You write the true night while the kettle clicks and the shutters remember they are only wood.

Time. Wind. What you saw, not what you wished. Lights, if you watched them, that moved with breeze and puddles. A scream, if you tracked it, that was an animal or a hole in a tree. Knocks, if you hunted them, that you could start and stop. Green wood, maybe. A dog, maybe. A mast in an electric sky, maybe. The page is honest about its blanks.

Aunt Mara comes home smelling like sandbags and rain. She reads with her finger under the lines, the way she reads weather. “Wonder stays,” she says. “Names get accurate. That’s keeper work.”

In the morning, Ms. Ellison photocopies a page for the scrapbook’s science column. Jonah Pike, from the next dock, asks for a copy too—to show an uncle who loves banshees. You let him. Folklore is not the enemy. Guessing without looking is.

You keep the notebook. The marsh keeps being a marsh. That is the happy ending that does not need a ghost to clap.

THE END

What you learned: a true odd sound plus a local story plus darkness can make a “ghost.” Recording time, weather, and animal sign is how you separate wonder from wish—without mocking the people who needed the old names.