When Jorge, age 10, moved into his new townhome, it wasn’t brand new. One family had lived there before, but no one died in it. Before it was a townhome, there was a regular house on that land. No one died in that house either. Before that regular house, there was a very old-fashioned house. No one ever died in that old house. But before that old-fashioned house, there was a log cabin, when no other houses and streets were around, just orchards stretching as far as you could see. And that is when someone died in that place, so long ago that it was before hospitals and ambulances. We’ll never know how the little girl died, because it was before detailed news and record keeping … but we know her name. Jorge’s strange experience matches the name in the obituary.

For weeks, Jorge was pestered by strange feelings and by seeing things at night in the home. No dust built up in his room. Something in the night cleaned everything. He could see it if he watched. It threw away his new electronic toys and kept pulling his old teddy bears and blocks out of his closet. When he slept, it sat on his stomach and pulled his toes. And randomly, he would wake up in the night and smell a person’s breath. Gross breath, like they ate oatmeal and cornbread and forgot to brush. But he smelled it when no one was there.

The ghost was never around in the daytime, only at night, only in the dark. He could see her long curly hair disappear around a corner, or the ruffles of her dress coming in and out of a moon ray, but never all of her at once. That is, until he started to dream about her. In the beginning, the dreams were all different and crazy, but then the dreams started to all become exactly the same. They would be playing blocks together, Jorge and the ghost, but as soon as he took one of her blocks to use, she killed him. He would try not to take her block; he would try to find another block or just not build anything. But every time in the dream, it turned out the same: he took one little block, and she killed him.

She was always spelling something with her blocks. Normally, in a dream you can’t read; you can imagine reading, but you can’t really see the words. It’s a trick of how the brain and dreaming work. But Jorge had the dream so much that he started to remember the letters on the blocks when he was awake. After weeks of torture, he could remember all the blocks. They said: “Julia Anne.”

Jorge worried all day at school, but he also thought maybe he had found the answer to his ghost problem. Maybe he could free the ghost, like her name was the key to the spell. He made a plan to try. Later at home, when it was dark, good and dark, he went to his room. He kept the light off. He pulled all of his blocks out of the closet, but he didn’t play with them himself. Instead, he played with his old teddy bears and waited. He was going to talk to her and solve his problem.

She didn’t play at first. She dusted everything. She had to finish her chores before she could play. He tried to wait, but when she seemed to be finished dusting, she didn’t come to the blocks yet. So he tried to say her name. He said, “Julia Anne.”

Instantly, she rushed his face like a monster, making a gruesome hiss scowl. He screamed and tried to run away, and that’s all he could remember.

He woke up in the hospital. He had a bloody bump on his head. He didn’t know if she hit him or he ran into something because he was so scared. But he didn’t say her name at night in that home anymore.

Jorge already had no real friends at school. The stress had made him sickly and bony, and it was disturbing to the other kids. Now with a big scabby bump, even the teacher couldn’t really stand to look at him. She had to think of something else to look at whenever she talked to him. Only one kid still took an interest in Jorge, so that one kid was his only “friend.” The truth is, Lincoln was fascinated by Jorge’s morphing into a subhuman creature. But Lincoln was the only one who would still play with Jorge, and the only one who would listen, so Jorge mistook that for caring. Jorge told Lincoln everything. He told him the name … “Julia Anne.” Lincoln asked to come over and play after school.

Jorge strictly warned Lincoln not to say the name, but the first thing Lincoln did, before he even got through the door, was to start saying it across the front yard and into the house. Over and over, every ten minutes, he had to say it again. Lincoln thought it was hilarious and fascinating. Jorge was so angry. But she wasn’t coming out. Jorge began to believe he was safe, that it had been a mistake before. Jorge became grateful to Lincoln for freeing him. Lincoln was his real friend.

Lincoln stayed late. He had dinner with Jorge and his mom. After dinner, it was dark. Lincoln said her name in the dark.

The mother knows there was some kind of struggle, but both boys gave conflicting and mostly incoherent versions of what happened, statements mentioning ghosts, bogeymen, and apparently vampires. The investigators believe the boys barely survived some attack with the help of friendship, but cannot make out the boys’ statements any better than the mother can. Whatever really happened, the mother finally moved, new school, new everything, except no more wooden blocks, that’s for sure. She burned those nightmare blocks in the driveway, and she got a ticket for it, but she didn’t care. She just wanted her boy to be free and clear.

But the end of our research records shows that Jorge died soon in his next home. His mother refused to cooperate with journalists, and the results of the police investigation were kept confidential. Police reports are rarely helpful for this kind of thing anyway. There’s no way to know, but we’re afraid Jorge called her name again, and that Julia Anne isn’t truly bound to that one home, just bound to the darkness.

You can write her name all you want, and say it in the daylight generally, but since there is always darkness somewhere, for the sake that you may be too near to some darkness, for the sake of keeping safety first, it is better you do not call her name.