(True Horror Stories)

There is a little boy named Charlie that lives in our house.

My nephew lives with me in an old farmhouse built in the 1840's. When he was about four (maybe five) he told me that there was a little boy named Charlie who lived in our house. He said Charlie had never heard of video games and that Charlie's dad left him home all by himself. This was around the same time that he had an imaginary friend named Mr. Cat (who was an anthropomorphic cat) so I wrote it off.

A couple weeks later I was shaving with the bathroom door open and thought I could see my nephew kind of looking in at me out of the corner of my eye. I stuck my head around and could see him from behind messing with an old china cabinet we keep important stuff in and just as I walked into the room I could see my nephew sitting in the living room watching tv. He couldn't have crossed that much distance that fast or silently.

I asked him about it and he said "Oh yeah, that was Charlie. He says there's a really book in there from when you were a little boy." And at the bottom of a stack of old documents and stuff in the china cabinet is a book I got as a gift when I was a kid. I didn't even know it was there, it was under two boxes of documents and couldn't been seen until the boxes were lifted out.

The little boy didn't look like you think of ghosts; he wasn't transparent, he didn't float, he didn't look spooky. He just looked like a kid. Now I'm convinced that people see ghosts (or whatever they are) every day and don't realize it because they look just as real as we do.