Creepy Encounters

Creepy Encounters

Short, first-person stories about the frightening things ordinary people run into — a neighbor, a stranger, a habit at home no one ever questioned. It's never a ghost.

  1. 1d ago

    Episode 44: My ex husband has sent my mother flowers every Mother's Day since our divorce and I only found out because he mentioned the florist

    Submitted by Renee — Chattanooga, Tennessee. 44. Paul and I divorced in the spring of 2017. It was not dramatic the way people expect a divorce to be dramatic. No affair, no screaming. I woke up one morning at thirty-five and understood I had married a man I did not want to grow old with, and I spent the next year doing something about it. He did not fight me on the house or the money. He fought me on Thanksgiving. That is the detail I always led with when I told the story to new friends. He sat across the mediation table and asked, completely serious, whether there was a way to write holidays with my family into the agreement. His lawyer laughed. My lawyer laughed. I think about that laugh a lot now. Every Mother's Day since, my mother has had flowers on the hutch in her dining room. Peonies, usually, with the little florist card up on a plastic pick, somebody's handwriting in blue ink. I never read the card. You do not read someone else's card. I assumed they were from my brother, who lives in Denver and misses everything, because flowers are exactly how a person misses everything politely. I remember feeling superior about it, if I am honest. He sent flowers. I showed up. I sat with her, I ate the ham, I fixed whatever was wrong with her phone that year. I was the good one. Three weeks ago Paul called me about an old retirement account. Nine years divorced and there is still paperwork. Nobody warns you about the paperwork. We were wrapping up, polite as coworkers, when he said, flat as a man reading a receipt, tell your mom I am sorry the peonies ran late this year, the florist over on Brainerd changed owners and they dropped my standing order. I stood in my kitchen with the phone against my ear and asked what he was talking about, and he told me. Not confessing. Not embarrassed. Informing. Nine years. Every Mother's Day. A standing order, renewed each January, the way other people renew their car tags. I asked him why. There was a pause, and it was not a guilty pause. It was the pause of a man checking whether I had seriously asked the question. Then he said, in that same flat voice, you divorced me, Renee. She didn't. I drove over that Sunday like always, and while she was out in the yard I opened the shallow drawer in the hutch, the one with the rubber bands and the dead batteries and every card anyone has ever handed her. They were there, banded together. Nine florist cards, blue ink, his small careful printing. And I want to be clear about what they said, because it would be a different story otherwise. They were not love letters. Happy Mother's Day, hope the knee is better. Happy Mother's Day, the hydrangea should be blooming by now. Happy Mother's Day, thinking of you both. Both. When she came in and saw what I was holding, she did not look caught. That is the part I keep coming back to. She looked at me kindly, the way you look at someone who is about to be unfair, and she went to make coffee, and neither of us said his name. So I sat there and went through the rest of the drawer. Birthday cards from my kids. A valentine from my dad, who has been gone since 2011. Cards from neighbors, from her Sunday school class, from a dentist's office. There is nothing in that drawer with my handwriting on it. Not one thing. Then I went back through my own calendar, nine years of it, because I wanted to be right about something. I was the one who showed up. That was my whole story about myself. Except the calendar says I missed four of them. Four Mother's Days, work trips and one cruise and one I cannot account for at all, years I told myself she understood how busy things had gotten. He has a standing order. It renews in January whether he thinks of her or not. I removed that man from this family with lawyers, and he has spent nine years proving he never needed my permission to stay in it, and the one who kept leaving was…

  2. 2d ago

    Episode 43: The same night clerk was at my hotel's front desk all six nights of my stay and I was the only person who thought that was strange

