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 was a very old-fashioned house. No one ever died in that old-fashioned 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 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 could 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 mother says that Jorge was never a whiny child. He didn’t complain at every little hardship, especially when he didn’t think adults would do anything. What could an adult do about a ghost pulling toes? Nothing. So his mom didn’t know why he started wearing socks when he slept because he didn’t tell her a thing.

Jorge later told us the ghost was never around in the daytime, only at night, only in the dark. He could see her cute 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, like dreams. They could have spiders or candy, be fun or dangerous, happen at school or in the woods. (Maybe her old orchard?) But slowly, the dreams became more and more the same. The dreams became all set in his room. They stopped having any other people, like his mom or strangers. The mood was always solemn and … bored.

Then, they always ended up playing blocks. And the same bad thing would happen night after night, maybe multiple times in one night. In the dream, Jorge took one of her blocks to use for his tower, and she killed him! As the dream repeated, he would try not to take her block; he would try to find

another block or just not build anything. But every night, three or four times a night, the dream 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 if you look at the words, the letters blur and change or swim around. It’s a trick of how the brain and dreaming work. But Jorge had this miserable dream so much that he saw it when he was awake. It stuck in his head and looped while his teacher taught math or while the worksheets sat empty on his desk. And one rainy day, since the other kids ignored him anyway, he went by himself and took out the plastic bin at the bottom of all the plastic bins. He took out the letter blocks that even the teacher didn’t expect anyone to play with. After weeks of torture, he could remember all the ghost’s blocks, in order. They read, “Julia Anne,” not the name “Julianne” or “Julieanna” but exactly “Julia Anne.” He was so sure he could cry.

Jorge worried the rest of the day, 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, just in case. 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. The other kids didn’t like Jorge’s shadowed eyes. Jorge had to play by himself in the rocks and mud at the edge of the playground.

But Lincoln loved Jorge’s shadowed eyes. He thought of Jorge as a scary movie character. And Lincoln loved his gnarly scabbed lump even more. At recess, Lincoln asked to look closely at the bump. He half-expected maggots to be crawling out. There were no maggots crawling out, but

Lincoln stayed to talk and play with Jorge. He asked how Jorge got the lump and at first Jorge wouldn’t say. But since Lincoln was the only one who would still play with Jorge, and the only one who would listen, Jorge mistook that for caring. Soon, Jorge told Lincoln everything; he told him, the name … “Julia Anne.” Lincoln asked to come over and play after school. Jorge’s mother was delighted.

Jorge strictly warned Lincoln to not 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.

Nobody knows what happened. The mother was startled by a sudden and violent struggle—the clear sounds of slamming furniture upstairs. She was angry until she was terrified to hear the wails of the two boys. But the angry shrieks of a girl is what pierced her. She ran to the room, but the door was locked. Some violence was happening to her son inside that room, and she could only kick and pound on the door. Jorge managed to release the door lock, but fell to the ground as she opened the door. There was no intruder, no girl, only the boys. There was no sign of anyone coming or going. There was not a thing out of place except overturned furniture, and two bleeding unconscious boys.

But both boys gave conflicting and impossible versions of what happened: ghosts, and boogeymen, and vampires. They all seemed crazy to the police, even the mom, but none of them seemed capable of inflicting the injuries, smashing a block on someone so hard that the blunt edge actually cuts the skin.

Jorge did not tell the police about Julia Anne, but he told us. He wrote down the name though. We told his mother. They finally moved, new school, new everything, except no more wooden blocks. Jorge’s mother burned those wooden blocks in the driveway and she got a ticket for it, but she didn’t care.

I edited the report into the above story. I gave it a happy ending. Then, I received this newspaper clipping.

Jorge *****, 8, of Orange, California, died on November 14, 1998, at home. He was a wonderful boy. He is survived by his mother Elisa *****.

His mother won’t talk to anyone. We’re afraid Jorge called the ghost’s name again. We believe that Julia Anne isn’t only bound to that one home, maybe just bound to darkness and her name. We don’t have an obituary for Lincoln, but we can’t find a current living record of him either.

You can write her name all you want or say it in the light. 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, do not call her name.