My Niece Came Home From Preschool In A Dress—But She’d Left In Uniform Shorts
After preschool, my niece ran up to me in a coral dress I’d never seen before. Her usual shorts were gone. When I asked, she simply said, “Swapped.” Inside her cubby, I found a velvet purse with a note: “She wanted to be princess today. I consented.” When I asked who gave her the dress, she said, “Hallway girl. Always has gum.” Gum isn’t allowed at school. And the girl? “She’s in the hall,” she said, like someone floating between places. That night, my sister recognized the dress pattern. “From high school… Lydia,” she whispered, clearly shaken.
The next day, I spotted a girl by a sealed storage room at school. She vanished when I blinked. Later, I found another note in the velvet pouch: “Tomorrow is someone else’s turn.” Ms. Leena, the teacher, revealed a long-buried truth—Lydia had choked on gum and died years ago. That night, my niece whispered, “She says it’s my turn forever now.” I returned to the school, followed the hallway, and found the storage room. Inside sat a little girl among piles of old clothes and forgotten things. She clutched a pair of sneakers marked “Lydia.”
“I just wanted someone to remember me,” she said. “You can still go home,” I told her. She let go of the dress, the shoes, the pouch—and disappeared. We donated all the items. My niece slipped a note in the pocket of the coral dress: “You can be remembered in good ways, too.” Weeks later, construction crews found Lydia’s old belongings during renovations.
The school created a reading nook, and in the community room, the coral dress now hangs in a shadow box. A plaque reads: “She showed her magic. We remember.” And whenever my niece says she feels like a princess, I believe her. Because now, somewhere, a little girl isn’t lost anymore.
A field guide to visiting the locations of real ghost stories
Real ghost stories and the places that inspired them are scattered around the world. Surprisingly, you can visit many of them, and sleep, dine or drink in countless. Almost any destination has its share of tales. I make it my work to explore both, the stories and the destination.
My name is Todd Atteberry, and I’m at various times a writer, artist, photographer, musician – in other words, barely employable. I’ve wandered somewhat extensively the eastern half of these United States, as well as Ireland and England, looking for history and haunts.
On occasion I have witnessed the supernatural on my travels. I’ve heard the laughter of a niece of Washington Irving, author of The Legend of Sleepy Hollow, who has been dead nearly two centuries. In fact, I’ve seen the specter of a full garbed Revolutionary War soldier twice in Sleepy Hollow Cemetery. I was locked out of Jerusha Howe’s bedroom in Longfellow’s Wayside Inn in Massachusetts, the hook thrown on the door from the inside of an empty room. I’ve seen the white lady in the George and Pilgrim Hotel in Glastonbury, in Great Britain. And I swear I was set upon by a host of ghosts in the Talbott Tavern in Bardstown, Kentucky.
Those however, are exceptions. When visiting the sites of real ghost stories, the best you should hope for is a mood, a setting that quickens the pulse and brings your senses to life. Best of all are the times and places where the present disappear and you feel yourself beginning to time travel.
A place with a gothic mood, steeped in the past will go a long ways towards creating those feelings, and also makes for an interesting place to have drinks or dinner, or to spend the night. If you don’t mind sharing your bed with ghosts.
Real ghost stories run in the family
My own search for real ghost stories began in my family home, long ago.
October of 2018 and I was in the kitchen of the family home. I’d lived here taking care of my parents for nearly a decade. Mom had died. Dad was in a nursing home. I was about to shut off the light and go to another part of the house when I got a whiff of dad’s cologne.
It wasn’t wafting through the room. It wasn’t subtle, as his cologne was never subtle. There’s something about an Aqua Velva Man. Foul smelling stuff but that’s what he liked, strong and manly.
I chalked it up to my imagination, but the scent held on. I said aloud to the silent house, “dad must have just died, and laughed at myself. Those with a gothic disposition are prone to making superstitious statements like that, and I felt kind of stupid for falling into the same trap.
I came upstairs and sat down at my desk and started to work when the phone rang … it was the nursing home. “Come right away.”
That wasn’t the first real ghost story in this house for me. They started before I was five. Not disembodied scents, lights switching on and off, footsteps or any of the smaller pantheon of ghostly occurrence, though those all came later. The first time was a full bodied apparition, and it wouldn’t be the last time I saw it here.
My parents told me it was my imagination, so I spent most of my childhood believing I was crazy. People who believed in such things are crazy, right?
Then when I was in my thirties I told my mother that and she laughed. Turns out she’d seen it too, as had her mother. My dad wouldn’t talk about what he saw, but he was afraid of the house. I thought the spirits in this house had finally found peace while I lived elsewhere for over thirty years. But over the past couple years I’ve come home to find two house guests, sitting on my porch at night, having chose not to stay in the house alone after disturbing occurrences.
And those are the just the people who will talk about it. So it’s safe to say, growing up in this house and coming back to it, I come by this shit naturally. I didn’t have to look far for real ghost stories.