The Little Girl Who Visits My Daughter’s Room

3 min read

The little girl my daughter talked about started as nothing more than an imaginary friend. Or at least, that’s what my husband and I told ourselves for the first few months. Our daughter Lily was four, and four-year-olds have imaginary friends. It’s normal. It’s healthy. There was nothing to worry about.

Lily called her “the other girl.” She said the other girl came to her room at night, after we turned off the lights, and sat on the end of her bed. She said the other girl was sad, that she was looking for her mother, and that she liked to watch Lily sleep. Ordinary imaginary-friend talk, we thought. We smiled and nodded and tucked her in.

The Things She Couldn’t Have Known

But then Lily started saying things that didn’t fit. She described the other girl’s dress in careful detail — old-fashioned, with buttons up the back and a faded blue ribbon. She said the other girl talked “the funny old way,” and she started using words a four-year-old shouldn’t know, phrases that sounded like they belonged to another era entirely.

One morning, Lily came to breakfast and announced that the other girl had told her a secret: that she had died in this house “a long, long time ago, when it was snowing.” We’d never discussed death with her. We’d certainly never told her anything about the house’s history. My husband, unsettled, decided to look into it. Public records showed that decades before we moved in, a young girl had indeed died in the house — of pneumonia, in the middle of a brutal winter.

The Night I Saw Her

I still didn’t fully believe. I needed to see it with my own eyes. So one night, I sat quietly in the dark hallway outside Lily’s cracked-open door, waiting, telling myself I’d prove it was all a child’s imagination.

Around midnight, the temperature in the hall dropped so suddenly I could see my own breath. And through the gap in the door, in the faint glow of Lily’s nightlight, I saw her. A small figure in an old-fashioned dress, sitting on the end of my daughter’s bed, perfectly still, watching her sleep. I couldn’t move. I couldn’t make a sound. I just stared, frozen, for what felt like an eternity.

Then Lily, half-asleep, murmured, “It’s okay. My mommy can be your mommy too.” And the little figure turned its head toward the doorway, toward me, and I felt — not fear, but an overwhelming wave of sadness and gratitude at once. Then she was gone.

We never tried to make her leave after that. Lily is seven now, and she says the other girl doesn’t come as often anymore — that she seems happier, more at peace. Some nights I still check the hallway. And some nights, I still feel that gentle cold, and I whisper into the dark that she’s welcome here, for as long as she needs. People ask me if I was scared, living with something like that in my child’s room. The truth is, after that night in the hallway, I was never scared again. Whatever she was, she had only ever wanted what any lost child wants — to not be alone in the dark. And in a strange way, I think she gave Lily a gift too: a gentleness, an easy kindness toward anyone who seems sad or left out. Lily doesn’t remember much about those years now. But I do. And I’ll always be grateful that our house, for a little while, could be a home for a child who had none.