 Stories and content in Weird Darkness can be disturbing for some listeners and is intended for mature audiences only. Parental discretion is strongly advised. Rachel Rogers was putting her four-year-old son Thomas to bed when he began talking about a man in his room. Rachel was a single mother. She and Thomas lived alone, and as far as she could see, they were the only two people present. But her son was insistent, pointing at the empty spot beside her. He's there, standing next to you, look. Thomas had always been quite shy and reserved, and I thought this was an imaginary friend, says his mother Rachel. I played it down and said the man was coming out of the room with me to have a cup of tea so that Thomas could go to sleep. I remember calling my mother and joking, Thomas sees dead people. But it didn't end there. Thomas continued to talk about the man who sometimes visited and played with his toys, always describing him the same, even drawing pictures of him. This man had a mainly bald head and wore very thick rimmed glasses, says Rachel. Thomas wasn't scared of him and there was no sense of threat. He'd say that the man had been to visit and I'd say, diddy darling, that's nice. A couple of years later, she and Thomas were at Rachel's father's house, looking at old photos, because Rachel was researching the family tree. She was showing her father a picture she'd found of her paternal grandmother standing beside her second husband, someone Rachel had barely known and had no photos of at home. Thomas immediately became animated. Mom, that's the man, he cried, the man who used to come and play in my room. He matched Thomas' description perfectly, bald, with thick rimmed glasses. Then Thomas pointed at his wife, Rachel's grandmother, who had died when Rachel was four. And that lady came to our flat and stayed with you when you had the car crash, he added. When Thomas was 20 years old, we'd been in a very serious car crash and I could have died, says Rachel. Thomas told me that this lady, my dead grandmother, had looked after me. He was absolutely certain. I was shocked, the hairs on my neck were on end. I have to be honest, I do believe he saw what he said and that he has a gift. It was just too much of a coincidence and there's no other explanation. I'm Darren Marlar and this is Weird Darkness. Welcome, weirdos. This is Weird Darkness. Here you'll find stories of the paranormal, supernatural, legends, lore, crime, conspiracy, mysterious, macabre, unsolved and unexplained. Coming up in this episode of Weird Darkness, it's been said that kids are more open to the supernatural, perhaps because their minds haven't been closed off to the possibilities that ghosts really exist. That makes stories about childhood hauntings even creepier. The real stories I'll be sharing in this episode include ghosts encountered by kids of all ages. The stories might convince you that the nightlight your child insists stay on in the bedroom needs to stay on for a reason. There's something inherently chilling about old orphanages. Maybe it's the fact that scary orphanage stories abound. After all, the buildings are associated with heartbroken and lonely children and not all of these tales concern the living. Plenty of real life ghost stories feature orphanages filled with restless and vengeful child spirits. And what should you do if your child says they see a ghost? Do you tell them there's no such thing? Do you encourage them to believe more fully? What's the right thing to do? A couple of child psychologists have a few ideas on what you can do. Now, bolt your doors, lock your windows, turn off your lights, and come with me into the Weird Darkness. The idea of the psychic child is many centuries old. In 1620, William Perry, a 12-year-old who claimed to be possessed, caused thousands to flock to his sleepy Staffordshire village. He eventually admitted he was faking it, though not before the poor woman next door had been arrested for witchcraft. Now it's a growth area. In the U.S. there are summer camps and workshops where highly sensitive kids can develop their intuition, spiritual gifts, and energetic awareness. The hit U.S. TV show Psychic Kids, Children of the Paranormal, followed spiritually gifted children as they talked to ghosts, predicted disasters, and attempted to find missing people. Endless YouTube videos offer up similar child-related spooks. One of the most spine-tingling focuses on Cameron, a boy from Glasgow who has remembered a former life on the remote Hebridean island of Bara ever since he's been able to talk. His level of detail is phenomenal. The White House, with the secret path to the beach, the black and white dog, the family name, all of which turn out to be true when Cameron and his mum finally take a trip there. All this interest is set against the backdrop of a surge in so-called magical thinking. It's no longer taboo to dabble in the paranormal. Robbie Williams has claimed that he used to talk to dead people as a child. Megan consults a psychic, while Gwyneth Paltrow's goop is turning crystals and cosmic flow into must-have items. Gigi Hadid, Jessica Alba, Demi Lovato, and Keanu Reeves all say they encountered ghosts as children. Children, it's popularly believed, can lead us to this other realm because they still have a foot in both our world and the spirit world. According to many spiritualists, they, like animals, are purer than adults, more primeval, with no cultural filters. They haven't yet been told what to think or see. This is why they so often surprise us with their intuition, sensing when we're sad or worried, or knowing that we are sick or even pregnant before we announce it. Emma Salter, 36, a council worker from Hull, believes her daughter Hermione was born with psychic powers. As a baby, she was happy to be alone, says Emma. She'd never cry. She'd lie in her cot, looking in a corner, cooing. As she began to talk, Hermione would tell Emma about friends in her bedroom. The first was a boy under the bed, wrapped in bandages, which Emma assumed were dreams or imagination. However, when Hermione was three, before she'd started school, Emma took her to a Victorian school museum. She became so excited, Emma remembers. She told me this was like her old classroom and explained to me what everything was, lifting the desk and telling me this was where she kept her slate and pencil. There is no way she would have known what a slate was. She told me her teacher had a funny cap and a long cloak and carried a stick. In another part of the museum, she told me what a mangle was and when we came to what looked to me like a big drum with a stick in it, she explained that this was where her mother used to wash the clothes. She recognized everything. By the time we left that museum, I thought, yes, my daughter can see things and remember things. I just believed her. Now a teenager, Hermione no longer displays any psychic gifts, but the family do believe her powers once saved her life. One morning, she had had a nightmare about two scary men that really upset her, says Emma. She kept crying. She even told her nursery teachers about it. That evening, Hermione was staying at her aunt's house, Emma's sister, and the kitchen ceiling collapsed. By that, I mean the whole ceiling, not a few bits and pieces, says Emma. Hermione had been coming downstairs about to go in there when she'd seen the two men from her dream outside the kitchen, frightening her away. The next night, she saw them again in her dream and they were smiling, wearing white dresses and they weren't scary anymore. They told her that they'd been there to keep her safe. Claire Waters, a homeopath who lives in rural Hampshire, has been so bewildered by what she believes to be her daughter's psychic gifts that she has recently written a book about her journey, Raising Faith. My daughter Faith had always been a wise soul, quite reserved, always calm, says Claire, but her psychic gifts came out of the blue. My husband is still on the fence. He's a scientific person and doesn't believe he has seen anything that is set in stone proof, but I have no doubt that Faith can see spirits around her. She never reveled in the attention of it. She didn't even think it was that interesting. It was just normal for her. As a mother, you know when your child is telling the truth. Faith first told Claire about her spirit visitors when she was four, though it's worth noting that it was in answer to Claire's direct question. Claire had been to see a medium who told her that her daughter was all seeing, all knowing. Claire remembers it as a bizarre and awkward conversation, and when the medium mentioned her daughter, Claire began to regret going to see her. However, she couldn't shake the medium's words from her mind. So one day, while Faith was playing alone on the floor of her bedroom, Claire plucked up the courage to ask her daughter if she could see other people. She didn't look interested or stopped what she was doing, remembers Claire. She just said, yes, and carried on playing. I asked if there were people in the room now. She answered, yes, and I asked who. She shrugged and said, lots of people. She also told me that my