The ghost I named Daniel

by Emma
(Australia, Queensland)

When we first moved into our house not much happened. Mum and I both believe in ghosts but at the time I wasn't very good at feeling peoples' energies. However, after a few years I started learning how too connect with the strange feelings I sometimes got in our house and they became stronger and more frequent.

Around this time I learned the energies of my family and my pets. But there was another energy, centered in my room, that caused me to start having nightmares.

I don't normally remember dreams and as much as my family believes in the paranormal they didn't believe that I could be being targeted. The more I tried to explain my dreams, which were so real it felt like I was actually awake and living them, the more they began to worry.

After a while I stopped trying to get people to listen to me. But then strange things started to happen. Doors opened by themselves, doors several of us had checked were closed and locked. The lock did not move.

Lights switched themselves on, TVs switched themselves on and off. We didn't have any thumps like I always read in ghost stories. But I knew what was doing it. And still no one believed me.

By now I was old enough to doubt myself, until the voices started. I heard a voice normally between when being asleep and fully awake, so I thought it was just a reflection of my nightmares, but then I started paying attention to what was being said.

"I didn't want to die, why did they let me die?"

I never told anyone, I was sick of not being believed. Daniel wasn't harmful, although there was one instance where he sort of panicked because mum and dad were planning on moving. I think he didn't want to lose me.

He pulled my hair when I was asleep, but we haven't moved. Slowly I learned more of Daniel's life from my dreams. The beatings he got from his father, he lived to a farm that used to exist where our neighborhood is now.

The heat was when he was working on the farm, alongside his father. And when he got sick the fever was burning him up, a doctor fed him a vile tasting liquid but it didn't work. He died the next day.

Over time, Daniel faded away, I am not sure if he was real, or a poltergeist or what he was. Or even if he was just part of my imagination. But I have never felt the energy again since he went away. Sometimes I feel the energy in other houses. I don't know what exactly the energy is or how any of this works.

Daniel is not the ghost's real name, I don't know what that is. I named him that so I had something to call him.