Mom Says 4-Year-Old Daughter Claims A 'Ghost' Is Bothering Her At Night — Parents Fear It's Something Far Worse
Is she just having bad dreams, or is something dangerous going on?
jupiterimages, karakotsya via Canva, Robert Hoetink / Shutterstock Children have such active imaginations and, oftentimes, such limited understanding of things that it can be hard to know how to respond to the things they say—especially when they say things that send up red flags.
One mom on Reddit found herself caught in this dilemma with her four-year-old daughter. In a post to the “r/Parenting” subReddit, she described the quandary she was in when her little girl made a most unusual, and disturbing, claim to a relative.
A mom’s little girl told her aunt that ghosts have been sexually molesting her at night.
The mom was, understandably, deeply shaken when her daughter said "sees ghost[s] in her room and that they touch her vagina." But given the bizarreness of the claim, she was totally unsure how to respond.
The mom said she immediately reported the situation to local authorities, and that a forensic interview was scheduled right away. Naturally, she began asking her daughter questions about the situation, but they proved futile in getting to the bottom of what was going on.
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The little girl said two ghosts visit her at night, one named Silly and the other named something “kiddish,” as the mom explained it, and that they touch her vagina.
“It's the same story three times now,” she writes. “They touch her vagina, they come at night, and they are white she said.” She also asked if the girl ever touches her vagina herself, and she said she did sometimes, which the mom assured her is okay.
The mom doesn’t know what to think because her daughter doesn’t seem frightened.
The mom is very confused by the details of the story her daughter tells, and wonders if it’s a recurring dream or something that’s actually happened.
“She says she is scared of the ghost,” the mom writes, “but when she mentions that they touch her she doesn't appear scared.” Her daughter also says the ghosts go under her bed.
The mom reports that the only other people in their home are her husband and 8-year-old son. “I've asked her if any of us have touched her or at school and she always says no, just ghosts and herself.”
Despite the strange story and the inscrutable details, she is obviously terrified, as any parent would be. “I don't know what to make of this and I'm so worried,” she writes and asked her fellow parents for advice while she waits for the authorities to investigate.
Experts say the mom did everything in right in handling her daughter’s admission of sexual abuse.
According to guidelines set by the National Child Traumatic Stress Network, or NCTSN, the most important thing for an adult to do when a child reports sexual abuse is to believe them—especially because, as the video below details, children rarely lie about being molested.
The NCTSN also recommends staying calm, and “ask[ing] children directly if anyone has touched their bodies in a way that they did not like or has forced them to do things that they did not want to do.”
The mom’s move to assure her daughter that she had done nothing wrong and it was okay to touch her own body was the right move too, according to the organization.
And perhaps most crucially, getting local authorities involved was a vital next step.
Experts also say small children often reveal sexual abuse on accident with stories like this little girl’s.
According to the NCTSN, small children often stumble into revealing abuse because they don’t understand what is happening to them, so the mom is right to take her child’s story—however strange—seriously.
One of the mom’s fellow parents on Reddit had a similar story from their own childhood and said that when they were molested, they told their parents “half-truths like ‘someone’ was touching me, or ‘someone’ showed me inappropriate videos,” instead of identifying the perpetrator.
On the hopeful side, however, the mom’s daughter is not showing some of the more common signs of molestation as detailed in the TikTok about how to recognize evidence of sexual abuse.
And others pointed out that it is possible that something far less terrifying is going on—a condition called “precocious puberty,” which the Mayo Clinic defines as puberty-related changes that begin too early, before age 8 in girls or age 9 in boys. In some cases, the condition needs to be treated with medications called puberty blockers.
The condition can cause sensations in children’s genitalia that are confusing and hard to understand in young children’s brains. One fellow parent on Reddit experienced this as a child herself, and described thinking “it was an imaginary friend type of thing [that] was randomly giving me these tickly vagina feelings.”
Hopefully, that’s the explanation in the case of this mom’s little girl, too.
Anyone affected by sexual assault can find support on the National Sexual Assault Hotline, a safe, confidential service. Contact The Hotline or call 800-656-HOPE (4673) to be connected with a trained staff member.
John Sundholm is a news and entertainment writer who covers pop culture, social justice and human interest topics.