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

This is Real Ghost Stories Online.

After midnight.

Some hauntings don't begin with death.

Some begin with childhood, and for her, it started when she was four.

The house was new,

fresh paint, clean walls, a bedroom all her own, a bright beginning for a young girl who

couldn't have known how quickly the night would change it. She remembers lying in bed,

surrounded by toys, the smell of new carpet in the air.

It was the kind of room a child should have felt safe in.

But the first night the bed shook.

It wasn't violent, just enough to rattle her awake.

She sat up blinking into the darkness, her tiny heart pounding.

Then, as quickly as it started, it stopped. A dream, she told herself.

Just a dream, except it kept happening. Night after night, she'd wake to the same trembling mattress, as if something unseen had crawled beneath it or was gripping the frame with invisible

hands.

Sometimes the shaking lasted a few seconds, sometimes longer.

She'd sit frozen, waiting for it to end, then pull the blankets over her head and will

herself back to sleep. But the house had other ways of making itself known. From her room above the garage,

she'd hear it, the heavy slam of the door that led to the garage below. It was an unmistakable

sound, old wood, misaligned hinges, that deep reverberation that shook the walls, and it always

came at the same time, late after

...