The Ball

When my brother and his family lived in Saltillo, Mississippi, they had many strange experiences in the house they lived in. The experience that I'm telling you about today is by far, the most strange and scary one of all their stories.

So here goes!:

My brother's son, Matt, had a favorite ball he liked to play with. It was a small ball, about 3 inches round; one of those balls that bounce really high when you drop them on the floor. Anyway, he played with that ball every day, throwing it against the garage wall, making it bounce back to him every time. Throwing it against the foyer wall (when he could get away with it) almost every day. Well, one afternoon, after playing with the ball in the garage, he put it away in his toy box.

A couple of weeks later, he went to look for the ball so he could once again bounce it against the garage wall. The ball was nowhere to be found and he continued to search for it for several days. Eventually, as young children will do, he gave up on finding it and forgot all about it.

Several months later, when my brother was home alone, he started up the long staircase to his study. About half way up the stairs, something hit him square in the back. Turning around to see what it was, he was shocked to see his son's ball which had been missing for several months, rolling across the floor as if it'd never gone missing. After searching, and looking around for any explanation besides the ball hitting him in the back, he could only surmise that it was the ball which had hit him in the back that day. Where had the ball been for so many months? He wondered. And who had thrown it at him? For there was no one else in the house at the time it happened.

After checking records and such, my brother came up with the only explanation he could think of: It had to have been the ghost of a child, a very young boy, who had died in the house many years ago. There was a reclusive family who had lived in the house. They never wanted contact with the outside world. They had one son whom they were way too overprotective of, meaning they'd never allowed him any contact with the world outside their home, so basically, no one actually knew of this child's exsistence and when he died, it was actually as if he'd never existed. A sad, sad life, but true nonetheless...