Here are my personal encounters. I did do my best to keep it as short as I could.
Background
I grew up in a house that was supposedly haunted. I never witnessed anything. My Grandma had died suddenly in the house from a heart attack. I just assumed if there was a ghost, it was her because she knew that having an experience would scare the heck out of me. It seemed like my parents and two older sisters were regularly having weird things happen to them. Even the family pets would occasionally act like there was entity present. I remained very skeptical. When I was 12, we moved across the country. I learned a lot later in life that this alleged haunting was going on long before my Grandma's passing.
Encounters at my Former Job
I worked for over 13 years at a family-owned, small retail business that sold office furniture and supplies. For the first few years, all I heard from my boss, his family, and coworkers was stories. Because I was out calling on accounts all day, I never experienced anything. I still remained Mr. Skeptic.
Then one morning, I was asking an employee about the new fax machine. As we walked up to it, a phone book sitting on top of the fax rotated 90 degrees and did a balancing act. We were both gawking at the phone book for a few seconds, waiting for it to fall on floor. My coworker grabbed the phone book, tossed it on a desk and scurried away. When I tried bringing up what had happened, he would get flustered and refuse to talk about it. I passed it off and remained a skeptic, even though I could not debunk it.
Another few years went by, and I received a promotion that kept me in the store more often. One day, I was needing an old invoice so I went into the "warehouse" to retrieve the customer's file. (The warehouse, which is located next door to the business, used to be part of a movie theater in the 50s and 60s. That is until a fire in the projection room killed the projectionist.) I got the keys, unlocked the door, then closed and locked the door behind me. (The businesses there get a lot of transients that will wander into unlocked places.) I went into the little side room where all the archived files were stored. After I was finished, I headed toward the door when I heard a "hey" or "hi." However, what I heard wasn't through my ears, but rather; well, I don't know how to explain it. I turned around and there was a male standing outside the projection room completely stationary, with his hand up, like he was waving. Thinking it was our new employee, I waved and said hi back to him. However, as I returned to the store, I saw him and the other employees in the parking area loading a van for a delivery. For the rest of the day, I tried rationalizing it. I told no one.
The next day, there were five of us in the warehouse getting ready to load an expensive desk into the van. As we started lifting the desk, the new employee exclaimed, "Look, there's a figure there!" Two other people saw the figure. When asked why I didn't look, I explained that my back was to it and I didn't want to risk dropping the desk. To everyone's astonishment, I then described what they had seen because I saw it the day before. (The other employee wouldn't turn around to look because of his religion. He believed it was a manifestation of Satan.)
A couple of months go by and one morning my boss hands me a huge ring of keys and asks me to go upstairs to match the keys to all the locks on the many office doors. (Some years ago, a woman who had been employed in one of the offices up there abruptly died late one night in an auto accident. But why would an entity go back, across town, to its place of employment and haunt it?) I went up via the back stairs and entered through the Aerobics studio. (There is another door that leads to the offices area.) As I checked keys and doors in the hallway, I started to hear footsteps on the stairs that lead down to the front entrance. I walked over to the edge of the carpeted, wooden stairs and looked down. I could hear footsteps going up and down the stairs, but nothing visible was there. I remained there trying to figure out what I was witnessing. As I continued gawking at the stairs, the footsteps were getting louder and faster. It wasn't so much the pace and volume that finally got to me, but that whatever was doing this, was coming up to the step right in front of me. I quickly left out the back door to see who in the store was trying to scare me. When I got to the store area, I asked the two employees present what was going on. I was asked the same question by them. They had heard the footsteps too. I looked at them and noticed that, for being on the overweight side, neither of them were breathing hard or sweating. Also, there was no way to get under the staircase to simulate footsteps. I sat at my desk for a while trying to debunk what just happened. Not being able to, I apprehensively went back upstairs to finish my job.
When I returned, the stairs were quiet. As I continued down the hallway to go past all the office doors, I started to notice the presence of shadows at that gap between the bottom of the door and the floor. I got to the end of hallway by the bathrooms. Standing in front of the last office on the right, I searched through the keys I hadn't marked as going to the other doors. I found a key and as I stepped up to the lock, the doorknob started to shake. Why I continued, I don't know. I went to put the key in the lock and a shadow appeared under the door. The doorknob started shaking violently. Immediately there after the door also started shaking violently. I knew no one else could get up there and into that room. I became terrified. I dropped the ring of keys, and leaving all the lights on, I ran! As I sprinted down the back stairs, the cleaning lady for the Aerobics studio was coming up. All I could do was wish her good luck. After getting an escort, I went back to retrieve the keys and turn off the lights. It was nearly three years before I could go back up there alone. While I was having these experiences, others were telling of strange happenings that they were having during the same time period. The activity seemed to come in spurts and happened at random, both during the day and at night.
