When I was a kid, my parents, brother, and sister lived in an older two-story house.  It was the first house that my parents bought and as kids, we thought it was a mansion compared to the other places we had lived.  I was only in kindergarten, so my knowledge of the paranormal was minimal at the time., but I believe now just as I did then, that the house had a ghost. 

The first instance occurred while we were moving in.  There were some things being done like carpet and paint so I would bring some toys and play.  The den closet on the first floor became my G.I. Joe base.  The gun was set with the gunner in his seat, ready to fight Cobra when I went to go get a drink.  Upon returning, I found the gunner was gone.  At the time I was gone less than a minute and my siblings were somewhere else.  This was not the only instance of toys vanishing.  One day some Ninja Turtles were on the stairs to go up to our rooms when two of the four disappeared in the three-minute span. 

The toys were weird enough, but what I saw one night really stuck with me for the rest of my life. 

My parents had gone to a get together at a friend’s house and took my brother and sister with them.  Thinking I was old enough, I was allowed to stay home alone.  I chilled in the living room watching TV and finally grew tired.  Walking to the bathroom, I went to the sink and began to brush my teeth.  From where the downstairs bathroom door faced, you could see the doors to the basement and to the upstairs.  When I went in, they were both closed and as I looked up , the upstairs door was slightly ajar.  Thinking nothing of it, I continued to brush until I saw a young boy at the doorway.  I looked up again and called my brother’s name.  Then it hit me that he wasn’t home and I quickly looked back up again only to find the boy was gone.  I was scared senseless.  Heck, thinking back about it now gives me goosebumps.

I guess it knew it freaked me out pretty bad, because I never saw it again and nothing else disappeared.  Maybe even in his state, the kid realized he messed up and decided to leave us alone and not take toys.  Those toys were never found even when my parents moved and the whole house got packed up. 

One day, I did think I was going to get an answer.  My father was busting up the old concrete steps at the backdoor to replace it with a bigger set of wooden steps and porch.  I helped him and when we busted through, we found the area behind the stairs was hollow, just an open space filled with some loose dirt.  In the back of my mind, I knew the boy was down there, his skull slightly buried beneath the dirt.  To my surprise, he wasn’t.  No toys either, but it was the hope of a teen who likes horror books to find the remains. 

A year or so ago, the house I grew up in burned down in a chimney fire and the house the leveled.  A few days after the fire, I drove by to look at the remnants of my childhood home.  In the upstairs bedroom window, my old bedroom window, I saw something up in the window looking down at me and was gone when I blinked.  Later when the house came down, I glimpsed him again, standing in the open lot where the house once stood.  Is he still there?  Maybe.  I have a new unbelievable belief however, I believe he followed me.  There are notes for a story concerning this, I’m just not ready to write it down yet.  When I do, you’ll know because he wants to meet all of you too.