Since it’s almost Halloween, I thought I’d share a little ghost story with you.
I’m no “ghost whisperer” (thank goodness), though that is the name of one of my favorite TV shows. However, I’ve always been open-minded on the topic. After all, Einstein and other scientists proved that energy can’t be destroyed. When we die, our energy (our essence, spirit, life force, or whatever you want to call it) isn’t destroyed. It is released, and it seems plausible to me that it could remain structured in a way that is still us even without a physical container to carry it.
One night, I became forever convinced of the existence of ghosts. This is the story of that night and my brief encounter with something unexplainable.
Office buildings are odd places at night after all the workers go home. Machines make strange noises, especially between midnight (resetting for the next day) and 2am (about 8 hours since they were last used). Elevators open and close their doors unexpectedly. The heating, cooling, and even plumbing systems creak, groan, and bang as they contract and expand. An unexpected blast of cold or hot air from a system as it turns on can be a little surprising. Automatic ice makers make some of the oddest noises.
Having worked the “graveyard shift” for several years in the past, and often working late into the night at clients’ site, I’m pretty used to such noises and activities. I’m mentioning that here so that you understand that I’m not a “nervous Nelly” when it comes to working alone, late at night, in a strange environment.
The first several times I encountered the spirit (for lack of a better term), I thought I had just caught a reflection of myself with my peripheral vision.
One night, I had another of those unexpected glimpses of movement from right to left past my window (that was the usual direction of the movement). I looked out into the main room, and caught a very brief, but intense sense (vision, image, ???) of a young woman, maybe in her early 20s, and dressed as a Native American.
Was I seeing things that weren’t there? Was she some odd daydream my subconscious brought forth? If so, why an Indian maiden? It all happened so fast, I couldn’t even be sure what I really saw.
Several weeks later, I was back at that client’s site. I didn’t see or hear anything other than the usual building noises.
The next time I was there, I caught another fleeting movement (again. right to left past the window that looks into the main room). I don’t know why, but I got the feeling that she looking for something, or maybe someone. It seemed that maybe these visits were just quick visits that she made in her searches. Were those feelings something I picked up from her spirit, or just my brain trying to apply some sort of reason or logic to this mystery?
The next time I talked with my contact at the client’s office, I mentioned in a joking manner that I thought the place might be haunted. I never expected the answer:
“Oh. You’ve seen her, too?”
“What!? Others have seen her? And you’re sure that it’s a her, too?”
She went on to tell me that I was at least the fourth person, including her, to have mentioned the female spirit. One person got the impression that it was a spirit from long ago. Another mentioned that she thought it was a Native American, and my contact thought so, too. We all felt that she was searching for something or someone. My contact and another had seen the spirit a few times each. The other woman had only seen the spirit once. Everyone agreed that the spirit was friendly, or at least not unfriendly.
Over the next year, I caught a few more glimpses of her zipping past my window, and also got one more brief look at her in more detail. “Detail” is relative, because it happened so fast I could barely register what I saw. She was maybe a little younger than I had thought at first–17 or so. She had dark hair and a gentle face. I don’t remember her mouth, which is a little odd. shrug
The last time I saw her was a rare night when I caught two corner-of-the-eye glimpses of her. I felt her presence a little more strongly than usual, and for a little longer than usual, too. I put it out of my mind and went back to work. This fleeting Indian maiden spirit was as common to me by now as the elevator noises were.
A short time later, I was in the break room making some tea. I was at the sink, rinsing out a cup. Suddenly I felt a presence in the room with me, and at the same moment I clearly felt a human finger poke me, gently but firmly, on my back. As I jumped, yelping in surprise, about a foot into the air and dropped the cup into the sink, the feeling of another presence in the room vanished.
I looked around frantically to see who had touched me. Nobody was there. I searched the whole building and the parking lot, but found nobody. I could only conclude what I had thought from the beginning… it had to have been her spirit.