    Submitted by Cal — Louisville, Kentucky. 46. I travel for work maybe eight or nine weeks a year, installing point-of-sale systems for a restaurant group. In June I had a six-night job in Chattanooga, and the company put me in a hotel off I-24, one of those places with a fireplace nobody lights and a breakfast room that smells like syrup until noon. The first night I got in late, close to one in the morning, and there was a man behind the front desk with a green steel thermos beside the keyboard, paint chipped around the base. He checked me in, made my key cards, told me the ice machine on three was the good one. Name tag said Sam. Perfectly nice. My job runs on restaurant hours, which means I keep terrible ones. I came through that lobby at midnight, at two, at four-thirty, at seven when the waffle iron was going. Sam was there every single time. Same shirt, or the same kind of shirt. Same thermos at his right hand. The second night I joked, "They ever let you go home?" and he said, "Somebody's got to be here." The fourth night I asked if he ever slept and he said, "I sleep fine," and turned back to the screen, and I stood there feeling rude for asking. I want to be clear that he was not doing anything. That is what made it so hard to say out loud. He got towels for a couple on the third floor. He signed for packages. He told a drunk wedding guest where her room was, kindly, twice. When my key card died on day five he made me a new one in about nine seconds, and I thanked him, and I told him I'd be out late again because the install was going long, and he nodded like a man writing that down somewhere behind his eyes. I brought it up in the breakfast room. Twice, actually. A guy from a paving crew told me big hotels rotate three night guys and they all kind of look alike, no offense to anybody. A woman traveling with her mother said she'd seen a clerk at night but couldn't say if it was the same one, and she looked at me like I was the odd thing in the room for keeping track. My wife, on the phone, said I always get like this on long installs, that I don't sleep enough to be counting anybody else's hours. Everybody had a normal explanation, and I was the only one who seemed to need one. By the sixth night I had stopped mentioning it. I just waved at Sam on my way up, and he waved back, and the thermos sat there catching the lobby light. Checkout morning there was a woman at the desk I'd never seen, day manager, blazer with the hotel logo. While she ran my card I said, mostly to be pleasant, "You ought to give Sam a raise. He was here every night of my stay. All six." She stopped typing. Not a pause — a stop, hands flat on the counter. She looked past me at the empty end of the desk, at the spot beside the keyboard, and then she looked at me, and her voice came out very level and very quiet. "Was there a thermos?" she said. "Green? Chipped around the bottom?" I said yes. She did not finish my checkout. She walked into the little office behind the desk, closed the door, and through the glass I watched her pick up the phone, and whoever answered, she kept her eyes on the lobby doors the whole time she talked. A girl from housekeeping ran my card in the end. Nobody explained anything to me, and I had a flight, and I am ashamed to say I got on it. Here is the part I keep chewing on. I gave that man my room number. My schedule. The nights I would be out late. I told him my wife wasn't traveling with me, because things come up naturally at a desk at two in the morning. I never checked one thing about him, and neither did anyone else in that lobby, because a man standing behind a counter is whoever the counter says he is. There were maybe forty of us in that hotel. As far as I know, I am the only one who counted the nights. I doubt I am the only one he did.

  3. 2d ago

    Episode 42: The same man sat at my bus stop every morning for nine years and never once got on a bus and I finally saw what the newspaper in his lap was

    Submitted by Hal — Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. 44. For nine years I caught the 71C at the corner of Marlowe and Fifth, the 7:14, downtown to the firm where I do payroll. And for nine years there was a man at that stop before me, every single morning, sitting on the left end of the bench with a folded newspaper in his lap. Older guy. Brown canvas coat, a cap when it got cold. In nine years I never saw him open that paper, and I never saw him get on a bus. I want to be honest about how normal this was, because you would not have noticed him either. The first winter I figured he was waiting on a different route — the 61 stops there too — and the second winter I figured he was retired and just liked being out in the morning, and after that I stopped figuring anything at all. He was part of the corner, like the mailbox. The drivers nodded at him and he nodded back. The high school kids said hey to him. He was there in the snow with the paper in a plastic sleeve, and he was there in August with sweat coming through the band of his cap, and one morning when the app swore the bus was on time and it wasn't, he said, "she's running behind," to nobody in particular, and he was right. That is the most I ever heard him say. The paper was always folded the same way, in thirds, the masthead showing. I must have looked at it a thousand times. That's the part I keep going back to. It was never hidden. It sat in his lap in the open, under the shelter light, in front of every commuter in that neighborhood, five days a week, for at least the nine years I can swear to, and I never looked at it once. Not really. Last spring he stopped coming. No buildup. There on a Friday, gone on a Monday. For a couple of weeks the bench looked wrong to me and I could not have told you why, and then, the way things go, it stopped looking wrong. In June the city put up notices saying the shelter was being replaced. The morning before the crew came, I dropped my badge, and when I knelt down for it I saw the plastic sleeve wedged up under the bench, between the slats and the frame, dry as anything. I knew what it was before I touched it. The same paper. I would have known that fold anywhere — soft as cloth at the crease, gray where his hands had been. I slid it out and stood there holding it, and my hands were not entirely steady, which was strange, because it was just a newspaper. Except it wasn't, quite. The date under the masthead was April 9, 2007. One issue. He had been holding the same day's paper the whole time, from long before I ever started riding, going by the wear of it. And it had never been opened. The fold was still tight, the inside pages still squared, the way a paper is before anybody reads it. The only thing on it that had not come from the press was pencil. Tally marks. Rows and rows of them, tiny and careful, running down the white margin of the front page and wrapping onto the back, thousands of them, in groups of five. No words. No names. Just the counting. The front page itself was nothing. A school levy. A ribbon cutting at a rec center. Weather. I put it back where I found it. I don't entirely know why. It seemed like that was where it went. The crew tore out the shelter two days later, and the new bench is blue, and the sleeve was gone, in a landfill or in somebody's hands, I could not tell you which. He never came back. The other regulars remember him the way you remember weather — "oh, the guy with the paper" — and then they run out of sentence. I looked up the date once. Nothing happened in this city on April 9, 2007. Nothing that made the news, anyway. The 71C still comes at 7:14, most days. I still take it. Somewhere there is a man who sat on that bench every morning for years, holding one unopened day, counting something, and either he finished, or he didn't. That is everything I know.

