Mom 'Absolutely Freaking Out' After Her 3-Year-Old Tells Her A 'Witch' Comes Out Of Her Closet Every Night
Does she just have an overactive imagination? Or can she actually see the paranormal?
Motortion Films / Shutterstock.com A mom on Reddit is "absolutely freaking out" after finding out the reason her little girl has been getting so frightened at night.
It turns out she's not alone, and it sparked a conversation among other parents about kids' imaginations and whether they actually have the ability to see things we adults often can't.
The mom's little girl sees a witch every night in her room, coming out of her bedroom closet.
Children have been at the center of myriad horror stories and movies for centuries. They're sympathetic characters, after all, so what better way to get people invested in a horror movie than have it revolve around a kid?
But there's more to it than mere convenience. It's long been believed that children have heightened senses that make them more reachable by things like ghosts, angels, angelghosts—whatever might be lurking in the world beyond this one that may or may not exist.
And in the case of this mom, the sneaking suspicion that her 3-year-old daughter is one of those children has her "absolutely freaking the [expletive] out."
Her little girl gets scared because 'the witch comes' each night, and the mom doesn't know whether to take her seriously.
"I know it's fairly common for kids, especially my daughter's age… to 'see things,'" the mom wrote in her since-deleted post. And most of us would dismiss it as simply their imagination.
But her daughter's outsized reaction the night before had her nervous that her "absolute worst fear has come true." She wrote that her daughter woke up terrified in the middle of the night, "pointing at her closet," and it took her and her husband an hour to calm her down.
"Today I asked why she was pointing and she said 'the witch comes,'" the mom went on to say. "Oh good. All the creepy… stories from Reddit flooded my brain."
She found herself waffling between two responses: "the veil is thin with kids and that's some real [stuff]" and "all toddlers see stuff because their imagination is crazy."
"The only thing I could think to do was have her finger paint some pictures to put on her closet to make it 'a happy closet'" she went on to say. She also told her daughter she could go under her blanket if she got scared. It seems to have worked for now, but she's still wondering just what exactly was going on.
pixelshot / Canva Pro
Tons of parents have reported similar experiences with their kids seeing everything from ghosts to dead relatives.
Social media is full of stories from parents who, despite their own skepticism, come to believe that their kids must be seeing SOMETHING because of their heightened, visceral reactions.
"Before my kid even knew what a cemetery was," one parent on Reddit wrote, "we drove past one and she called out with a big enthusiastic wave 'Hiiii everybody!'" Uh, yikes. "My son pointed to my big standing mirror one time and said 'the crying girl is in there,'" another wrote.
And here is where I reveal my biases: I have a niece who was regularly "visited" by a woman named Marlene at night who wanted to have a tea party.
All of us were skeptical until the loss of sleep she was suffering made it seem implausible that Marlene was "just a bad dream." You can't have nightmares when you're awake all night, after all. In any case, "Marlene," whatever she was, finally stopped coming around about the time my niece turned 10.
According to spiritual advisors, this phenomenon is real and common. Psychic medium Blair Robertson explained it this way: "Young children don't have the limitations of life and belief systems… They haven't been 'taught' that 'ghosts don't exist' so that limitation isn't there."
This, Robertson said, makes them easier for spirits to reach, and "they exploit this 'opening' to visit young children in particular," always with pure intentions toward connection that are sometimes misconstrued as being frightening.
Psychologists, however, say that kids seeing ghosts is just confusion arising from their rapidly developing brains.
As real as kids' propensity for seeing spirits may feel, many psychologists say there is a far simpler explanation — their brains and imaginations are developing faster than their ability to reason out what is and is not reality.
In essence, they can easily get confused. As Charles Fernyhough, a psychologist at the U.K.'s Durham University, put it to The Washington Post, “I think on occasion kids do mix up imagination and reality to have something like a hallucination-like experience." And there you have it: "The witch comes."
So what do you do if this happens to your kid? Psychologists say to focus on how the experience feels, not whether it's real or not. Then work with your child to reframe it into something less scary, similar to what this mom on Reddit did.
Of course, if you're among the 18% of Americans who say they've seen a ghost, that surely sounds like malarkey to you — there's obviously something in this kid's closet!
Nobody actually knows, of course, but even psychology professor Jacqueline D. Woolley said to keep an open mind. "It's important to never say never," she told the Post, "because it's the scientific way to be."
John Sundholm is a news and entertainment writer who covers pop culture, social justice and human interest topics.