in the breath of ghosts
Sep. 26th, 2004 11:52 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
the_siobhanOK, so I'm not napping.
Let's talk about ghosts.
When I was a teenager I had a poltergeist. It showed up the summer we lived in the nursing home, so that would have been Grade 6. About 11-12 years old. It came and went for the next 4-5 years. Mostly it used to just dump things on the floor, but it would occasionally move to turning things on and off. When I lived with the wife-beater it started throwing things. Never at him, unfortunately, we would just hear things smashing in the kitchen.
When I lived in Guelph I was surrounded by ghosts. one house I where lived in had a woman in a dress that came down to just above her ankles. She was very young and very timid, she would flee if you acknowledged her in any way. One day I was bent over under the stairs sorting through boxes of Crap and I called out to the person I could very clearly see - from the shoulders down - standing at the foot of the stairs. They didn't respond and when I stuck my head out to look around the stairs at the person there was nobody there.
I also spent a number of years working in bar in an old building that had a biker history and a mobster one before that. During prohibition the main room had featured dancing with non-alcoholic refreshments, but if you opened a trap-door in the floor you could go down to a series of underground rooms where there was booze and gambling. At the time, there had been secret passages running out to the nearby fields in case the cops showed up - the passages were now sealed at either end but they were still there and rumour had it that there were a few bodies in those passages.
The bouncers used to like bringing all the new staff downstairs to show them the rooms. They were dusty and deserted except for some broken chairs and old newspapers. One girl who had just been hired as a waitress wandered into one of the rooms away from the rest - and screamed. She was found lying on the floor. After everybody dragged her out and made sure she was uninjured she told us she had come face-to-face with a man in a suit and had fainted on the spot.
The building itself also housed a hotel, a ballroom and restaurant, all connected by a warren of passages and smaller rooms. The waitresses were supposed to drag the night's trash through the kitchen and out to the dumpsters, I always had to go with them because they were terrified of being in the silent corridors alone. One of the bigger unusued rooms was supposed to be a staff room, but nobody ever used it. I was sitting at a table one night doing something when the gigantic chandelier started swinging back and forth - no noise, no vibration, just gradually picking up speed. There was no floor above it. Nothing else in the room moved. I sat and watched it until it stopped just as suddenly.
Definitely the weirdest experience I've ever had was the one night I walked into the corridor behind the ballroom and heard the unmistable sounds of a party going on - music, glasses tinkling, the unmistakable sound of dozens of voices chatting and laughing. It was loud enough to hear through the closed door. The lights for the ballroom were right on the corner of the wall before you entered the room and I flicked them on as I walked in. Into a completely silent empty room. The noise cut off the second the lights came on.
The building where I work now used to be a children's hospital at one time. Some of the staff tell stories about seeing children running through the halls. I haven't seen anything yet.
Tell me a ghost story.
Let's talk about ghosts.
When I was a teenager I had a poltergeist. It showed up the summer we lived in the nursing home, so that would have been Grade 6. About 11-12 years old. It came and went for the next 4-5 years. Mostly it used to just dump things on the floor, but it would occasionally move to turning things on and off. When I lived with the wife-beater it started throwing things. Never at him, unfortunately, we would just hear things smashing in the kitchen.
When I lived in Guelph I was surrounded by ghosts. one house I where lived in had a woman in a dress that came down to just above her ankles. She was very young and very timid, she would flee if you acknowledged her in any way. One day I was bent over under the stairs sorting through boxes of Crap and I called out to the person I could very clearly see - from the shoulders down - standing at the foot of the stairs. They didn't respond and when I stuck my head out to look around the stairs at the person there was nobody there.
I also spent a number of years working in bar in an old building that had a biker history and a mobster one before that. During prohibition the main room had featured dancing with non-alcoholic refreshments, but if you opened a trap-door in the floor you could go down to a series of underground rooms where there was booze and gambling. At the time, there had been secret passages running out to the nearby fields in case the cops showed up - the passages were now sealed at either end but they were still there and rumour had it that there were a few bodies in those passages.
The bouncers used to like bringing all the new staff downstairs to show them the rooms. They were dusty and deserted except for some broken chairs and old newspapers. One girl who had just been hired as a waitress wandered into one of the rooms away from the rest - and screamed. She was found lying on the floor. After everybody dragged her out and made sure she was uninjured she told us she had come face-to-face with a man in a suit and had fainted on the spot.
The building itself also housed a hotel, a ballroom and restaurant, all connected by a warren of passages and smaller rooms. The waitresses were supposed to drag the night's trash through the kitchen and out to the dumpsters, I always had to go with them because they were terrified of being in the silent corridors alone. One of the bigger unusued rooms was supposed to be a staff room, but nobody ever used it. I was sitting at a table one night doing something when the gigantic chandelier started swinging back and forth - no noise, no vibration, just gradually picking up speed. There was no floor above it. Nothing else in the room moved. I sat and watched it until it stopped just as suddenly.
Definitely the weirdest experience I've ever had was the one night I walked into the corridor behind the ballroom and heard the unmistable sounds of a party going on - music, glasses tinkling, the unmistakable sound of dozens of voices chatting and laughing. It was loud enough to hear through the closed door. The lights for the ballroom were right on the corner of the wall before you entered the room and I flicked them on as I walked in. Into a completely silent empty room. The noise cut off the second the lights came on.
The building where I work now used to be a children's hospital at one time. Some of the staff tell stories about seeing children running through the halls. I haven't seen anything yet.
Tell me a ghost story.