A Child Who Cries

First of all, I won't apologise for this story being too long as I have found the longer the story,with many details,the better the ghost story..

I was raised on my mother's many stories of ghosts and other scary incidents, and have raised my own children with those same stories along with stories of spooky things that have happened to myself, my children and my older sisters through out our lives. I have written a book of these stories which has never been in print. Hopefully the story I am going to tell you will give you an idea of the stories we all love to hear, over and over..

A few years back, I moved into a house in Hot Springs, Arkansas, along with my 3 kids, an older daughter and her 2 small children. It was a big house with 3 large bedrooms, large kitchen and living room and a small balcony on the back..
It wasn't a fine house but the rent was low so we decided to fix it up and make it at least look a bit better.

One thing I didn't like was an open "crawl space" under the house. There was a small walk separating our house from the building next door which was a large apartment above ground and a small and musty smelling apartment odor the ground. The two buildings were rather close and both were owned by the same people.

I should have gotten a clue that something wasn't right when I went to get the utilities turned on. At the power company I gave the lady working there the address and she asked me which apartment that would be?. I explained that it was not an apartment but a house. She replied that they had it listed as an apartment and she had to have the apartment number if we were going to get the lights turned on. For a moment we disagreed but finally I got tired of trying to make this woman understand I was renting a HOUSE, so finally I said, "Okay it's apartment 1 then". That suited her so we left it at that. All I cared about was getting the power turned on lol.

The next thing I noticed was that while sitting on the little balcony I could smell soured water. On checking under the house I could see water leaking from a pipe, and the water was going into an old bathtub in the crawl space. I saw under there other old pieces of junk furniture and figured previous tenants had placed it there intending to remove it later. I called the landlord and he promised to send a plumber to fix the leak.

As a rule I usually do my Internet business later in the evening after my kids go to bed so I can concentrate. It was one of those nights, when I first heard the child crying. It sounded like a small child so I figured it was the neighbors' in the top apartment next door since they had a baby. But the crying would go on for a long time. Soon I got worried that the baby might be sick so when the landlord came by, I asked if the baby next door was sick. He replied that that couple had moved and he had just rented the apartment to two sisters who would be moving in shortly.
The only other people near were a family of Mexicans who lived behind our house. I happened to notice one day while clearing the yard of old litter and carpet pieces the landlord had tossed out when replacing the carpet, that the house behind us was now empty.

The child continued to cry. By now, others in my family had heard the crying, as it sometimes got louder than at other times.

At the far end of the street, which was a dead end, lived a couple who had 2 small children and their daughter would come up and play with mine. The mom would come and we would sit and chat while watching them play. I baby sat for the two kids now and then and soon got to know the mom well..Her name was Kathy and coincidentally her daughter's name was Whitney, the same as my daughter's.

One day my older daughter, Kim, told me she had been told that someone had gotten burned up in our house, but I didn't think it looked as though it had been in a fire. She insisted that the person who told her this was a relative of the person who died. Well, I never gave it much thought, for a while anyway. Finally, I got frustrated hearing that poor child crying night after night, and being helpless to do anything about it, and decided I was going to find out something one way or another.

One afternoon while I was chatting with Kathy while watching the two girls play, I asked her how long she had lived in her house and she said they lived there seven years. I asked her if she had heard anything about someone dying in my house. Kathy gave me a strange look and said, "You've heard the little girl crying, haven't you?" I nearly fell off the porch rail where I was sitting. This is the story she told me.

The "house" had, in fact, once been an apartment with another underneath.I'm not sure if anyone was living in the upper one or not but there was a family with three kids in the lower apartment.The children's mom had to work and left her kids with her boyfriend, who was an alcoholic,and who started drinking soon after she left.The older child went out to ride his bike leaving the other little boy and small girl with the boyfriend,who soon was drunk and smoking.He fell into a drunken stupor and awoke some time later to find the house engulfed in flames. He was still drunk and not thinking clearly as he grabbed the little boy, who I believe was his own son. He threw a blanket around them and ran out before he realised he had left the girl inside. But it was too late. He couldn't get back in. When the fire department extinguished the fire they found her small body inside the bathtub where she had hidden, I suppose in her child's mind, thinking the water would keep her safe.
She died of smoke inhalation and not from burning, as Kim had been told. The old tub in the crawl space was the very one the little girl died in.
After that, when I heard her crying I would feel so sad for the poor little thing, and would pray and ask God to find her little lost spirit and take her home, so she would no longer be the child who cries.