Three-year-old boy haunted by vivid nightmares of dying on 9/11

A mother says her three-year-old’s overwhelming fear of planes and skyscrapers combined with vivid nightmares of dying in a building explosion, led her to a connection to a man who died on 9/11.

Cade Wilson was three when the nightmares started. The little boy would wake up crying about working in a tall building – one where he could see the Statue of Liberty from his office window.

At first, his mom Molly Curnutte didn’t think much of it.

“I noted it, but I never thought anything of it,” she said on LMN’s The Ghost Inside My Child. “I noted it as an oddism. I just thought he had a vivid imagination.”

His dad Rick backed Molly up. Cade had never even been to New York. Nobody in the family even had a tie to the World Trade Center.

Cade’s fears kept getting worse

Soon Cade developed what his mom called an obsessive fear of planes, but not flying itself.

His grandmother Fae said he was “totally petrified” of them, “like they were monsters.” Driving through downtown got hard, Cade would go frantic around tall buildings.

Then the boy’s descriptions got hair-raisingly specific. According to Molly, Cde flat out told her he’d been in a building that was hit by something, that it exploded, and that he fell.

He also started insisting Cade wasn’t his real name.

A connection to a 9/11 victim nobody was expecting

Molly posted Cade’s incredible and unsettling story on an online forum, hoping someone could help her make sense of it.

“It was actually another mother who sent me the link,” she said. “She said there was a man that worked in the World Trade Center. And he died on 9/11. His life mimics what Cade describes his life and his death was.”

The other mother pulled up the man’s obituary and photo and it was like the last puzzle piece had been found. Molly never reached out to the man’s family though, worried about intruding on their grief.