I just had my first free weekend in a year. It wasn\u2019t planned. I was supposed to go to a Halloween party on the 29th, but then we had a freak blizzard. While, thankfully, there was no accumulation in DC, the psychological effect \u2013 especially after the last two years of horrific winter storms \u2013 was crushing. I looked out at a hard, wet curtain of snow and I knew the weekend would grind to a halt. My friends, who had been planning their party for months, saw their guest list dwindle, and I sat in my bathrobe and allowed myself to devolve into a filthy mess, with a brain dulled by Netflix.
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\nWhen you work over 100 hours a week, mainly at customer service gigs, the value of 24 hours without having to speak or be presentable on any level is incalculable.<\/p>\n
It being Halloween weekend, I started to think about paranormal experiences, which is a great way to spend a cold Saturday night, sleet pounding off the windows, while Netflix is having streaming issues. I\u2019ve only had two\u2026I think. They were underwhelming, all things considered. Mainly because I didn\u2019t react with fear. They weren\u2019t the thrill I\u2019ve always sought. They were inconveniences, at best. One event happened at my dad\u2019s house, after he died, and that\u2019s its own article. The other happened at my weekend job, which has been a hotbed of passive haunting since I started there in April of 1991.<\/p>\n
The house I work at on the weekends was built in the 1920\u2019s and saw a family pass through it before being willed, along with 40 surrounding acres, to a podunk little nonprofit group in 1967. With only about 12 staff members at the time, their solution was to rent the property, both as clumsily maintained apartments and for weddings and other events.<\/p>\n
The property eventually demanded a full time groundskeeper (we say \u201cproperty manager\u201d now) who lived on the grounds and, by the time I started, there were 30 full time staffers, an army of volunteers, and five rentals a week that pushed 800 people in and out every weekend.<\/p>\n
What should have been a quiet, empty house nestled on a dark, secluded lot was a place of constant light, life, and action. Even in the few quiet moments, there was activity. Usually overzealous staff members spending the night in their offices, or, like me, working four shifts a weekend and not able to enjoy the luxury of going home. You can even run into someone on New Year\u2019s Eve or Christmas morning. Staff members like me looking to get away from it all and sit in the silent, old house, surveying the property through the French doors, perhaps pretending that they\u2019re the lord or lady of the manor.<\/p>\n
Or you\u2019d arrive, imagining some alone fantasy time, or with a cocktail waitress in tow, and find an illegal party going on. My favorite abuse of the property is the illegal underground party. As if all the theft and bribery weren\u2019t enough, some of my co-workers have their hands in the illegal event rental business. They charge a fraction of the price, somehow avoid the watchful gaze of the groundskeeper, and have small-scale weddings and other events in the dead of night, or on holidays.<\/p>\n
The underground weddings are sometimes brazen \u2013 taking place during the day, and complete with chairs, tables, and catering. In these cases, the property manager doesn\u2019t even assume anything is wrong. An old trick, really. A hard hat and a clipboard can get you almost anywhere, even post-9\/11. A fully catered event, going the whole nine yards, must be above board.<\/p>\n
Most underground weddings are suitably paranoid, though, and stick to the house, running from 1am to pre-dawn. Some of my co-workers have made a comfortable living off of that trade.<\/p>\n
With this near-constant activity and human presence, it\u2019s hard to think that the old house would be one of the most haunted places in the area. Yet, since I started in 91, almost every single staff member \u2013 and many have come and gone over the last two decades \u2013 has a ghost story of some sort. For many years, I collected these stories, compared them, mapped out hotspots in the house. My hope was to encounter\u2026something. It seems like everybody had a story, and I was always jealous that these day-workers got to tangle with ghosts whereas I was alone with the house every weekend, deep into the night, cleaning up after a rental, and never even got a \u201cboo!\u201d<\/p>\n
The first ghost story I heard, several months after I started, came from my boss. She told of her hair being pulled. Nothing aggressive \u2013 a light, playful tug in the bookshop\u2019s upstairs, corner office. Since then, the shop has slowly lost its space and the upstairs offices have been repurposed, the shop\u2019s old office housing six different people over the last 20 years. All women, and all of them have complained about their hair being pulled.<\/p>\n
A theme I often see repeated are people moving their offices to get away from hotspots \u2013 such as one of the groundskeepers, who gave up his large, luxurious basement office for a second floor former half-bath. He was plagued by a woman calling out his name, and a figure rushing quickly past his door. He started to avoid the basement and, finally, relocated to the second floor hole in the wall\u2026and then quit without notice a month later.<\/p>\n
Lots of staff members have quit because of the ghosts. One woman claimed that she was attacked in the main office, held down by an invisible pair of hands. Another claimed that something tried to push her down the steps. Another \u2013 one of my events co-workers \u2013 was driven out by slamming doors and stomping boots. She called the police and waited for them in the parking lot at 1am. They explored the house, found nothing, and finished the close-out checklist for her. Which was kind.<\/p>\n
Another events co-worker simply fled the house, leaving it wide open all night with the light\u2019s blazing.<\/p>\n
The groundskeeper who replaced the quitter reported frequent encounters. He lived on the property alone, patrolling the grounds late at night (a task that\u2019s since been removed from the property manager\u2019s duties), and, eventually, he stopped checking on the house. Used to be, the groundskeeper would make sure everything was locked and the alarm was set after 10pm each night, but he soon had enough of footsteps, slamming doors, and the occasional voice murmuring from the blackness at the top of the grand staircase in the Great Hall.<\/p>\n
He downgraded his responsibility to just checking the doors from outside, lazy security guard style, and gave that up after a few months when the lights went up in the dining room as he tested the French doors. The only switch was in the room, and he stared at it through the doors as the lights went all the way up, then dimmed down again. In his last year on the job, he said that he would sit at the gatehouse (where the property manager lives) and look up the hill at the house, watching the lights go on and off in sequence from the top floor to the bottom. Once, he was sitting in the company truck in the parking lot and watched this happen. At that point, he just drove away. No questions asked. He\u2019d given up investigating long before.<\/p>\n