My Ghost Story
I believe in ghosts.
Let’s get that out of the way right up front.
But I didn’t always believe in ghosts. Sure, when I was a kid, it was fun to believe in spooks. And there was more than one occasion when I managed to scare myself silly by convincing myself there was something lurking in the darkness of my bedroom, or prowling hungrily outside my window on a windy, stormy night. I even used to get pissed off at the Scooby-Doo cartoon show because they’d always float the promise of the gang in the Mystery Machine coming in contact with an actual denizen of some horrifying netherworld… only to cop out at the end and blame the whole thing on some local small business owner.
In other words, I wanted to believe.
Thing is, wanting to believe and actually believing are two very different things. I may have shivered with delicious fright on those dark and stormy nights as a kid, but I knew, deep down, that I was really only scaring myself for the fun of being scared. I never actually saw anything. I never actually heard anything. I never actually experienced anything. So I contented myself with scary movies, scary books, and the truly scary experiences of adolescence.
But then, when I least expected it – and in a place where I least expected it – I found myself at the center of what can only be described as a… well… a ghost story. And when I say it’s a ghost story, I mean it’s a story. None of this, “I was walking through a graveyard on a rainy day and saw a man dressed as a Civil War soldier staring at me. As I watched he turned away and vanished into thin air! The end.” Naw, this story has a beginning, a middle and an end. And an epilogue! How often in real life do you get a story with an epilogue? (Answer: Not too freakin’ often.)
So here’s the story of how I went from someone who wanted to believe in ghosts, to someone who actually does.
“AT THRIFTY DRUG WE FIGHT, WE DO ACHIEVE…”
That’s the opening line of the “Thrifty Fight Song,” and why I remember it I have no idea. (Why they wrote it I have no idea, but that’s for another time.) Thrifty Drug and Discount Stores fed and sheltered me for the first twenty-plus years of my life. Not because I was abandoned as an orphan at one of their ice cream counters, but because my dad worked for them. He worked as a store manager, then a district manager, then a division manager, and has the distinction of being the only human being in the history of the retail business to have earned the love and admiration of the people who worked below him (well, the only one I’m aware of, at least). Possibly the only abuse of power my dad ever engaged in was to get me a job with Thrifty when I was a teenager. It wasn’t the securing of the job that was the abuse of power, it was the fact that it was dumbass me he was securing the job for.
After a few years on the Thrifty payroll I was transferred to the store in Escondido, California. Escondido’s a town about twenty or so miles northeast of San Diego. It’s hotter than hell in the summertime, cold during the wintertime and boring pretty much all the time. The people who settled Escondido in the great migration west must have done just that – settled. Why else would they stop and set down roots in a pseudo-desert armpit when, had they traveled just fifteen miles west, they could have lived on the coast overlooking the Pacific Ocean? It’s one of life’s not-so-great mysteries.
The manager of the Escondido store was Bob Clay. Bob was a homespun guy with a crafty sense of humor and a couple bad knees, causing him to hobble more than walk. Working for Bob was kinda like working for the sheriff of a small western town. There were a lot of good Bob Clay stories floating around, but I’ll give you the one I think sums him up best:
The manager’s office was a small raised area just above the photo counter – more a platform than an actual office. You had to climb a short staircase to get there, and every time you opened the door it’d let out a loud BUZZZ! Being open-air, it allowed the manager a bird’s-eye view of the entire store. One day while Bob was in the office a customer stepped up to the photo counter below him and rang the small silver bell sitting on the counter. DING. When the customer didn’t receive immediate assistance he struck the bell again. DING DING. When help still didn’t arrive he began striking the bell repeatedly, causing a continuous DING DING DING DING DING to ring through the store. Glancing down from his perch in the manager’s office Bob sighed, got up from behind his desk, opened the office door – BUZZZ! – hobbled down the stairs and walked to where the customer was ringing the bell. Satisfied that he was about to get some service, the customer stopped striking the bell, flashing Bob a look of smug satisfaction. Without a word Bob calmly picked up the bell and placed it underneath the counter before turning and hobbling back up the stairs. He opened the office door – BUZZZ! – and returned to his desk, leaving the obnoxious customer to stare up at him, slack-jawed. Do I need to tell you I loved working for Bob Clay?
As much as I enjoyed Bob, my best friend in the store was Tim Downs. The assistant manager, Tim was a big, genial, funny, low-key guy. We hit it off right away, and my wife Mandy and I quickly became friends with Tim and his wife Jen. Tim and Jen lived in Escondido, and we’d often spend the evening at their house, sharing our love for movies and music and the absurdities of life.
