I think a lot of kids at one point are comforted by their parents and told without hesitation that ghosts aren’t real. They hear a bump in the night, and mom or dad tuck them in safely and reassure them that there are in fact no monsters under the bed.
That’s not exactly how I was raised. My Italian-Catholic family believed wholeheartedly in ghosts. When I went to them with a quivering lip after I heard a mysterious crash in our super-creepy basement, I asked my mom and grandmother, who lived with us, if that was a ghost.
“Probably,” my grandmother said with a shrug…