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

This is Real Ghost Stories Online.

After midnight.

For most of her life, Rachel never paid much attention to dreams, like most people.

She occasionally woke up remembering fragments

of strange places or bizarre situations that made perfect sense while she was asleep, and none at all

once she was awake. By the time she finished her morning coffee, most of them were forgotten.

Dreams were simply dreams. They were products of a sleeping mind, nothing more.

That was why the first dream didn't stand out. It happened on an otherwise ordinary night in early

spring. In the dream she found herself standing beside a lake she had never seen before.

The water was perfectly still, reflecting the trees that lined the

far shore and everything felt oddly quiet, as though the world had been muted. A man stood several

yards away near the edge of the water. She couldn't make out his face clearly because every time

she tried to focus on it, the details seemed to blur.

She remembered noticing that he appeared older, perhaps in his 60s, and that he wore a faded flannel shirt beneath a worn jacket.

He wasn't frightening. If anything, he seemed familiar, though she couldn't explain why.

The man looked at her for a few moments before turning

toward the lake, and then the dream ended. The dream stayed with her longer than most, but only

because it felt unusually realistic. By lunchtime, she had mostly forgotten about it and moved

on with her life. Three nights later, however, she found herself standing beside the

same lake again. This time she recognized it immediately. The same trees lined the shoreline,

the same still water stretched into the distance, and the same man stood waiting near the

...