The Ghosts That Changed My Career!
I love #ghoststories. I am someone that completely binges all of the shows on the Travel Channel about ghost hunting. Although I am not an active paranormal investigator. I have spent my fair share of time around ghosts, especially when I worked at a school. I am a believer and that is what drove me into a career into the creepy.
It doesn't matter who you are, when stuff happens that you can't explain, you try to reason with yourself that it is not something #paranormal. When you can't explain it away or when you try to recreate what happened and you can't do it, a majority of Americans are convinced that it is a haunting or something paranormal. In fact, according to a YouGov study in 2021, 41% of Americans say definitively that they know ghosts are out there and another 22% say that they are unsure. 63% of Americans are open to the thought of ghosts and that is why people are less and less afraid to talk about their experiences.
Back to the #hauntedhighschool that I worked at for thirteen years. It was an incredible place for the paranormal. It was so active that a popular west coast chapter of paranormal investigators (that have a current show on TV) used the campus as a place to train new investigators because the campus never disappointed. During the day and on the clock, my experiences were strictly off the books and I was a skeptic, but in reality, that place could scare the tar out of you.
It was not an old property, being built in 2003. The interesting bones and history of the building was that it was a converted #detentioncenter for male juveniles that focused on training from Indian beliefs and the Buffalo soldiers. When we moved on the property, there was an Indian sweat lodge and the landlord required the school to get an Indian blessing before removing the lodge. I researched the property and found that one person had a heart attack in a hallway and died on the way to the hospital, but there was definitely more than one ghost on that property.
I can't remember what my first encounter was with the #ghosts, but looking back, they were always there. I remember painstakingly making sure that all of the lights were off throughout the campus. This was a task that would take over an hour to complete. Then, I would get into my car and drive around the property to have lights in every building on. This was before we knew the place was haunted.
Over the years, it was strange the way that the activity grew for about the first 8 years, and then faded. I can't tell you how many kids would talk about what happened to them in the "X Building" or the "Y Building." As time went by, the staff named all of the ghosts, "Jim" because someone, somewhere in time thought they heard the ghost say that name. But what happened to me?
I was doing inventory throughout the campus one year the day before school started. Walking with another person, they got about twenty feet in front of me. I turned to catch up and I had a door slammed in my face. As if that wasn't enough. On the other side of the door, the person inventorying with me saw a #shadow cross the light under a door in a room that he went in to to find out that the room was vacant.
One time, I decided to drop in on the #paranormalworkshop to make sure they weren't going to wreck the place since the school was (and still is) open. I followed a team of people into an "active" classroom. The group was excited because they felt that me and the person that was with me might trigger the ghosts because we were attached to the school. (That theory did not disappoint.) As we walked into the classroom, one of them handed us an EVP meter so we could ask questions. It had been an eventful day in discipline and this distraction was well worth the trip.
In the classroom there were three small groups of people all using their own investigation devices to see who could record evidence. Once they found out that we worked at the school, the whole room asked us to ask the ghost in the room questions to see if anything popped up. As a believer of the ghosts on the campus, but also believing that 90% of what I had experienced was in my head, I decided to interrogate the ghosts.
"OK, so if you are truly a ghost that lives here all the time, tell me what happened on campus today."
This had been a dramatic day that we had not discussed with anyone. To our surprise, the #EVP responded immediately.
"SEX"
OK, holy cow! Yes, sex had happened on campus today and it was a big deal. A young lady had decided to become "Deflowered" on that day and one of her friends had given her medication to be able to handle it. She had a reaction to the medication, so her friends rushed her to the hospital. So, I was definitely intrigued. This was not my phone app, but someone else's EVP from inside the room. There is absolutely no way that anyone in that room knew this had happened because none of them had any affiliation with the school.
"Thank you. So you say sex happened on campus today. Can you tell me who?"
There is no way that anyone possibly knew this. Suddenly from across the room, the other group asks if anyone in the room knows a XXXXXXX. This was the first name of the girl involved. Right after that, the other group's EVP meter spouted off XXXXXXX, the last name of the boy. This creeped the hell out of me.... and was so cool at the same time.
From that day, I downloaded the #M2 app and have become even more interested in paranormal investigations. This story and thirteen years of other stories like this one just reinforced what I already knew. I love the paranormal.