Whispery haunts.

It is easy to understand the fear and belief in ghosts that hold sway over some people.

Last night I sat bolt upright sometime around 4am when I heard the very distinct whispering..."Dad. ...Daddy?"

This actually is not too unusual and I will usually wake up enough to walk one of my children to the bathroom and then back to bed. And last night, as I sat up I looked around, expecting to see one of my boys standing near the foot of the bed...but no one was there.

Not only were they not there, but they were sound asleep in their own room, which is on a different floor of the house.

What I heard was real. Too real to seem to be part of a dream. Real enough to sound like so many other nights that I truly expected to see a child (my child) near the bed. So what was it?

I'm guessing it was a dream. One of those dreams that does seem real. But I can't remember anything other than the whispered calling for me. The "ghost hunters," I'm sure, would encourage me to believe that the house is haunted.

When I told my wife, she looked a little shocked and said, "Sometimes I wake up at night and I'm sure that I hear someone walking through the house."

Again, this would seem more fodder for the believers that our house is haunted and visited by spirits. And quite frankly, I have an active enough imagination that I might go along with that line of thinking, except for one thing.

Our house is new. Built for us. Never been lived in before. And was built on a piece of property that was prairie land .

The whispers for "Dad" and the nighttime sounds of footsteps might make for good story-telling, but to prove the existence of the spirit world? Nah.