Few years ago, not as long ago as it seems now, I was hangin' around town with a few friends. After a while the conversation turned to ghosts and experiences in the paranormal. I remembered that there was a supposedly haunted place not too far from where we were: The old town reservoir. Way back in 1963, a six year old girl was kidnapped from the local swimming hole. She was missing for days. Police sent out a town-wide search. Specially trained dogs roamed all the parks, woods, and undeveloped places around the whole town, sniffing for a corpse. It wasn't until two days into the search that she turned up. Floating face down in the town reservoir, her hair flowing gracefully in the gentle currents of the water. The police dragged her out and laid her poor, bloated little body down on the banks, snapped the necessary photographs for the record books and handed the body over to the morgue. She's buried in the centuries old cemetery near the center of town. Naturally being reckless kids with a few ghost-stories under our belts we decided to head down to the old reservoir and see what kinda things we could find. We parked the cars in the middle of the bridge, surrounded by nothing but water, woods and smothering darkness. The usually calming night-sounds of crickets and the gentle movement of water had begun to take on an eerie, spine-chilling and palpable sense of isolation. We were very much alone and we knew it. Everybody was wandering around, laughing off the fear and tossing rocks over the railing and into the water, but I refused to move very far from the car. Maybe I'm more sensitive, maybe I was just scared, I don't know. What I do know is that I'm damn glad I made that decision. We weren't there ten minutes before I heard a rustling in the woods behind me. The hair stood up on the back of my neck and I tried my best to shrug it off, to convince myself that it was a squirrel or a raccoon. I was almost successful. Then she started giggling. Faint at first, like a small child playing hide and seek, realizing you're about to reveal their hiding place and preparing to scream and run between your legs. It was gradually getting louder and less innocent. A child's laugh can be frightening in just about any setting. But when you're virtually alone in the middle of a dark stretch of road on the outskirts of town, a child's laugh is maddeningly horrifying. A sound that has no business in those surroundings. I looked around to see if anyone else had noticed. No one seemed to be paying any attention. The giggles were growing closer, emerging from the blind dark of the woods into the moonlit clearing closer to the car, but there was no one to be seen besides me and my friends. All of a sudden the giggles ceased. I breathed a sigh of relief, but it was a brief respite. My entire head was suddenly filled with a shrill, piercing and continuous scream. I clutched my temples and dropped to my knees, managing to choke out a whispered 'help'. My friends had taken no notice. I tried desperately to drown out the sound, but to no avail. Then it stopped, just like that. It was as if somebody had flipped a switch in my head and all was silence. The world spun. I fell the rest of the way forward so I was on all fours, vomited, and passed out. When I came to we were back in town. My friends were standing around me looking pale and frightened. I asked what happened. They told me I threw up and passed out, and they dragged me into the car and left. The whole way back I kept yelling 'help her, help her, she's screaming, go back and help her, she's screaming'. I had no recollection of anything after passing out. I came around, and explained to them what I had experienced. Shortly thereafter we noticed two small, wet hand prints, child's hand prints, the hand prints of a six year old girl, on the back windshield of the car.