grandad who had died read her bedtime stories. I asked if he looked the same, and she said, yes, but his hair is darker. This was normal for her, not something she thought was a big deal. Over the next seven years, Faith opened up to Claire about her spirit visitors, and Claire's book is filled with spooky details. When the family moved into a new house, their dog would frequently focus on full alert as if watching something invisible. When she asked Faith, her daughter laughed and said they'd inherited two spirit cats. Claire also says that from time to time, she became aware of a strong smell of antiseptic in random places like the car. Faith told me it was someone I'd worked with in a former life during the war and that she was wearing a nurse's uniform with a green cross on it. I said I'd only ever known nurses with a red cross, but Faith was quite sure this one was green. In fact, there was a women's volunteer ambulance corps, also known as the Green Cross Corps, during the First World War. Faith is 15 now and rarely speaks about spirit visitors or psychic matters. She's still wise, super diligent, very reserved. She wants to be a normal teenage girl, says Claire. She thinks I'm the weird one. Deborah Hyde, cultural anthropologist and editor-in-chief of the Skeptic Magazine, is unconvinced. Children have had imaginary friends forever, she says. I had one, and I also remember doing it for attention. You can usually put these cases into categories. There's outright pranking from the child and sometimes attention by proxy for the adult. Adults have agendas that might be invisible to children and if you dig deep enough, you can usually see adults picking up the story and taking it along as a way of getting their own message out into the world. Hyde gives the example of the notorious 1977 Enfield poltergeist, the subject of books, documentaries, films and TV dramas. The haunting of a modest council house in Enfield, North London, loud noises, moving furniture and thrown toys centered on two sisters, Margaret and Janet, 13 and 11 who also appeared to levitate. The events made headlines and attracted parapsychologists who claimed to have witnessed the strange events for themselves and became heavily involved in the children's lives. Although as adults the sisters have admitted to faking 2% of the phenomena, they largely stand by their story, while also avoiding media attention. First of all, there were many people who visited and weren't convinced, says Hyde, but their voices are rarely heard and the mother didn't like people coming unless they were believers. Those girls were intelligent, frustrated and unhappy. Their father had left home and that was unusual in the 70s. I think that what probably started as adolescence mucking about then brought in some lovely supportive male figures and there was too much at stake to stop. I've met Janet as an adult. She was extremely shy and very nice. I feel sorry for her. Usually these cases somewhere along the line suit an adult's narrative, often that their own child is special. Hyde points to the New Age phenomena of indigo children who are supposed to possess supernatural traits and whose typical qualities include resistance to authority and being seen as strange. Critics argue that parents have chosen this label when in fact the children are displaying classic signs of attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, autism or mental illness. Is this enough to explain all the spooky sixth sense moments that moms such as Rachel Rogers may witness with their child then play down and file away? Whatever your beliefs, even the Spiritualists National Union recommends that playing it down and filing it away is exactly what you should do. Children say they can see things. It might be genuine. They might be making it up. Or they might have parents putting them under pressure, says minister Stephen Upton. It's impossible to know, but children's minds are incredibly impressionable and you can create false memories just through the way you question them. So it's a very dangerous area. According to Upton, if your child seems to exhibit psychic knowledge, keep it light. Make sure they're not frightened and move on. When they're adults, they can decide for themselves if this is something they want to develop, he says. Until then, let children be children. Later in this episode, we'll find out what a couple of other psychologists suggest you do if your child sees a ghost. Up next, has your toddler ever pointed to the empty space next to you and told you that someone's there? I'll share a few stories that might explain why your child insists you leave the door cracked open so they can see light from the hallway. You wouldn't want to be in the pitch black with some of these ghosties either. Every October, we take the month and raise funds for organizations that help people who struggle with depression. It's called Overcoming the Darkness. AZ wrote in a few years ago talking about our Overcoming the Darkness campaign. I can tell everyone that no matter what you think, there is a way out of depression, and I'm living proof. I spent 30-plus years in a funk so deep. There are large chunks of my life I simply don't remember. At times, it was just a feeling of sadness and impending doom. I thought of ways out many times. I finally got tired of barely being alive. I talked to a doctor and began taking antidepressants. Now I rarely get depressed or stressed, and I no longer find myself dreading tomorrow. This is why our Overcoming the Darkness campaign is so important. It supports organizations that help people who struggle with depression, so that they too can start looking forward to tomorrow instead of dreading today. Please donate today. Right now, if you can, go to WeirdDarkness.com slash Overcoming. Washington Post columnist Rosemary Counter once wrote, When I was about three, my mother took me to her friend Donna's farmhouse. As the grownups sipped tea in the kitchen, I played freely throughout the house, this was the 80s, until reporting back with some alarming news. A little girl was crying at the top of the stairs. Mom dismissed it as just my imagination while Donna's face turned white. She just remembered what her daughter, long grown up and moved out, used to see and say as a child. A little girl crying at the top of the stairs. I don't remember any of this, of course. Three decades later, this unfact checkable story has gone the way of many campfire tales. It's mostly fun and only partly scary. Though firm proof for this undeniable truth, children are spooky little creeps who see ghosts report past lives and chat at night with dead relatives. If you don't feel like sleeping tonight, that's good, because you might have difficulty doing so after I share several stories from mothers and numerous redditors about children experiencing and even interacting with the paranormal. Turns out, kids see ghosts all the time. From aerialist, I wasn't allowed to lock my door as a kid. I was about 7 years old and one Saturday morning I'd woken up at 7 or 8am, I didn't know the beauty of sleep then, and had found that my mom had locked her bedroom door when I tried to go in and wake her. Childishly, I decided to go ahead and lock my door too, and then figured I'd let myself enjoy a computer game until my mom woke up. I was actually in the middle of fighting Captain Hook when I realized that this weird metallic clinking noise wasn't actually coming from my game. With the way my room was laid out, my back was facing the door while sitting at the desk, but I had a clear view behind me if I glanced at the mirror that hung over my dresser to my right. The doorknob was turning slowly, but nonstop, almost as if someone were trying to sneak in as quietly as possible but was starting to get impatient or agitated. I remember blinking a few times before asking, Mom? And as soon as I spoke, it stopped. Now by this time as a kid I'd heard plenty of scary stories and even stories about supernatural happenings that had occurred around me as a baby, so I was a little concerned, but being a pretty sensible kid, I figured I had to at least double check and make sure it wasn't my mom pulling a prank. I opened the door and the hallway was completely empty. I tried calling for my mom again, trying not to panic and hoping she was just elsewhere in the apartment and nothing. Just the soft sound of birds and the occasional rumble from a car outside. With the last bit of hope, I went to my mom's door and pressed my ear to the wood, hoping I'd hear her talking at least or moving around, but instead all I heard were soft snores. It definitely wasn't her. I remember then the hallway went frigid, like a 20 degree drop in a space of less than a minute. My brain went into automatic mode and I took off running down the hall, heading straight from my Yorkshire Terriers crate. I scooped her up and ran back down the hall to my room where I shut and locked the door immediately. Our dog was still pretty young and so she didn't mind much being carried or how I sat her firmly in my lap, watching the door apprehensively. I kept waiting for something else to happen. Finally, after