It was late one night while closing the store with Tim that everything started. He had some paperwork to finish up in the manager’s office, and since it was against policy for anyone to be alone in the store after hours I stayed with him. I’d finished my closing duties, so Tim suggested I go into the stockroom to check on the shipment that had come in earlier that day.
(A note about the stockroom. The store was a two-story affair, with the stockroom taking up nearly the entire second floor. Shipments would come in the back door, the boxes fed onto a big rubber conveyor belt which would transport them to the upper floor for unloading. The boxes would then be stacked against the east wall to await unpacking. On this night the shipment had been so large that boxes covered the entire east wall, and another tall pile had been stacked parallel to them, creating a space in between – a pathway – for easy access.)
I was upstairs in the stockroom, checking on… oh hell, I wasn’t really checking on anything. I think I was making some half-assed notes on what had come in the shipment, but mostly I was killing time. I was standing in the pathway between the stacks of boxes when I heard footsteps passing by on the other side. The stockroom had a wooden floor, and the sound was unmistakable. I listened as the steps began in the southeast corner of the stockroom – where there was a small room containing plastic garbage cans waiting to be sold – past me, and toward the stairway leading down to the first floor, which ran parallel to the conveyor belt. Thinking it was Tim (I mean, who else could it be, we were the only two people in the store), I called his name.
“Tim?”
No answer.
“Tim? That you?” I called again.
And again, no answer.
Stepping out from behind the boxes I glanced around the room to find myself completely alone. Thinking Tim might be messing with me I hurried downstairs, sure I’d find him waiting at the bottom. But he wasn’t anywhere to be seen. Stepping onto the sales floor I looked to the front of the store… where I saw Tim in the manager’s office, still working. There was no way he could have made it from the stockroom, across the sales floor, behind the photo counter, up the stairs and into the office from the time I heard the footsteps until I stepped onto the sales floor. Add to that the fact that I never heard the loud BUZZZ! of the office door opening. Add to that the fact that the steps I heard moved from the back of the stockroom toward the stairway to the first floor – the only exit – and I’d never heard anyone enter the stockroom after me. I mentioned my experience to Tim, and we went back upstairs to make sure there was no one else in the store, hiding in the stockroom. There wasn’t. We were the only living souls in the place.
SCARING THE PEE OUT OF ME
Now, lest you think (that’s right, I said lest!) that my experiences that night convinced me the store was h-h-h-haunted, and I’d experienced a gh-gh-gh-ghost, let me assure you that was not the case. I remember thinking it was weird, even a little cool, but hardly proof that we needed to hire an exorcist. Things went on pretty much as normal.
Well, that’s not entirely true.
Though I didn’t see or hear anything unusual in the store, I did feel something. If you hung a sharp right at the top of the stairway to the second floor you’d find yourself in a hallway. To the left were a couple storage rooms that were used to dump all the crap (broken fixtures, broken merchandise, broken whatever) that no one really wanted to deal with. To the right was the employee restroom.
The restroom was a tiny little one-seater with a dingy mirror, dirty sink and filthy linoleum floor. And a sign reminding employees to wash their hands, of course. Just slightly nicer than a gas station toilet on a dusty desert road ninety miles from the truck stop hamburger you shouldn’t have had for lunch and 120 miles from the next pit stop. But what the hell – it was an employee restroom, not the Ritz.
Now a confession – I am not a comfortable public urinator. This, oh let’s say eccentricity, has provided me with one very helpful trait. Namely, I can hold my whizz. For hours and hours and hours. Especially if it means having to use a dirty public restroom (particularly if there is a trough involved). This means I very rarely made the trek up those stairs to visit the employee restroom.
Unfortunately my ability to hold my pee is not a superpower, and sometimes it fails me. On one such occasion I grudgingly headed up to the restroom, bladder nearly bursting. Closing the door behind me I took the time-honored position in front of the toilet and began to urinate. Now, this was not your normal whizz. See, one side-effect of holding it for hours and hours and hours is that when you do go, it’s epic. Like draining Hoover Dam is epic. These are the whizzes that take so long you actually find yourself thinking about something else for a minute, before looking down in amazement and realizing “Man. I’m still peeing?” (Followed inevitably by “I shoulda sat.”)
Halfway through my business I began to feel… I don’t know… uneasy. Uncomfortable. Vulnerable. I began to feel like I wasn’t alone in that dank little room. Like I was being watched.
