by Ron Rule
When my wife and I bought our first house, an old Victorian-style home built in the 50’s, almost every night we heard what sounded like a kid’s footsteps running down the hallway and up and down the stairs.
There were other random sounds as well.
My wife mentioned it to one of the neighbors and they said it was probably just peacocks on the roof – the house was near a conservation area where wild peacocks lived and they would occasionally get up on the rooftops.
That answer made sense so we basically got used to it and eventually ignored it.
Less than a year later our son was born, and when he was one he would balance all of his toys on top one another and made them spin – literally found the center of balance of various toys and would walk in a circle around the room giving each a gentle touch to keep them rotating.
It was the weirdest and coolest thing I had ever seen.
When he was 2 or 3 we would hear him talking in his room at night, and one night I asked who he was talking to.
He said “Tracy”.
I asked who Tracy was, and he said “the girl who lives in the wall. She’s usually nice, but sometimes she scares me.”
He described a girl with brown hair in a yellow dress who would play with him sometimes, and occasionally wake him up at night but he didn’t seem bothered by any of it, just startled sometimes. He would talk about her once in a while but it wasn’t a common occurrence.
A couple years later we had added on to the house and moved the master bedroom downstairs, switching the kids’ rooms around.
Our youngest was now in his old room, and about ready to transition from crib to toddler bed.
She had always been a sound sleeper but she cried almost every night in that room.
Her first night in the toddler bed we heard a loud thud followed by screaming and rushed into the room, thinking she had fallen out of bed.
We found her on the other side of the room.
We got her calmed down and back to bed and it happened again the next night, so we ended up switching the kids’ rooms back and things became fine again.
We looked up the history of the house but didn’t find anything about any missing little girl or anyone with the name Tracy that had lived there.
Eventually our son stopped talking about her and a few years later I ended up taking a job with another company and we moved.
The house was empty for a few months after we moved and the neighbor across the street called my wife one day, said about a week after we left she thought she saw our daughter looking out the window so she waved to her – and then she remembered we didn’t live there anymore.
“Call me Tracy,” the phantom murmured before the last of her was gone.
Kinda weird!
Really weird!