“Father.” The word shakily escaped me as I stood in the doorway of my parents’ room. “There’s a little girl in my room.”
It was the middle of the night and I had woken with a chill. I opened my eyes to find a little girl, translucent and barely there, adorned in white, sitting at the edge of my bed. Her hair was chestnut brown, twisted into two braids, each tied with a ribbon.
Startled by the sight, I curled myself into a seating position. I blinked ferociously, rubbing my eyes with the backs of my hands.
“Who are you?” I whispered.
“I’m Charlotte,” the girl replied.
I clutched the corners of my blanket, yanking them over my head. “Go away.”
When I uncovered my head, she was gone. I switched on my lamp. An immediate and harsh light illuminated my lavender room. I hopped up and ran down the hallway to my parents’ bedroom.
I knew who she was.
Our neighbour, Mr. Butler, had come to visit one day. We were sitting together on the front lawn, and when my mother went inside to pour him a glass of lemonade, he’d told me the story of the family who’d lived in our house before us.
“Their daughter died of leukemia when she was around your age,” he explained, sitting in a deteriorating wooden chair. He was the oldest man I had ever seen. He wore his beige pleated trousers high above his hips, and a baseball cap loosely perched on top of his head.
“What’s leukemia?” I asked, stumbling over the word.
“It’s a disease. A bad one.” He adjusted his thick glasses, his eyes shrunken beneath them.
I was squinting from the sun. The smell of fresh-cut grass wafted through the breeze as I listened to the faint noise of a lawnmower in the distance.
“About a year later, the girl’s mother was standing in the doorway and a gust of wind took her.” Mr. Butler’s hand flew through the air. “She fell and bashed her head on a rock.”
I buried my face in my hands.
He paused until I uncovered my face and looked up at him.
“Her husband packed up and left a week later.”
My mother returned, carrying a silver serving tray with three glasses of lemonade. She passed one to me and then one to Mr. Butler. “What are we talking about?”
“I was just telling Grace here a little secret.” He winked at me and I moved toward my mother, hugging her leg.
Despite the tragedy that had brought Charlotte to my room, I knew she was good. Her energy was calm and playful. Sometimes I would hear her laughing, her light steps creaking up and down the hallway. She only ever came to visit at night.
There were, however, negative forces at work in the house. Sinister memories clutched the mattresses, oozing from the comforters, seeping from the walls, vile and iniquitous. As an adult, I was unable to return. What haunted our house was much more disturbing than any ghost.