By J. L. Thurston

Lately, I was chatting with a co-worker of mine. She had recently taken a trip to one of America’s most haunted cities, Savannah, Georgia. Though she had spent good money on a ghost tour, she returned from her trip with no real life ghost story to share with me. However, she did not disappoint. As we spoke, she began to tell me of her teenage years and the strange and terrifying experiences she had during a handful of sleepovers. What she said to me not only sent chills down my spine, but set my pen to paper in a rush to record every detail.

Amanda’s friends were typical, intelligent young girls. They went to school, they wondered about the future, they had sleepovers. But after an encounter with unexplainable happenings and a message from a medium, it would become clear that one of Amanda’s friends was not a typical teenager.

Amanda began telling me about the different strange activity she experienced. During a sleepover, she was beguiling her friends with a retelling of a nightmare.

“I went to the window,” she said, pointing to the very window that had starred in her dream. “And, all on its own, the roll-up blinds shot up! And staring at me from outside the window was… the Grim Reaper.”

Just as the words escaped her mouth, the blinds on the window rolled itself up. The sound of the canvas hitting the window frame sending electric shocks of fear down every spine in the room.

Another sleepover found Amanda and her friends in the basement. A Quija board made of permanent marker and a greasy pizza box sat before them.

“Are there any spirits with us?” one of the girls asked.

The cardboard spirit board did not respond, but a black shadow streaked across the basement wall to the stairs. Gasping, but unable to contain their excitement, the girls raced up the basement stairs after the shadow. At the top sat a little doll, kicked over onto its side. No one could explain what they saw, but they all agreed, it was the creepiest thing they’d ever seen.

So far.

Then Amanda began telling me a story unlike anything I’d heard before. The sincerity of the story, the lingering fear that lived her words, could only lead me to believe she was telling me the absolute truth.

It was another sleepover. Same friends, same antics. The house was newly built, one of the cookie cutter houses in the developing subdivisions. The neighborhood was mostly made of freshly dug earth and halfway completed landscaping. Five of the three story houses were complete. The house had neighbors, but not many. It almost felt like a country home. Isolated.

Amanda was on the computer just outside the kitchen on the first level. The rest of the sleepover was on the third floor. As she was checking her Facebook, she could hear someone moving a cup around in the kitchen. Clunk. A few seconds later another clunk. As though someone was taking one sip at a time and setting the nearly empty cup down hard on the counter between sips.

She quickly went upstairs to be close to her friends. But she did not tell them what she’d heard. She didn’t want to sound paranoid. But one of the other girls went downstairs and returned stating she heard someone moving a cup around in the kitchen.

“I didn’t want to say anything,” Amanda spoke up. “But earlier I heard it, too.”

A general feeling of insecurity began to overwhelm the girls. They were all alone with hardly any neighbors, and it sounded like someone else was in the house.

Quietly, they crept into the bathroom and locked themselves in. One of the girls called the closest neighbor boys and asked if they could come over to check things out.

The boys called back.

“Uh, we can see someone in your kitchen window,” said one of the boys. “Moving around. A white figure.”

Panic began to set in. The resourceful girls began heating up straightening irons, preparing to fight. Breanne, the host of the sleepover, called her mother.

“There’s someone in the kitchen!”

Breanne’s face twisted with fear as she listened to her mother on the other end.

“No, I swear! I’m not making this up. Can you come home, we’re really scared.”

After a moment, she hung up the phone. Her mother had just received a call from her sugared-up teenage daughter during a sleepover. She had not taken her plea for help seriously.

The girls were on their own. But where were the boys? Had they left? Were they too afraid to come in and help?

Footsteps could now be heard. One deliberate stomp after the other, climbing the stairs. From the kitchen in the first floor to the landing on the second. Thump, thump, thump. Whoever it was, whatever it was, they were coming for the girls.

The heavy footfalls were drawing nearer and nearer. The girls crowded together, eyes glued to the door, waiting for the shadow to fall upon the gap at the floor. At last, the footfalls could be heard on the landing just outside the bathroom door. It had made it to them. Just a door width away.

Suddenly, there were shouts from the kitchen. “Breanne? Amanda?”

“Girls? Are you here?”

The neighbor boys!

The girls began screaming and shouting from the bathroom. “Upstairs!”

“We’re in here!”

“Help!”

Thundering footsteps ran up the stairs. A herd of teenage boys coming to the rescue. They had returned home only briefly to retrieve baseball bats after spotting the figure in the kitchen. They blazed into the bathroom and began sweeping the house. Every room was empty. There was no evidence that anyone else had been there.

As Amanda was telling me this, I could tell she’s leading me somewhere.

“It turns out my friend, Breanne,” she continued. “Had a lot of things like that happen to her. Once she could hear someone jumping on her bed, but when she looked no one was there. Then she heard someone in her walk-in closet. When she approached the door, the doorknob rattled.”

“No fucking way,” was my response. It wasn’t an indication of disbelief, it was a plea for more juicy details.

“So, later,” Amanda went on. “One of Breanne’s neighbor approaches her. She tells her that she’s a medium and has something important to tell her. The medium says, ‘I have to tell you that you have a spirit following you. It is a jokester spirit.’”

Whatever that meant, well, I guess it is self-explanatory. And it really does explain a lot. If you can believe in those sort of things. But one of the things I found interesting was that any time Amanda witnessed something otherworldly, Breanne was always there. And the girls are still friends to this day, but the ghostly encounters have ceased.

Was the jokester spirit real? If so, did he get bored of Breanne because she grew up and began adulting?

I have no answers for you. That is what makes stories like these so enjoyable. We cannot explain them. We can only enjoy hearing about them, or- in some cases- live through them.