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

This is Real Ghost Stories Online.

After midnight.

From the outside, the relationship looked ordinary enough.

A year and a half together, shared apartments, work schedules that

pulled them apart, and snapped them back together again. Nothing about it suggested the

slow accumulation of dread that would come later, or the question that would eventually

sit between them, unspoken but heavy. Is this following him, or is it him?

The first sign was physical.

Early in their relationship, she noticed the scratches on his back, not the kind you could

explain away easily.

They were long, angry-looking marks, sometimes deep enough to scab, sometimes shallow but

persistent.

He told her this had been happening for as long as he could remember.

He would wake up with them.

No pain during the night, no memory of anything unusual.

And the placement made them difficult to dismiss, high on his back, along his shoulders,

places that would require contortion or assistance to reach.

Some of them healed cleanly, others left scars.

He said it casually, the way people do when something has been part of their life long enough

to feel normal.

He also said something else that stuck with her, that he had always felt a presence around him.

...