There was a dead girl hanging in my bedroom when I was a child...

It's been almost 15 years ago since my family moved out of the creepy old house that nurtured my nyctophobia which still persists to this day. I have a panic attack if it's dark enough that I can't see in front of me, and I cannot go to sleep in a room that's dark enough that I cannot see all 4 walls, so today I always sleep with my TV on. But as a 7 year old I didn't have the privilege of a TV set in my bedroom. My family was struggling (mostly due to my mom's now ex-husband's tendency to spend each paycheck to support his drug addiction, but that's a whole different story) and they'd gotten a pretty good deal on a crappy house in the poorer section of town due to being friends with the landlady.

My bedroom was at the end of the hall with a single window facing the back yard, and a tiny closet across from it that seemed to creak open on its own overnight as the house settled. There was no central air, so I had to rely on a window unit to keep cool during the night. For anyone who's had to deal with window units you'll understand how easily the cool air in one room can seep out to the rest of the house, rendering it completely ineffective if you leave your door open. But my parents were dicks and refused to buy a night light--“You're nearly 8 years old, you don't need to use a nightlight anymore”--so I would either have to shut my bedroom door so my room would stay cool enough that I could sleep, or I'd have to keep my door cracked open so the light from the hallway would ease my mind enough that I could sleep.

In any other house I may have been able to shut my door, hide my head beneath my blanket and learn to sleep in the dark. But I wasn't in any other house, I was in 812 Havemeyer in Park South...a house so crap that nobody had been willing to live there for 20 years, in a neighborhood so crap it got demolished just a few years after we left. We lived there for less than a year, but it was the most memorable year of my entire childhood because of how terrified I was each night to go to sleep.

I remember the first night sleeping in that room, door closed, blankets pulled up as the AC blasted, when the creaking of my ceiling fan suddenly got louder just as I was about to fall asleep. I opened my eyes and there, hanging in the middle of the room was a little girl in a plain woolen nightgown, long dark hair obscuring her face. I screamed and flung the sheets up over my head. My step-dad banged my door open a minute later and flipped the light on.

“What's wrong?” he asked as he came up beside my bed and pulled the sheets off my head. My eyes went to the middle of the room immediately, and I pointed.

“There was a girl hanging from the ceiling fan.”

Step-dad turned and looked, “There's nothing there. You had a nightmare, go back to sleep.” And just like that he walked out, flipped off the switch, and shut the door. When my night vision came back in the girl was there once more, swinging back and forth, as if she'd been there all along, hidden only by the light.

I pulled the blankets back over my head and laid there shivering all night, too afraid to call out for my parents again because I knew my step-dad would get angry and yell at me. The next night I slept with the door open, so that the light from my parents room would light up the hallway and seep into my room, and the hanging girl wouldn't appear. It worked long enough for me to fall asleep, but when I woke up an hour before daybreak needing to pee, all the lights in the house were off and the girl was there once more, swinging slowly back and forth. I held it in, lying in bed squirming and waiting for the sun to rise, and when she finally faded as the light seeped into my room I bolted to the bathroom and pissed like a fire hose.

That became routine the next couple weeks, until one morning I woke having to pee earlier than usual and I couldn't quite hold it long enough. I knew I was about to piss myself, and I'd have to make a run for it, so I steeled myself, edged out of the bed, then bolted across the room when suddenly the girl reached out and lunged for me, hair flinging back off her head, white, glazed eyes staring at me with grim intensity. With greater dexterity than I thought myself capable I spun on the spot and lunged back into my bed, slinging my blankets up over my head and hiding until sunlight. Needless to say, I caught hell for wetting the bed.

After that I absolutely refused to sleep in that bed. My step-dad yelled and screamed and threatened to beat my ass but I absolutely refused to go into that room after dark, and spent the rest of our stay at that house sleeping on the living room couch.

After we'd moved I was able to convince myself that it had all been a recurring dream or a delusion or something...and despite my lingering fear of the dark, I'd essentially forgotten about the house entirely until the day before yesterday. I had taken my mother grocery shopping when we bumped into our old land lady and my mother had to stop and chat as she is wont to do. Naturally, assuming I didn't remember her my mom mentioned the house we lived in when I was 7 and wouldn't sleep in my bed, and I mentioned why. As soon as I mentioned the hanging girl the former landlady's face became grave.

“There actually was a young girl found hanging in that house in the 80's,” she said. She wouldn't elaborate, and my mom moved the conversation to lighter topics, but when I got home and was able to hop online I looked up old news regarding the house/neighborhood and found the article.

It was a young girl named Deborah Gibbs. As the story goes, she had been complaining of a monster in her closet watching her as she tried to sleep every night, and she would scream and scream every time she saw it until her parents would come in and bring her into their room. Allegedly the dad got sick of it and to teach her to face her fears left her in her room one night when she screamed out. They found her hanging the next morning. The father was charged with her murder, but I can't help but wonder...