My son has been giving me the creeps: I’m starting to think that he sees dead people.

Even worse, if he has anything else in common with Haley Joel Osment, he is going to be UGLY AS SIN when he hits puberty.

Evidence of my son’s relationship with the paranormal is becoming harder to ignore.

To wit:

• He has a habit of waking up at the SAME EXACT TIME every night, a few hours after we’ve put him to bed, and crying for a few minutes. By “same exact time,” I’m talking between 9:50 and 9:53. EVERY NIGHT. As if someone is waking him.
• He has a tendency to stare at, wave at and say “hello!” to things that aren’t there. Constantly. He also puts the remote control to his ear and says “hello?” to it, so it’s possible he’s not seeing ghosts and is just confused as to what hello means, but still. It’s CREEPY.

None of this would be particularly alarming if 13 people hadn’t been murdered in our apartment building between September 1950 and September 1953, one of whom was the actor who played Uncle Leo on “Seinfeld” (HELLO!). Just kidding.

It was Lionel Ritchie!

In all seriousness: babies are already pretty freaky. They’re round and fleshy and they speak in tongues and they scream a lot and they look exactly like you. It’s like having a mini-You, only one that’s far less sarcastic. It can be nerve-wracking, even when they’re just doing normal baby stuff. Once they go beyond that it’s nightmare city.

There are few things more unsettling than peeking your head into your kid’s room in the middle of the night, only to see him sitting up in his crib, silently staring directly at you as if he’d been waiting all along (which, since he can’t feed or change himself, he often is. But in those instances he’s rarely quiet). One of the things that is more creepy? The aforementioned phantom waving. It’s one thing for him to do it in the middle of the day, it’s entirely another to see him offering salutations to ABSOLUTELY NOTHING when it’s the middle of the night and you just saw Dylan McDermott’s bare ass on your TV.

We’ve been trained by years of horror movies and episodes of “Lassie” to understand that when an animal senses something amiss, you best listen. And what are babies but animals without the furry upside?

This whole situation has made caring for my son extremely problematic. The baby monitor – the last line of defense if something happens when we’re in the other room – has me terrified. I find myself scared to listen too closely, lest I hear some sunken-faced turn-of-the-century preacher singing terrifying lullabies (“God is in…his holy temple…”) to my son at 3:30 AM.

I think I’ll move the monitor to my wife’s side of the bed.