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The Ghost Who Visited At Night

Rachel, Iowa, USA
September 2006

Hi. I'm Rachel and I am 15 years old. I never really had a dad and two years ago, my older brother, who was 23 at the time, died in a car crash.
It was the middle of July but it was unseasonably chilly that night. I was doing dishes and getting ready for bed when I saw something move out of the corner of my eye. I wrote it off as one of my cats, but it had seemed a lot bigger than a cat.

That night I couldn't sleep for the feeling of being watched. I thought briefly about the thing I had seen earlier from the corner of my eye, but I was scaring me so I forced myself to drop the subject.
It was about 2:30am when I finally drifted off to sleep. I awoke again about an hour later to the acute feeling that there was someone else in the room. I looked around and saw a dark, blurry shape in the corner of my room, slowly making it's way toward my bed. I was quite frightened and sprang up from my bed and ran into my mom's room, which was across the hall from my room. I told her what I saw and she told me I was just dreaming and to go back to sleep. I left my mom's room and nervously peeked into my room. The sensation of being watched was gone and so was the blurry figure. I also noticed that the room was considerably warmer. I relaxed and went back to sleep. This same experience happened almost every night for about the next 2 months. Gradually, I grew used to it and even stopped being afraid.
On about the third week of this nightly ghostly visiting, I worked up the courage to talk to the spirit or whatever it was. I asked it who it was and why it was here. It seemed to want to speak but I don't think it could. It shook it's head (it had been becoming clearer every night and now it was a distinctly human shape) and vanished. At that moment I knew it bared no ill will towards me and was just desperately trying to tell me something. Also, during the days I saw things moving about out of the corner of my eye. I knew these things were connected with my nightly visitor, so I wasn't afraid of them. I told my mother about my nightly visits so often that she started to believe me.
After the first time that I tried to talk to the ghost, I began to actually welcome the visits.
Over the next week, I tried talking with the ghost a few more times. At the end of the week I actually got sort of an answer. I asked him (as usual) who he was and why he was here and he replied with a sort of grunt and then disappeared.
Over the next 4 weeks his form got clearer and clearer and he was able to talk better and better. It soon became clear to me who he was. My nightly visitor was my deceased older brother.
I told my mother this and she believed me without question. She even told me that she had suspected this might be the case for a while because she had had a similar incident during the first few months after he died.
On the last night that he came to visit me he could speak very clearly and brought with him other dead family members. There was my grandma, my great- grandma, my great-uncle, and an assortment of pets that we had loved over the years. They had all come to say their final good byes to me. My brother was the only one who spoke. He told me that he loved me, my younger sister, and our mother. He said not to miss him too much because he was happy where he was. He promised he would watch over me and said that he would come check in every now and again. When I told my mother this she nodded tearfully and hugged me and started sobbing. It must be hard hearing about a dead son. And to this day, I know that, true to his word, he checks on me sometimes. I always know when he's with me and sometimes I hear him speak. I no longer grieve over his death because I know he will never be completely gone.

Rachel, Iowa, USA
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