Ghostly encounters #2

I used to work for the county District Court Archives, which had offices on the first floor and basement of the former county jail, downtown. At some point in the past, the jail was renovated into office space for the district courts, county attorneys, and other county agencies.

It was nicely renovated, but the construction was still old brick and limestone blocks. Catty-corner to the Hall of Justice, the building held thousands and thousands of records relating to various court cases going back to the 19th Century, and saw all kinds of traffic during the day. Lawyers, cops, private investigators, criminals of all stripe, and the mentally ill all paraded through, providing me with interesting anecdotes.

The records I worked with were a mix of district and circuit cases. The circuit cases were generally more interesting, and often more grisly. Those were the cases the dealt with more serious crimes, like murder, rape, and arson. A couple of the rooms had been used for storage of evidence, although not much evidence was around at the time I worked there. Just a few odds-and-ends. Just knowing the room I was in had recently held murder weapons was enough to add to the atmosphere.

I recall my boss and others saying that a prisoner had hanged himself in the area our offices were, and that one of our storage rooms had been solitary confinement. Where the parking garage is now, there had been a courtyard, where there had been hangings.

All this made the building sort of a creepy place to be at night, when the doors were locked and hardly anyone was around. I worked there in the evening for a while, and there nights when the time was up and I was out of there with a pretty solid case of the creeps.

By eight o’clock at night, there were few people in the building. Often it may have been just me and the security guard, who had a booth by the front door, far out of earshot. I listened to the radio and tried to keep from my head thoughts of the frustrated, irate, disappointed, or just downright strange people I’d met earlier in the day, perhaps skulking around outside the building, looking for unlocked doors. Or hiding in the restrooms or under the stairs.

A friend and co-worker related this story, similar in a way to my Mountain Dew story: He was in the farthest corner of the archives room at the end of the hall in the basement, filing circuit court cases (those are the ones that dealt with, for instance, murder. Photos included.) The case files were kept in heavy cardboard bankers boxes, stacked on metal shelves four or five high. The boxes lined the walls of the room and also filled a free-standing set of shelves in the middle of the room.

After filing a load of cases, he walked around the room making sure all the drawers were closed. He shut a few drawers, walked around to the other side of the room, and shut a few more. Then he turned to leave, looked back, and saw that a couple of the boxes he shut were open again.

Weirded out, he almost flipped the lights off and slammed the door with the intention of just getting the heck out of there. Instead, though, he stopped himself and forced himself the think calmly about it. There had to be a good reason the heavy cardboard drawers had dragged themselves back open, right?

After thinking about it a bit, and then messing with the drawers, he realized that when he had slammed shut the box drawers on one side of the island of shelves, the backs of the drawers had bumped against the backs of the drawers on the other side, bouncing them back open.

Rational explanations aside, it was still a damn creepy place to work.

My ghostly encounter #1

Just about ten years ago, at another place I used to work, I had a supernatural experience. Not really. But the experience was one that I remember as funny and, for a few seconds, slightly startling.

I was sitting in the otherwise empty breakroom, having polished off my lunch and the last of my can of Mountain Dew, and reading a magazine. My lunch break was nearly over.

Without warning, my can of Mountain Dew slid noiselessly and smoothly from one side of the table to the other.

My reaction, for a couple of seconds, was to sit slack-jawed, the hair on my neck prickling upward. Then I looked around to see if anyone else was around. I didn’t see anyone.

After another couple of moments of consideration, I formed a theory about what had happened, experimented, and solved the mystery to my satisfaction. We’ll play “Encyclopedia Brown” and see if one of my thousands of readers can guess. Here’s another clue: This happened during the summer.

More Ghost Fiction

Here’s another ghost story, one that I recall reading many years ago. I suppose I read it somewhere between sixth and eighth grade, and I found it memorable enough that the plot and the title stuck with me (I had the title slightly wrong: I thought the phrase was the “Watery Ghost” instead of “Water Ghost.”) It was in a collection of short stories I checked out of the school library.

The Water Ghost of Harrowby Hall