Real Horror Stories

36: My Child's Ghost

"About six years ago I moved into a maisonette which had just been purchased by my parents. I had been in that place for a couple of months and everything was fine. One night I put my two year old daughter to bed, all was quiet for a while so I did the usual and went upstairs to check on her. She was sound asleep in her cot but as I walked out of the room and onto the landing, I felt a breeze rush past me. It felt like someone had walked passed me and there was a very strong smell of lavender.

I went downstairs putting it down to my imagination. About five minutes later, I heard my daughter start talking so I went upstairs and turned on the bedroom light. I asked my daughter who she was talking to and she pointed to something across the room and she said she was talking to the lady.

This happened on several occasions and sometimes in the middle of the night I would hear my daughter talking and laughing with someone. Some mornings I would go into her bedroom and she would have glitter on her face. Around this time, a friend of mine came to visit one afternoon.

When she left, she put some cigarettes on the coffee table as I had run out of them. I walked her to her car and went back inside. I remember noticing the cigarettes on the table and I went up stairs to the toilet. On my return, the cigarettes were nowhere to be seen. There was no one else in the house at the time, my partner was still at work and my daughter was at my parent's house. I looked under the coffee table and saw that the rug underneath had been rolled up into a tube. 

I unraveled it to find the cigarettes inside. Obviously my bad habits were not appreciated! Another time, myself and my partner had just gone up to bed, our daughter was asleep and our cat was curled up at the end of the bed. Suddenly I heard the phone start to beep as though it had been left off the hook. My partner went downstairs to find that this is what had happened but none of us had used the phone that night. 

Also it was one of those phones that was attached to the wall so it couldn't have been knocked off the hook rather it would have had to have been lifted. If I stood at the top of my stairs, I would always get a feeling of someone rushing up the stairs past me and out of the corner of my eye I would see a figure but if I looked directly at it, it was never there. This went on for the first year that we lived in the maisonette. 

Things calmed down and for a while nothing really happened. Then we encountered a run of bad luck. I had seven miscarriages including losing a baby when I was five months pregnant and I also lost my Grandmother who I was very close to. Finally last year I gave birth to a beautiful baby girl after having an extremely difficult and worrying pregnancy. 

I spent the last two months of my pregnancy in bed unable to walk. I remember one particularly hot summers day, I was in bed, my partner at work and my daughter at school. I burst into tears as I was so fed up. I have to point out that we had swapped bedrooms with my daughter. Anyway, I noticed in the corner of the room some lights had started to appear. For the first time in five years I smelt the lavender scent and I began to hear a female voice. 

Although I didn't hear the voice physically, it was definitely in my head. It was a voice of a lady reassuring me that everything was fine and it would all be over soon. At the time I was thirty five weeks pregnant. The next week I gave birth to my daughter. She was four weeks premature but as strong as an ox! A couple of weeks later, I woke up one night and again in the same corner of the room the lights appeared. 

I then noticed a very tall figure bending over my baby daughter's crib. I had the feeling that the figure was smiling at her and meant her no harm. I also had the feeling that who ever this person was, they were very pleased that we finally had a healthy baby.   

We moved out of there a few months ago and bought our own house, but we go back to the maisonette regularly as my parents own the place and are redecorating to let it out to the next tenant. On a recent visit, my partner went up into the loft to clear out all of our Christmas decorations, old toys , baby clothes etc. Whilst he was up there he found some old paintings which neither of us remember being up there before. 

He bought them down and on closer inspection they had been painted by a girl called Laura. Unfortunately, there was no date on them but it is a mystery how they got there. Like I said before, we go back quite often and I always feel like I'm being welcomed. 

One night as I sat in the car as we were leaving, I looked up at our old block and I swear I saw a figure standing at the window of our old bedroom watching us leave."