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 forget the first time the world of the living and the world beyond collide,

especially when you're six years old and

summer should mean nothing scarier than mosquito bites and scraped knees. The year was

1987, out past the quiet streets of a small Montana town, a patch of countryland stretched

flat and wide beneath the blue-white sky. That land had belonged to my grandfather for as long as I could remember.

To most people it was just pasture grass, an old oak tree that bent in the wind,

the rusted skeleton of a fence, but buried under that soil were stories,

a homestead that had burned down long before I was born, and locals whispered

an old native burial ground just beyond the property line. The adults rarely mentioned it. Kids like

us could feel it in the hush that came over the grownups when the subject slipped out. That summer I was six, my brother

four, our cousin five. We were barefoot and sun-burned and believed the world was ours. By afternoon

the air smelled of cut hay and the resin of hot pine. We chased each other around the oak tree

that anchored the yard hiding our battered toy truck as part of an

endless game of Find It was my cousin's turn to seek. I'd hidden the truck behind the oak's

gnarled roots, a perfect spot in my six-year-old mind. When she couldn't find it, I grinned,

pointed toward the tree, and froze. Someone was already there. A small figure crouched by the

roots, holding the toy truck as if it were his own. At first I thought it must be a neighbor

kid, maybe from the ranch down the road. He was small, boy-sized. But there was something wrong,

something that made my cousin gasp and bolt for the house before I could stop her. I stayed. I was six, still too naive to know when to be afraid. I walked toward

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