Child Hauntings

My little Cricket is the best thing that has ever happened to me. He is my life and the purpose of me being on this Earth. If anything ever happened to him my heart would grieve to the point of death. My name is Selena Tyler, and I'm twenty years old. Here is my story.

The summer of my sixteenth birthday, I took a pregnancy test. It was a dare from my birthday party; to buy a pregnancy test and then take it. I did, being the adventurous kind. You can imagine my surprise when it came back positive. No, not surprise; shock. Horror. I didn't know what my parents would say. I broke the news to them the next day at breakfast. Needless to say, they were shocked, as I had been. I called my boyfriend afterwards. His initial reaction was not surprised at all. He acted almost as if he'd been expecting it, but informed me that he wouldn't be helping me raise the child or even give me child support. I was furious! I mean, it was his child too, so he could at least help me! My mother, my poor mother, told me that she had been saving money for my college fund, but I couldn't go now.

The child support would come out of that money. That was a disappointment to me, but it was necessary if I wanted to support my baby. And that was all that mattered to me at that time. Dad was pretty mad. I mean, wouldn't you be? Your daughter is unexpectedly pregnant, and the baby-daddy won't even help pay for the kid. Eventually it got to the point where we weren't speaking to each other through my whole pregnancy.

I was three months away from my seventeenth birthday when, SURPRISE!, my water broke. I checked into the hospital at three-thirty a.m. And stayed in until six days after my baby was born. Me being the only (responsible, mature) parent present, I named him. I named him Cricket. The day I'd discovered my pregnancy, a cricket had perched on the edge of the windowsill and he had trilled his little heart out. My mother loved him from the moment she saw him. My father, however, was a little less easy to please.

It took days of Mom trying to drag him to the hospital to see me until he finally let up. Once he met Cricket, he fell in love. I don't think it's physically possible for a man to hate his grandson. A man would have to be completely insane to do something like that. I only wish that Cricket's father would come around. It might not be possible to hate your son, but it sure is possible to hate his mother.

Skip ahead a couple years and now I'm eighteen and looking for a house and a job. I mean, who could raise a child without those things? Given, you could live with your parents, but mine got fed up after two years of Cricket crying in the dead of night. We lived in a quiet, peaceful town at the moment called Wiscasset, Maine. I went house-hunting with Cricket a couple of times, but he never liked any of the houses I did. He liked the small, cramped ones with low ceilings. Maybe I didn't like them because I'm tall, but whatever it was, they made me dizzy and claustrophobic. I guess Cricket liked them because he was small and big houses seemed HUGE compared to him.

We eventually settled on one in a larger town called Damariscotta. It was cute; beige clapboard house with two stories. It was in the middle of a field surrounded by trees, with a pavement walkway. It was definitely my style. The rooms were spacious and airy, but not gigantic. Cricket seemed happy with the small blue room I'd chosen for his, and I was happy with the large white and green room I'd chosen for mine. We moved in three weeks later.

Odd things started happening; one of Cricket's toys disappeared one day, my favorite mascara the next. They'd show up in the oddest places, too. Cricket's toy appeared in the dishwasher, and my mascara showed up in the refrigerator. I brushed it off as a prank from the neighborhood kids. Pretty soon, though, it got serious.

I'd be driving home from work (I'd started working as a secretary at a big business firm) and my car would swerve. Or one day while I was making a chicken casserole for dinner, I heard a thump from upstairs. I bolted up the steps into Cricket's room, where he was hanging upside-down from his bed. I screamed and gently lifted him down, shaken.

Another happening was that one night I woke up to Cricket wailing and crying in his room. I rolled my eyes and made to get up to help him, but I was physically unable to move. I started to panic at this point; if I couldn't get up, would Cricket be hurt? I lay there for a long time, just listening to my son's cries. Eventually the weight lifted and I shot out of bed and tiptoed to Cricket's room. I stood in the doorway, watching him cry, because there was an odd feeling in that room.

It was freezing cold, and a dark shape was huddled in the corner. I began to hyperventilate. Suddenly the temperature began to drop as the shape straightened and began to move across the room towards Cricket's crib. I was about to scream when a sweet-smelling warmth flooded the room and a bright light flared from the ceiling. A breeze blew through the room. It smelled like a field in late spring. You know, flowers and grass. Anyway, a tall woman was standing in the middle of the room, wearing a white dress. She crossed herself and said a few words in Latin, and the dark form writhed and vanished. Cricket smiled, curled up into a ball, and fell asleep immediately. The woman turned to me, bowed, and walked through the wall.