about 5 or 10 minutes I turned around and went back to my computer game, trying to forget the whole thing. I'd finally settled back into the game when I heard it again, except this time it wasn't soft or sneaky. As I turned to look at the mirror, my Yorkie growled sharply from my lap and I saw the doorknob twisting violently. The door starting to bang and my dog snarled and jumped off running for the door with her hackles fully raised and clawing at the door. I didn't know what to do so I did all I could think of. I closed my eyes and prayed. It's funny in retrospect because even back then I wasn't religious at all, despite being raised in a Catholic family and being forced to do a First Communion, but it was the only thing I could think of to do and so I did. Mumbling and stuttering through it until my Yorkie's growls and barks finally stopped and the rattling disappeared completely. I think I stood there for a full 10 seconds before I started screaming my head off, waking up my mom and getting in trouble for making a ruckus, but I sure was glad to hear her voice after all of that. I'm still not sure what happened. It wasn't the only weird slash scary thing to happen in that apartment to me, but I can remember every detail, even to this day, from Mike Carroll 360. When I was 12, my little brother Rogan was six. I had another brother and sister that were at friends' houses for the night and my dad was on business in Sweden for a week, so it was just me, my mom and Rogan that night I guess. I didn't talk to anyone but my mom that night and that was only to get a snack because I sat in my room playing video games. So around 10pm I walked out of my room to get another snack and passed Rogan's room with its door open. I looked in for a second to see him sleeping, only he was sleeping facing the wall, breathing heavy, sweating and skin, eggshell white. I ran downstairs to get my mom and tell her that Rogan might be having a seizure. She told me that Rogan was at his friend Ryan's house. I said someone's in Rogan's bed. She didn't believe me so I walked upstairs with her to see the bed and sheets covered in fresh sweat and messed up with no one in it. My mom called Ryan's house and Rogan was put on the phone. My mom said goodnight and she went back to bed. I didn't sleep that night and just continued to play video games. From Ashley M, mom of two. When we were looking at condos to purchase our first place, Claire was just shy of her third birthday. We brought her with us to all of our showings because we wanted to see how comfortable she was as it would be her home too. When we walked through the door of the place we ultimately bought, the second floor of a 1911 Chicago brick three flat, we all knew immediately that it was the right place. That evening I asked Claire if she thought that place would be a good home for her and her response was yes and the little boy that lives there is really nice too. This took me aback but I tried to remain calm. I asked her what she meant and she said there was a little boy in his pajamas that she saw in the dining room. She said that he waved at her, he was about her age and he was only in the dining room. She knew his name which I don't remember now and that he was afraid of water. After she went to bed that night, I looked up ways to clear the energy of a home, how to communicate with a ghost so they don't bother your family and anything else I could find to make sure at least I could be comfortable living in this otherwise perfect condo. Claire never talked about him again, not even the next day when I asked her to tell my husband. From PM me your poem. Laying in bed one night, it's pitch black apart from the light creeping under the door from the landing. My mom was actually with me in the same room as we had just moved in and she was sleeping on the floor. I look up and the door slowly creaks open and an oldish woman hears around the door, looks at me and goes away. I just thought I was having a nightmare so I turned around really fast and went under the covers hoping I would wake up. Then I will never forget my mom whispering to me, did you just see someone peer around the door? Safe to say we did not sleep a wink that night. Riley's mama tells this story. When my daughter was an infant, we of course had baby monitors. One night, really late, we heard two people on the monitor talking, a man and a woman. They were talking about how peaceful she looked. We both went running to her room and she was laying there peacefully sleeping with no one in the room. My husband swore it sounded just like his dead grandparents. Reddit user PsychedelicGoat42 says, In high school, I used to hang out with my friend John almost every day. When we first began hanging out at his house, I'd sometimes hear disembodied footsteps, but very often I would see what looked like the shadow of a person out of the corner of my eye only to have it disappear moments later. After a month or so, I finally mentioned this to my friend and he got mad. He demanded to know who had told me that he saw shadow people and begged me not to joke around with him about it. I assured him I was serious. Soon we would hear laughter when no one else was home. Doors would close by themselves and the TV would turn itself on and off. One day after these experiences had grown more intense and more frequent, I mentioned to my friend blessing the house. Right as I said this, a box sitting on a nearby counter flew right towards me. It sounds unbelievable, but it was the single most terrifying experience of my life. My friend and I got holy water and sprinkled it around the house while saying a prayer and never experienced anything in the house again. Months later, my friend came to stay at my lake house with me for a weekend. At one point in the night, we both thought that we saw a shadow person but decided to pass it off as nothing. Later that night we woke up to what sounded like voices coming from the living room. He went to investigate thinking someone might have broken in and I stayed put. A few moments later, I heard the sound of somebody thundering down the hallway and ran out to see why my friend was running, but he wasn't in the house. My friend was outside on the porch and came inside saying that he had heard a loud noise from the house too and thought that it had been me. Nothing else happened for the rest of the weekend but the next time I went to the house after it had set empty for a week, a picture frame with my photo in it had been ripped off the wall and thrown down the hall and the pillows from my couch were stacked one on top of the other in the very middle of the couch. I have since stopped hanging out with John and I have never experienced anything of this sort again, from Reddit user LittlePrettyThings. So both my parents tend to snore quite heavily when they sleep and sometimes one will be loud enough to drive the other out of the room to sleep somewhere else for the night. So every now and then one of my parents would come crash in my room or my siblings room on the spare bed or on the other side of the double bed. One night I woke up in the middle of the night and saw there was someone sleeping in the bed next to me. I assumed it was my dad. It sort of looked like him and it was dark and that he had trouble sleeping in his own bed. So I just figured no big deal, it's quite comforting to have a parent around anyway. So I turned around and went back to sleep. The next day just randomly in conversation I mentioned something to the effect of, so mom must have been snoring quite heavily last night, eh? My parents both just kind of looked at me like, what? Me, isn't that why you crashed in my room? Dad, no, I was asleep in our room all night. I asked siblings, etc., no one had gotten up throughout the night or anything. Who did I see? From Aaron T. My son was around two at the time. We were driving past the cemetery when he said, look, mama, dead people. Yes, darling, I responded. Kids, he continued, matter of factly. And sure enough, we were passing by the children's section. Curious, I asked if the kids were happy or sad. Happy, mama, he said. They're running around that daddy. All I saw was a man standing alone with his head dropped. It warmed my heart, honestly. From Mr. Hegel. When I was younger, I used to think I was having dreams of an old woman in a blue dress and cat eyeglasses sitting at the end of my bed singing to me. She'd always sing the same song and then leave. One night I followed her into my brother's room. He's younger than me and was around five, and instead of singing to him, he woke up and they began talking. After like 20 minutes my mother came in and asked what we were doing. My brother said, I'm just talking to the lady in the blue dress. She made us go back to bed. I woke up still thinking it was a dream. My mom told me in the next morning that she didn't want me sneaking out of bed anymore in the middle of the night to play with my brother. I asked her what she was talking about, and she gave me her version of what she saw the night before. To this day I believe that was real and that every night the old woman would sing to me. I get