The Ghost

Growing up, I never believed in ghosts.  Until I did.  My downfall was the night I spent at Amelia’s house.  Sleepovers at Amelia’s were a regular occurrence and our favorite nighttime activity was telling scary stories.  Amelia’s family were staunch believers in the Bible and absolutely did not believe in ghosts.  Which led us to only tell ghost stories, in the dark, under the covers, after her parents went to bed.  Amelia and I had been told repeatedly ghosts did not exist and we were not to speak them into existence. 

The night I started believing in ghosts was the night Polly joined our sleepovers.  Polly was new to school and Amelia and I had quickly welcomed her to our small group of friends.  Hillary often spent the night with us, but had recently been grounded for breaking her nine o’clock curfew by a matter of five minutes.  Polly had no reservations about telling scary stories and told us about her previous run-ins with ghosts.  As Polly dived deeper into her story and filled in details about the exact appearance of the ghosts she encountered, I felt the hair on the back of my neck stand up. As the story neared the ending, I felt my entire body tense. Polly was describing me in exact detail. Like I was a ghost. Like I wasn’t sitting right next to her. But when she finished her story, she only had eyes for Amelia. They both acted like I no longer existed.