Now I know what you’re thinking, because I used to think it, too. Whenever people tell scary stories and claim they feel like they’re being watched, or they’re not alone, there’s always that skeptical little voice in the back of your mind that scoffs, “How do you feel not alone? How do you feel watched?” And until it happens to you, it’s unexplainable. One reason is because it also feels irrational, even when it’s happening. Of course I was alone. Of course there was no one watching me. But the sensation that I wasn’t, and someone was, was overpowering and intense. And the impulse to flee became all-encompassing.
Unfortunately, I was still whizzing. You know what the longest measure of time is? It’s the time between the moment you feel like you need to get the hell out of an employee restroom, and when your basketball-sized bladder finally empties. I was getting more and more freaked out, and the urine kept coming like it was on a direct line from Niagara Falls. Bearing down didn’t help. Relaxing didn’t help. And cutting off the stream was not a possibility. It’s like trying to pull a mule out of a ditch – it’ll come when it’s damned good and ready.
Stream finally reducing to a trickle, I hurriedly zipped up, my feeling of discomfort at being watched now having grown into a kind of low-grade terror. Reaching for the door I paused, suddenly afraid of what might await me on the other side. Gathering my courage I yanked the door open, breathing a sigh of relief to see an empty hallway. It was everything I could do not to bolt and run out of the room, down the stairs and out of the building.
Needless to say, I didn’t wash my hands.
“STOP TELLING STORIES”
A couple weeks later I was sitting at home when Tim called me from the store. He sounded strange, and said he had a story to tell me – but not over the phone. Always a sucker for a mystery (or just some juicy gossip) I agreed to meet him that evening.
Arriving at his house, Tim sat me down and told his tale. The store had received a shipment that morning. Each week, after the shipment arrived and was unpacked, two employees would stand in a small room at the foot of the conveyer belt with pricing guns, stickering merchandise before it was sent to the sales floor. That day two female employees (let’s call them Sarah and Bonita) were stationed in the pricing room. When Tim came to check on their progress, Sarah said, “Mr. Downs, make Bonita stop telling stories.” Confused, Tim asked what she meant. Sarah pointed to the top of the staircase leading to the stockroom. “Bonita says she saw a man standing at the top of the stairs.”
Remembering my experience in the stockroom – and knowing that neither he nor I had shared this story with any of the other employees – Tim felt a chill go down his spine. When asked what exactly she saw, Bonita said she’d felt like she was being watched (sound familiar?) and glanced up from her work to the top of the stairs, where a tall, dark man wearing some sort of old-timey suit was staring down at her. Before she could say anything the man turned and headed down the hallway… where the employee restroom was located.
Tim did his best to calm the girls by joking with them. Of course there wasn’t a man at the top of the stairs. Bonita must have seen something out of the corner of her eye – that happens when you’re drunk. Ha ha. But Bonita wouldn’t be calmed. She saw the man at the top of the stairs, and that was that.
Then she dropped her second bombshell.
Bonita confessed that she was afraid to go up to the stockroom – especially the employee restroom. She said she always felt like she was being watched while she was inside, like she wasn’t alone. This time Sarah didn’t tease Bonita about her fears, she agreed with them. She, too, hated going into that restroom. She’d never told anyone, but she felt watched when she was in there, also. Tim shrugged this off until I told him I’d experienced the same overpowering sensations – something I’d never revealed to anyone before.
We stared at each other, dumbfounded. If this was just a case of overactive imagination, it seemed to be catching.
ASSEMBLING THE PUZZLE
Tim and I stayed up late into the night, trying to piece together just what might be going on. A haunted Thrifty Drug? It seemed about as silly as finding a portal to hell in a McDonald’s. Ghosts appeared in creaky old mansions or spooky old graveyards, not discount stores with ice cream counters. But the more we discussed it, the more events Tim remembered that might indicate this… whatever it was… had been going on for a while.
That first night the things he recalled were small, seemingly insignificant events that began to take on some level of importance in the light of these new happenings. His first story was about the small room in the stockroom that contained plastic garbage cans waiting to be sold. He and the other managers had, on more than one occasion, opened the store in the morning to find the room had been emptied, the trash cans scattered haphazardly around the stockroom. Grumbling, they’d pick them up and put them back (or, being managers, it was more likely they made someone else pick them up and put them back). This wasn’t an everyday occurrence, so it was just chalked up as one of the many annoyances of working retail and forgotten.
I suggested maybe there was something more going on in that room. Because on the night I heard the footsteps, they had begun in that room, and headed past me to the head of the stairs. The head of the stairs where Bonita had seen the tall, dark man.
Tim then told another story – something he’d always found curious, but had never put much actual thought into. As the keyholding manager who lived closest to the store, Tim was the guy who’d get the call if a fire or burglar alarm was tripped late at night. This is commonly known as a shit job. But, good employee that he was, he’d pull on some pants, toss on a coat and drive to the store where he’d meet the police and/or firemen waiting for him, and let them into the building to check it out.