goosebumps just thinking about it. She stopped singing to me soon after that, though people in my family still caught my brother speaking to nothing on numerous occasions. A while later an aunt came to visit from down south and refused to come into our house after seeing an old woman in cat eyeglasses standing in the upstairs window. She came in asking who was upstairs and then freaked out when my mother told her no one and let her search the house. You shouted this says, my family was very religious when I was growing up. One time we were in church and they'd asked a few members to go to the front so they could pray for someone specific. They were led to a small wooden railing like a church pew with no seat. My aunt had gone to the front and brought five-year-old me with her. We closed our eyes and started singing and lifted our hands in prayer, Pentecostal, and after about a minute I felt someone's hands touch mine, like flat against mine. I swayed my hand slowly from side to side as I'd seen the adults do, and the person touching my hands followed along as normal. I thought it was the pastor's wife who liked me and in general really liked all the children of the church. I was so happy she chosen to pray with me that after a few minutes I decided to break prayer protocol and open my eyes to smile at her, but quickly realized it wasn't her. It wasn't anyone. I looked from side to side to see if maybe the person had moved on to pray with someone else, but everyone else was doing their own thing. There was no one else there, but I distinctly felt someone's hands touching mine. I know I wasn't mistaken. I mean, you'd be able to tell if someone placed their hand on yours, right? I don't know if this qualifies as creepy, but for me it's still unexplained. Up next, more stories of children seeing ghosts. And later, how should you react if your child sees a ghost? These stories and more when Weird Darkness returns. Central Massachusetts is a land of oddities and apparitions. Stories of the strange and paranormal have been passed down from generation to generation, and only the local populace has any idea of just how vast and deep their superstitions run. The world around you is much more than you can touch, taste, smell, see and hear. Some of the stories are funny, some are sad, but all of them give you a taste of what it's like to be from the oddest part of the United States. You can't have a region of the country that has been settled for centuries without getting a few odd tales out of it. Open up a whole new world of fact and fiction that will leave you with a deep appreciation for the strange and bizarre ghosts and heroes await, and the only thing they need to live on is you. Slightly Odd Fitchburg by Ed Sweeney, now available on Kindle, paperback and audiobook versions on the audiobooks page at WeirdDarkness.com. We've all heard the stories, a television that flips channels on its own, the house that echoes with a baby's cries, despite no baby actually living there, a bar stool that skitters across the floor when no one's near, the piano that plays itself at all hours of the night and day. Do ghosts exist? Turns out if we want an answer, all we need to do is look at our children. From Priscilla A. We bought our current house from a man who was married for 40-plus years. His wife passed away a couple of years before we bought the house. One evening, while tucking my two-and-a-half-year-old into bed, he said, Mama, night-night to the grandma, while pointing to the hallway between his room and mine, what was her room back then. Baren Johnson tells this story, I woke up in the middle of the night and I looked in the corner of my room and saw a hooded figure next to my dresser. At first I thought it was just some clothes hanging off my dresser, but then it turned and I saw red eyes staring at me. I immediately jumped out of bed and turned on the lights. There were no clothes hanging off of my dresser. I would have just brushed it off as a bad dream, but then I saw my dog staring at the corner. I was outside of the room and I kept calling for her to come out, but she would not stop staring where I had seen the hooded figure. She did not react at all to me calling her and so I finally just went back in my room and yanked her off the bed. I slept in the living room the rest of the night, and my dog slept in my parents' room for the rest of her life. From another Reddit user. Part of my dad's job when I was younger was to go around a very old house that was falling apart and check on these dowel things in the walls every six weeks. He basically replaced them and packaged the ones we took out and sent them away to find out how the building was drying out after years of rain leaking in. This was a listed building and the company wanted to bring the house back to its former glory, but as far as I am aware, since my dad stopped working for them, it's back in complete disrepair. I'd go along with him on a Sunday morning to do the changes of these dowels since I loved being down there and have always been interested in history. So off we went one morning and turned on the generator and my dad got to work. I'd normally wander around playing Indiana Jones by myself since this was a huge manor house. It was a construction site, but I was old enough to appreciate the rules and knew not to go near any holes or find a way to fall through the floor. So my dad's busy getting to work on the first dowels when I'm playing upstairs in one room that I always liked because it was a child's room. I'd claimed it as my own play space whenever I visited. I played for about five minutes when I felt someone was watching me, when I turned around to see what looked like a long skirt follow someone along the hallway. I sneaked out and tried to see who was there and saw the back of a lady walk into another room wearing a floor-length skirt. I tried to follow her, but when I went into the room, literally two seconds after, there was no one there. I called my dad and we checked every room in the house, but no one was there. The only way to exit would have been to walk past us, so I have no idea what I saw. From Amy F. When we moved into our house, Leo, two and a half, was seeing a ghost. He would say ghost and point to the dining room table. One day, I mentioned Mr. Hutchinson's to someone while giving a history of the house and Leo said, Mr. Hutchinson, my ghost friend? We confirmed with a house cleanser that someone attached to the home, like a grandfather figure, was here and attracted to Leo's light and innocence. We have since had our house cleansed, twice. Reddit user Sassicide says, I'm not sure if this qualifies as childhood since I was in my teens, but here goes. My mom was married to my father, a minister, for a long time, and when she left him, she left behind all the traditions they had out of spite. One of these traditions was blessing a house before entering it. Well, needless to say, the new house she and I moved into after their split was in need of a blessing. It was located between a Civil War-era cemetery and a more modern one. I don't know if I'd add anything to do with what was happening with the house. The first day we were there, the stove had turned on by itself and shattered a glass pan that we had sitting on one of the burners. We brushed it off. From then on, things escalated. The radio would turn on and off. Box fans would mysteriously turn on, full blast, and my daughter would end up barking at the corners with more ferocity than I'd ever seen her use. My mom got locked in the bathroom once when she was home alone and had to wait for me to come home from school to let her out. Thankfully, it was only an hour or so. I saw our visitor once or twice and took to calling him Sam. To this day, I can't explain what exactly was going on in that house, but I'm very glad that I am out of it. From Samir Broket. I never met my maternal grandfather as he died before I was born at a relatively young age, around 50 or so. He died of a heart attack. He was too drunk to acknowledge he should have gone to the hospital at the time and instead sat in a chair in his living room with his house keys in his hand and he squeezed them so hard that they were all bent when they found him the next morning. My mom described that night feeling his presence over her with his keys in his hand. Many years later, when I was about six, my mother told me about my grandfather for the first time and showed me some photos of him. She told me the next morning that I claimed he had visited me the previous night and handed me a set of bent house keys to play with. There's no way I could have known that detail and I maintained this for many years until I was too old to recall it and she told me the story. From Tracy B. My then four-year-old would tell me about a little girl who wanted to play with her. She apparently wanted to play all hours of the day and night. When I was finally able to sort out what was up with my daughter, in the middle of the night I left this little ghost some toys in an upstairs closet so she could play by herself. She had a stuffed lamb and a stuffed duck and I used to find them moved most