This seriously gave me the shivers.
Lots of children have imaginary friends but what happens when your child believes that their friend isn’t so imaginary?
Mum, Robin Wang, recently came up against a very strange parenting problem.
Her little girl started to complain that there was the ghost of a child in her room, and it wasn’t the friendly kind.
Robin wrote a piece for Scary Mommy ,describing how her daughter has had trouble going to sleep in her room because she’s convinced it’s haunted.
Her daughter has said that she keeps seeing the ghost of a little girl with no hands or arms and when Robin asked if the ghost was a friend the little girl replied ‘no’.
The little girl even tried to draw a picture of the ghost and attempted to spell out her name but her mum began to get freaked out and decided they should start talking about something less creepy.
Robin and her husband didn’t want to brush off their daughters fear and began to stay with her at night until she fell asleep but Robin began to really hate her daughter’s bedroom.
“I can’t even stand being in her room now. I woke her up this morning and said, ‘let’s get ready in the living room today’. I then closed the door and locked it.”
I haven’t come up against this problem yet with my own children but I know my mother did with me.
I shared a room with my mother and grandmother and I was convinced we weren’t the only ones in there. I felt like I was being watched from something that was lurking on top of the wardrobe. I was afraid of the room for years but it eventually came to a head when my mother woke up one night and I was on my side in the bed across from her ,wide awake with my back to the wardrobe and frozen in fear. She asked what was wrong and I said that there was something behind me. She told me there wasn’t but I wouldn’t believe her. The hair was standing up on the back of my neck and I would not turn around for love nor money. I got into her bed without turning around once.
When I was a teenager my aunts and female cousins who had all stayed in that room at one point started discussing how they felt like there was some kind of entity living on top of the wardrobe. I had never told them about my fear of that room so I was pretty freaked out that they had the same concern.
It was a lovely house but I have to admit I’m glad I don’t sleep in that room anymore.
During her ghost dilemma, Robin’s daughter helped her parents with a way to keep the ghost at bay.
One night their daughter Rachel said that the ghost was underneath the table in her room. Robin and her husband told the ghost to go away but Rachel insisted that she was still there.
Then Rachel got up from her bed and put a toy dinosaur under the table. That’s when her parents got a brainwave. They then got all her dinosaur toys and made a circle around the ghost and told their daughter that she was safe now, the ghost couldn’t get past the toys.
Robin’s best advice for dealing with your child seeing spooky specters is not to doubt them but tell them that they are safe and the ghost can’t hurt them.
In my house believing in ghosts was a given so I was never doubted. Instead, the room would be doused with holy water and once my grandmother even brought the priest around to exorcise the house of bad spirits.
It’s incredibly common for children to say that they’ve seen a ghost and those that believe in the afterlife think that spirits are more likely to present themselves to small children.
Whether you’re a believer or not, this is a problem that comes to most parents in time. However you decide to deal with it the most important thing is that you comfort your child and let them know that they are always protected from harm.
What do you think of Robin’s problem? Do you believe in ghosts?
