More Ghostly Annoyances

The wife and I have become enamoured of a new TV show on Netflix. It's scary without a lot of jump scares and occasionally funny as hell. It's called "Paranormal", which really cuts to the chase. Our protagonist is Mr. Refaat, a quiet, somewhat mousy college professor who's a scientist and a very by the book guy about reality and life. The thing is, he's A. being haunted by a demon, and B. has become the reluctant go-to guy for paranormal disturbances in his suburban Cairo (Egypt) neighborhood. If that's not complicated enough, he's also C. deeply in love, though not with the woman he's about to marry. It's in Arabic with subtitles and in case you did not know this, Muslims are just as superstitious about otherworldly beings as Christians are. Maybe more so. They did, for example, bring us the djinn, among other things. 

So in my last blog post, I talked about ghosts, and that I don't see them, or maybe I do see them and I just don't pay enough f_____ attention to know that I'm seeing them. I talked about this with a friend and she pointed out that I've been hanging with a gang of Buddhists since 2006 and meditating quite a lot, and that she thought I could probably use that focus to notice when stuff like that happens. And I thought, wow, applying a religious principle to real life. How novel.

Aside: I hung around with a bunch of Lutherans in San Diego for about 10 years. Tricky, since I didn't believe in God for most of that time, but I grew up in the Lutheran Church and these guys really walked the walk. (First Lutheran Church of San Diego, https://www.firstlutheransd.org/, and if you stop by, tell them I said hi.) Fed meals to the homeless in violation of local laws, set up a free medical clinic, had a lawyer who came in pro bono once a week to help people apply for Social Security or veterans' benefits (I helped), stuff like that. Oh, and they had this church over here, too, and if you came by on a Sunday you could hear some good music and maybe learn something. If more Christians were like that, then those other Christians would be too ashamed to rant about being demonized for being Christian and maybe realize we demonize them because they are assholes.

But yeah, seriously, apply meditation principles to paying attention to small things (since most ghost encounters are quite brief, a second or two, a single sound, etc., and if you're not paying attention, you will miss it). I have that whole ADHD thing about not being able to focus and also being able to hyperfocus, which makes no sense and drives other people crazy but makes Perfect Sense To Me. So I can do that. Just, you know, not all the time and often not when I want to.

Anyway, this brings us to the Office Ghost.

I dunno if the Office Ghost is a common phenomenon, but I've been told by more than one person that our office, at least, has a ghost. People talk of seeing a big shadow going down the hall by itself, and one lady told me about a human-shaped blob of light that came out of somebody's office and went into the copy room, then disappeared. Since I have never seen one, despite being many haunted places, I just figured I was never going to see it anyway and so it did not matter if our office had a ghost or not. At least until yesterday.

(Foreshadowing. Your sign of quality blog posts.)

So I have a small office that's across from a vacant office, and the office to the right is also vacant. The room to the left is the server room, and people rarely go in there, so it's pretty quiet in my neck of the woods. I face the back wall so I can't generally see people coming (except with my little rear view mirror), but I can hear them about halfway down the hall, and I've gotten pretty good at knowing who matches what stride cadence and breath sounds. In particular there's one lawyer named Tom who has a very distinct sound. He often comes up the hall to talk to his paralegal, whose office is a little farther on.

Yesterday I heard him coming and was glad, because I had to ask him something. As he got about even with my office I said, "Hey, Tom, come here a sec." I waited for him to stop and stick his head in my door and say, "What's up, Trouble?" like he usually does. Only he didn't. Which was odd. I looked at my little rear view mirror and I thought I saw him, so I turned around. And, uh, he was not there.

I got up and looked out into the hallway. No Tom. No anybody, for that matter. Now I'm thinking maybe he just didn't hear me and went on by, so I went back to my desk and waited for him to go back the other way. After about ten minutes I thought maybe I just missed him. So I got up and went down to his office and--he was not there. Furthermore, it didn't look like he'd been there all day. His light was off and none of his stuff was there.

Very puzzled, I went back to my office. I had only been back there a minute or two when the phone rang. It was Tom! "Hey, where are you?" "I'm in Colorado. Why?" Uh, that kind of threw me. "Oh, I thought I heard you go by." "No, I just landed in Colorado. I was in Nevada yesterday." And by the end of the conversation I figured out that he hadn't been in the office since Friday and there was no way he could have walked past my office.

And while I was pondering the weirdness of that, I realized that about a week previously, I was at a restaurant getting take-out. The order wasn't ready so I was sitting down, and somebody suddenly whispered "Hey!" in my ear. I was sitting next to a wall, so it's not like that was really possible. And besides hearing "Hey!", I felt the breath against my ear. I turned and looked, but of course there was no one in, uh, the wall. And I mostly forgot about this because they called my order and I got up to get it.

So, maybe I don't see ghosts. But, maybe I've been hearing them all along and I just didn't realize it. I still don't have a logical explanation for what walked past my office yesterday. My wife thought maybe Tom fell asleep on the plane and accidentally astrally projected himself back to the office because he needed to talk to me. Which I guess is possible. But, uh, it's also possible that whatever is haunting our office can impersonate living people.

And I'll be sleeping with the lights on tonight. Cheers!