Please note: this is NOT Flash Fiction day, so I am not fabricating this story.

I think the first house Dilf and I purchased, located in Wheaton, Illinois, was haunted. By nice ghosts.

When we purchased the house, neighbors told us it was the former abode of the guy who had owned and parceled off much of the surrounding neighborhood. He designed and oversaw the construction of our house himself. Clearly, he had an emotional investment in the property.

And it was a beautiful house. If it had had a basement and wasn't located on a busy street, we would've stayed there -- even with the ghosts of the former owners hanging around.

I became suspicious when baby Elder would look past my shoulder and smile and someone or something behind me. That suspicion sharpened once when I was finishing the dishes in the kitchen, and heard Elder cry from her crib as she woke up from her nap. I called out, soothingly, "Just a minute, sweetie! I'll be right there!" as I tried to hurriedly dry my hands on a dish towel.

Then she stopped crying. And started giggling. Not a random giggle, but a giggle AT something.

But mostly, I feel like the house was haunted right after a successful bid was put on our house, and I had a strange dream. In it, a slight, elderly woman with short blonde-white hair was seated at our dining table, chatting with me. "I know you have to move," she said, a bit sadly. "I only wish you could've seen this place the way it was. There was a pond and a golf course behind us. You would've loved it. Oh, well."

Several days later, as Dilf and I were packing and purging and preparing to move, the little old lady who lived next door to us came over to talk. It was a long, difficult selling period (stories for another day), which we were discussing when she said, "You wouldn't have had a hard time years ago. Just beyond your property line was a pond, and behind that was a golf course..."

To quote the Cowardly Lion from the Wizard of Oz, "I do believe in spooks... I DO believe in spooks!"