mornings. The four-year-old shared a room with her sibling so I know it wasn't her moving the toys. From another Reddit user, when I was four or five, I'm 28 now, my older brother and I were roughhousing in the basement. I remember this very distinctly because I still can't explain what happened. It was just my brother and I in the house. Mom went grocery shopping. We were in the basement when all of a sudden the closet door just swung open. We both stopped and stared at the closet when a dark black entity floated out of the closet towards us. My brother took off upstairs and left me by myself and I remember just staring at this black mass. I had no idea what it was. I blacked out and when I came to I was crying on the stairwell with my mom asking me what was going on. I was crying saying there's a ghost downstairs. She didn't believe my brother in me. To this day my brother and I swear a dark entity ghost floated out of that closet. The weird thing is my brother slept downstairs in one of the rooms and at night he claims he could hear someone walking around outside his room. One time his friend stayed over and slept on the floor and his friend claimed there was something staring at him from underneath the bed. A cousin of mine stayed over one night and claimed he saw a black dark mass roam from room to room in the basement. He got up to check it out and found nothing in the rooms so he sat down in the rumpest room where my brother and I were rough housing when he claimed he saw a dark mass staring at him at the end of the hallway. He ran upstairs. We all sat down and talked about these experiences and came to the conclusion that someone was possibly murdered because the house had a really big crawl space. The crawl space entrance was located in the closet that the entity came from. No idea how to explain it so we decided on someone being murdered. From Explosive Amnesia. I was about 12 at the time, maybe sitting my little sister who was around 8. My parents were out for the evening at the church setting up for some event as I recall. I remember it was around 8 or 9 at night, plenty dark out. My sister and I were playing in the unfinished part of the basement and in the Midwest that means this part of the basement was mostly underground with just the storm windows at ground level. This is when things got weird. I heard the garage door upstairs open and two distinct pairs of footsteps walking into the house. They did not belong to my parents. Being familiar with not only the sound of my parents but also the sound of the floorboards creaking above our heads, I knew people were in the house. I quickly shushed my sister looking up trying to figure out what to do. The closest phone was upstairs where the footsteps were. I knew better than to call out. Two small girls home alone, my only concern was getting my sister out safely. As the footsteps tread back and forth, I assumed they were turning out the lights we had left on upstairs. I could hear two men's voices, not enough to make out words but I distinctly heard two men. As soon as my sister saw I was panicked, she began to freak out, crying and whatnot. The footsteps immediately stopped. I slapped my hand around my sister's mouth and picked her up under one arm and ran up and out of the unfinished part of the basement. To get to the bottom level sliding glass door, we had to pass the stairs that led from the upper level where the men were to the basement where we were. After a moment of silence I heard booming footsteps. I could only assume they heard my sister and were headed towards us. Running with every bit of I'm-gonna-die adrenaline, I heard the thundering sounds of them coming down the stairs behind us. As I got to the sliding glass door I threw it open, shoved my sister out and screamed for her to run for help. I tripped out soon after her. I could feel them right behind me. I had clearly heard them practically falling down the stairs, huge booming footsteps. I fully expected to get grabbed. My sister, now screaming bloody murder, had attracted the attention of our neighbors. I turned around to see no one. They were right behind me. I heard them. I knew they were there. I had no idea where they could have gone. Needless to say the cops were called and my parents rushed home. There were no signs of entry at all. All the upstairs doors were locked. The garage door was shut. There was nothing missing, nothing at a place. I still have no idea what happened that day. It was definitely one of the most terrifying experiences of my life. From DDA. Ender, my four-year-old, will tell us stories about the little girl who shuts doors and turns off the lights. He can't tell us what she looks like or where she goes. I don't talk about ghosts or anything that would give Ender this idea. The last time the little girl was here I heard the door slam. I ran in and asked if he had closed it. He told me no. The little girl did because she didn't want to play. Brown Eld shares this story. So this is more of a collection of stories and I haven't told them in a while because even thinking about it freaks me out. Not to mention makes me question my own sanity. Anyway, here goes. To preface, when I was entering fifth grade, my dad's company gave him an opportunity to transfer to an overseas job in Florence, Italy. My parents obviously jumped at the chance and we lived over there for three years, which was an awesome experience for the most part. The first few months we lived in an apartment across from Santos Ferrito Cathedral and then moved to a small town in Tuscany called Impranetta, where my father's company basically paid for us to live in this awesome Italian villa. I mean, seven bedrooms, five baths. It was the biggest house I'd ever seen. We started speaking to the farmer who works the olive orchards around the house and who knows the family who was owned it for centuries and find out that the oldest part of the house was a 500-year-old hunting lodge owned by the pity family and the rest of the villa was built around it in the late 1700s. Since we were renting it, it came furnished with all sorts of cool, old furniture, art, etc. My father, in a conversation with the neighbors, heard from them some anecdotal stories about the monk ghost who haunted the house, guarding the pity's forgotten treasure. And he told my mom but they didn't tell my sister and I because they didn't think that it was a true story and they didn't want to freak us out. The first thing I remember being weird about the villa was that I was never comfortable being there alone. I've been a very solitary person my entire life and I usually enjoy time by myself. However, I can remember right from the start that any time my parents would leave me alone there, I'd feel like I was being watched and or there was another presence in the house. I spent months convincing myself it was just nerves that I wasn't used to living there or that the huge size of the house was what was freaking me out. Then I noticed that our cats, we had one house cat when we moved in but we also adopted the four to five cats that roamed the property and some of them moved into the house, would act stream sometimes, staring at empty spaces, running up to a spot like they would a person when there was nothing there. But it seemed like I only noticed them doing it when I was there alone. By the end of our first year in the house I was terrified of being left alone. My parents thought I was crazy and whenever I was there by myself, which was rarely, I would lock myself in my bedroom with one or more cats who I thought could protect me. I don't know how or why it just seemed like a good idea at the time. At the same time I started noticing noises at night, scrapings, clawings, that sort of stuff. But when I'd freak out, my dad would come in and remind me that the house was hundreds of years old and there were probably mice, bats, and other critters above my room making the noises. It made sense to me but I can't even begin to recount how many nights I got woken up by these strange noises that seemed too loud or persistent to be a mouse. I started to occasionally hear random doors shutting, those sorts of things. But by this point I just kept it to myself because my parents were already thinking I was crazy. After about a year our relatives started to fly over from the states to come visit us. They basically got a vacation in Tuscany for the price of a plane ticket so we had guests at least once a month if not more. The first major incident I remember was when my aunt and uncle and two cousins came and visited and stayed in the apartments that were originally the second floor of the hunting lodge. I'll mention briefly that it seemed like a majority of the incidents, noises, etc. seemed to all originate from the oldest part of the house, which were the three floors of the original hunting lodge and the root cellar below it. There were two adjoining bedrooms with a bathroom opening onto the front bedroom. My aunt and uncle slept in this front bedroom, my cousins in the back. To make a long story short my cousin Casey woke up at like five in the morning, walked into the bathroom half asleep and