Living in a 100-year-old house, you get comfortable with the probability that some previous occupant completed the circle of life on the premises. After all, until the early 20th century, most people in the U.S. were born and died at home. The idea never troubled me. And I never considered that my own dwelling could be haunted.

Then I became a mother.

One day, when I was nursing my baby in the living room, he pulled away abruptly and stared, wide-eyed, at a spot directly over my left shoulder. So intent was Simon’s gaze that I turned around to see what had caught his attention. A dancing sunbeam, maybe? Or a spider? There was nothing.

I forgot about the incident until a few days later, when it happened again. With no warning, Simon reared back and looked beyond me, over my left shoulder, his body entirely still. He didn’t seem scared, simply intent. But after it occurred several more times, I was spooked. What exactly was the kid seeing?

The incidents took place at varying times of day, but only in that one particular place in the living room.

“Maybe he’s seeing a ghost,” joked my husband. “Maybe, right at that spot, someone — ”

“Don’t be ridiculous,” I said. We knew nothing about the previous inhabitants of our 1908 wood-frame house, but I had never experienced spectral phenomena here — or anywhere else, for that matter.

For months, Simon continued to stare at whatever it was in the living room. But by the time he was 3, the “ghost” had been mostly forgotten. Then, while I was preparing lunch one afternoon, I heard him speaking animatedly in the next room.

“Who were you talking to?” I asked, snapping a bib around his neck.

“Oh, that’s Toddy Ro,” he said nonchalantly.

I was charmed. My toddler had an imaginary friend, just like all the parenting books said he would.

“Tell me about, uh, Toddy Ro,” I said, fully prepared to learn that this oddly named personage was obsessed with gasoline lawn mowers and plastic spray bottles, objects my son was bizarrely fixated on these days.

Simon turned his limpid blue eyes upon me. “I see Toddy Ro sometimes,” he said.

“He’s here. In our house.”

The calm certainty in my toddler’s voice as he said those five words was strangely unnerving. I looked around, almost expecting the mysterious Mr. Ro to materialize beside the high........

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