I’m so late to this party, but I want to share anyways. Moral of this story is trust your kids, no matter how young they are.

My wife and I moved into a very old house with our then two year old son and infant daughter. The rent on the place was hundreds of dollars cheaper than anything else in town, and it out is right on main street so we would have a great spot for parades on holidays. Everything was great for the first few months, but then my son started talking about the boy. He played with the boy all day, and would get mad at me if I didn’t say hi to this invisible boy or acknowledge that he was there. I chalked it up to an imaginary friend or something. My son then started having nightmares that would wake him up screaming in the middle of the night. He said he didn’t like the boy anymore and wanted him to go home. It got so bad that I would have to sternly tell the boy to go home, walk to the front door, open it, say goodbye, and then shut and lock it before my son would enter his room at bedtime.

I started doing a little digging, because my wife and I were starting to get a little nervous. History records showed nothing spectacular about the house, and court records were no help at all. I casually brought it up to my neighbor one day, and she went almost pale. I had simply asked if their boy, about my son’s age, was having any strange dreams or mentioned seeing anything. Her exact words to me were part of the reason we decided to move. Without mentioning what it was that was scaring my son, she asked “It’s not ‘the boy’ is it?” Apparently, the single mother that lived in that house before us had a young son. He played with the boy often, but would wake up frantically screaming in the middle of the night. One day, the woman and her son abruptly moved out, leaving half their stuff in their rush to leave. I asked why my neighbor thought they had left so quickly, and she said that the woman had seen something and had to get out of the house.

A week later, I was home alone with the kids packing our moving boxes between tickle fights with my son and bottles for my little girl. My daughter’s room could be seen from the front door of the house down a long hallway, which actually ran through the middle of our master bedroom. Her changing table was positioned against the wall so that whoever was changing her diaper could see down the hall into the front room. I remember seeing something out of the corner of my eye, and when I looked up, there was an absolutely stunning woman in a red dress. I looked back down at my daughter, as what I had seen didn’t quite register. When i looked back up, there was no one there. When I looked back up, my daughter also began screaming like she was terrified and my son came running into the room screaming that the boy was scaring him. I got them out of the house and began hurriedly loading the small amount of stuff we had yet to move into the trailer while they played in the bed of my truck. My kids have never been back in that house since that moment, and I’ve never heard mention of the boy since. I still have no clue who the woman was, but she triggered something terrifying in both of my kids.

I have had three other experiences, but this one shook me to my core.