It’s a question many have been trying to find the answer to for years. Do children see ghosts?

In this episode of Real Ghost Stories Online we hear real stories of children seeing unexplained entities or “ghosts”, where adults see nothing.

Is it possible for children to see ghosts that we do no see?

Listen to this weeks podcast and you tell us.

Here is a letter sent to us by a listener named Randy. This is his account of his child witnessing paranormal activity in his room.

I was listening to your latest podcast when you mentioned your daughter acknowledging things that are not there.  My son did the same thing.  At the end my wife, myself and anyone who saw it believe it was of the supernatural variety.  But i’m getting ahead of myself.  When my son was a few months old my wife and I lived in a tiny apartment meant for one person in Brooklyn.  When I first moved in, before my son was born, I started having these weird dreams with a dark figure chasing me and trying to scare me.  I thought it was just anxiety because I was starting a new chapter in my life.  I wasn’t sleeping well for a few weeks so my wife asked me what was wrong.  When I told her she was surprised as I had just described the nightmares that she was having.  It felt like something was not happy that we were there.  After awhile the dreams went away mostly because I moved our bed away from the window to be by the kitchen, but every now and then something would happen (pots and pans moving around, computers turning on by themselves in front of me, etc.) but nothing big.

Both my wife and I have had a history with the paranormal, and through our experiences we tend to “block” things away from us. So while these things were interesting we didn’t dwell on them.  When my son was born he had problems sleeping.  Mostly due to stomach problems.  So being in this tiny apartment, with a crying baby led to no one getting any sleep.  My wife and I would take turns trying to sleep.  I had the late night shift and one night I went to the kitchen. It really was a part of the living room with a wall dividing the room but a window you could look into the living room. I went to make a bottle (and eat ice cream) and I saw an old woman drift past the my son’s crib and fade away.  I rubbed my eyes and told myself that the exhaustion was making me see things.  A few days later I saw something darker, and while I do think it was due to the lack of sleep, I called my mom to ask her for help so that my wife and I could catch up with sleep.

A few months passed and my son got to the age where he was engaging us more, laughing, trying to talk, that kind of thing.  He moved his head more and started to turn over by himself in his crib.  When he would see us he would gurgle and giggle, and follow us with his head and eyes.  One day my wife told me to look at my son.  He was in the crib and gurgling and doing the things he would to do us, but there was no one there.  We tried to explain it away (maybe there is a spot on the ceiling, maybe this is what babies do) but sometimes we would get creeped out as it looked like he was engaging someone and it started to happen more often.  It would be the same spot too.  We would move him around the room and his eyes would stay fixated to that spot.  I would check out the spot and there was nothing there, just white paint which covered the rest of the ceiling.

After a few days of this happening we noticed that he would fixate on a different spot at times.  His changing table was by a window in the corner.  When we would take him there he would look at the corner, do a hearty laugh and giggle like he was having the best time of his life.  Sometimes he would stop and reflect and start laughing and smiling like someone was talking to him.  He would act like that with only myself, my wife and my mom and only for a little while.  But when he was in the corner he would giggle and have a grand old time the whole time he was there.  We were fine with all of this for a few weeks we just thought this is what some babies do.  But after awhile when he was in his crib, he started to get a scared look on his face when looking at the ceiling.  I would move him away and he would be agitated. He would keep looking at that spot.  A few days of that then he started crying at night and now he would look at that spot and have a terrified look on his face.  I moved his crib which helped a little but his eyes would always look at that spot on the ceiling.  No more gurlgling or giggling, just terror.  His stomach issues had been resolved so before all of this happened we were sleeping more.  When he started being scared by whatever, he would cry into the night so no sleep was had by anyone.

