A Prayer in the Night

From: Karen (mydingaling@comcast.net)
Story type: Ghost
Location: My house
Source: Form Submission
Date submitted: Fri Mar  2 00:38:29 2007

My husband and I found a repo house for purchase at a very reasonable price. When we walked through, there was plenty work to be done--holes in walls, writing on walls (rip--we will miss you--etc), doors kicked in, and drug paraphenalia around--obviously a previous drug house where one or more persons had met their fate. We fixed up everything before we moved in, and it was beautiful.

After moving in, our 1 year old daughter (who previously had always slept through the night) started waking up every morning at 3 a.m.--almost precisely at that time every morning. And not just waking up, but waking up SCREAMING, at the top of her lungs, as if she were terrified of something.

At first I attributed it to new surroundings, getting used to a new bedroom, etc. But night after night of waking up at almost exactly 3 a.m., I tried to think of other thing that might be waking her up. Was it my husband getting home at 1 a.m. from his second shift job? Or maybe the neighbor, who was a bartender, coming home after the bar closed and shining her headlights in my daughters room. Maybe the dogs coming down the hallway were waking her up? It was a mystery as to why she would wake at the same time every day.

I decided to do some investigating, since no one in the house was getting any rest after 3 a.m., since I would bring her into bed with my husband and myself to calm her down (if you have ever slept with an active 1 year old, you know what I mean). A couple nights a week, I would sit in her room from 2 a.m. until she usually would wake--but nothing happened, and on those nights, she would sleep through. Odd!

After about a month of no one in the house getting a full night's sleep, my husband finally said "Just sleep with her in our bed--when I get home at 1 a.m., I will go to sleep in her room and we can all sleep all night." It sounded like a plan and we did it for about a week. I thought it was working well--we were all sleeping the night through. At least I thought so...

About 2 weeks after starting our new sleeping arrangements, my husband and I were chatting when he says, "By the way, what kind of stupid doll does the baby have in her room? Every night when I start dozing off, I hear a dolls voice reciting a prayer." I got chills when he said this and I asked "What time is this?", and he said around 3 a.m. At this point I was a little scared. I asked him how often this happened, and he said every night around 3 a.m. I told him she didn't have any dolls that talked, let alone recited prayers. He insisted that she must, because every night as he was starting to fall asleep he heard a doll's voice (or child's voice) saying a prayer.

Needless to say, the next day I cleaned out her room. I took every toy out, moved the furniture around, changed everything, and placed a crucifix on the wall. Since then, we haven't heard a child saying a prayer, or anything else in the room.

Although we constantly have strange things happen in our house--it never seems to be anything evil. Just little annoyances--that are possibly a child's pranks.