They say children have wild imaginations.

  That we see things that aren’t really there.

  But what if that’s wrong? What if children see the world exactly as it is, just without the words to explain it?

  When I was six, I lived in a house at the end of a dead-end street. 926 Raleigh Avenue. It was small, white, old. The kind of house people would call “charming” if they didn’t have to live there. A brick porch leaned crooked toward the street. The chain-link fence surrounding the yard buzzed in the wind like it was holding something back. Or maybe trying to keep something in.

  There was a basement with a slanted ceiling and a single light that never stopped flickering. The laundry room always smelled like wet stone and metal. And just behind the backyard, past a patch of dead grass, train tracks cut through the trees like a scar. That’s where I lived. With my brother Tyler. My mom. Her girlfriend Michelle. And our two dogs, Major and Dylan.

  Some days were good. The kind of good that only exists before the world shifts. Before the air gets heavy. Before the silences stretch too long. I remember the feel of the dogs' fur under my fingers, the way Tyler could make me laugh just by crossing his eyes, the way our mom used to sing to herself while washing dishes. For a while, we were a family. But that house… that house never felt like it belonged to us.

  It watched. And then the whispering started. It began with a shadow in the doorway. Just standing there. Not moving. Not breathing. Just… watching. I remember staring at it, frozen in my bed, covers pulled to my chin. It wasn’t the darkness itself, it was darker than that. A silhouette of something man-shaped but empty. Hollow. And it whispered. Fast. Garbled. Urgent.

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  Like someone trying to speak underwater. Like the words weren’t meant for human ears. I couldn’t understand it. I couldn’t block it out. I just lay there, listening. Every night. It didn’t leave. It didn’t fade. It didn’t go away when I blinked. It stayed, rooted in the frame of my door, just out of reach. Some nights, I swear I could feel it smiling. Other nights, it sounded like it was crying. I told Tyler. He said I was dreaming. I stopped telling anyone after that. Because maybe I was dreaming. Or maybe something had followed us into that house. The longer we lived there, the more the air changed. Rooms felt colder. Walls seemed to close in tighter. And the shadow… it got braver. Closer. Louder. Sometimes I thought I heard it during the day, just a flicker of sound behind the walls, like it was pacing while we played. Like it was waiting for something. Sometimes I’d catch its shape out of the corner of my eye, standing behind a door or at the end of the hallway. Watching. Always watching. Even when things got worse. Even when the laughter stopped. Even when doors slammed and voices raised and footsteps retreated up the stairs and didn’t come back for days, he was there. The Whispering Man. He never left. I don’t remember the first time I gave him that name. But once I did, I couldn’t call him anything else. He wasn’t just a shadow. He wasn’t just a feeling. He became him. And in some strange, broken way, he became familiar.

  Even now, after everything… after years and miles and therapy and silence… I still think about him. I still see him sometimes, in my dreams, in flashes, in the darker corners of my memory.

  I still hear him when the house is quiet and the night feels too long.

  People ask me why I don’t believe in ghosts. I tell them I do. I just don’t think they’re what we think they are. This isn’t a ghost story.

  Not the kind you’re expecting. This is something else. This is the story of 926 Raleigh Ave.