  4. 4d ago

    Episode 41: My landlord took three hundred dollars off the rent so I would never use the second bedroom and it took a burst pipe for me to find out why

    Submitted by Marcy — Scranton, Pennsylvania. 41. I found the apartment nine years ago, the second floor of a green duplex on a street of green duplexes, two bedrooms, and a rent so low I read the listing twice looking for the catch. The catch met me at the door. Gene was the landlord, somewhere in his seventies even then, flannel over flannel, and he showed me the place like he was proud of it, which he was, and when we got to the end of the hallway he put his hand flat on the second bedroom door and said, you won't be needing this one. The door was painted shut. Not stuck. Painted, deliberately, the seam filled with so many coats of white that the door and the frame and the wall were one surface, the way a tree heals over a fence wire. There was no knob. There had been a knob once, I think, and the hole was filled and sanded and painted like everything else. Gene said he'd take three hundred off the rent for the inconvenience, and I was thirty-two with eleven hundred dollars to my name, and an apartment with a room I couldn't use was still bigger than any apartment I could actually afford. I signed that afternoon. Here is the part I should be embarrassed about: it never bothered me. It became a joke, then furniture, then nothing. I hung my calendar on it. Friends asked about it at parties the first year, and I would shrug and say that's my discount, and everyone laughed, and after a while no one asked. Gene was the best landlord I have ever had or even heard of. He fixed things the same day. He shoveled the walk before I woke up. Every spring he repainted the hallway, and I noticed, without ever once thinking about what I was noticing, that he always started with the seam of that door, on his knees, with a little brush. Last January the pipes froze all over the city, and one let go somewhere above the second bedroom. I woke to water sliding out from under a door that does not open. Gene was eighty-one by then, in a rehab facility for his hip, and his phone rang and rang. The emergency plumber looked at the door, then at the water, said this is coming open, scored the paint with a utility knife, and set a flat bar into a seam that had not been a seam for longer than I had lived there. It was a child's bedroom. A boy's, I think. A twin bed, made, the blanket printed with pennants of teams that moved cities decades ago. A small pair of sneakers side by side at the foot of it. A desk with a workbook open on it and a pencil laid in the crease. Curtains drawn. Everything clean the way things are clean when the dust has simply finished falling. The radiator under the window was hot. Nine years I had lived one wall away from a warm, made bed, and the plumber stood in the doorway with water spreading around his boots and would not go in until I did. We fixed the pipe. I dried the floor with my own towels and I moved nothing, and I cannot tell you why moving nothing felt like the only thing that mattered. When Gene came home he stood in the hallway a long time. He asked me one question. Did they touch anything. When I said no, he nodded, and the next week he was on his knees with the little brush, sealing the door back into the wall. The rent went down another fifty dollars. Neither of us said anything about that either. Elaine downstairs has been in the building since 1979. She says Gene has owned it all that time and lived alone all that time. No wife that she ever saw. No boy, ever. She said it the way you would report the weather, and went back inside. Every city has a listing like mine. A two-bedroom priced like a studio, a landlord everybody calls a sweetheart, a number that makes you read it twice. Somebody is signing one of those leases today and thinking how lucky they got. The discount is real. It is just not for the inconvenience. It is for whatever you are agreeing, without knowing it, to help keep.

