Ghost Stories

I have half an hour before my next class and I'm not hungry for lunch because It's 11am and blah blah blah. GHOST STORY TIME!

So last night I was watching The Haunted, a super awesome show on Animal Planet about haunted houses and what not. It got me thinking about ghosts and if I'd ever seen one and the answer is YES. I saw a ghost once... and it was a for real ghost!

Some of you have heard this story before most of you haven’t. But I love to tell it because it’s the only for real paranormal thing to ever happen to me! Yeah, I believe in spirits and ghosts and aliens. How can you not? Human beings hold so much energy and I think that sometimes it just doesn’t go where it’s supposed to; it just chills around the earthly plane to scare the crap out of people. So begins my story… one sunny afternoon…

This happened when I was 16 or 17. I used to work at a retirement home. You’d think that with all the old people dying every week I would have seen a ton of ghosts but I only saw one, one fateful afternoon. I used to work in the dining room as a server. The dining room was big. It held about 30 round and square tables and 4 residents sat at each table, unless they were mean then they sat alone or with one other person. The walls of the dining room were decorated with paintings of plants and pillars to make it look like you were outside and probably to hide the fact that residents were actually just trapped in the retirement home. The dining room was a large rectangle. There were 4 ways in and out of the room. There were the main double doors that led to the hallway to the lobby, the back door that led to the resident rooms, the glass double doors that led to the patio and the two kitchen doors (one in and one out door) that went to the kitchen, obviously. On the back wall there was a server station that housed the cutlery, drink ware, soda tower, soups, ice cream etc. The server station was just a wall basically, a small blocked off section with no doors or windows and we used it to hide from the residents when we forgot their prune juice.

My job as hostess required me to be at work an hour before everyone else to prep everything. This day, I was getting ready for the dinner rush so I was there at around 330 in the afternoon. Residents were not allowed to be in the dining room in between meal times, I don’t really know why but we had to tell them to leave if they were in there. So the setting: Me, alone in the dining room, making iced tea in the server station. I was going in and out of the kitchen through the in/out doors that are right next to each other. At some point, after being in the server station for a while (behind the wall mind you so I couldn’t see the dining room or people coming in or out) I walked super-fast  cuz I was in a hurry, into the kitchen as I walk in I see a man sitting on table #2. I looked at him as I walked through the double door. He was wearing a blue vest with blue pants and maybe blue or white shoes. He had his arms crossed, he was balding and he was looking out the window. He didn’t look up at me or anything. I walked into the kitchen and then thought two things: 1) I’ve never seen this man before so he must be new and 2) I should probably tell him we don’t serve dinner until 5. So I turned right back around and came out of the kitchen and this took approximately 10-15 seconds. SECONDS!! And he was gone.  At this point im not thinking OMG ghost!!! I was kind of confused since he was JUST there and how would a man be able to walk out of the dining room so fast? He was at the furthest possible table from ANY door. So if he had gotten up to leave in 15 seconds he’d still be slowly walking through the dining room. Being the investigator that I am, I went to the front double doors- no one in the hallway. I went to the back door – no one by the rooms. I looked out into the patio-empty. At this point, I started to panic because I had no idea where this dude was and THEN I started to wonder what I’d seen. Finally it hit me that I’d probably just seen a ghost!!! I was way too scared to be excited.

I told the story to Chef (muh boss and mom’s bf) and he just laughed it off. Pretty much no one believed me. But I was sure an old man could NOT run out of that room in the time it took me to literally walk in and out of the kitchen. I knew every resident and I didn’t recognize that guy. And a new guy wouldn’t be playing games with me, would he?! Everyone thought I was joking and it made me mad because I knew what I saw. I could describe the man perfectly! And I can still see him clearly in my mind. He wasn’t a mist, or transparent and he wasn’t hovering or making noises. He was just sitting there staring out the window. I think that’s what made it scarier… that he looked so real? So I told my mom the story about the man I saw. I told her “I saw a man sitting in the dining room with his arms crossed staring out the window and when I went to tell him to leave he was gone.” She looked at me weird and she then asked me if he was sitting at table #2, and if he was wearing blue. I said yes. She said, “That was his favorite color.” And I was like whaaaaaat??? My mom, before working in the dining room at this retirement home, used to be a caregiver. She’s seen lots of people come and go in her time. And apparently she used to take care of this guy until one day he died. I don’t remember how he died but she said that he used to love looking out the window. After she told me that I freaked out a little bit because I knew she wouldn’t joke about that kind of stuff and then I knew it was true. I saw a ghost! And I didn’t even know it at the time!

Looking back I wonder how more scared I would have been if I had gone up to him when I saw him instead of hesitating for a few seconds. Would he have talked to me? Would I have realized he was a ghost? Would I have ever known he was a ghost if I DIDN’T wait to tell him to leave? I dunno! Im glad I waited though because I got to experience something otherworldly and not many people can say that. But, if ghosts look so real, we’ve probably seen way more than we think…

DA END

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