Spectral

I don't believe in ghosts. As it happens, the friend of my daughter does.

We were driving back from their dance class today when my daughter asked if they'd seen ghosts at her house recently. The girl had recently moved into an old house that's not too far from here. I'm not sure how old the house is, exactly, but if I'd had to guess I'd say not more than a hundred years. There are older houses around, you can see them pretty much everyplace. This house doesn't have anything unusual about it, except that apparently it's fairly common for them to see what they swear are ghosts.

The girl says that she was in bed one night when she looked at the foot of the bed and saw a young boy with black hair standing there. She says that she was in a hallway talking with her mother, who was in the bathroom putting on makeup, when they heard footsteps upstairs. They were the only ones in the house. And she says that both she and her sister had independently seen something, or someone, in what looked like a white dress walk past their bedroom door. When they have darted outside to see who it was, there was nobody there.

The house has some history behind it -- apparently there were houses behind it, sort of shacks really, for several years in the 19th century. What's now a relatively open field across the street on them used to be farmland, apparently owned and operated by the people who lived in the house and the shacks. What the relationship is between that and what they say they see, I don't know. And whether they really are seeing something, or this is just suggestion, I don't know, either.

Because, you see, I don't believe in ghosts.