'Ghost Child' Video: Alleged Footage Captured Puzzles Ohio Police and Community

Videos from the small town of Mentor, Ohio, have gone viral, as some believe they show a "ghost child" caught on camera. According to a WKYC Studios report, several different residents have shared supposed sightings of the odd shape on Facebook. Some also say they've seen the so-called spirit with their own eyes, and they can't help but believe.

Videos of Mentor's alleged ghost are going viral, as are accounts of its sightings. So has a police report about an encounter on the night of Wednesday, March 10, when police were called about a young girl apparently running down the street near the Bellflower Elementary district. The caller and the officer who responded estimated that the apparition was about 7 years old. The report said: "I was surprised by what I saw; the person appeared to be a small child, running rather erect and too quickly for a child."

The officer said that they got out of their vehicle to approach the child, but she disappeared. The officer then looked around the area and the surrounding buildings, expecting to find a child "crying or scared." When they couldn't find her, they called for back-up.

Other police departments — including a K-9 unit and a drone operator — lent a hand with searching the nearby area. Finally, the responding officer checked their dashcam and found no sign of the running child. When this video made it to social media, the whole community was in an uproar.

The "ghost child" has now been spotted on a handful of security cameras, always running unnaturally fast down the road. The town of Mentor has rallied around a Facebook group called the Mentor Ohio Paranormal Research Society, which is posting updates and speculation regularly. However, even there, doubt is beginning to take over.

"We had a bunch of people ask us what we thought about the new video that has been released of a possible ghost in our city being spotted on a doorbell camera," read one post by the group. "Based from our experience, we believe that this is actually a person running, and the camera is out of focus. You also have to consider lighting and shadow effects going on. We [are] not saying that it couldn't be, we are just saying... we need to study the actual footage itself."

The Mentor Police Department has reportedly filed the first encounter away as an "investigative encounter." It is not clear if there will be more follow-up on this issue.