The Child

From: Richard (tran03@yahoo.com)
Story type: Ghost
Location: Western New York
Source: Form Submission
Date submitted: Fri Nov 20 22:49:57 2009

I have always had ghosts in my life. As a child in Wilson NY, my twin brother and I had an imaginary friend named Joshua. I still remember never actually seeing him but playing with him all the same. My parents still enjoy telling the stories of strange occurrence's in that old house.

My Mother always mentions our old pedal firetruck which rolled itself from one end of the house to the other completely on it's own! My father likes to mention a bowl of ice cream which flew on it's own across the kitchen. My sister will usually deny anything ever happened there but on the rare occasion she will discuss it, she mentions a night when her and my brother walked into the bedroom late one night to find a glowing sphere bouncing up and down on my stomach as I slept.

There were many of those types of incidents but the one that by far stands out for me is what I refer to as the Green Hand incident.

One night during the Winter we had lost heat, so we were all camped out in the living room in sleeping bags and heavy clothing. My mother on the couch, my Father at work, my brother, my sister and I on the floor. Our living room had the nice old double doors which slid into the walls. Well naturally trying to preserve what heat we could they had been closed, perhaps for the first time I had ever seen them closed. I woke up at some point late during the night and as I looked to the double doors I saw a Green glowing arm sticking through the seem where the doors meet. The hand was curling it's finger in a beckoning fashion as though asking me to "Come Here." I looked to my sleeping mother and then to my siblings, satisfied this was not one of them playing some prank on me, I did what any sane and rational child would do in such a situation... I threw the sleeping bag over my head and pretended I was sleeping, until I fell asleep!

When I woke up in the morning I promptly told my story to my mother who (perhaps out of denial, perhaps she didn't wish to frighten me) informed me it was just a dream, until my sister who had over heard, said that she had seen the same thing. Many years later my mother had confessed she saw it as well.

Aside from the Green hand, this presence had never seemed dangerous or scary, in fact it was more like a part of the family rather than a ghost. It's actions as my father once pointed out were very childish, so much so that he even went out once and bought it a Hot Rod Fire truck and placed it in the attic (where we all believed it claimed as it's bedroom) for the Ghost. My father always said that he must have loved it because it was never in the same spot twice.

At one point my father had gone to our next door neighbor, she was 102 at the time and had lived in the house next door to us since she was a teenager. She had informed my father that shortly before we moved into the house there had been a ten year old boy living in our house who (either by accident or on purpose) hung himself in our other neighbors garage. His name was Joshua.

From that moment on he was no longer a ghost, at least not to my father and never to my brother and I. Joshua was a member of the family. I can still remember my mother yelling at him when things disappeared and she was satisfied it was none of us, and thanking him when they reappeared.

When my parents informed us they were getting a separation I think he took it as hard as we other kids did. As my father was packing he would leave the room and when he'd return what he had just packed was thrown all over the room. Items disappeared at a increased rate, and finally the day came when my father left the house. He reached for his keys which he left on the downstairs banister and they were gone. After forcing us all to search the house for well over an hour my father finally found them in the Attic! My father it seems had not said his goodbyes to Josh, so he told Josh he would be back and he would bring him another Toy car (A promise he kept by the way) before he left. I was 10 by this point and we had been in that house for eight years.

It was only one year later when finally my parents could no longer afford to keep the house, it was old beautiful and just too expensive to keep up with.

I'll never forget the last day I spent in that house, I promised Joshua I would return some day. It's been 23 years since that day, I've been back twice now once when I was 12, I met the next family to own the house who also did a lot of remodeling. and the second time when I was 14 and the house was for sale and they were giving an open house.

What I didn't know the day I left that house which I still consider my home was I was about to go from a house haunted by love and family, to a house that was haunted by the darkest spirit I have encountered to date! I'll post that story later, I'll title it 'The Dark Stranger'