Also around this time, the Juvenile Detention Center was taking troubled kids and having them do artistic spray paintings on the dumpsters in all the parking lots where we were located. All the artwork on the dumpsters have something to do with the business that's near them. (The music store has a musical note, the bookstore has a book, etc.) The dumpster that was located right outside where I worked has a face of a smiling ghost.
After that, I saw full body apparitions coming into the business through the back door and go through the open door into our delivery area. Each time it was late in the afternoon and I was alone. Thinking it was a customer, I went to help them. (Past the delivery area, there was another room that eventually led into the office chair showroom.) When I got there, no one was to be found. The way the place was situated, there was no way for anyone to get by me, hide, or exit the building. This happened only a few times to me.
My last experience was in the upstairs area. A locksmith had replaced the locks on the back door that goes into the Aerobics studio and on the door that leads into the offices area. My boss asked that I go up and make sure the door going in to the offices area was locked, and that the locksmith cleaned up after himself. When I got up there I unlocked the back door, walked over and made sure the other door was locked; which it was. Over by the back door, the locksmith had left all the old hardware behind. While I was finishing picking up, my boss came in and we conversed for a few minutes. He mentioned he had rented out some of the offices and needed to check on a couple of things. As he walked across the room, I remembered I had the key. I turned around to tell him, but the door was wide open. I thought, "Oh, what the heck." I got up and quickly followed him through the open door. When I told him about the door being locked, he wasn't surprised at all. He just thanked me for not leaving him alone and he assured me we'd be quick.
There have been many experiences by others there. My son has had two; once with my ex-wife. As I was in my boss' office changing clothes after I closed up, they saw a shadow in the area where lots of activity has taken place. Calling out, they thought it was me. Hurriedly, I finished changing and went to see what was going on. They told me where the shadow appeared. I pointed out that there was no way a shadow could appear at that angle, that high up on the wall the way they claimed. After not being able to debunk it, my absolutely skeptical ex actually claims it as a paranormal experience and proudly tells people about it.
Before my final days of employment, I was alone in the store at closing. After walking to the front of the store and checking to make sure the door was locked, I went through the store area and headed out to leave. I got to that area of activity. All I was thinking about was getting home and the evening with my family. Suddenly from right behind me, I felt something and heard a voice up next to my right ear. There was no physical contact, nor could I understand what was said. It was only one syllable. I jumped and then bolted. I never clocked out and set the alarm that fast before. I unlocked the door, got outside and without looking up, locked the door and sprinted to my car.
Other Encounters
While I was still at the office supply place, I decided to finish my degree. One of the classes I took required a research paper and presentation. I was in a trio that wanted to do our project on the paranormal; primarily on the hauntings in our community. Even though each assignment was to be backed by facts and concrete evidence, the professor still okayed our idea. Two of us had past encounters and were believers. The other was fascinated with the paranormal and parapsychology, but was a huge skeptic.
Not surprisingly, the majority of haunted places we went to were nothing but fables or legends handed down throughout the years. One place we experienced paranormal activity was at the Double Eagle restaurant (that has the infamous Carlota Room, where the deaths took place). The quick history of the place was that it was a new home back in 1848. The wealthy Hernandez family moved in. Soon after, the son fell in love with one of the maids. The son's mother strongly disapproved. The mother came home one day, caught the two in bed, and became enraged. While stabbing the maid with scissors, she also stabbed her son. The maid died on the spot, and the son died in the his bed three days later. The hauntings are widely publicized and more on this is easily found on the internet. Anyway, while we were in the Double Eagle looking around and conducting interviews with the manager of 11 years and a few other employees who were there, the three of us had an encounter. One of my classmates was up toward the front with a camcorder when he said something brushed by him. Right after that, the large swinging door to the kitchen, that I was standing next to, started slowly swinging back and forth. As I stared at it, the door stopped swinging, but it stopped where it was partly open. Then I heard my other classmate in the Maximilian room exclaim the temperature had suddenly dropped. I turned my attention away from the door and when I looked at it again, the door was closed the way it should be. We had other (minor) unexplainable things that happened while we were there.
After I receiving my degree, I found other employment. I haven't had any experiences with the paranormal. For some reason, I miss having encounters, even though I'm occasionally having ghostly nightmares about my old job almost 10 years later.
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