Good catch OP. I had the immediate suspicion that other’s have voiced that this was King’s drunk/coked up years.

But who knows, he writes about the supernatural, and it would be like something from the Dark Tower for the ghost of her father to come back and protect Carrie. Or, maybe Carrie was kind of crazy and misremembered something?

Finally, didn’t Carrie have a lot of different perspectives on the incident? It could be that someone perceived something incorrectly, but it was forever ago that I read Carrie and am not confident in that.