A Haunting Hello, Springfield

We’re just over two weeks into the project, and it’s been an absolute privilege to hear so many stories. They’re all special, but there’s something really trusting when people take the time to show me exactly where their experience happened.

Tonight’s story comes from Keely in Springfield, who not only told me about the experience she had back in the 90s, but also sent me a carefully annotated Google map. Not only did it help me to picture the events more clearly, it meant I could go along to see the site for myself. I’ll talk more about that below, but for now, let’s hear Keely’s tale.

It was around 1992 or ’93. Keely was in her early twenties, walking home late at night in Springfield. The route was familiar — a path between the houses and the park, leading to her own back gate. Her friend had walked her as far as the alley, staying to watch her the rest of the way, a shared routine of care.

“I thought it was a bit of white fabric,” Keely remembers. “Maybe something kids had used to make a camp.” But as she reached the middle of the park, the shape moved. And then it was no shape at all — it was a little girl.

“She was just there. Right in front of me. Long hair, parted in the middle. A white dress or nightie — sheer, lacy, buttoned to the neck. Old-fashioned. She smiled and said: ‘hello.’”

Keely replied in kind, but ran.

By the time she’d burst into her house and opened her bedroom window, the park was empty. Her phone rang. It was her friend, now back at her own house. “Why did you run?” she asked. Keely told her. The friend hadn’t seen a thing.

But a few nights later, that same friend was up late, coughing. She went to the kitchen sink for water and opened the blind just slightly.

“She saw her too,” Keely says. “Same girl. Just standing there across the road. And when she looked again — gone.”

They never saw her again. But they both remember. They both saw. They both described the same child, in the same strange clothes, out in the night when no child should be.

Keely’s story was so atmospheric that I wanted to go and see the site for myself. I’m getting into a pattern with these research trips now. For each case, I carefully check the location, plan a route on Google Maps and then head out as early in the morning as I can. Why? For these kinds of pictures, it’s best if their’s no-one in the background, and particularly with playgrounds, it would be weird of me to catch anyone’s kids in the shot. So, this morning, I set off for Springfield just after 6am.

I was fine. There was no-one playing there. But there was a very good reason for that—the playground was gone.

What remains are just rusted relics of where the slide and swings must have stood, an absent space where even the grass looked blasted and scorched.

You’ll just have to do what I did, and imagine what it must have been like in years gone by. I stood in the haunted silence of a phantom playground, on the exact spot Keely pinpointed so precisely. No ghost child for me, just the shouts of crows and the traffic rushing by beyond.

I stood there for a while. Long enough for the shadows to shift. Long enough for the stillness to press in. If anyone happened to glance from a window that morning, they’d have seen me: a lone figure in black, motionless in a derelict park, head tilted slightly as if listening for something. And maybe I was. Not for footsteps or laughter, but for that single word, carried on the wind like an echo from the past.

“Hello.”

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Thank-you to Keely for trusting me with this story, and thank YOU for reading!
If you have a story of your own to share, I’d really love to hear it.