Over the past few months he’d received a rash of these late night calls. The alarm would trip, he’d let the police into the store, and nothing would be awry. After a few such rude awakenings, Tim began to realize these calls were all coming at the same time – right around 3 a.m. Not once, not twice, but every single time.
3 a.m.
One night he and another employee (also named Dave, and obviously a helluva guy) were working late at the store, struggling to assemble patio furniture for a display that was to go on sale the next day. As they fumbled and grumbled and cursed, trying in vain to get various tabs A to fit into various slots B, they were stunned to hear a loud commotion at the front of the store. They looked up in time to see the front glass doors shaking violently, making a terrible racket, as though someone were pounding on them. Except there was nobody there. The shaking stopped as quickly as it had started, Tim and Dave exchanging wide-eyed looks. They had no idea what might have caused such a ruckus – there was nobody shaking the doors, and it was a calm night outside, no rogue gusts of wind kicking up that would have rattled the glass. A thought crossing his mind, Tim looked down at his watch to check the time.
3 a.m.
Tim paused as he told me his story, a thin, joyless smile on his face.
“Is that the kind of thing that would’ve set off the alarms?” I asked.
“Absolutely,” he nodded.
Having had enough for one night, I got up to leave. Tim and I decided not to tell any of the other employees about anything we’d experienced or discussed. For one thing, there was no need to scare anyone. For another, we wanted to keep the stories and experiences pure. We didn’t want anyone to start claiming ghostly activity any time a can fell off a shelf or their cash drawer was short. If there was something going on, we wanted to get to the bottom of it.
AN INTERESTING DETOUR
A week or so later Mandy and I were invited to join Tim for a get-together at a fellow employee’s house. Her name was Bobbie, and she and her husband lived in a nice ranch house on a quiet dead-end street in Escondido. In her mid-to-late fifties, Bobbie had worked at the store long enough to become a fixture to customers and workers alike. She was kind, gentle and caring – the kind of person you were always happy to see, and who was always happy to see you.
Since I was off that day, and didn’t know the way to Bobbie’s house, we agreed to meet Tim out in front of the store after closing and follow his lead. We pulled up after 11 p.m. to find Tim sitting in his car – the only vehicle in the dark, deserted parking lot. I began to greet him, only to have him raise his hand for quiet. He pointed into the darkened store.
“I’ve been sitting here about twenty minutes, and I think there’s someone in there watching me,” he said.
I turned and peered into the store, but all I saw was, well, store. “Where?” I asked.
“Near the clock,” Tim nodded.
The store clock was hung high on the back wall, just above a small ledge. Okay, “hung” isn’t the right word. It was supposed to be hung, but instead it dangled by its cord, balanced on the ledge. I squinted into the store, where I could just make out the shape of the clock in the murky darkness.
“Standing under the clock?” I asked uncertainly.
Tim shook his head. “Next to the clock. Sitting up on the ledge. Very still. Staring straight out the windows at me. It left when you pulled up.”
“Left? Like climbed down?”
“Like disappeared,” Tim said. He turned to me with a shrug. “It was probably nothing. I’m probably just seeing things.”
With that we climbed into our cars and headed over to Bobbie’s. Even though the hour was late, she and her husband were preparing drinks and snacks for a pleasant few hours of conversation. As they puttered in the kitchen, Tim took Mandy and I aside. He told us he’d learned something about the history of the store, but he didn’t want to discuss it in front of Bobbie and her husband. The reason became immediately clear.
In hushed tones he told us that a previous manager working at the store had died under mysterious circumstances. Seems he’d been a Boy Scout leader, and Bobbie’s son had been in his troop. On a camping trip with the Scouts, under his watch, Bobbie’s son had had an accident and been killed. This manager had suffered a deep sense of guilt and depression over this incident, and some time later had been found dead in his garage. Whispers of a possible suicide spread. Tim wondered if this former store manager might be the spirit haunting the building.
Now, I’d known Bobbie’d had a son, and that he’d died. But I hadn’t known the circumstances. As I listened to Tim tell his story, I became aware of a growing pain and stiffness in my neck. It came on completely out of the blue and became very unpleasant. Our conversation ended as Bobbie and her husband entered with the refreshments. As we sat and enjoyed each others’ company the pain and stiffness in my neck went away just as suddenly as it had appeared.
As we were driving home that night I thought about Tim’s story. While it was interesting, I wasn’t really sure it fit with what we’d experienced at the store. Then I had a sudden revelation. “I know how Bobbie’s son died.”