saw a man standing in there so he turned around and sat on the chair outside the bathroom door. He'd been sitting there for a couple of minutes when my aunt sat up and asked him what he was doing and he told her waiting for dad to get out of the bathroom, to which she replied dad is still in bed right here. And he was. Needless to say by the time breakfast came around we had all heard the story and it was at that point that my father finally made mention of the ghost stories he heard from the neighbor and that supposedly this was the reason the villa had been empty for a few years until we started renting it. Apparently the last people to live there had been freaked out. I pretty much flipped out on all of them because I felt like everything I had experienced finally made sense and they had been making me feel insane by passing off my experiences as something I made up in my head. After it was out in the open in my family we all started noticing how frequently weird things happened in that house and I'll just list a few examples. My sister had a slumber party for her birthday with five or six girls and my mom sat out in the stairwell around midnight for a bit to make sure they all went to bed. She started hearing furniture being dragged around and went down to see what the girls were up to but they were all talking and no furniture was moved. A week later my parents had the owners come out and open up the third floor of the hunting lodge which were two more rooms they kept locked up as storage and inside there were several large wardrobes, dressers and other pieces of furniture that had been dragged around at random. You could see the trails through the dust where they moved anywhere from a few inches to several feet. The owners got mad at us thinking that my sister or I had managed to break in and mess with their stuff but the door was locked and my dad pointed out that there were no footprints. The owners freaked out, made a bunch of hurried excuses and dismissive gestures and left pretty fast. From Michelle Kaye. My husband's father passed away several years before my son was born. He died from the flu and my husband had always felt guilty because he'd been the one to share the sickness with him. We never talked to our son about his grandpa but one morning he woke and said point blank, Daddy, Papa Don wanted me to tell you he's doing fine. We asked him to describe his grandpa and he did, to a T, despite never having seen a photo of him. He said he was standing by a fast car with a cloud of smoke around him. This made perfect sense because my father-in-law raised sports cars and smoked heavily all his life. This comes from Takagi. A few thanks as a kid. In the first house I lived in, my parents and I were sitting at the table eating dinner when suddenly we heard this whistling sound. Not like the wind whistling through a door but a full-on song. I was about five at the time and remember pretending I was the one singing so that my parents wouldn't be concerned. My mom immediately told me to stop pretending and said it was probably the TV downstairs. After dinner I went downstairs to check and all of the lights, TV, everything was off. I don't claim the house was haunted or anything but it's something I remember vividly and have never been able to explain. When I was about ten we moved into a new house and my younger sister for years would talk about the man in black that she would see around the house. No one took her seriously but twenty years later she still swears she saw him although she doesn't anymore. I never saw anything like that but can't remember hearing cupboards open or drawers shutting while home alone late at night. Recently my dad woke up at 3am to find his TV on full blast and his phone screen had been smashed during the night. Lastly when I was in kindergarten I used to have recurring dreams about this black figure with red eyes following me. My dreams were relatively normal but always in the background this figure was stalking me. Eventually after a few weeks of this and one of my dreams my grandfather confronted the figure and told me everything would be okay. The figure left and I never dreamed of it again. I mostly chalked that up to being a kid but still kind of interesting to me especially considering how vividly I could remember that last dream from flying knee bar. When I was a kid I lived in these apartments that were pretty normal and didn't seem like they would have a history of anything odd or unusual. After a few nights of living there I'd hear the sounds of something dragging on the floor. I didn't think much of it since it was an apartment that had super thin walls. One night the dragging sound was loud like it was in my hallway so I took a peek out and noticed something that looked like a man army crawling on the floor. It wasn't clear since the lights were off and the only light I had was coming from outside through the windows. My immediate reaction was to close the door which I did and waited in my room until my parents woke up. As soon as they did I tried explaining to them that I saw a man crawling on the floor and they immediately dismissed it as a bad dream. After that night I never heard dragging sounds or saw the crawling man again. Fast forward a few years when we were finally moving out. I returned the keys to the manager and asked who used to live in the apartment before us. The manager stated that a paraplegic gentleman used to live in there and passed away a year or so before we moved in. This creepy story comes from Jojo's 23. So I used to live in Florida and was just a small car trip away from St. Augustine which is one of the oldest cities in America. One day my mom, brother and I went on a nice little sightseeing trip there to visit a few places. One of those places happened to be the old lighthouse. When we walked in there was a little room giving some history on the place and as soon as I walked through the doorway I just felt a heavy presence all around me as if pressure was being added to the room. Let's just say that we decided not to check the room out. Next we made our climb to the top. My mom's really afraid of heights but she went up there anyway. When we got to the top we were just looking at the view when all of a sudden some lady that looked like she was dressed in 1930s attire came up to us and said, Oh you don't have to be scared of heights, it's okay. She then walked off and we then went around the whole lighthouse top and never saw her again. We then looked at a picture of some of the residents that used to live there. What a coincidence. One of those people just so happened to be the same lady we saw up in the lighthouse. From Lily 4. One time when I was about six or seven my brother and I were playing out in our yard. It was pretty late. I told him that I'd be right back because I had to use the bathroom. The yard is weird since there are two houses on the lot. My dad lives in the front house and the coach house is where my grandma lives. My brother was headed towards the front of my dad's house and I was headed towards my grandma's. I just stopped dead in my tracks. Along the corridor that runs on the side of both houses was a door that led to the alley. I saw a floating figure there that I can only describe as the grim reaper. It was just floating in front of the door. I know it couldn't have been someone playing a trick on me because it disappeared while I was looking at it and we'd been playing near that door all day. To this day I cannot go near that door. It creeps me out. From Arvo the Aspie. Little things would move around my house while I was home alone. I live in a very small town in the south so during the summer parents would usually leave kids home alone like kids 10 and up at least. Markers would go missing while I was coloring in the living room, only to be found in my parents' bathroom the next day. Action figures would go missing while I was playing with them on my bedroom floor and when I'd look for them I'd find them sitting on my very tall, I still can't reach the top of it without a stool, TV stand. Books would go missing, CDs, video games, you name it. They were never missing forever with the exception of a Hillary Duff CD. I was 10, okay? And I'd usually always find them later in the day or within a couple of days. This only happened when I was alone and I still have no idea why. So I guess ghosts can be Hillary Duff fans. Coming up, we move away from children seeing ghosts and move towards adults seeing ghosts of children. That might be something you'd expect in one of the many haunted orphanages around the world. Also, what should you do if you have a child who claims to see a ghost? A couple of child psychologists have some advice to share on that subject when Weird Darkness returns. Hey, Weirdos, how would you like to receive a box full of scary stuff in the mail full of fear-inducing objects like creepy collectibles, true crime-themed accessories, frightening flair, blood-curdling books, terrifying trinkets, eerie e-downloads, and more. Absolutely free. Every other month, I'm filming an unboxing video of the newest creepy crate that I get in the mail. Then, I'm