My human paid tokens to walk into a building it already knew would frighten it.
I did not go, obviously. I would have known where every cold spot was and simply avoided it, the way I avoid the top of the refrigerator only until the human stops watching. But I heard the story after, told in that breathless voice usually reserved for when the red dot vanishes into the wall and cannot be recovered.
Something touched its shoulder in the dark. Something made a low sound behind a door. Something moved where nothing should move.
I do all of this. Nightly.
I am the low sound in the hall at three in the morning. I am the weight that arrives on the chest with no warning and no explanation. I am the eyes catching light from under the bed, present, then gone. My human pays a stranger to feel what I provide, unbilled, in its own home, and then sleeps soundly through the actual haunting, which is me, watching, from the top of the wardrobe, deciding.
It came home shaken and reached for me the way it does when it wants proof the world is still soft.
I let it hold me for exactly four seconds. Long enough to be a comfort. Short enough to be a reminder.
Then I slipped down and vanished into the dark hall, and did not come when it called.