I did not see her again in the few months that I continued to work there. Then the client changed service providers, and I haven’t been back.
I wonder if she ever found what or for whom she was looking. What if it was me? Was the touch her way of saying goodbye, and if so, was it because she wasn’t coming back or because she knew I would be leaving soon myself?
That’s my ghost story. I never fully believed my eyes, but that human finger poke in my back inside an empty building convinced me 100%. Well, maybe 99%. I like to keep my options open.
Have you ever had encounters with spirits? Tell me about them in the comments. Thanks.
I’m surprised no one else has commented on this. I had a few experiences in the house that I grew up in…
I’ve never been someone who is easily frightened, but growing up in that house and staying there until my early 20s, even when I was the only one home I never felt alone. I always felt like I was being watched, even in the bathroom, which was especially disturbing. I wouldn’t sit anywhere that didn’t give me a full view of whatever room I was in. The feeling of not being alone in an empty house is just the beginning though.
When I was a child, I had a doll that was a little shorter than me. I kept it in the closet when I wasn’t playing with it. I also always kept my closet closed. At night, I’d go from room to room playing, as kids tend to do. If I left my light on, when I came back it would be off. If it was off, I’d come back to find it on, and every time the closet door would be open with that doll just sitting there. I had my own bathroom and it got to the point that one day, I just shoved that doll in the bathroom cabinet and told my mom I was moving into the other bedroom.
In middle school, I started noticing that things weren’t always where I left them. At first I chalked it up to the fact that my room was never very tidy and I probably just misplaced things. But one day I had borrowed some money from a friend for a field trip or something that was going on at school and promised to pay him back the next day. My mom gave me the money to pay him back, and I stuck it in my desk drawer. The next morning, I take the money out and bring it to school to pay my friend. I come home and the money is back in the drawer again, so I call up the friend even though I KNOW I gave him the money and he states that yes I paid him back. I still have no idea how that money got there.
The next thing I remember is in high school. My then-boyfriend who I later married and some friends of mine had gone out somewhere earlier in the afternoon and come back to my house to watch movies. I have a habit of messing with the earring in my right ear, and I noticed it was gone, although it was there earlier. So thinking I had lost it, I just continued watching the movie. My boyfriend at some point thought it would be funny to mess up my hair, so I went to my room to brush it out. Next to my brush was the earring I lost, which couldn’t possibly have been there, since I hadn’t gone to my room since coming home.
Not long after that incident, my grandfather had passed away and my grandmother and uncle came to stay for a bit since my mom wasn’t taking it too well. We decided to go swimming and when we’re getting out my mom realized she had lost one of her earrings. I got back in and looked for it. It wasn’t a big pool so I should have found it. She gave up and we all went inside. The next morning she woke up with her hand balled up. She opened her hand and there was the earring. No one could explain it.
Now a young adult, and things are still happening. By now we have affectionately called the mischievous ghost Scotty. I don’t know why, since we never actually saw “him.” So my older sister was a bartender at a restaurant and a couple from out of town become regulars of hers while the husband is on an assignment here. The wife claims to be psychic and my sister invites them over for dinner and some drinks, without telling them anything about the house since up to then as far as I know she never had any experiences. The woman then proceeds to tell us that there is a little boy there about 3 years old with dark curly hair and that I have most of the experiences because I was his age when we moved in. I guess he was more comfortable with me, I don’t know. She said he also loves that we had a lot of pets and he likes playing with them. I guess that could explain the odd things they did now and then. So then I said something like “I wonder where he is now..” and across the room (no pets or people nearby) the basket with the pet toys just tipped over on its own. To validate that she was legit, she turns to my friend and tells her something personal that only she and I knew. She also mentioned our neighbor’s house had something evil in it and that occasionally it wandered over to our house. Even before our neighbors told us about their house, I was always terrified of it. When you walk in it’s just this very uneasy feeling and the farther you go into the house, the worse it feels. Once I heard their stories, I decided not to spend the night there anymore.
