "Can't I have any privacy?"

I went up to break up one more sibling-rivalry argument, and she said, "Johnny came into my bathroom. I could see him through the shower curtain. He has his own bathroom downstairs. Make him stay out, Mom."

I had just dropped Johnny off at his soccer game. I asked, "What was he wearing?"

She said, "A white tee shirt and Levis, why?"

"I don't know who you saw, but it wasn't Johnny. He's been gone for a half hour wearing his blue soccer clothes."

I did some investigating, and the house had a sad history. A young man had been depressed and eventually killed himself with an overdose back in the 1960's. Most of the neighbors were reticent about discussing it, and I couldn't find out too many details except that he was a teenager when he died and had been hospitalized for mental illness.

None of us were exactly comfortable with the idea of living with a ghost, but we saw no reason to move. It wasn't as if our house were haunted by something evil. We felt sad about the boy.

Six months later, I was cleaning the kitchen after dinner, loading the dishwasher and wiping counters. Behind my head, a kitchen cabinet door slammed shut. Hard. And I jumped at least a foot.

My father was visiting at the time, and he didn't believe in ghosts. Still he looked startled by something he couldn't explain. He asked, "Did you do that? Slam that door?"

No. Not only did I not slam the cabinet door, but I knew who did it. I started thinking about moving. Our ghost was turning violent.

The next thing we noticed was a bad smell. It varied between mildew and some chemical that we couldn't identify. My son was taking chemistry class, but he couldn't figure it out, either. The odor came and went, but it was usually in the same area of the hallway.

Meanwhile, my husband became very irritable.

He had developed insomnia and started taking sleeping medications. They didn't help. He would fall asleep, but it was a fitful, toss-and-turn kind of sleep.

He started having nightmares and would awaken, yelling unintelligible things. I moved into the guestroom because he flung his arms around, once hitting me in the face in his sleep.

He didn't believe in ghosts. He thought the kids and I were talking nonsense. Meanwhile, he grew paranoid, suspecting the rest of the family of hating him. This wasn't true. We loved him. We were simply bewildered. Meanwhile, the stench grew stronger in the hallway.

After a year of bad dreams and occasional teenage ghost sightings, my husband said we were crazy, and he was leaving us. He moved out and filed for divorce.

All of us felt the ghost's presence, but my husband received the brunt of its anger, and it changed him. It has been twelve years, and he's still a haunted man.