One of the biggest arguments against the existence of ghosts over the past few years is the fact we have SO little evidence of them. That made sense in the 1970s, but for the past 10 years everyone and their little brother have been walking around with HD cameras in their pockets at all times. Not only that, every other house has motion-detector triggered digital security cameras.

By now shouldn’t some ghost have been caught on camera by several bystanders with cell phones or doorbell cams?

Well… that may be what’s happening in Mentor, Ohio this month.

Related: The AMAZING Britney Spears Haunted House Story You’ve Never Heard

Over the past weeks, videos have popped up on Facebook community pages showing something pretty spooky: a white figure the size of a child running down the street.

And it wasn’t just cameras that saw the “ghost child.” On March 10, local police also got reports of what one witness said looked like a 7-year-old girl running fast down the street at about 10:40 p.m. In the official report, an officer for the Mentor Police Department confirmed seeing… well, something:

“I was surprised by what I saw, the person appeared to be a small child, running rather erect and too quickly for a child.”

But when the officer got out of his car to follow the figure, suddenly no one was around. Not anywhere. He says he rounded the corner where she had to be, expecting to find a little girl — scared or crying considering she was running so fast so late at night — but there was no one.

Not only that, cops were under the impression they were looking for a child that could be missing, so they pulled out all the stops. The sent a drone around the area to search, other departments joined in just to be safe, they even brought out the K-9 unit to comb the area for a scent. But the dogs came up empty, too.

After hours, they found NOTHING. In fact, after the search, the officer reviewed his own dash cam for footage of the little girl and found nothing was captured there either!

Ultimately the incident was labeled simply as an “investigative encounter” and filed away. After all, what else could they do?

As exciting as all this is, the local group you’d expect to be most thrilled is actually a little skeptical. The Mentor Ohio Paranormal Research Society wrote on FB about the event:

“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… 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.”

Of course, that’s a pretty standard response for most legitimate paranormal groups these days, as investigative approaches are taken more seriously.

YOU can study the actual footage itself (below), starting at about the 1:33 mark!

[Image via Blumhouse/WKYC/YouTube.]

The post 'Ghost Child' Caught On Camera -- And Even Seen By Police! appeared first on Perez Hilton.