  5. 5d ago

    Episode 40: There has been a note on my cable account since 2007 and nobody would tell me what it said until a kid on the overnight shift read it to me

    Submitted by Curt — Cumberland, Maryland. 61. I have had service at this address since 2007, and for eighteen years I honestly believed I was somebody's favorite customer. It's the only company that runs a line down our road, so there is no shopping around out here. For the first decade you could pay in person at a storefront on the state highway, between a tax office and a nail place, and I did, because I am my father's son and I like a receipt in my hand. That's where I saw it. The girl behind the counter had her monitor turned a little toward the window, and while she pulled up the account I could read the top of the screen upside down. There was a line of type in red with a small red flag beside it, sitting up above my name and my balance like a headline. Everything else on that screen was black. Just the one line, and the flag. I asked her what it said. She said she wasn't able to read out account notes, and she was perfectly nice about it, and she waived the convenience fee. After that I noticed the pause. Every single call, eighteen years of them. Let me pull you up, sir — one moment. Then two or three seconds of nothing, and then their voice would change. Get careful. Get slow. And then whatever I had called about would simply be taken care of. I have never paid an install fee. I have been late plenty and never paid a late charge. In eighteen years not one of them has tried to sell me the phone bundle or the doorbell cameras, and they sell those to everybody. When I need a technician I get one the same day, sometimes within the hour. They don't come inside. I never asked for that. They work the box on the pole or the gray box on the corner of the house, and if a receiver has to be swapped they do it standing on the step and hand it to me through the storm door. One young guy apologized to me for it. He said he wasn't supposed to explain. My wife used to say I must have saved a man's life somewhere and forgotten about it. I told it at work as a funny story for years. I don't know what my file says, but whatever it is, it's working. The company got sold twice. New logo, new bill, an app now. The pause came right along with it, and so did the flag — I saw it again in 2019 on a technician's tablet in my own driveway, the same red line above my name. Then in December we lost service for two days in the cold, and I was on the phone at two in the morning with a kid doing overnight from somewhere out of state, and he had stopped reading off the script an hour before that. He said, before I go any further, sir, I have to tell you there's a note on this account. It says do not dispatch Dale to this address. I asked who Dale was. He said he was a technician a long time ago, and that he isn't with the company. I asked what else the note said and he said that's all of it, that's the whole note, four words and a name. He said it came over from the old system in the merger, and that nobody there can take those off. They just travel with the account. I sat in the dark with the phone and asked my wife, who was awake by then. She said the name back to me twice and then said she didn't know any Dale. We have been married thirty-one years and I believe her. I worked second shift at the plant until 2011. Every afternoon of those first four years, somebody was home in this house alone, and it was not me. I called and asked them to remove it. The woman said she'd put in the request. Two weeks later a different rep pulled me up, and there was the pause. All that time I thought the pause was somebody seeing what a good customer I'd been. It was somebody reading. My bank has a place for notes like that. So does the pharmacy, and the clinic, and the county. I have been polite to an awful lot of people while they were reading something about me.

  6. 6d ago

    Episode 39: My office has celebrated my birthday on the wrong day for eleven years and I only found out what that day is when we took the calendar down