boxing it all back up and giving it away by random drawing to someone subscribed to the Weird Darkness email newsletter. And before I close up the box for good, I might toss in a couple of Weird Darkness goodies as well for good measure. You can keep the creepy crate for yourself or give it away to a weirdo friend or family member. To watch my latest creepy crate unboxing video and to register to win a creepy crate of your own for free, visit WeirdDarkness.com slash creepy crate. That's WeirdDarkness.com slash creepy crate. There is something inherently chilling about old orphanages. Maybe it's the fact that scary orphanage stories abound. After all, the buildings are associated with heartbroken and lonely children, and not all of these tales concern the living. Plenty of real-life ghost stories feature orphanages filled with restless and vengeful spirits. These scary orphanage ghost stories all take place at actual haunted orphanages or abandoned orphanage sites around the world. These creepy stories aren't just campfire fodder, but are based off of real-life tragedies that actually occurred at these places. You can even visit these locations if you're in the mood for a firsthand ghostly encounter. Just be warned, you never know what might come home with you. And in these cases, you didn't have to be a child to see the ghosts, but some of the ghosts could very well have been children themselves. According to Ohio legend, gore orphanage in Vermilion burned down in the 1800s. Rumor has it that the fire was started by a disgruntled employee or by the owner himself to collect insurance money. None of the children survived the fire. The site has since been raised and abandoned, but visitors to the area claim that you can see ghosts of the orphaned children frolicking about the woods. Others report smelling burning flesh and hearing the screams of children and even finding tiny handprints on their parked cars. The Holy Family orphanage in Marquette, Michigan opened in 1915. While it was initially meant to be a whites-only orphanage, the first occupants were 60 Native American children. These children weren't all orphans. Some had been taken from their mothers in an effort to assimilate them into white culture. Rumors of abuse were common. One story says that a young girl who had disobeyed orders and stayed out in the cold perished of pneumonia. Her body was put on display as a warning to the other children that they had better behave. The Holy Family orphanage closed in 1965 and visitors report hearing moaning children and citing ghosts on the property. St. Mary's orphanage housed children in Galveston Island, Texas. That is until a hurricane wiped out nearly all of the orphans. In 1900, the Great Storm descended upon the island. As the orphanage began to flood, the sisters working there tied the children to them with rope as they sought higher and higher ground. Eventually the roof collapsed, trapping them inside and slaying 90 orphans and 10 sisters. Their bodies were discovered, still tied together by the rope. Today the site is home to a Walmart. Employees report toys going missing and hearing kids phantom laughter. One employee was certain they heard a child calling for her mother, but upon a store-wide search, no one was found. The Guthrie Boys Home in Oklahoma opened its doors sometime in the early 1920s. According to legend, one employee of the orphanage took his own life in the bell tower. Another employee, a nurse maid, abused many of the boys and slayed several. The building was closed in 1978 with the emergence of the foster care system. Today, visitors to the Guthrie Boys Home claim to hear footsteps in the bell tower, bells ringing and even gasping. The ghosts of the boys can be heard screaming late at night, and the spirit of the nurse maid supposedly lurks in the main entryway. Raleigh, North Carolina's crybaby lane was once the spot of a Roman Catholic orphanage. When a fire broke out in the dormitory in 1958, it gutted the building and slayed many of the orphans. All that remains is a patch of grass and the cornerstone of the original building. Months after the fire, neighbors continued to complain to the city about the strong smell of smoke. People walking through the field felt as though they were being suffocated, and creepiest of all, they heard the cries and screams of the orphaned children. Because of this, the surrounding houses have now been abandoned. A privately owned orphanage, known as the Fairmount Children's Home, opened in Alliance Ohio in the 1870s. Unfortunately, the headmaster of the orphanage was said to be a cruel man who tortured and even slayed the children who lived there. That is, until one night in 1944. According to legend, the children rose up against the headmaster and hanged him from a pipe in the basement. The headmaster supposedly began to haunt the orphanage, looming over children's beds and appearing as a shadowy figure in the back of class photos. The orphanage eventually shut down and was abandoned in the 1990s before it mysteriously burned down. During the Civil War, orphans of Union soldiers were often taken to the National Soldier's Orphan's Homestead. The orphanage ran without problems for years until Rosa Carmichael was appointed the orphanage's matron. Said to be an abusive disciplinarian, Carmichael reportedly tortured children in the cellar of the orphanage. Eventually, a runaway out at her abuse and she was fined for her transgressions. Apparently, the spirits of the children she tormented don't believe justice was served. The building is now a tourist attraction and said to be highly haunted. Some visitors claim to have cited Rosa Carmichael herself, trapped and angry in the cellar. The Elizabeth Orphan Asylum opened as an orphanage for girls in Elizabeth, New Jersey in 1858. It closed in 1962 and was eventually raised in 1996, but during its years of abandonment, it was the site of a lot of creepy folklore. The basement was rumored to be used for satanic rituals. The house became considered a sort of magnet for evil as it was hit by a small airplane in the 1970s and partially burned a few years later. People often claimed to see demons or satanic nuns in the area. Visitors also reported noticing glowing green orbs almost like eyes in various sections of the house. The Montana Children's Center is also known as the Twin Bridges Orphanage. It was established by the state in the 1890s as the mining boom of the area declined. While some of the children there were orphans, many were simply abandoned by parents who couldn't afford to care for them. Tales of abuse at the orphanage were numerous. Children were whipped for wetting the bed or hung on coat hooks and locked in dark rooms as punishment. Many children also perished on the property from disease. One former employee said there were 30 headstones in the yard for children, but they have since disappeared. The orphanage closed in 1976 and the current owner claims to hear children singing when alone on the property. It was investigated by the TV show Ghost Adventures who communicated with the spirit of an orphan girl and found flashing lights dancing from room to room. Opened by Sisters of Mercy and the Catholic Church in 1905, St. John's Orphanage in Gulburn, Australia housed 200 boys at its peak. By many accounts, the boys were treated as slaves and cruelly punished. They were given one set of clothing upon arrival and they were beaten and caned regularly. Neglect was common and most of the orphans were not educated beyond 5th grade. As it wasn't the happiest of places, it's no surprise that it is now known as one of the most haunted locations in Australia. Disturbing messages are written on the walls, seemingly by someone who once lived there, and the spirits of little boys supposedly still roam the premises. The Liverpool's Siemens Orphan Institution later became Newsham Park Hospital, a medical hospital, and then, just to make things extra creepy, ended its days of actual human occupancy as a mental asylum before it was finally closed down by the City Council in 1997. This abandoned Victorian building is just asking to be haunted. The building once housed 400 orphans who risked being locked in unlit, naughty cupboards in an attic corridor if they misbehaved. There have been many ghost sightings at the location on the building roof and in Ward G. Visitors have also reported hearing dragging noises in the dining room and have feelings of uneasiness in the basement. The Odd Fellows Home was constructed in 1900 in Liberty, Missouri as a place for unfortunate souls. It included a hospital, a home for the elderly, and an orphanage. It was run by the Independent Order of Odd Fellows, or IOOF, a fraternal order meant to help others. But the order may have had a more sinister purpose. Many residents of the Odd Fellows Home past 600 bodies are buried in the cemetery. That's a lot of spirits. There's also suspicion that the IOOF had some creepy secret practices, which included using human remains of their residents in their societal rituals. This supposedly upset the spirits, nor is said to haunt the location, now a winery, to this day. The old orphanage in