Real ghost stories from real people. This is Into the Paranormal with Tony Bruske.

There's something about 3 a.m. isn't there? That hour where the world feels thinner, quieter,

when the boundary between what we know and what we fear begins to blur. For one family, that hour became a doorway,

a moment when the ordinary slipped away, and something else stepped forward. It was supposed to be a

simple farewell. A father and son heading off on a long drive for work, bags packed, tools ready, breakfast on the table.

But in the quiet dark of Pine Hollow, standing just beyond the reach of the porch light,

something was watching, something small, something fragile, and something not quite alive.

Was it the ghost of a child lost to time? Or was it something far older, a trickster wearing the shape of innocence, waiting for the right moment to make

itself known? The family would wrestle with those questions for years,

haunted not just by what they saw, but by what they couldn't explain.

Let's get to the letter.

They write, I've gone back and forth about writing this for a while now.

It's one of those stories that sounds unbelievable until it happens to you.

The kind that gets passed around at

family gatherings with nervous laughter to break the tension, but deep down no one's actually laughing

because we all know we saw it. We all know it was real. This happened when I was about 16 back in

the late 80s in a town called Pine Hollow.

We lived in a house that was nothing special.

Just a small three-bedroom at the end of Sycamore Lane.

We'd been there since I was little, and up until this night I never thought much about the house.

It creaked like old houses do.

The pipes rattled in the winter.

...