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

This is Real Ghost Stories Online.

After midnight.

You can always tell when someone's being watched.

It's not the turn of the head or the startled look when the floorboard creaks.

It's smaller than that, a stillness in the body, a carefulness in every movement. It's how a person

learns to tiptoe through their own house, not to wake what's already awake inside it. That's how

it was with Danielle. Since childhood, she'd lived with the quiet, irrational certainty that she wasn't alone.

She couldn't name it, couldn't prove it, but she could feel it.

A presence just behind her shoulder, never cruel, never kind, simply there.

She grew up telling herself it was nerves, some leftover superstition that had stuck to her bones.

But another part of her, the private part that only surfaced in sleepless hours, wondered if she was right.

And one night last spring she got her answer.

It began the way most trouble does, with a dare and a little curiosity.

Danielle and her friends had gathered for a sleepover at a small two-story house on the edge of town,

one of those places that still smelled faintly of old wood and rain-wet leaves.

They were 16, invincible, laughing over soda and chips, the television flickering in the

corner, the kind of night where you feel wrapped in safety, until the conversation drifts where

every late night talk eventually goes. Ghosts, spirits, what happens after we die.

One of the girls, the loud one, the fearless one, said she knew a way to call them up.

No, we aboard, she promised.

No seance, just a candle, a necklace, and focus.

...