    Submitted by Hal — Green Bay, Wisconsin. 52. I ate lunch under that calendar for eleven years without ever once really looking at it. It hung in our breakroom on the second floor, on a nail beside the microwave. Not a month-at-a-time calendar — one of those laminated year-at-a-glance sheets, all twelve months in columns, about the size of a card table, with the phone number of a heating and cooling company printed across the bottom in red. A new one came in the mail every December and went up on the same nail. Somebody wrote the birthdays on it in marker, a name in the corner of a square, and when your square came up you got a grocery store sheet cake at two thirty and a card that had been going around in an interoffice envelope all week with everybody's handwriting crammed in around the edges. That somebody was Perry. He sat on the other side of the half wall from me, accounts payable, and he had been keeping the calendar since before I was hired. He bought the cakes on his own card. He printed in small capitals, the way a man does who has filled out forms his whole working life. My name was in the square for March ninth. My birthday is October twenty-fourth. I did say something. Once. My first spring there I stood in front of the calendar with him and told him mine was actually in the fall, and he looked at it a second and said, huh, and I said no big deal. That is the entire record of me pushing back. Eleven years, one huh. Because then March came around again and there was the cake, and forty people came in on their break and sang at me, and you cannot stand there holding a paper plate and tell forty people they have the wrong day. You especially cannot do it the second year, when it has become a thing everyone knows about you. I was a March. Guys from claims would say happy early one in the parking lot in February. My wife thought it was the funniest thing about my job — that I had a birthday at home and a separate birthday at work, and honestly the work one came with a better lunch. We got bought in the fall. Perry took the package and retired in October, and in January the rest of us moved across town into one floor of a building off the interstate. Because my desk was closest, I was the one who packed the breakroom, and I put my hand on the calendar and lifted it off the nail, and there were more behind it. Eleven of them. Nobody had ever taken the old one down. Every December he had just hung the new sheet on top, same nail, same corner hole, so they had stacked up against the wall like the layers of a paint job. I carried the whole pile to the table and went through them, because everything else was already in boxes. Every year, March ninth, my name in those small capitals. That was not the part. The bottom two sheets were from before me. I started there in April. Two of those calendars went up on that wall while I was still out at the plant in De Pere and had never heard of the company, and on both of them the ninth of March has my name in the corner of the square in Perry's printing, and most of the other squares have names of people I never met. March ninth is the day my father died. I was nine. We were not a family that marked it — nobody called, there was no dinner, we did not say it out loud — and I never told a soul in that building, because it is not a thing you bring up in accounts payable. I have Perry's cell number off the card we signed for him. I have gotten as far as it ringing, twice. The new office runs everything through a shared calendar. It pulled the real dates out of the system, so mine says October, and it emails you the morning of, and nobody bakes anything. Every place I have ever worked has had one person who keeps that list. In twenty-six years I have never heard anybody ask where they got the dates. You sign the card, you take a plate, you go back to your desk.

  7. Aug 13

    Episode 38: The same air freshener has been hanging in four different cars in three different cities and my receipts say they were four different men

    Submitted by Shay — Omaha, Nebraska. 43. There is a version of me that only exists between an airport curb and a hotel lobby, and that woman does not look at anybody. I train front-desk staff at regional clinics on a scheduling system. Three weeks out of four I am gone Monday morning to Thursday night, and two years ago my company stopped approving rental cars, because somebody in a spreadsheet worked out that expensing rides is cheaper. So now I come out of baggage claim with a roller bag and a laminated badge and get into whatever pulls up, and I sit behind the passenger seat and answer email, and I say the same four things every time. Hey. Yes, that's me. No, just the one bag. Thank you so much. If you showed me a photograph of any driver I have had this year, I would tell you I had never seen him. What I did notice was an air freshener. One of those little cardboard pine trees, the green kind that has been hanging in cars since before I was born. It was in a car in Tulsa last spring, and I noticed it because it was not on the mirror. It was hung on the turn signal stalk, down low where his left hand sat, so it swung every time he changed lanes. And it was finished. Sun-bleached almost white, the way newsprint goes in a window, the top corner soft and curled. No smell in it at all. I remember thinking it was a funny thing to keep. A thing worn past the point where it does anything, still hanging there. Then there was one in Columbus in August. Same tree, same washed-out white-green, same stalk. I thought, huh. And then I explained it to myself the way you do — some guys hang it on the stalk instead of the mirror, it is a car thing, like the beads or the parking pass. Then Charlotte in January in the sleet, and then Tulsa again in March, and every time I noticed it the noticing got smaller, because the fourth time anything happens is less than the first. I told it as a story at a team dinner in April. That is genuinely all it was to me — a small dumb travel thing you offer up when the table goes quiet. Every car in America has the same dead air freshener in it, I said. Nobody's does, said a guy on my team who flies the same circuit I do. He put his hand out for my phone and pulled up my ride history, because he is the kind of person who settles a thing at the table, and he scrolled back through fourteen months and read the four of them out loud to everybody. Four different first names. Four different cars — a Sonata, a Malibu, two I do not remember. Plates from three states. Four separate accounts, four completed trips, and I had given every one of them five stars without looking, the way I give everybody five stars without looking. He thought it was hilarious. He said something about how I had finally found the one thing all men have in common, and the table laughed, and the entrees came. I called support the following week. I want to be fair: there was nothing for anyone to tell me. Nobody overcharged me, nobody took me anywhere I had not asked to go, nobody said a word to me that I could repeat to you and have it sound like anything. I got where I was going every time. I have four receipts that say four men drove me, and I have a picture in my head of one hand resting on one stalk with one dead pine tree swinging off it, and there is nowhere to take that. There is no form for it. Since then I have done what you would do. I have watched. I have gotten into a lot of cars in a lot of cities and seen nothing at all — phone mounts, a rosary once, a bare mirror — and I would feel stupid and put my head back against the window. I fly to Wichita on Sunday. I have started checking the stalk before I let anybody put my bag in the trunk. I do not know what I will do if it is there. I do not know what I will do if it is not.

