Midnight has passed, and in the stillness of these hours, the hauntings are never silent.

This is Real Ghost Stories Online.

After midnight.

Before she understood what haunted meant, she understood unease.

She was five years old the first time she felt it,

that weight in the air that makes a room seem to breathe without you. Her mother had just

separated from her father, and life had folded into something smaller. There was her mother,

her two-year-old sister, and a new house that belonged to her mother's boyfriend.

It was an ordinary enough place, a two-level home with the kind of basement you only visit because you have to.

Upstairs, the air was warm and bright. Downstairs, the walls seemed to hold their breath.

When her mother told her that her new bedroom would be in the basement,

she smiled because that's what brave children do. She didn't want to seem scared, though the word

basement had already started to echo in her head. Her mother had done her best to make the space

welcoming. She'd bought a new bed, laid down a soft rug, hung up a few of her drawings. She said things like,

See, you've got the biggest room in the whole house, as if size could make up for what it lacked in light.

Still, when the first night came, she stalled. Her bed hadn't arrived yet, so she slept upstairs on her sister's top bunk.

From that small, high space, the world felt safe again, like she could see all the shadows before they moved.

When the new bed finally arrived, her mother built it herself, tucking the blanket in tight.

See? Just like a grown-up, she said. But the first time the girl

put her foot on the top step to go down alone, she stopped. The air changed. It was the same hallway,

the same walls, the same paint, but it felt like crossing into someone else's house.

The stillness down there wasn't peaceful.

...