For some reason, I had a number of dreams about ghost children.  There's only one I can remember very much about, but I do know that they were all not exactly happy and pleasant, though I wouldn't really call them scary; not by my standards, anyway.

  In this particular dream, it was at night, and I was in the back yard of a house.  I didn't see what all was around me, but the yard, while technically large, was not roomy, because there was a lot of stuff there.  The stuff is what I couldn't tell what was, but there seemed to be some old wooden constructions about four feet high, like animal pens or sheds, and there was what was supposed to be an outside storm cellar, but the opening was small, and it dropped straight down like a shaft, and the drop was about six or seven feet down.  Everything out there had a dank feel.

  In the house lived a grandfather, a father (about 50 years old), and a daughter (about 7 or 8 years old).  The grandfather was about 5' 8", and he ate the flesh of young people (not children) in order to stay alive and healthy, but it was a lot like a drug to him, so he was not quite of the right mind, in a manner of speaking.  The father was somewhere between 6 and 7 feet tall, very strong, and had a deformed face.

  The father liked to keep a child down in the outside storm cellar, though never his daughter, not that he had any great special love for her.  If there were a brother and sister of similar age, then he would put them both down there, but mainly he would just steal one child and keep him or her down there, barely feeding them, and occasionally taunting them.

  He would not do anything frequently, and more often than not, he would not even think about them.  It was almost like they were pets, and he just wanted them there.  After a month, the child would die, and then he would get another.  That's enough back-story.

  What actually happened in the dream was that, for reasons I do not recall, but maybe it was because a child ghost led me there, I was in that yard at the entrance of the cellar.  There was a child in there, and there were first two ghost children, about 9 years old, one female, and I'm not sure of the other.  They were the main ones in charge of this rescue mission.

  I was trying to think of how I was going to get down the shaft, but I was also ducked down to keep from being seen by anyone in the house, and I had a feeling that someone was going to be coming out soon.

  A little later, two more younger female ghost children, about 6 years old, appeared with the two older ones, and they were just watching, kind of like moral support or something.  A little later still, a male ghost child, about 5 years old, appeared and was playing over a fence while sort of keeping a closer watch for anyone who might come out.

  I don't recall how one event led to the other, or really if the following actually came after, but the grandfather and the father were outside in the small open area in front of the cellar opening.  The grandfather didn't really care about what was happening, because he was focused on the fact that he had not more flesh to eat.

  The father was mad, as one might expect, but he seemed to not acknowledge my presence.  I think I was a mere observer at this point in the dream, which was a bit muddled, because though the father would never put his daughter down there, she kind of was down there.  She had very nice shoulder length, straight, very vivid, blonde hair,

  Anyway, at this point in the dream, what I was seeing was not so much a course of events as just a non-linear series of clips with no obvious bearing on the "logic" of that particular dream.  At one point I was just reaching down the hole in an attempt to grab the daughter's head to pull her out.

  This particular dream was the least startling of the ones of that night, and I wish I could recall the others.  I don't dream about ghost very much, but when I do, they always seem to be children, or at least that I recall.  It makes me wonder why.  Also, sometimes the ghost children are "bad", and sometimes they are good.