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

This is Real Ghost Stories Online.

After midnight.

You never think twice about a broom leaning in a corner.

Not until the night you come downstairs and find it standing upright on

the kitchen table circled by four chairs as if some secret meeting had been in progress, and you

were the uninvited guest. That night came later, before that came the move, our supposed fresh start.

I'd had a rough stretch in the last place, strange incidents, a low hum of dread

that seeped into every room. When the chance came to share a four-bedroom rental with a

classmate, two single mothers pooling our resources, I leapt at it. I arrived with my three kids,

Mary, seven, imaginative, and chatty. Tie, a serious five-year-old

with a permanent furrow in his brow, and Adam, my youngest, three years old, still round-cheeked

and shy enough to ask for a nightlight. My classmate had her own two-year-old Max, five children,

two women, one big, airy house, large enough to feel almost like a victory.

The house had the kind of cheerful, family-friendly layout you see in real estate ads, a high-ceilinged

foyer with an open staircase curving up to the second floor, its banister stretching left

and right like welcoming arms.

To the left of the stairs a short hall led to a laundry room, a small bathroom,

and a den lined with aging cedar panels that smelled faintly of pencil shavings.

The kitchen stretched along the back wall of the house, sun bright by day.

On the opposite side were the dining and living rooms that framed the foyer.

In daylight it looked like the sort of house where crayon drawings belonged on the fridge where the scent of bread or soup might linger after dinner. Nothing about it warned us.

...