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 feel the heat of new orleans before you even see it a living thing

that seeps into your pores and sticks there like it's

trying to own you. That's where my story begins. Not just the haunting, but everything that made me

the kind of person who could feel a haunting before it ever showed itself. I grew up in a shotgun-sized

house off a cracked road where the streetlights hummed louder than the neighbors talked.

Mom was barely out of high school, mean when she was scared, and she was scared a lot.

She'd already made one bad choice in a man.

And husband number two was worse, a walking hangover with a temper that could clear a room. He was the kind of man

the bayou itself might spit out, red-faced, drunk most nights, talking about respect while

breaking whatever he could reach. The kind of man who made you wish you could melt into the

wallpaper. And me? I was the little girl who learned

how to breathe without making a sound. The house wasn't much. Peeling paint, sagging porch, the

smell of mildew and whiskey soaked into the walls. But what I remember most isn't what I could see.

It's what I felt. Like the air inside was alive and listening.

Looking back, it makes sense. You cram that much fear, shame, and violence into four thin

walls, something's bound to feed on it. Maybe not human. Maybe never human at all.

My first memory of the paranormal didn't start with something I saw.

It started with the sound of my own name.

I was six, maybe seven, sitting cross-legged on the floor, coloring quietly,

while the grown-ups argued in the next room,

and then clear as day but whispered like a secret came.

...