Ghost hunters. That really is what we fancied ourselves, as ridiculous as it sounds nearly two decades later. In reality we were bored teens in rural California—too chickenshit to dabble with drugs, but still desperate for mental escape. We had a voice recorder, a pickup truck, and a penchant for being where we really weren’t supposed to be, so naturally, ghost hunting became our hobby.
Most of the time we were really just trying to scare ourselves. To this day I’m convinced most of my hometown is “haunted”: the high school auditorium; the weird, huge well in the middle of that one orchard; the cemetery for children (brilliantly and harrowingly called Babyland). There is the sprawling hilltop home that my friend convinced me was actually owned by Anton Lavey, mostly because of the giant outdoor stone fireplace and seating area that, quite truthfully, does resemble the sacrificial altar and pews we assumed it obviously must have been. There are little one-room structures made of stone scattered throughout the valley and creepy windows and year-round roadside ofrendas. The place I grew up in is an eerie one, and it didn’t take much for us to lean into that. Everything was a mystery, and there were clearly ghosts that needed to be hunted. So we did.
It was always the same; we would seek out an abandoned house, usually out in the country unless we were feeling particularly bold. We would go at night—rarely past curfew but always under the cover of complete darkness. The houses always had a way in. Well, almost. There was the one time I did use a rock to smash one of the panes on a glass door so I could reach in and unlock it. This was a matter of life and death, though; our friend had gotten a weird feeling when he drove by that house. I had a big crush on him. I needed to get to the bottom of it. (I suspect the “weird feeling” was from the substation on the opposite corner of the intersection; I can’t be the only one whose teeth hurt and head feels funny in close contact with that much electricity.) We had a couple favorite houses, one of which was precariously close to the city limits, and conveniently close to our high school. The proximity built familiarity and familiarity made us fearless. Soon enough, we were visiting that house and hunting ghosts during the day, between last period and evening play rehearsal.
It was on one of these careless afternoons we encountered her.
Now, to preface this whole story: I’m nowhere near a skeptic. Much like Fox, I want to believe. So I do. That being said, I’ll admit that it was probably nothing. We tried to disprove what we experienced, we tried to make a rational square peg fit in the mystical round hole. I think that as much as we all wanted to believe, being right scared the hell out of us. We experienced something paranormal, but it wasn’t like in the movies at all, it wasn’t at all what we expected. Maybe part of what freaked us out so much was that it wasn’t what we wanted—there were no photographed orbs, no spectral entities, no ectoplasm. We had a recording that didn’t match the memory we all shared, and we had a lot of questions.
After snacking on french fries and McNuggets we still had over an hour before play practice, and we were bored. Nobody’s house was appealing; we were kind of over crowding around desktops to watch YouTube. It was October and already too cold to go swimming, and we didn’t have enough time to properly raid the local thrift store. I don’t remember whose idea it was; regardless, Sammy, Eleanor, Haven, and I found ourselves crammed in the cab of my red pickup and parked outside the house.
The house itself was impressive. I never even knew it was there until I began exploring the area on my own, but I’m sure in its prime it was beautiful. It was a mansion, but in the way the Haunted Mansion is a mansion—nothing like the hideous, bloated stucco boxes on the rich side of town. This house stood tall and imposing; the intricate woodwork crowning the gables with a delicate floral design that contradicted how scary the place was. It was mostly surrounded by dirt; any lawn that had previously been there long since dead and gone. There were a couple big trees in front though, and there was a structure out back. In my mind now it was a barn, but it wasn’t. I think it was a detached garage. We never went into the garage; it felt weirdly off-limits, even for what we were doing.
Sammy pulled the little plastic voice recorder out of her bag as we got out of the truck. I don’t remember if this was the first time we recorded ourselves. Surely it wasn’t; that would be way too convenient. We approached the house with a reverence four bored, trespassing teenagers had no right to possess and entered through the busted side door with an audacity that none of us carried into any other aspect of our lives. I remember walking through the first floor, keenly aware of the smell of stale piss. Thinking back on it now I’m surprised and a little offended that 16-year-old me didn’t find the whole experience totally disgusting. Yet there we were, arms linked, defiantly and determinedly making our way through the same creepy house we’d explored several times before. At some point we inevitably parted ways; each of us peeling off to scope out a different part of the house. I cannot speak for the others, but I felt no trepidation at all. I was fully and completely in my element, stale piss and all.
I was in a bedroom. I remember that because I was distracted by a pile of garbage in the closet. I tell people I grew up in suburbia, but it was really more rural-suburban. My hometown was a tiny speck on the map when I was born, a small farming town in California’s Central Valley that was mostly inhabited by migrant farm workers and the rich, white farmers that employed them. By the time I left for college, the town had definitely grown—now boasting a Walmart and a Starbucks. When I was a 16-year-old amateur ghost hunter, though, it was definitely a pretty rural place, one that didn’t experience the same issues that larger cities face. And yet the small garbage pile I was preoccupied with made the room feel lived in. It wasn’t the trash left behind after a party that we sometimes encountered in our beloved abandoned buildings—the empty glass bottles, condom wrappers, and even the odd syringe—it was mostly food wrappers and used napkins. I think I was so distracted by the trash because I knew instinctively that someone was living in the house. In that moment, I felt two things simultaneously. After breaking into so many abandoned spaces, I finally felt like I was doing something wrong. I also became acutely aware of my fight-or-flight response. I felt like I was in danger, like we were all in danger.
About the time I turned around to collect my friends and get the hell out of the house, what I ironically only now considered to be someone’s home, I heard the crash. To this day we have no idea what it was, but it was loud enough to trigger that flight response, and I ran. We all met up near the busted door we had entered through, scrambled our way out and off the side porch, ran through the dirt field, and got back into the cab of my truck, prompted by that goddamn crash and driven by a fear that coursed through all four of us. Inexplicably we all just sat there for a minute, wordlessly collecting ourselves before I turned on the ignition and cautiously, shakily backed out of the driveway.
