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

This is Real Ghost Stories Online.

After midnight.

Jason and Marcus had grown up a few houses apart on the same quiet street, the kind of neighborhood where kids drifted in and

out of each other's homes without anyone thinking much about it. Their parents knew each other well

enough that sleepovers didn't require planning. If one of them was still at the other's house

when it got late, someone would usually just say he might as well stay the night. Those nights usually followed the same

routine. They would watch television long after everyone else had gone to bed, flipping between

whatever strange reruns happened to be on after midnight. Old science fiction shows, late

night monster movies, the occasional black andand-white anthology episode that always seemed

creepier at two in the morning than it probably deserved to be.

When the television finally went dark, neither of them ever went to sleep right away.

They would lie there in the dark and keep talking.

Sometimes the conversation stayed harmless, school, video games, whatever dumb things someone had said earlier that day.

But once the house had gone completely quiet, the topics almost always drifted towards stranger territory.

Stories they had heard growing up, weird things people claimed had happened in houses around town.

The kind of conversation that feels like harmless entertainment until you are lying in the dark listening to every sound the

house makes. One night Marcus mentioned the house his family had lived in before moving into the

neighborhood. He didn't call it haunted. In fact, he sounded almost hesitant to bring it up at all.

But he said there had been a stretch of time when he was younger, when something strange kept

happening at night. He would wake up with the feeling that someone else was in his room,

not standing over him, not staring at him, just there. Most of the time what woke him was a sound.

...