The Ghost Story
By B. Dear

When I was a child, I used to walk home from school with a classmate named Mike. When we were both small, maybe in the third grade, I can’t remember exactly, he told me a very strange story about a ghostly visitor.

He said that when he went to bed at night, and was trying to go to sleep, a man named John would come into his room and sit on the end of his bed. The man would sit with him until he fell asleep. He said that he was never afraid of the man, and the man was always peaceful and kind. The really scary part about it though was that the man’s mouth was sewn closed and he never spoke.

I didn’t believe him at first, even though he wasn’t the type to tell tall tales. I humored him and asked questions about his story even though I thought it wasn’t true. What he told me was insanely scary, but I had never experienced anything like that and figured that if his house was haunted, he would definitely be more shaken up than he was. Apparently I was wrong.

I thought it was a pretty crazy story and shrugged it off. I never thought much about it again until years later when we were teenagers. I used to go over to his house in the afternoons to hang out as most teenagers do.

One day his mother had someone come out to visit at the house that I didn’t recognize, and Mike acted a bit strange upon his arrival. The man went about his business and we went about ours. He walked through the house acting in a rather odd manner, holding his hands out as he spoke and talking a lot about “energy”. I figured he was just eccentric or using drugs or something.

I found out later, that the man was there to conduct a séance. The séance was a part of his investigation into some ghostly activity that was happening in the home.

While Mike’s family was doing some repairs and construction at their home some really spooky activity started to happen. Tools went missing that no one could find, a very bad smell like rotting flesh permeated throughout the house that could not be resolved, and moaning sounds accompanied by creaking floorboards kept them up at night. (I experienced the smell personally on my visits to his home, but figured it was garbage or a dead mouse somewhere.) All of these occurrences would cease whenever they stopped construction on the house and would return again as soon as they picked up a hammer. They were at their wit’s end.

After the séance, I asked about what the man was able to find out. It turns out that an older man named John lived in the house years before they moved in.  He was a kind, older gentleman who had lived his later years and died in the home. He would prefer that they leave the house as it is. He likes it better that way.

My mind immediately went back to the story that Mike told me years before in my driveway. I realized that he wasn’t lying about the ghostly visit after all, but was trying to tell me about some incredibly strange events that were going on at his house.

Time went by and we didn’t talk much about it anymore. A few more years later, when I was in college, I was sitting in my apartment with nothing better to do than surf the net. I started to think about his story, about the man, the séance, and the odd activity at his home. I looked up his address on our state’s taxation and assessment website and looked up the previous owner of his home. Sure enough, the former owner of the house’s first name was John. Seeing this sent shivers down my spine.