"Though I know I must be wary, still I venture someplace scary." - Lydia, BeetlejuiceI kinda can no longer sleep at night, thanks to Babesia causing ridiculously vivid and stressful terrorizing nightmares. It's kinda silly for me to get so stressed and weird over nightmares, but I don't think you understand the severity of said nightmares. The reason I can't sleep is all subconscious; the first night I was afraid to fall back asleep because the dream was so gruesome and real I didn't want to experience it again. Now, I don't care about that and I'd really like to sleep but I just can't. So, by request, I'm going to write little segments with my encounters with ghosts* that I've had. All these experiences that I plan to write are things that really happened to me, and are no exaggerated and are written exactly how I remember them happening.
*ghoststar = I don't think I necessarily actually believe in ghosts, as much as I'd actually like to believe they are there. What I believe, ghost phenomenon is simply misplaced energy. The huge amounts of energy in your body has to go somewhere when you die, so what stops it from doing things it already knows? I don't believe that these energy ghosts are capable of harming any one or anything, making direct communication, or interacting. . . with that being said, I love watching Ghost Adventures.
I'll start off with a simple story tonight, and will add more stories during other sleepless nights (which I really hope will stop being a thing soon).
This took place when I was still in Mortuary College, so about 2007ish. The school is a very small school my graduating class had 30 people in it which is typical. The school was set up as a square, a hall that basically outlined the auditorium in the middle with 2 classrooms, a break room, library and offices off the other side of the hallway. On the right side of the school is the embalming labs and garages. There are two labs; first injection labs with two embalming room tables (or was it three?) and a second inject lab with six embalming room tables. Coming off of the labs were double hallways passing a 10 person sized cooler, and into the garages.
It's clean. I'm a good cleaner, and trust me, it's clean.
This school is a bit creepier than I bet you already think it is. The school is the oldest mortuary school in the United States, established in the 1800s. Lining the halls of the school are photos of every single graduating class; from the very first one to the very present, which are pretty awesome to look at. I don't know why I threw it in there, but that's definitely not where I was going when talking about the creepiest-ness.
Everyone knows what first injection embalming is; only really called embalming, it's what is used to preserve during funerals. Embalming only enables to body to with hold its...composure...until after the funeral, when it'll start it's natural break down. Second inject embalming is what is used on cadavers for medical education. These cadavers can last up to 5 years when second inject is done. The mortuary college I went to provided cadavers for the University of Cincinnati. What I'm leading up to is that the anatomical department in UC had limited room (and by limited room I mean a creepy room with maybe 50 or 100 (my memory isn't remembering the quite size) bodies in body bags lining the walls of the rooms, stacked individually on shelves. Because UC had limited room means that my mortuary college used to hold the "overstock" (<-- that sounds so awful) in the garage. I should throw in there that second injections don't have to be refrigerated.
Now that I have all that covered: I used to work in the embalming labs. I assisted with the anatomical program in UC, (cleaned up disrespectful medical students dissections -- they'd leave tools inside them and just a bunch of awful things you shouldn't do if you had any compassion for someone who dedicated their life to help YOU learn... not that I am bitter or anything, no.) which meant working with the coordinators at UC and organize the amount of cadavers we had going to the college. Record keeping, cleaning and all that stuff. One of the tasks I had was being on call. It wouldn't consist of pick-ups, like a regular funeral director would, but consisted on getting the phone call from the teacher on call to go to the school and wait for whoever was dropping off the recently deceased. These calls could happen at any time in night, therefore I had the keys to the school.
One night I got a call at about 2am and headed out to the school. The keys only opened one door, so you gotta enter into the cave of the dead (garage). Walking in there with the bodies chilling in the back of the garage (we had up to 20 at one time) was always a little creepy, but never that bad. You'd have to walk past the cooler, which conventionally always make a loud knock and turn on scaring me right as I walk by, and then into the office (the light switch was in the office, so walking through to get to the office was just feeling around for a while.) The office was in the embalming lab that only had the two tables, but they were regularly filled.
The office has the school's security camera monitors in there, so I could just hang out in the office until I see the pick up van show up. So that's what I did. I decided to head to the student lounge area to grab a drink real fast. The light switches I have access to in the lab only work in the lab. There's no access to any of the other lights in the hallways of the school. As I was walking back from the lounge I heard a knock on one of the school's side doors. I thought it was the funeral home that showed up and ran into the labs to check the monitors, but nothing was there. I brushed it off and relaxed back in the office of the lab.
There are two doors that exit from the embalming labs into the schools hall. The one that goes past the office, and another that is in the second injection embalming room. These doors made with tension so when they are opened they close and lock right behind them.
