Are Ghosts Real? By Katelynn Humbles

It’s not the kind of question you ask at breakfast. It waits. Lurks. Slinking into the places you’d rather not be: in the mildew-laced corners of motel rooms, the backseats of rental cars with traces of stale breath and strangers, the forgotten pews of ruined chapels where the wind mumbles louder than God.

You learn not to say it out loud when you do what I do. People want certainty. That’s why they call me. They offer me coffee in kitchens that still smell like primer and rot, waiting for me to say something that will let them sleep again. I never answer. Not directly. Say yes, and they start sleeping with the lights on. Say no, and they think you’re part of the problem.

Because the truth is—I don’t know. And if you’ve been doing this work long enough, that’s the only answer you trust.

The woman found me through a friend of a friend. Said her son hadn’t spoken since the day they moved in. No outbursts, no tantrums. He just sat at the kitchen table, tracing circles on the wood with one finger. Same spot, same motion, day in and day out. Until the finish wore down and the grain remembered his touch.

It wasn’t the silence that got to me.

It was the circles.

It sounded like trauma. Most things do. Children are canaries in the coal mines of grief.

But still—I took the case.

I brought the usual: incense, salt, the bottle of holy water I keep hidden in a vintage Chanel No. 5 atomizer. I brought doubt, too—folded neatly into the lining of my bag, tucked beside the EMF reader and the extra batteries. You have to. Doubt sharpens the senses.

The house was perched at the end of a spit of land that jutted out into a narrow, choked river. It had the sagging frame of a widow left waiting too long, shutters clinging to rusted hinges and vines crawling like fingers over the stone foundation.

I slept—or tried to—in the nursery. It was stripped to its bones: no crib, no toys, not even curtains. Just cracked wallpaper—the kind with faded stars and moons that peeled like old skin. But in one corner, the dust was wrong. It stopped abruptly in a ring, a pale circle perfectly preserved on the floorboards. No dust inside it. No decay. Like the rest of the room had aged, and that one spot had held its breath.

I didn’t do a ritual. Didn’t light a single candle. I just sat in the nursery that night, and I thought about her—the mother who must’ve once rocked her child in that room, in that cradle, long before the vines took the windows and the boards warped with time.

At midnight, the air changed.

Not colder. Not louder. Just heavier. Like the space between the walls was thickening. I sat on the floor with my back to the door and listened. Not for footsteps or whispers or scratching in the walls—no, those are easy, too easy. Houses settle. Pipes groan. Fear makes everything louder. What I listen for is silence with weight to it, silence that leans in like it’s about to speak. And this house had it in spades.

Around three, the door creaked. I didn’t turn.

Soft footsteps. Bare feet on dry wood.

Then, behind me, a whisper, “Did she send you?”

I turned my head just enough to see the boy standing in the doorway. But it hadn’t been his voice. His mouth was still. Still as the rest of him, except for his eyes—wide, unblinking, locked on mine. In one hand, he held something tight, his small fist clenched like it was full of marbles.

My body didn’t stir, and in a hushed tone, I asked, “Who?”

He came forward. Knees hit the floor without sound. He pressed his fist into my palm, leaned close, and whispered—no, breathed:

“She said you’d open the door.”

Just before dawn, the boy was back at the table, circling again. But this time, he looked up. Met my eyes. Smiled. His mother wept when I told her he’d spoken. Tried to hug me. I let her.

I didn’t charge her. Just packed my things and left quietly.

As I stepped outside, the porch groaned beneath me. I hesitated, turning back once—just once. The nursery window, though untouched and sealed, was fogged from within. A dry day. No rain. No reason. Yet there it was: the faint outline of a hand, pressed flat against the glass. Not waving. Not reaching. Just braced.

Something was still inside. And it was watching me leave.

That should’ve been the end.

But three nights later, I woke up in my apartment with dust on my palms. Fine, pale dust, clinging to my skin like ash. I washed it off, but it came back the next night. And the next. Always the same: just a ring of it, settling into my hands, like something cupped there. Something I hadn’t meant to take.

Now, every time I try to sleep, I hear it. The slow drag of a finger across wood. A loop. Over and over.

So—are ghosts real?

I don’t know.

But something in that house had waited a long, long time to be heard. And now—

—it will never forget the sound of my voice.

Katelynn Humbles

Image: An empty room with dark walls and a bare wooden floor from pixabay.com