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

This is Real Ghost Stories Online, after midnight.

By the time he was old enough to help set up lawn chairs for the 4th of July parade, he had already heard the story dozens of times.

Every small town has its local legends. Some involve haunted houses. Others revolve around old cemeteries,

abandoned buildings, or mysterious disappearances. In his town, the story belonged to a woman

who supposedly appeared along the parade route every Independence Day.

Nobody knew exactly who she was.

More importantly, nobody could agree on whether she had ever existed at all.

The legend had been around for as long as anyone could remember.

His grandfather claimed he first heard it as a child in the 1940s. His mother remembered

hearing the same story while growing up in the 1970s. Every generation seemed to inherit it

from the one before. The details changed depending on who was telling it, but the basic idea

remained the same. Somewhere along

Main Street, usually near the courthouse square, where the parade made its turn, people

occasionally reported seeing a woman who didn't quite belong. When he was younger, he loved hearing

the different versions. According to one story, she had been a young woman whose fiancé never

returned from war. Every year, she supposedly been a young woman whose fiancé never returned from war.

Every year she supposedly waited along the parade route hoping to see him marching home with the veterans.

Another version claimed she had been killed during a Fourth of July celebration sometime in the early 1900s when a runaway horse bolted through the crowd.

One elderly resident insisted she died in a fire at a house that

once stood near the courthouse. Someone else swore she had simply been a beloved member of the

community who attended every parade for decades before passing away, and the sightings began afterward.

...