In college, my sister, her girlfriend, and my friend all lived with me and my mom. I was home alone washing dishes and out of nowhere I hear a door slam in the back of the house. It sounded like a heavy door, so I assumed someone was coming in through the garage. After waiting for someone to come down the hall, I finally go to see what’s going on and there’s no one there. I’m still alone. I was a little unnerved, but used to weird things happening by now, I went back to washing dishes. A few hours later, my sister and her girlfriend come home and my sister accuses me of going into her room because the door is closed and she left it open. I can only assume her door is what I heard slam earlier since no one came through the garage. Her room is also the one I moved out of when I was young because of the weird stuff going on in there.
The scariest thing to happen to me was in 2004 I believe. I had gone to a friend’s new house and was left alone there for a few hours. It seemed like I was seeing shadows everywhere and this was the middle of the day. I shrugged it off as just being in an unfamiliar house, and eventually went home. A few days later, I was on the phone in my bedroom and was getting ready to hang up and go to sleep. The lights were already off and I was in bed. Before I ended the conversation, things were knocked off of my desk. Took me a second to realize the cats weren’t in my room and so couldn’t be responsible and then as that realization hit me, a female voice said my name right in my ear. I was too terrified to even scream. I just bolted out of my bed, ran across the room and turned my light on. I got no sleep that night. The next day I called the friend whose house I had visited and told her what happened. She then tells me things like that have been happening since they moved in, and they see shadows there too. I think whatever was there decided to follow me home for a bit. That was my first and last visit to that house.
There have been other things that have happened but I’ll finish with this last one. So after everything that has happened, I posted our experiences online and a local ghost hunting group was interested in checking out our house, but they wanted me to fill out a form on their webpage and go into as much detail as possible. So while I was in the middle of spelling it all out for them, the screen starts scrolling up and down really fast, preventing me from finishing. Eventually I had to shut down the computer and restart it. I went to a few sites I normally visit and everything was working fine so I decided to try to send the group the information again and again the screen starts scrolling up and down. After a couple more tries, I just blurted out “I’m not trying to get rid of you, but if you’re that pissed off about them coming then I won’t bring them here.” After that the screen went back to normal, and as promised, I exited their webpage.
We moved out in 2006, when my husband and I bought our own home, and my mother came to live with us since her house was gutted after Katrina and never repaired. I’ve thought of “Scotty” since we left and wondered if he felt abandoned or if he’d moved on with no one to entertain him anymore. The house was torn down last year.
Wow! I am very glad that my ghost story was much less intense than yours.
I know what you mean when you talk about an “uneasy feeling” about certain places. There was an area between one of my apartments and its laundry room that always felt kind of creepy. It seemed cast in shadow, even though it got just as much sunlight as the rest of the pathway. It was always having problems with the plumbing running through that section, with leaks being very common, even after they replaced the water lines. I assume that as a result of the leaks, the area was frequently inhabited by mushrooms. Despite the dampness, you never heard any frogs in the area, though they would give their chirpy little croaks in other damp areas around the property. Some places just have a weird vibe to them. When I sometimes wish I could see more spirits, then I think of places like that, and I am very glad that I can pass obliviously through them without knowing what might really be going on. So much nicer to pass blissfully unaware through them.
Thanks for sharing your story about Scotty. I hope he has found rest now, and that you get some peace, too. 🙂
I’ve often wished that I could have seen Scotty or whoever it was that was sharing our home with us, but I think that just would have terrified me so much more than just observing the occasional mischievous pranks of a bored spirit. After all of my experiences, I’ve been tempted many times to investigate other sites that are reported to be haunted, but after hearing stories and my one experience of something following me home for a bit, I’ve decided to leave that up to Ghost Hunters and the like. Fortunately the house I moved to is peaceful and quiet and I’d like to keep it that way. I do love to hear other people’s experiences though and will always be fascinated by the paranormal.