Thirty minutes go by and still no word from the funeral home. It's about 2:30am now, and I've really got nothing to do. This was not around the cool smart phone era, and we weren't allowed to access Facebook (and Myspace!) from the lab's computer so I played solitaire occasionally glancing at the monitors. I suddenly heard the second injection embalming room door slam, which only could have happened if someone unlocked it and opened it. I actually started to get a little uneasy at this point. Being alone in big deserted building is one thing, but in the complete dark, surrounded by about 15ish dead bodies... it's a very different feeling than just being uneasy.
I check the second injection lab cameras, and low and behold nothings there. I decided to head out into the garage to just check the other doors and nothing. So, I just head back into the lab. At this point I'm watching the cameras intensely trying to figure out where the noises were coming from. Do you remember the movie House on Haunted Hill? The Vincent Price remake that had Chris Katan in it? There's a part in the movie where they are watching a tape and this entity looks at the camera and does a creepy shift shaky move that's devastatingly haunting. As I'm watching the cameras the camera outside suddenly brightens and starts doing these odd jerky movements of light. Of course, House on Haunted Hill being a movie that I watched religiously years before, that's instantly what I thought of. I was freaked. (Okay, not so scary, the next morning I figured out it was a spider web with a spider right on top of the camera. Well, slightly scary because I've never wanted to see that close up to a spider in my life.)
You know, horror movies, when something scary happens you make the stupidest decisions? I knew the stuff I was experiencing was probably over active imagination, but I was still like "I don't want to deal with this" and decided to lock myself in the office until the funeral home showed up with the body. I knew I needed to watch the cameras but I was pretty reluctant, but I did.
About 3am and still no sign of the funeral home. I started to calm down a bit (not that I was at panic attack status or even near it, I can deal with a lot before it even gets to that point, if it ever does) and was watching the monitors. One in particular caught my eyes, the one on the opposite side of the school than the lab. I don't know exactly what it was that caught my eye, but something did. There was movement, not enough to register exactly what I was seeing; it was the same color as the rest of the screen, black, but it was something. I watched it carefully for a bit, and absolutely up and down swear I saw a shoe at the bottom corner of the screen, as if someone slightly walked into shot.
Now I was just getting pissed and annoyed. I get up, walk out into the school hallway slamming the door and am just angry. I walk through the halls with the dingy little light from my cell phone (again before there was an actual flashlight in them), and walked past the case of heads (restorative art heads not real ones, come on now) and through the halls. I get to where I saw the image on the camera and there's nothing there. The second I get to the spot I hear the embalming room door slam closed on the other side of the school. I break out into a run. Then it occurs to me, and I stop by the front doors. The lab manager actually lives right next store to the college. We were close friends who'd play jokes on each other and I figured it out. It had to be him because his normal asshole (silly) self. I start calling his name at the top of my lungs, circling the whole school through the hallways. The second I get to the opposite side of the school from the lab, I hear the lab door slammed close yet again. I cease my circling and taunting and run to the lab. I get to the door that leads into the second injection lab and it's unlocked. The doors are always locked when the door is closed.
My David Bowie restorative art head that was on the best in the class and got displayed in the case of heads at the front of the school!
I start searching, I got through the lab, I go into the cooler and check behind everything (everybody) and head into the garage and start checking the garage. He's no where to be seen, so I circle back to head into the office and first injection embalming lab when someone starts banging on the garage door. Its.... nothing exciting just the funeral home. I let them in and asked them if they passed the lab manager as he left, and they looked at me like I was crazy. Apparently they had been waiting there for about 15-20 minutes. Oops.
I let them in, I get the body logged and checked in, put beside the appropriate embalming table, and do the typical body identifying. To do this, you double check names and with the numbers from the anatomical lab. Before you can leave you have to open the body bag and write an identifying number on the legs of the cadaver (only for anatomical donations, not typical funeral home procedure FYI).
I open the body bag and get to writing the identification number when, of course, I hear the door open in the second injection lab. Screw it, I'm just going to ignore it this time, but I'd be lying if I said I wasn't rushing. Marked the body, closed the body bag and high tailed it out of there. I got home around 3:45ish.
The next morning at school I was talking to the lab manager. I said "You're a dick. You're a flat out asshole dick." He was extremely confused and had no idea what I was talking about. He wasn't even home the previous night, which I later confirmed with another teacher who worked in the lab. When I explained to the manager what happened, he had his usual bullshit smile and said "Oh yeah, that's happened to me before..."
Haha, I must have looked bat shit crazy walking through the school at 3am yelling and cussing at nothing.
I'm not going to reread and edit, so sorry for all mistakes and errors. Goodnight.
