90B Schofield – The Green Girl Ghost
The Green Girl Ghost
(inspired by “90B Schofield – The Green Girl Ghost”)
Night settled over Schofield Circle like a heavy quilt, the wind sighing through the old oaks that lined the street. In Quarters 90B—a stately limestone duplex more than a century old—Anne Marie Wilson thought she had finally settled into a quiet evening. Her son Zack, a sweet four-year-old with wide, curious eyes, sat on the basement floor surrounded by toy cars. He wasn’t speaking, but his little hands moved gracefully, signing words only his mother understood.
Anne Marie smiled faintly, until Zack paused mid-play. He tilted his head, watching something over her shoulder. Then he began signing rapidly.
“The green girl is cold.”
Anne Marie froze.
“What girl, sweetheart?”
He pointed toward the corner of the basement where shadows swallowed the light. There was nothing there. Nothing but the faint scent of damp stone and the slow, deliberate sound of dripping water.
That night, she told her neighbor Mindy about it. Mindy’s face went pale.
“Oh,” she said quietly, “you must mean the little girl in the green dress.”
Anne Marie never mentioned the color. She hadn’t said a word about a dress.
The first time the radio turned on by itself, the family had been watching TV. The static swelled, the volume rising in a mechanical screech until a voice—a young girl’s—giggled through the static.
“Ha ha!”
Zack’s mother shouted, “Knock it off!” and the radio fell silent. The laughter stopped—but the cold stayed.
Over the next few weeks, Zack continued to talk to “the green girl.” He would sign at the empty air, his lips forming the ghost’s name: Abbey. Sometimes, Anne Marie swore she saw movement at the edge of her sight—a flicker of color, soft as a child’s dress swaying in the dark.
When the Wilsons left, the house rested for only a short time before new tenants arrived. Tammy and Fran had four children. They knew the stories, but they didn’t tell the kids. Better not to feed young imaginations—or old ghosts.
But soon, their son Ethan began to talk to someone unseen.
“The little girl,” he told his mother.
Tammy tried to smile. “What little girl?”
Ethan pointed to the corner of his room. “Abbey.”
The name struck her like a whisper she’d already heard somewhere before.
One evening, Tammy sat in the attic, the sewing machine humming beneath her hands as she worked on her daughter’s costume. The house was quiet. The other children were asleep. A shadow passed over her, the shape of a small child—shoulder height.
“Ethan, go to bed,” she murmured without looking up.
The shadow didn’t move.
When she turned, no one was there. The light bulb flickered once, then steadied.
The next morning, she found a baby doll sitting neatly beside her sewing machine. She hadn’t brought it there.
From then on, toys appeared in the attic where they didn’t belong—Barbies, tiny plastic horses, a stuffed rabbit with one ear missing. Tammy began locking the attic door. It didn’t matter. The toys kept coming back.
Sometimes she heard crying from upstairs—a soft, distant sob, the kind that sounded more lonely than afraid. Once, thinking it was her own child, she ran downstairs to find all four kids outside playing.
The house was empty. Yet the crying continued.
Even now, when the night deepens over Fort Riley and the wind slides through the cracks in the old stone, Ethan sometimes wakes and talks softly in his sleep. Tammy will stand in his doorway and ask, “Who are you talking to, baby?”
He’ll point to the space just behind her shoulder and whisper, “Abbey.”
And every time, before she can bring herself to turn around, the air grows cold.
Cold, and faintly green.