The Phantom of the Archives

Just in time for the Halloween season, I have a spooky and true ghost story to share. I should preface this with the fact that I didn’t really worry about my office being haunted until we recently hired a part time worker. She’s a very nice lady and a very good worker and claims to be a sensitive, meaning she can see auras and ghosts and is mildly empathic. I honestly don’t know where I weigh in on any of those things. I certainly believe there are things going on around us that we aren’t really aware of and I’ve experienced some pretty weird things before so I can’t say that I don’t believe in ghosts but at the same time I’m not entirely sure that I do believe in them.

So, we were joking around one day and she said something about my office being haunted and I kind of laughed and she said she was serious and that she’s been tapped on the shoulder several times and been given a hug at least twice. I just thought “well at least the ghost is friendly” and sort of dismissed it. I always figured it was entirely likely that we had a few energies come into the building attached to the collections. We have something like 120,000 cubic feet of stuff in the building and it’s all important, old, and most of it belonged to people that are no longer living.

I try to not think about any of that while I’m in my office though. It’s isolated, it’s hard to get to, it’s completely windowless, and I’m often the only person down in that part of the building. So, it wasn’t unusual when I found myself alone in that part of the building last Thursday. The secretary in the adjoining office either left early or was working upstairs, the IT guy across the hall was gone, my assistant wasn’t in, and the part time worker went home early. I was in my office doing my thing and I heard footsteps in the storage room next door. It sounded like someone walking very determinedly in heels from one end of the stacks to the other and then back. It seemed a little odd that someone would be pacing back and forth in heels but I didn’t think much of it since people often work in the storage rooms. So, I kept working until a little after five and I heard someone still walking around in there. Since I was the last person in that part of the building I was shutting things down, locking doors, and shutting lights off. I decided to unlock the door to the storage room and tell whoever was in there that I was going home and to ask them if they would make sure all the doors were shut behind them. But… the room was empty. Nobody was in there. Not only that but the moving stacks had been deactivated and there were tarps over them since contractors were getting ready to replace some pipes in there so it was highly unlikely that anyone would have been working in there. Well, that freaked me out since there is only one door in and out and nobody had been through for a while and I had just heard someone walking around in there a few minutes before. I asked one more time (this time a little more plaintively and loudly) if anyone was in that room and got no response. At this point I was pretty freaked out so I told the empty room that I was going to shut off the lights and go home, which I did – as quickly as I could!