During the day he would look scared, during the night he would look terrified and cry.  We didn’t want to believe that anything supernatural was bothering our son, so we looked for any solution.  We went to the doctor and begged for help.  He told us that he would grow out of it and that he was probably looking at a paint spot or a shadow or something.  I explained that I checked all of that out and that wasn’t it.  At certain times of the day there were no shadows and I also changed the lighting in there to dispel any shadows.  I checked the ceiling and the paint was fairly recently painted and uniform.  He gave us the whole don’t worry they grow out of it attitude that doctors have and was of no help at all.

I called my mom to take my son to her house for a few days to give all of us relief.  I told her what was going on and she kind of made fun of me and said we were probably imagining stuff due to lack of sleep.  A little background here – I grew up in a haunted apartment.  When we kids told my mom of weird things, she would poo poo us or laugh it off.  Years later I got her to admit that she knew stuff was going on, her defense was what could she do?  Back then there were no resources, no internet, no ghost shows and no explanations.  So her way of dealing was trying to make us not believe so we wouldn’t feed whatever was there.

She came over to our apartment and went over to my son’s crib (not before making fun of me some more, but I wasn’t pushing the matter). My son would usually light up when she was around, but she could see that something was bothering him.  She even looked at where he was looking almost expecting to see something.  She looked for an explanation, but could find none.  She looked scared because she had never seen my son like that before.  Other than his stomach issues he was usually a happy baby whose eyes would light up for Grandma.  She moved him around the room and saw he was still focused on that spot.  She looked at me in disbelief.  Then she took him over to the changing table.  Once she saw his reaction, his face lighting up and laughing so uproariously at that spot, my mom’s eyes started to well up a bit.  She said in a low voice “maybe this is my mother?”  Honestly I don’t know if whatever was there was my grandma, but I do know whatever was there was a comfort to my son.

My mom who minutes before was making fun of me realized that something was going on.  She suggested we do a “water” ceremony.  In my culture you do a “water” on a baby to ask for God’s protection.  Its almost like a baptism, except you are not in Church and there is no Priest.  You invite family members and friends over and say prayers and ask God to protect the child and anoint his head with holy water.  I believe this practice may have evolved from there being a shortage of Priests that would travel to rural areas to conduct a baptism in the place where my mom’s family is from is from.

Because whatever was scaring my son was getting worse I agreed and we got everything together as soon as we could.  After my son was blessed and we bought him back home there was a change in his attitude.  That night he went to sleep and slept through the night.  He would sleep though the next few nights as well, but we put that to that he was so exhausted from everything that was going on.  At first he would still look at the spot on the ceiling, but more like he remembered something was there.  After awhile of not seeing whatever it was he stopped looking.  In the corner spot he would still laugh and giggle, but after awhile it lost its intensity and he stopped looking for whatever was there.  Like it gradually went away as opposed to the scary thing that just left after the blessing.

When I told my wife I was writing this, she reminded me that have a video of my son looking at the the thing on the ceiling.  If I find it I will try to send you a copy if you wish.  After all is said and done I have these thoughts.

From my wife’s and my dreams we gathered that there was a spirit that may have been curious about us but reacted to us in a negative way.  From the dreams I got that he was angry and always floating above the ground.  His face was black almost blue, like a burn victim or something.  We also talked to a few people that told us that there was a bad fire in the building and people died.  But that is all they knew and we looked around the web for more info and found nothing, so it could all be untrue.  We think this was the thing trying to scare my son.  We moved our bed because of the noise from the window, but then we realized that when we moved the bed that the dreams stopped, and this was only after my son started having his experiences.  We had our son’s crib in the vicinity of that bad spot because it was the spot closest to the heater.

I believe the lady is the same one I saw by my son’s crib.  When I saw her she looked serene and peaceful.  I did not get anything negative off of her.  Our sense is that she liked my son and perhaps came to visit because the negative thing was there.  We didn’t move his crib to that spot because sometimes he would laugh so much there that he would lose his breath and turn red.  Too much of a good thing.  When his laughing occurrences happened less and less, to be honest we were a little sad.  During the scariest of times putting him on the changing table bought us relief, as his demeanor would change, and he would not look scared.