  8. Aug 12

    Episode 37: The woman who sold us our piano has come to every one of my daughter's recitals for four years and I was the one who kept inviting her

    Submitted by Dee — Erie, Pennsylvania. 43. We got the piano for two hundred dollars in the spring of 2021, which is what an old upright goes for around here. The listing had one blurry photo and three words: good tone, must go. The woman selling it — Colleen — met us in the driveway and didn't haggle and didn't hover. My brother-in-law and I walked it down her two porch steps while she stood in the grass with her arms crossed. Before we pulled away she came to the truck window and said the bench was full and she'd left it that way on purpose. The music should stay with the piano, is what she said. Then: it was my daughter's. She said it the way you'd tell somebody the furnace filter was new. I said thank you and put the truck in gear. Nothing was ever hidden from me. That isn't the part that got me. That bench was packed. Not a few pieces — a whole education, in order, from the beginner books with the cartoon notes at the bottom of the page up to a Chopin nocturne photocopied out of a library book. All of it penciled in: fingerings, circled measures, arrows over the hard bars, and in the corner of every first page a date, in a kid's careful handwriting that got less careful as the years went on. The day she finished it, I assume. Some pieces had two dates. One had four. My daughter was eight and had been taking lessons on a keyboard from a warehouse store. The day the piano came in she opened the bench, because that's what kids do, and we used what was in it. Those marks were better than anything her teacher wrote in — somebody had thought hard about which finger goes where. Play it how it's marked, I'd tell her. The first recital was that December, at the Lutheran church on the corner, and I invited Colleen. That was mine. My idea, my text message. It seemed decent, and honestly it made a good story. She sat second row on the aisle, and when my kid got through two minutes of Für Elise she clapped with her hands up by her face the way people do at weddings. She came to the next one, and the one after. Nine now, and she has not missed one. She has never called the house or asked for the piano back. Everybody at the studio knows her. She introduces herself the same way every time — I'm the one who sold them the piano — and the other parents think it's lovely, and it is lovely, and I've told it as lovely at three different jobs. Here's what I did, though, and I never caught myself at it. I started texting her the dates before the studio posted them. I started steering my kid toward the pieces with pencil in them, because those were the ones Colleen sat forward for. I got where I could read her face in the second row. In December my daughter wanted to play something off a video game soundtrack. I told her that wasn't a recital piece. We did the nocturne. The nocturne is the one with four dates. It was a new mother who ended it, downstairs this May over the sheet cake. She nodded across the room at Colleen and asked if that was my daughter's grandmother, and I gave her the warm version — four years, never misses one, all of it. Then she said huh, and her face did something small she tried to put away, and she asked, so she asked you if she could come? I said no. I said I'm the one who invites her. And she looked at me a second too long and said, I meant your daughter. Has your daughter ever said she wanted her there? I drove us home. That night, after my kid was asleep, I went through the whole stack, and the dates stop. Fall of 2011, on the nocturne, and past that page it's clean paper. My daughter is thirteen. She got past that page in October. Colleen has never asked me for one thing. Every date, every seat, every piece — that was me. I keep going back to that driveway, that woman standing in the grass with her arms crossed, telling me plainly that the music should stay with the piano. She never said one word about t…

About

Short, first-person stories about the frightening things ordinary people run into — a neighbor, a stranger, a habit at home no one ever questioned. It's never a ghost.