Scarlet, my daughter, when she was six years old, had taken up sleeping in the living room on the floor by the heater duct. From where she lay behind the sofa, she could see into our kitchen.
One night Scarlet’s intense cries awoke me. I waited for a minute to see if she would call again (every parent does this). When she called again with more intensity, I got up, and came down the hall. I came over to Scarlet, and said, “What is it baby?” She told me that she was scared. Expecting a nightmare, I asked her to tell me about it.
She said she was afraid of the little girl in the white dress in the kitchen. My spine got a cold chill, and I sensed its presence in the kitchen too. But I calmly said, “What little girl?” “The one in the kitchen, she was spinning around and then she stopped and leaned on the chair.” She said she asked the girl if she was Stryder or Ivy, her younger siblings. The little girl just turned her head, and stared at Scarlet.
"That’s when she called me," said Scarlet.
As I came into the room, Scarlet said the little girl had turned into a “Dot” and flew away.
As calmly as I could, I explained to that our bodies have a chemical in the blood stream when we sleep/dream that makes us so we can’t move as well while we are dreaming (that way we don’t hurt ourselves as we dream). Sometimes we wake up fast, but the chemical hasn’t cleared form our blood stream, so we see dream images, even though we are awake. It was a good explanation. And I can usually explain away a good many night time spooky experiences this way. Scarlet bought the explanation, and went back to sleep (after making me get her a drink of water in the extremely chilly kitchen).
But I was troubled because Scarlet doesn’t know about “orbs”, so she wouldn’t have dreamt about one. Worse still, I had been reading about an infamous Axe murder case in Villisca, Iowa. There was a whole family cut to pieces as their slept, back at the turn of the century. In the last picture taken (the day before they died) of the two little girls, Lena and Katherine had on white dresses. They would have been about Scarlet’s age at the time they died. No one ever figured out who did it. I wonder if I inadvertently attracted Lena or Katherine by researching the case, and then she was hanging out at our house, and Scarlet saw her. If this is what really happened, then Scarlet has actually witnessed a spirit turn into an orb. -- January 2006