The Ghost Children

This story also comes from Hannah, whose synchros we’ve posted before. I found this one intriguing, since a lot of my fiction involves ghosts. Also, the story spans several years, which synchros sometimes do.

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When I was 16, I ran away from home for a week or so to be with my boyfriend. He lived in a van in the middle of nowhere with only a handful of other vans parked there. It was along a very old track so you wouldn’t really want to drive up there.

One night I woke up desperate to pee and obviously I would have had to go outside. I was never scared of the dark but something made me not want to go out so I got back in bed desperate for the toilet but just waited. It must have been one or two in the morning. As I lay there, I started to hear children playing outside – more than three kids. It was loud but creepy because I could hear them running past the van. It sounded like a ghostly giggling in the wind. Yet, no children lived nearby and I knew it couldn’t be sound travelling from the school because it was the middle of the night. The next morning I so wanted to say something but thought my boyfriend would think I was mad. I said nothing.

My boyfriend broke up with me not long after and I was devastated. One day I walked to the track to try and see him. Luckily he wasn’t there, but Rosie, who lived at the beginning of the track, asked me in for coffee and a chat.

“I’m absolutely knackered,” Rosie said. “Them bloody kids kept me awake again last night.”

I asked what she meant; I said there weren’t any kids up here. But she said it was haunted and they were keeping her awake all the time. I told her I was so glad she’d said that since I’d heard them one night. I think she was pleased that she wasn’t the only one who’d heard them.

A year or so later I bumped into my friend Emma. She’d been living in the van next to where I was when I’d been there. I asked her if she ever heard them and she said yes, many times sometimes even during the day. Since then several other people have confirmed they also heard them.

Years later, when I was a taxi driver, I was asked to be an escort on the school run with another driver, Jon. We happened to be driving at what is the main road now below the old track. You can look up and see the tops of the vans up the fields. I mentioned that there are still vans there and he said, “My aunties died up there years ago.” He thought they’d died from TB from the milk that came from a nearby farm. “They were young. Their names were Lilian and Doris.”

This struck me for a couple of reason. My dad always called me Lil and Emma’s boyfriend, who had died only he previous year, had called her Doris.

The next day when I picked up the school dinners, I told the whole story to Janet, the cook. She wanted to know who had told me about their aunts dying and I replied that it was Johnny Preddy, the other driver.

“Don’t listen to him,” she said. “He’s an old storyteller.” Then she told me I was related to him, so the aunts he’d mentioned had been my aunts as well. I’d never heard of them. It’s true he’s a storyteller but the connection seemed like such a nice idea it seemed like such a nice idea that I had worked out who the ghost children were.

The next day when I picked up the dinners, Janet told me she owed me an apology. She said that Lilian and Doris were her aunties and she hadn’t known they existed until her mum did the family tree. Apparently they had lost their house and had a hovel near where the track is now and that they died from tainted milk. She even showed me a photo and told me where they were buried. I went to visit their grave; they died when they were 12 and 21.

Were they the ghosts at the track?

Emma and I have visited the track a few times to see if we can hear them….nothing. We bumped into someone who lives there and he hadn’t heard them either so I guess they are gone. Apparently that was their favorite place to play.