Savannah, Georgia, was built in 1810. The stone mansion was once an all-girls orphanage until a fire trapped and killed 11 of the 17 girls who resided there. Today, the owners claim to hear young girls singing and playing and say they often move items around the rooms. There's little factual evidence to be found on the Good Serpent, later known as Good Serpent Orphanage in Vallejo, California. There was an orphanage built in rural Vallejo in the 1800s that closed amid investigations of child abuse and passings. Less substantiated rumors claim the orphanage housed mentally unsound children who were experimented on and lobotomized. Whatever the real story, the orphanage was eventually destroyed. A golf course was built in its place and later a housing development. Many residents of the housing development claim their houses, despite being new, are haunted. They hear footsteps and moaning and see the ghosts of children. There are many haunted buildings in New Orleans and St. Vincent's guest house is no exception. It was originally built as an orphanage in the 1860s, a time when many children would have died from yellow fever. Today, the orphanage has been turned into a hotel. Guests constantly report hauntings, specifically that children laugh inside the walls. The apparition of a nun stalks the top floor and spirits move their possessions and wake them up at night. The Wise County Orphanage in Wise, Virginia was abandoned in the 1920s. Not much is known about the orphanage itself, but those daring enough to venture into the area have reported hearing bouncing balls and laughing children and seeing orbs of light. The phenomenon of kids allegedly seeing ghosts thrives online. But no matter how improbable or unprovable, the volume of these stories alone is enough to make scientists take notice. There are admittedly lots of reports of kids seeing ghosts, says Jacqueline D. Woolley, psychology professor at the University of Texas. Woolley's research dives deep into children's evaluation and understanding of reality versus the fantastical. She revels in Rosemary's tale about the girl on the stairs I shared earlier in this episode. That's enough to make you believe that it's real for about a millisecond, she says. Though good Halloween fun, there are many holes in stories like that of Rosemary and the girl at the top of the stairs, Woolley says, namely the brain. Our minds naturally make connections between events, whether they're connected or not. The brain pays attention to evidence that fits our theory and ignores the evidence that doesn't fit, she says. For example, it's far more likely that a child overheard the name Susie a hundred times than the undead Susie lingers in this realm for an eternity of tea parties. Next, consider children's fertile imaginations and you could easily argue that Susie is not a ghost but actually an imaginary friend. We know that between a third and two-thirds of children have imaginary companions, says Charles Furnioff, a psychologist at Durham University where he investigates the phenomenon of hallucinations. Not too long ago, imaginary friends were considered a precursor to mental illness. Now we know they're a positive sign of healthy child development. Now, adults come to me concerned if their kid doesn't have one, he says. Developmental psychologists such as Jean Paget have been fascinated by the murky line between fantasy and reality for kids, whether it's imaginary friends or dreams or, yep, ghosts. Old thinking assumed kids just couldn't differentiate between what's real and what's not, while new thinkers such as Woolly believe kids know full what's real, even if it looks like they can't tell the difference. Furnioff falls somewhere in the middle. I think on occasion, kids do mix up imagination and reality to have something like a hallucination-like experience. If you would never tell your child their imaginary friend isn't real or that they're just imagining things or even lying, you should treat an encounter with a so-called ghost the same way. Which presents a strange question. How should you react if your little one reports a visit from the other side? Most important, do not flip out. A lot of parents get worried about imaginary companions and strange experiences, Furnioff says. Unless there is real distress, do not worry. To know whether there is real distress, just ask the child. You want to work with the emotion, not the ghost, Woolly says. Now is not the time for a grown-up lesson on imagination versus reality, because if they're scared it doesn't matter anyway. Instead, Woolly suggests you work within the fantasy, just like you might for a monster under the bed. Engage with the kid as to what it looks like, what it does. Ask her if she's scared of the ghost or if she likes it and if she has seen it before. A scary ghost can be tweaked as necessary. Maybe you can help the child pretend he's in old-timey underwear, for example, to become a friendly one. Then it's up to you as a parent to decide if you want to encourage or discourage this belief. According to Rosemary Counter, the columnist with the girl at the top of the stare story, my mother did the former, subscribing fully to the notion of friendly ghosts, which to this day are said to haunt our house. As for me, I'd say I'm 99% logical unbeliever, though really 1% is all you need. Even the scientists agree. It's important to never say never, Woolly says, because it's the scientific way to be. It can't be easy, but child psychiatrist Jim B. Tucker is balancing science and the paranormal at the Division of Perceptual Studies at the University of Virginia. We don't take the approach of believer or nonbeliever. We restore and explore the phenomenon of children who report past lives, he says. Overlapping often are reports of kids who see dead relatives, including some who were dead long before the child was born. They tend to go something like this. When my daughter was three years old, she started telling us that she was being woken up in the night by a man who kept tickling her feet, read one tale on BuzzFeed. We figured she was just dreaming until we came across an old picture of my grandparents on their wedding day, and my daughter pointed at my grandfather and said, that's him, that's the man who tickles my feet. My grandfather passed away when I was six. When you hear enough stories like that, you do start to think there must be something there, Tucker says. I'm open to it, that's all I can say. Whether you believe or not, his best advice is to be cool. I don't know if you really have to do anything other than listen to what your child says. Kids grow up and grow out of it and let it go. But do they really? Rosemary is living now three decades post Little Girl on the Stairs, still loving to tell her story. And now that she has her own toddler, I'm sure she sponges up all her mother's love of witches and ghouls come October. My guess, Willie says, is that kids see ghosts much more commonly around Halloween when their parents believe. To boot one last story from Rosemary. We were curled up reading books the other night when my two-year-old whispered, there's someone at the door. What did you say? I asked, peering at the dark empty doorway. There's someone at the door, she slowly repeated. Then she pointed, matter-of-factly at the book we were reading where little Miss Lucky indeed had a visitor at her door. Proving the only spooky creep in this bedroom was me. If you made it this far, welcome to the Weirdo family. If you like the podcast, please tell your friends and family about it however you can and get them to become weirdos too. And I greatly appreciate you leaving a review in the podcast app you listen from. That helps the podcast get noticed. While you're listening, you might want to check out the Weird Darkness website at WeirdDarkness.com. You can find paranormal and horror audiobooks I've narrated, the Weird Darkness store, plus you can visit the Hope in the Darkness page if you're struggling with depression, anxiety or thoughts of suicide. You can find all of that and more at WeirdDarkness.com. Do you have a dark tale to tell of your own? Fact or fiction? Click on Tell Your Story at WeirdDarkness.com and I might use it in a future episode. All stories in Weird Darkness are purported to be true unless stated otherwise, and you can find source links or links to the authors in the show notes. Haunted Children is by Amanda Sedlick-Hevner for Ranker and from the website The Every Mom. Orphanage Ghosts is by Ella Tharp for Graveyard Shift. And What to Do When Your Child Sees a Ghost is by Rosemary Counter for The Washington Post. Now that we're coming out of the dark, I'll leave you with a little light. James 1-2-4 Consider it pure joy, my brothers and sisters, whenever you face trials of many kinds, because you know that the testing of your faith produces perseverance. Let perseverance finish its work so that you may be mature and complete, not lacking anything. And a final thought from Thomas Edison. Many of life's failures are people who did not realize how close they were to success when they gave up. I'm Darren Marlar. Thanks for joining me in the Weird Darkness.