Ghost Stories

I've never met a person in retail who doesn't claim their building is haunted. It's just a fact of the industry. What it proves is beyond me. Maybe we are all nuts, and working here just proves it.

Through my 20 years, I have encountered every kind of ghost story. Most of the time, I blew them off (the story, not the ghost). I don't really believe in that sort of thing. There may be things we can't explain, but give it time. I mean, the Greeks thought thunderstorms were the Gods fighting, after all. A little bit of time and we finally learned not to golf in an electrical storm.

Some of the stories were simple, like the building in San Jose haunted by the former employee that died in the restroom of natural causes (like what? gas?). Or the supposed construction worker that died on the new building in Fremont just before they opened the doors. Or a personal favorite from my days in Virginia, George Washington haunted the store (uh... yeah.... just because Mt. Vernon is 15 minutes up the road... dude, you are nuts!).


I did have some things happen to me in San Francisco that defy my explanation. I told others about them, and someone finally did some research and found out the building we worked in was used as a hospital/morgue/crematorium after the 1906 Earthquake/fire. After finding that out, PB refused to go into certain parts of the building...

My three encounters got everyone laughing at me, but on two of the occasions, there were other witnesses, so they decided I wasn't crazy. (Well, not THAT kind of crazy. You have to be crazy in SF. It's in the rules.)

During my first week of training with this company, I was closing with an assistant manager who was to show me the operational aspects of closing that store. J and I had some problems balancing the store (we later found our error to be something really idiotic, but common). We were off quite a significant amount, so we let the rest of the crew go home and retreated to the office to find our mistakes. We finally gave up after an hour (the openers the next day found the error) and went into the office to call LP to report it. I sat in the chair next to the LP cameras while J stood there facing me on the phone. After a few minutes, I heard footsteps in the building, which was odd since we were the only ones there. I kept trying to get J's attention, and she kept telling me to shut up (something BossLady is enjoying doing these days). I started scouting the store on camera trying to see if we had an intruder. I then tried one last time to get J to listen to me. She just sighed and turned around to face out the office. Just then, we both saw someone walk by and slam the hallway doors. J came UNGLUED! She slammed the office door and refused to go out. I finally went out, and the hallway door was wide open, and there was no one there.

Freaky.

The next day, people got the story from CD (another assistant that was good friends with J) and J, and it was the running joke. PB started looking into what I was encountering, but couldn't find anything then. After a week or so, it died down.

About six months later, I was relating this story to my team in Fremont (which happened to include BossLady) as we were waiting for one of their rides to come pick them up. As I got to the end of the tale, the alarm at the Circuit City across the lot went off. A couple of weeks later, the closing crew got locked into the store. They blamed me for telling the ghost story.

Later that winter, I had been transferred back to SF and was working an over-nighter as they cleaned the carpets and repaired the stairwell in our store. The cleaning crew finished early, so I had about 3 hours till the stair crew arrived. I took my lunch around 130 in the morning. All the lights in the building save for 2 are on timers and overrides. Those two lights, the office and the break room, were by traditional light switch. The two rooms are right next to each other. I sat down to eat my soup, while talking to BossLady on the phone (who I had started dating a couple of weeks earlier and was off to college). As I was eating, she says I came completely unglued and freaked out. She couldn't figure it out. What had happened was that as I was eating, I looked up to see a hand (I was in the building alone at this point) reach into the room and turn the switch off. I lost it. I ran upstairs, overrode every light in the building and sat on the Mezzanine stairs facing Powell in full view of the windows and people on the street. BossLady stayed on the phone with me for another hour at least.

That story got a ton of laughs from everyone except my resident ghost buster, PB. He started researching it again, and started getting some results, discovering other haunted buildings in and around Union Square. He promised to attack the leads to see what it netted him. He finally discovered the link to the '06 Earthquake. Good times.

A couple of months later, I was leaving with my team after a rough closing shift, when I realized that I had left the Muzak on. The Team Leader (JC) and I went downstairs into that office (again) to turn it off, but not without some teasing from the crew. We came back upstairs at a dead run and JC so white-faced that he glowed under black light. (I personally spent the BART ride home checking my shorts.)

What happened was this. We unlocked the office, and rather than turn the light on, we just walked in to where the Muzak player was. Now above the office door is a vent. As we reached the Muzak, we turned to leave just in time to see a disembodied hand reach at us through the vent.

The jokes about me being nuts stopped that night.

I left that company soon after that, but friends still working there tell me they have had encounters too.

Do I believe in ghosts? I don't know. I do know I saw something three different times beyond my explanation.


This is a site that PB said got him on the right track to finding the history of that building. Check it out as it lists ghost stories by building in each US city. Neat stuff. (Please note, the store I worked in is NOT listed on this site. It's where PB got some pointers on where and how to look. It is very cool to see what is haunted in your area, though!)

http://www.theshadowlands.net/

Happy hunting.