While we lived in that building we would talk to different people and get a sense of the history of the building.  We found out that the building was a YWCHA with a pool where our apartments were.  The pool developed cracks in its foundation so the decision was made to make apartments instead of repairs.  When they ripped out the pool they readjusted where the floors and ceilings were.  My wife thinks we always saw him floating in the air because its idea of where the floor was, was in reference to where the pool floor was.  This idea was later reinforced when when my son would look at the ceiling instead of person level around his crib.

My wife, my mom and I weren’t the only ones to see my son’s behavior.  Other friends and family would comment on the behavior.  Some even video taped it.  They would also look for an explanation and not find anything.  We had a repair person come in and at first he was fascinated, but I think it kind of freaked him out a bit, which made me and the wife laugh.

I better understand my mom’s rationale of how she dealt with the paranormal.  The worst feeling in the world is to know that something negative is around your child.  Followed by the lack of help there is out there, you feel useless.  There isn’t a pill you take to make these things go away and we were lucky that the blessing worked as well as it did.   We didn’t want to believe what was happening was paranormal while it was happening, but after the blessing we had to admit that this is what it was.  My son was too small to be reacting to cues from us (5 months old I believe.)  We eventually moved but before that there were no more incidences.  He’s a nice and normal little 4 year now and I make sure that he doesn’t play with any imaginary friends.

Another letter that we discuss in the show comes to us from a woman who is now 22 years of age. She talks about the paranormal experiences she had as a child. She writes:

The first one happened when I was about 6 years old. I was living in a fairly nice house in a really small town in Northwest Washington. The whole family had experiences in this house (including a spirit that liked to stand behind my mom and whisper her name into her ear). My big experience was seeing a full body apparition in our kitchen one day when I was alone in the house. My dad was at work, my brothers were at their friends house, and my mom and sister were outside tanning. I went inside to grab a drink of water and standing in my kitchen was a translucent man wearing a suit. We looked each other dead in the eye for probably about 30 seconds. I blinked, and he was gone. Needless to say I ran outside screaming to my mother about it, who told me that it was a “trick of the light.” Years later she told my sister (who had also seen the man in our hallway) and I that the house was indeed haunted and that she and my father had both seen and heard things that they can’t explain.

My second story comes years later after we had moved from Washington down to Arizona. We were living in a single wide trailer in a really awful town in the Western half of Arizona. I was 13 or 14 at the time. I had gotten home from my cousins house at around 1am during the summer. I came in the living room and saw that my mom was asleep on the couch. I went into my room and tried to sleep, but was still wide awake. Now the walls in this trailer were paper thin so you could hear basically EVERYTHING that happened in the house. I heard my mom walking around the living room (very distinct steps mind you) so I got up to talk to her. When I got into the living room she was still asleep on the couch in the exact same position I had seen her in when I came home. I stood there for a second to figure out what I had just heard, when right next to me I heard footsteps walking from the living room into the kitchen. The sound of the footsteps even changed from muffled carpet to bare feet on linoleum. Now the kitchen and the living room were practically the same room. The only separation between the two was a small section of counter-top. I heard a few more small footsteps coming from the kitchen, and then a little girl started humming! After the humming started, one of the blinds on the window lifted up and dropped on its own. I didn’t feel too scared by this presence, but I thought it was just a little girl. However, pretty much the moment I had this thought I heard three loud stomps heading down the hallway in the direction of my bedroom. They seriously made the windows shutter a bit. At this point I flipped out and woke my mom up. She said “You were probably just dreaming it…” Until a few days later when she saw the washer door slam shut on its own and heard someone stopping around in the living room when no one was home. Also, our dogs (a Rottweiler and a Pitbull), would randomly bark, growl, and get really defensive towards the hallway.

I also saw a lot of unexplained shadows and things in that trailer. It was not a fun place to be.

I’m 22 now and haven’t had any real significant experiences since I was younger. Those are just the two craziest things that happened to me.

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