It was when we were safely back in our high school’s drama classroom that we realized Sammy’s recorder had captured everything. That basement classroom felt like a fortress, and once again huddled, this time in the safety of the classroom’s inner costume room, we hit play. For the most part, the recording was boring, exactly what you would expect it to be. You could hear us talking as we approached and entered the house. You could hear three of our voices grow fainter when we parted ways. And then, of course, you could hear a loud crash. We all knew it was coming and we all still jumped. Sitting in that room, we were as confused and freaked out as we had been in the moment.
It was at this point, though, that the recording got interesting. Have you ever heard the sound of a person running from something through a tape recorder they were holding in their hand? It’s a dizzying combination of wind distortion, the scraping of fabric on fabric, deep breathing, and, in our case, breathless gasps and whimpers. It was a cacophony of screams and then about 20 seconds of that. There was something else, though, something that none of us expected and none of us remembered hearing in real time. Above the weird, distorted sound of running, there was a giggle.
To this day, I swear on my life that none of us were laughing; we were too terrified to be laughing. That was beside the point, though; the giggle was clearly that of a child, a little girl. It didn’t sound like any of us, because it sounded like a little girl. I remember looking at the faces of my three friends, sitting on the floor in that tiny costume room crowded around Sammy’s recorder, and taking in just how confused they all looked. Sammy hit pause and we immediately tried to rationalize what we were hearing. We began throwing out theories, we even tried to recreate the sound of us running—Sammy sprinting across the classroom, the recorder at her side in various positions—to see if we could verify that we were the ones that had somehow created the sound. We just couldn’t figure it out; the sound just didn’t make sense. It was the sound of a little girl giggling. We rewound the recorder and pressed play around the time we started running. We heard the giggling again, and then the sound of car doors opening. After listening to ourselves clamber into the cab of the truck and slam the doors, everything changed. In the span of a couple seconds the giggling made perfect sense and no sense at all. With a clarity untouched by the wind distortion and heavy breathing of the previous 20 seconds or so, we heard the voice of a young girl ask, “Are you guys okay?” What was even more unnerving was hearing Sammy’s voice, clear as day, respond and say, “Yeah.” None of us recalled hearing her say anything; in fact we all remembered the anxious silence that hung around us once we were back in the truck. Without missing a beat, the same young girl’s voice said, “Good.”
What happened next is probably the most predictable thing about this whole story—we all cried. We sat there on the floor in the costume closet, four teenage girls, once again huddled together and now bound together by this inexplicable experience, and we cried. It was an expression of pure adrenaline and emotion coming to a head. We held each other and cried, unsure of how to process what happened. We had our answer, our “proof,” but we simply couldn’t explain how or why. It was uncomfortable and scary, and left us all with more questions than ever.
These questions would never be answered, of course. The reality is that we were teenage girls, and teenage girls have very short attention spans. We picked ourselves up that day and carried on with play practice, sharing our story and recording with a select few outsiders. That was my junior year, and it ended up being my favorite year in high school. We all carried on, finished school, and parted ways. Since then we have all crafted very different lives for ourselves, lives that seldom intersect anymore. Sammy and Eleanor are moms now. Haven is married. I’m 200 miles away in LA, living alone with my cat and telling stories sometimes.
I still think about that day a lot, though. I’ve told versions of this story on dates and camping trips and to new coworkers. I think about those girls, who I used to be, who I wanted to be back then, the Little Girl Ghost. I think about what could have happened to us if the consequences of our reckless decisions ever truly caught up to us. I think about how scared and confused we were when we finally experienced the unexplainable.
The scariest thing about encountering the Little Girl Ghost has been realizing as an adult how lucky we possibly were. As it turns out, the unknown is something to be afraid of sometimes, just not in the way we thought, expected, or wanted when we were 16. We all believed that the Little Girl Ghost chased us off that day to protect us. We believed that she made the noise—dropped something upstairs or broke a window or something—to startle us into leaving someplace we were never supposed to be. As an adult, I am not ashamed to admit that I still believe this, at least to some extent. I also believe that there was an unknown danger in that house that day. I sensed it when I stumbled upon the pile of garbage that had so captivated me. It sunk in when I realized that we had entered someone’s home. Not in the sense that we had trespassed, because I clearly didn’t care about that, but in the sense that someone had already claimed the interior of the house, of “our” house, as their own. Maybe we were a threat, but we were also the prey. And she protected us.
Because our paths no longer really cross, I was surprised to receive a Facebook message from Sammy a couple years ago. Since high school, Sammy has struggled a lot, although that is not my story to tell. Her message, while absolutely welcome, was unexpected. We exchanged vague pleasantries and made sure each other were doing alright. Before we virtually parted ways again, Sammy asked me if I remembered that day. I picked up on her hesitation through the screen, masking something that made me sad—she seemed expectant, hopeful even. I told her that of course I remember that day, that I will never forget that day. “Me either,” she typed in response. Her words conveyed a sigh of relief and validation that I was surprised to find myself also feeling.
The four of us eventually experienced what we had been chasing for so long, and there was a part of me that had always wondered if our ghost story was just that. Sammy’s message, over a decade later, was more proof than our recording ever was. We really did hunt our ghost. But even more than that, we experienced something that bonded us, gave us a story to tell, and deepened our beliefs in spirituality and the afterlife. And now, as a thirty-something thinking back on one of the strangest experiences of my childhood, I can thank the Little Girl Ghost for giving me a reverence for the unknown, and a respect for the potential consequences of fucking with such.
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