Dreams and Nightmares

My dreams and nightmares as a child were haunted by a story I read in a book my parents bought for me. It was a book of true ghost stories, which I loved when I was a little kid.

It remains the most disturbing and creepy true ghost story I’ve ever come across. I can’t remember all the details, but I will try to recount as much of the story as i’m able to recall. The book claimed that it was a true story but try as I might, I’ve never been able to find out more information about it.
Years ago, in a small town, somewhere in the United States, a married couple and their young daughter moved into an old house.
One night, the daughter was awakened by a strange smell in her bedroom. At first, she wasn’t sure if she was still dreaming. She could hardly breathe and the air was thick with smoke. As she blinked her eyes and looked around, she found that her bedroom looked different. The wallpaper was old and peeling off the walls. The carpet was threadbare and worn away in places. The furniture in her room seemed to be old-fashioned and there were cobwebs and mold all over everything. Frightened, she jumped out of bed and tried to make her way down the hall to her parents’ room.
Minutes later, the family who lived next door heard screams outside their house and a rapping on their front door. When they opened the door, they found the little girl standing there. She was crying and babbling incoherently, and kept pointing to her own house. When they looked across the garden wall, they saw that her house was on fire.
They immediately called the fire brigade, who arrived minutes later and put out the fire. Sadly, most of the house was burned beyond repair and in the rubble, they found the charred bodies of the little girl’s parents. It appeared that they had been burned alive while they lay in bed.
When police questioned the little girl, she told them a shocking and unbelieveable story. When she had woken up during the night, she went to her parents room and opened the door. She had been confronted by a horrifying scene. Her parents lay dead in bed and there were two young black boys standing over them. One of the boys was holding a bloody scissors. The girl said she began screaming and fled to the neighbors’ house.
The police didn’t believe her story at first, and assumed she must have been having nightmares. But when they researched the history of the house, they found that it had originally been a reform school for young black boys. The boys were treated horribly by the people who ran the reform school and it had eventually been closed down and converted into a residential property. Nobody could ever convince the little girl that what she had seen was just a dream.
This is the story I read in that book years ago and, of all the true ghost stories I’ve ever read, this one scared me the most. It freaked me out to the point that I had to throw away the book because I kept having nightmares.
So if anyone recognizes this story, please leave a comment and tell me where it happened so I can research the story further and determine whether or not it is actually true.