In honor of #Halloween and #Samhain, would you guys like to hear the story of how my house was haunted when I was growing up (but isn't now)?

*waits for half a second*

Okay, I'll tell you. /1

First, a caveat: I have only the vaguest of memories of most of this. Much of what I'm about to tell you I only know because my parents related it to me when I was older. But this is the story I can tell to the best of my abilities from my memories & my parents' info. /2

When I was a little girl, I had an imaginary friend. Her name was Sharon. We played together a lot, and I talked to her all the time. I was so young my youngest sister was just a baby, meaning I would have been no more than 5 or 6 at the time it all started. /3

Anyway, I eventually started talking to my parents about my imaginary friend. They asked me what her name was: "Sharon." They thought that was cute - I must have named her after my oldest aunt, a favorite of mine who lived in Florida and I didn't get to see that often. /4

Sometime later, they asked me what Sharon looked like. This is where it got weird, because I described her as having a long, brown braid, and wearing a long, flowered dress and high black boots with buttons, "like back in the old days." /5

That raised some eyebrows, my parents finding it somewhat odd I'd apparently decided to put my imaginary friend in period costuming, but hey. I used to watch "Little House on the Prairie," and besides, I was a wildly imaginative kid. Weird, but...ok, whatever. /6

But things took an f'ed up turn the day I was playing & my parents amusedly asked me why Sharon played so much with me. "Oh," I said casually, playing with my Transformers or something, "she died. So she's lonely."

*record scratch*

Hold up. WHAT.

/7

Cue my parents snapping to attention and asking me further questions. Had-had she told me how she died? "She and her brother got real sick." From what? "I dunno," (still playing with my toys and unaware of my parents' alarm), "something red."

Something red? What the hell? /8

Around that time, odd things started happening. My parents would get up in the morning & my sister's picture, & only hers, would be face-down on the ground. Not as if it had fallen off the wall, but as if it had been neatly placed there by someone who didn't want to see it. /9

One night, when my mom was at work (she used to be an ER nurse and had regular night shifts), my dad was downstairs, reading in his chair, having put us to bed a 1/2 hour before (at the time I shared a bedroom with my middle sister). He kept feeling like he was being watched. /10

Suddenly he KNEW someone was there, and he looked up in time to see the flash of a long dress and the end of a brown braid disappearing around the corner. My mom usually braided our hair before bed to keep it from being a tangled rat's nest, and my sister had dark hair. /11

Thinking my sister had gotten out of bed, he chased her around the corner and up the stairs, believing he'd catch my sister in the act. He burst into our room - where he found us both sound asleep. Later, he realized the braid was on someone too tall to have been my sister. /12

After that, my dad would regularly spot her when he was alone at night, sometimes out of the corner of his eye, but sometimes just...standing there. A roughly 10-year-old girl dressed exactly as I'd said, like she'd stepped out of the pages of a book set in the rural 1800s. /13

Once, when I was a few years older, my middle sister and I were sent to stay at my grandma's house while we had a bad case of chicken pox, so as not to infect our baby sister. My dad said Sharon showed up one night, looking upstairs at our room and then back at him. /14

Suddenly it clicked for him. She was looking for me, wondering where I'd been. "She's not here," he explained to her. "She went to her grandma's. She'll be back." And with that, she disappeared in front of him. /15

As I grew older, I naturally grew out of having an imaginary friend as my time with Sharon was replaced with real friends and activities. She eventually turned into a murky memory for me, but two incidents remain clear as a bell - and these are my own distinct memories. /16

Oh, but first. To those of you thinking my dad might just be suggestible or gullible, know this: My dad is the most stoic, pragmatic person I have ever known. If he thinks you're being a gullible idiot, he'll tell you. THIS is my dad: /17 https://twitter.com/AlishaGrauso/status/719712112461746176

Not exactly a guy prone to flights of fancy & scaring himself. I once asked mom why she never saw Sharon. "I think because...I didn't want to," she said. She was scared. Dad, cynical but inquisitive to the bone, was more open-minded. He wanted to KNOW (a trait I inherited). /18

Anyway, back to the story. Two incidents, yes. One happened whenI was about 13 or 14. My mom and dad often ate dinner together later, and as the oldest, I was permitted the exclusive privilege of staying up to eat with them after my sisters had gone to bed. /19

One night, I was helping my mom in the kitchen. I carried some silverware out to my dad in the living room. "Stop hitting me, you little brat," he teased. I gave him a weird look, shrugged, and went back into the kitchen. A few minutes later he came into the kitchen. /20

"Alright," he said, more annoyed now, "You keep coming in and smacking me in the head. I said stop." This time my mom and I both gave him weird looks. "She's been in here with me the entire time," my mom said. "The whole time?" Dad asked. "I was!" I protested. /21

Dad was baffled. He told us it felt like someone kept smacking him in the back of the head or ruffling his hair. But my sisters were sound asleep and I'd been with my mom. No one had been in the room with him. We all looked at each other. "Sharon?" Sharon. We nodded. /22

Here's the second incident: My dad built an addition onto our house that he finished when I was a teen. When he was digging the foundation, my sisters and I used to dig in the dirt to see what we could find in what had been unburied. Cool rocks, the occasional arrowhead, etc. /23

But once we found something that had no business being there, buried in the dirt: A fragile china teacup. It was old. White china with tiny blue flowers painted on it and the edge painted gold, the perfect tiny size for a doll's tea set. How on earth did it get there? /24

My sisters & I had never had a doll's tea set, and our dad had built our house on land that hadn't been touched in, well...ever, as far as he knew. So how did a little girl's teacup get buried in the ground under the foundation of our house? /25

I carried it inside and carefully washed off the dirt, sitting it on a paper towel on the windowsill behind the sink to dry. The next morning, the teacup was gone. I asked my mom if she'd touched it - she hadn't. And my sisters had shown zero interest in it. /26

It was just...gone. Like it had gotten up and walked off in the middle of the night - or like someone who had been attached to it had taken it. Say a little girl who had lived long ago who was missing her teacup from a cherished doll's set. /27

That's the last clear incident I remember from my childhood that had to do with Sharon. As I grew up (or maybe after she found her teacup) incidents with her faded, then stopped altogether. Maybe I stopped seeing because I grew up or maybe she found peace. But they stopped. /28

But here's the final kicker: Remember I'd said she'd died from "something red?" My dad remembered a book he had that had been written about the history of our small town, which had been founded in 1815, and he'd recalled something he'd read. /29

He remembered that toward the end of the 1860s, a deadly plague of scarlet fever had swept through the town and killed a number of people, but mostly children. The last penny dropped. "Something red" = scarlet = scarlet fever. Sharon had died of scarlet fever. /30

And one last thing: He did more digging and discovered the existence of two siblings who had been on the list of the dead, their long-gone homestead not far from our land. Two unnamed children: One boy, who died when he was 9. And a girl, who had died shortly thereafter. /31

Anyway, that's the story of how my childhood imaginary friend wasn't actually imaginary at all, but the ghost of a long-dead girl who had died from a deadly and awful disease and just wanted a friend. Or her teacup. We're still not sure which.

THE END!