our daughter a bit, so she called out and asked who it was. He replied that he wanted to talk to her mother, but by the time I opened the door he had again vanished and we never saw him again after that.
The Mailroom Ghost
During my first year of college I worked part-time in the residence mailroom on the campus, and being before the days of e-mail, my shifts were very busy sorting all those students’ letters. I hardly had time to look up from the piles of mail I had to distribute into the alphabetically arranged compartments.
My shifts were usually late at night, and no one else was ever around. The only sounds were the ticking of the clock and the rustling of the envelopes as I sifted through the endless piles. The radio would never work in that area for some reason, and I usually just left it off instead of having to constantly tune it, trying to pick up a signal.
One night I was working alone as usual, but had a very uncomfortable feeling. This was not normal for me, as I had never been bothered by the solitude of that job before. But on this night I could not shake the feeling I was being watched. Every time I looked up from my work I expected to see someone standing there because the feeling was so strong, I assumed someone was there.
The radio was not turned on. I had tried to get a station to come in at the start of my shift and had given up and shut it off because I hated the static. As I sat with my back to the open door in the mailroom, trying to resist the urge to constantly turn around, it finally got too strong, and I couldn’t keep myself from turning to look again to see if anyone was there.
And that time there was. A young man, in his early twenties I would say, was leaning against the doorjamb looking at me as I sat at the desk across the room. I wasn’t sure if he was actually staring at me or just daydreaming in my direction, because it seemed to take a minute before he realized I was looking at him. When our eyes connected it seemed to startle him as much as it did me (maybe even more); and just as I saw him jump a bit, the radio on the desk suddenly turned on. That really startled me.
When the radio came on, he took a step backwards from where he was leaning and then seemed to freeze, as though he couldn’t decide if he should leave or stay. But all the time our eyes were locked, and I thought he was going to say something to me.
Now normally back then, being a young woman alone in that isolated mailroom late at night, just having a strange man show up out of nowhere would have been enough to alarm me. I always made sure the main door leading to that area was locked behind me when I came in for my shift, and the door to the mailroom itself would have been inaccessible to anyone without a key to the main door beyond it. But neither of those facts occurred to me in that moment.
I didn’t feel threatened, though, but he definitely seemed nervous of me, or at least of being seen standing there. And just as I wondered why he wasn’t saying anything, he slowly started to disappear. He slowly faded into nothing. I was left staring at empty space, but could still feel his presence there. It was the oddest experience I have ever had. And even at the time I wondered why I wasn’t more afraid of what I was seeing.
I sat very still for a few moments and decided to leave early that night, because I didn’t want to stay there alone any longer. But I didn’t go screaming out of there. I packed up my things, with a feeling like I was moving in slow motion, and locked up. I kept looking all around me, still feeling like he was nearby. Even on the quick walk back to my dorm room it seemed like he was walking along beside me.
The next day I had to return to the mailroom to pick up a textbook I had forgotten the night before, and saw one of the daytime staff there. She was a middle-aged woman, and had always just ignored me any time she saw me before.
But on this day she was friendly to me and even called me by name, which surprised me because I didn’t think she even knew what it was. She asked if I enjoyed working the part-time night shift, and winked when she asked if the “ghost” bothered me at all.
Her wink made it seem like she was joking, but I still felt myself tense a bit when she said that. I just smiled, though, and told her I didn’t believe in ghosts (I didn’t want to talk about my experience with her). But she surprised me by telling me that she was a firm believer now. She told me it was haunted in that office, and then she told me why.
About twenty years ago, a group of boys were walking outside of that building and two of them got into an argument that led to a fight. They ended up inside somehow, possibly one was trying to get away from the other, but the one boy fell, or was pushed, and hit his head against a pipe by the main door. He died instantly. It was such a senseless tragedy. A young guy’s life cut so short like that. I shuddered at her story, thinking of him dying right there.
She told me everyone who worked there, including herself, had seen his ghost. I asked for a description without admitting I had also seen him just the previous night. She described him exactly, even the birthmark on his left cheek. But I still didn’t want to talk to her about my own experience. She treated the haunting almost as a joke, like it amused her somehow. Maybe that was just nervous tension on her part.
But to me, it was so sad that he lost his life like that, and his spirit still remained at the scene all those years later.
I don’t know if the mailroom employees are still seeing him to this day. I hope not. I hope he is finally at peace by now.
My Grandmother’s Spirit
This isn’t really about a place being haunted so much as an experience I had with a ghost. And since it was my grandmother, I prefer to call her a spirit.
When I was nine, my parents signed me up for a week away at a summer camp with our church. I didn’t want to go. I had never been away from home before even for one night, never mind a whole week. I begged my parents not to make me go, but they kept telling me it was for the best.
I knew something was going on because my mother was so sad and there were a lot of long-distance phone calls from far-away relatives, which usually only happened on birthdays or Christmas. My parents seemed to want to get me out of the house, and that made me feel even worse and want to leave even less.
When I asked to see my grandmother before I left, and was told I couldn’t, I really broke down. My grandmother and I were very close. I thought she would talk my mother into letting me stay home if I could just explain to her how scared I was to go. But no one would let me visit her, or even talk to her on the phone. So I felt completely miserable by the time I was put on the bus for camp at our church the next week.
I refused to admit it in the letter I wrote home, but I did enjoy myself there after the first few hours of feeling sorry for myself. The last night that I was at camp I was lying in my bottom bunk with my eyes closed, but I wasn’t sleeping or dreaming. I felt the bunk sink down as someone sat beside me. And when I looked up, there was my grandmother, smiling down at me. She gently brushed the hair back from my eyes and cupped my cheeks in her hand, as she always did.
Looking back now it is surprising to me that I only felt comforted and excited to see her. I never wondered how she got there or why she had come alone, so late at night, to see me. I was just glad she was there. She sat there on my bunk holding my hand until I fell asleep.
My parents arrived to take me home the next morning, and I was eager to see them, but my mother looked even sadder than before I left. When we got to the car my father told me that my grandmother had died the night before. She had been very sick and dying in the hospital
