Instead she mostly ended up listening to old houses settle, investigating "cold spots" that were clearly ordinary drafts, and chasing away neighborhood kids who couldn't resist the opportunity to try and freak out the ghost hunter. She was still certain ghosts were real, but now she was even more certain that homeowners were terrible at identifying a haunting.
So when the Henderson family hired her to have a look at their house, she wasn't very hopeful.
The Henderson's had at least done some research on their house before coming to the conclusion it was haunted. A woman named Annabelle Fairchild had died there fifty years earlier, shortly after giving birth to a baby boy. Her husband had moved out two weeks later.
The fact that someone had actually died in the house made it more promising than some of places people hired Emma to look into, so she agreed to spend a night looking into it. The Hendersons let her in and went to spend the night in a hotel. Emma set up motion activated cameras throughout the house, briefly walked through asking for any spirits to show themselves, and settled in the nursery, where most of the activity had been located, to wait for any paranormal activity.
At midnight, the temperature in the room plummeted. Shivering, Emma got up to look for anywhere a draft might be coming from. She was interrupted by her EMF meter let out a sharp whine and she felt something brush past her, moving toward the crib.
Emma turned to face the crib. In the moonlight streaming through the window, she saw the faint outline of a woman in a white nightgown leaning over the crib.
Emma's heart leapt in her chest, and goosebumps that had nothing to do with the cold rose along her arms. This was what Emma had been waiting for her whole life. A real ghost. And not just any ghost, a full body apparition. She had enough cameras set up in the room that she definitely had footage. If she could just get the ghost to talk to her, she become a legend in the paranormal community.
Emma pulled out a radio scanner, turning it on to create white noise for the spirit to speak through. She took a step toward the ghost. "Hello? Annabelle?"
Annabelle turned slowly to face her. "Where's the baby?" The voice that came through the radio scanner sounded nearly robotic, but Annabelle's face clearly displayed her anger.
Some of Emma's excitement faded. The ghost's interest in the Henderson's baby wasn't necessarily anything evil, but Emma felt almost instinctively wary about it. "He's not here. I'm--"
"Where is he?" Annabelle had somehow turned up the volume on the radio scanner. The temperature dropped again, a cold wind whipping through Emma's hair, and the furniture began to rattle. "What have you done with him?"
"I haven't done anything!" Emma yelled over the wind. "His parents took him away."
Annabelle let out a wordless shriek. Toys that had been scattered across the room floated up from the floor and flew through the air. "NO! They can't do this to me. Taking him away, just like my husband took my little boy. I watched over him every night, comforted him when he woke up and cried, protected him. And now he's gone forever."
"Annabelle," Emma shouted. When the ghost didn't respond, she raised her voice even more. "Annabelle! He's not gone forever, just for tonight."
The wind cut off abruptly, toys hovering motionless in midair. "What?"
"His parents took him to a hotel so I could investigate. They hired me to find out if the house was haunted, because they were worried about his safety. I'll tell them that you don't pose any danger to him, that you were just trying to look out for him."
The toys dropped back to the floor and the room returned to a comfortable temperature. "So he'll be back?"
Emma nodded. "Yes, he should be back by tomorrow night."
"Very well," Annabelle said, fading from view. "I'll return tomorrow night, then."
Emma stared at the empty space where Annabelle had been for a moment. Then, she hurried over to check the footage on her camera. What she'd witnessed tonight would revolutionize the way the world thought about ghosts.
Being a paranormal investigator was the coolest job in the world.
(Ghost)
Author's Note: This story is loosely based on the Russian fairy tale The Dead Mother. In the original the mother dies in childbirth. The father hires a woman to take care of the baby, and the woman notices that the baby is unusually quiet during the night. She spends the night in the nursery and discovers the dead mother coming in to nurse the baby. The next night, the father and some of his friends wait to catch the mother. When they burst out of hiding, the mother runs away and they discover that the baby has died. I kept the idea of a dead woman coming to take care of a baby in the night, but switched it to a modern setting with a paranormal investigator and got rid of the part where the baby dies.
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