True Ghost Stories for Kids by Barbara Smith

Author:Barbara Smith
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Barbara Smith
Published: 2016-08-16T00:00:00+00:00

Lesson Learned

For 12-year-old Andrea, the worst part of living with a ghost was that she knew she had caused the haunting with her own thoughtless actions. The second worst part was that she had to keep everything a secret.

Andrea had always lived happily with her parents in their perfectly ordinary house. Then one fateful summer evening, the girl did something very foolish and that night her carefree life vanished. Fear replaced happiness.

The trouble began innocently enough when Andrea and two girlfriends decided to take a shortcut through the local cemetery. If the girls had just kept walking, it’s unlikely that anything bad would have occurred, but as sometimes happens, one thing led to another. For a joke, Andrea gave the friend walking next to her a bit of a shove – just hard enough to put the girl off balance. While she was trying to steady herself, that girl bumped into the third girl, who had been walking nearest to the graves.

“Cut it out!” the third girl yelled as she steadied herself. “You nearly pushed me on top of that grave.”

Andrea must have been in a devilish mood because she laughed at her friend and teased, “Scared of the dead, are you?” With that, Andrea and her friends began chasing one another around the cemetery.

As they ran, the three youngsters became less and less careful about where they ran. Soon they were scurrying across graves, jumping over small headstones and hiding behind larger ones. Eventually they tired of their game and that was fortunate. After all, they knew better. They knew they were being very disrespectful to the souls of the people buried there.

That night, hours after she’d gone to bed, Andrea awoke from a deep sleep. At first she wondered what had wakened her. Everything was quiet. Nothing seemed to be wrong. That is, not until her eyes adjusted to the darkness. Then Andrea could see the image of an old man sitting in a chair across the room.

She gasped and buried her face under the covers. A moment later, as the comfort and warmth of the blankets began to lull Andrea back to sleep, she decided that she hadn’t really seen an image at all; that she’d only dreamt it.

But the next morning, that old man was still sitting in the chair across the room from Andrea’s bed. Is he real? Andrea wondered. She rubbed her eyes, blinked several times and shook her head to try to make the image disappear. It didn’t work. The strange man just sat there. He didn’t move, he didn’t even say anything. He just sat there so still that Andrea thought she was imagining him.

She grabbed her robe from the foot of her bed and put it on before getting out of bed.

Once she was out of her bedroom, the girl felt much more confident. Wow, what a realistic dream I had, she thought with a sigh as she wandered into the kitchen to get a bowl of cereal.

Then Andrea saw the man again.

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