As Tim and Jen were to leave the next day on vacation I couldn’t verify my suspicion until they returned. But you can bet the day they got back home I was on the phone.
“How did Bobbie’s son die?” I asked Tim.
“He fell out of a tree,” Tim said, “and broke his neck.”
When I told Tim about the pain and stiffness in my neck that night at Bobbie’s house, he speculated that maybe it was her son trying to shield her from our conversation, as he’d always been very protective of his mother.
I call this part of the story an “interesting detour,” because I don’t think it has anything to do with what was happening at the store. It turns out the manager who died under mysterious circumstances was killed while trying to repair a fan. He’d taken the protective cage off to get at the blades, and when he turned it on to test it one of the metal blades flew off and embedded itself in his chest. Now, even if you’re trying to make your suicide look like an accident, I think there are simpler and more effective ways to do it than rigging a fan blade to pierce your heart. I also don’t think he was the spirit inhabiting the store, as Bonita had worked for him, and would have recognized him had he been the tall, dark man she saw at the top of the stairs. Plus, if you were gonna haunt someplace, would you spend eternity at your job? Nah – me, neither.
But even though the manager theory was easily debunked, two interesting things did come from that night. The first was Tim thinking he saw a figure sitting on the ledge near the store clock, staring out at him. Even Tim admitted his imagination might’ve been playing tricks on him… but maybe not. Turns out the store clock was dangling from its cord and resting on the ledge because they simply could not get it to stay attached to the wall. Despite numerous attempts with ever stronger bolts and screws, the damned thing wouldn’t stay put. They’d inevitably walk in the next morning to find it dangling by its cord – so they finally just left it that way. Why is this significant? Because directly on the opposite side of the wall from the clock was the small room in the stockroom where the garbage cans were stored.
The room where I heard the footsteps originate.
The room where workers would find the garbage cans strewn about in the morning.
The other interesting thing was the sensations in my neck while at Bobbie’s house. Like I said, I hadn’t known how her son had died, or any of the circumstances surrounding the event. And while stiff necks have become a common occurrence as I get older, I was in my early twenties at the time, and still reasonably healthy and pliable. For all I know it was Bobbie’s son, trying to send a message to stop a conversation he knew would upset his mother. A sort of “Shut the hell up” from the spirit world.
A GHOST WILL FOLLOW YOU HOME
Mandy and I lived in Vista, in a tiny, shack-like guest house on an acre of property owned by her brother and his wife. Our place was located at the rear of the property, down a long, unpaved driveway. It was quiet and secluded and leaked like a sieve whenever it rained. If our marriage had survived, perhaps I’d think back on it as “charming.” Instead, the word that comes to mind is “hellhole.”
One night Tim paid us a visit – nothing connected to what was happening at the store, just a regular ol’ visit. When he was ready to leave I walked him to his car and we lingered outside and talked awhile.
As we talked I began to get that “we’re not alone, we’re being watched” feeling again. But I figured it was my imagination. I mean, we were standing outside, in the country, in the dark. If we were being watched it was probably by a hungry coyote or an owl perched in a tree above us.
But then something else started to happen.
I started to see lights. Not bright lights, and not electric lights. These were more like glowing lights. And they moved, leaving a dim trail behind them before fading out. At first I didn’t think much of it – I was catching flashes out of the corner of my eye, not an uncommon occurrence in the dark. So I didn’t say anything to Tim.
But soon the lights began appearing more often, and they weren’t only in my peripheral vision anymore. They were right there, in front of us, streaming silently past. Finally a particularly bright light moved from the bumper of my truck to the base of a tree, leaving a dim glow in its wake before vanishing. Unable to ignore it any longer, I looked to Tim. “Did you see that?” I asked.
“That light? Yeah,” he nodded. “It went from there,” he said, pointing to the bumper of my truck, “to there,” he finished, pointing to the base of the tree.
The lights continued to appear. At first maybe one a minute, then maybe one every couple minutes, then maybe every five minutes, until finally they stopped appearing altogether. After they left, the feeling of being watched faded away as well. Both Tim and I had heard theories of spirits manifesting themselves as ectoplasmic lights, and wondered if that was what we’d just experienced. But if it was, why the hell was it happening here, at my home? Could this be connected in some way to the events at the store? I sure hoped not. I didn’t like the idea that my life had become like the end of the Haunted Mansion ride at Disneyland, and somehow I’d picked up a hitchhiking ghost.
But if I had, I hoped it was the little short one with the scraggly hair and long beard, and not the big fat one wearing the bowler hat.
MY FINAL CONFRONTATION WITH THE BEASTS FROM HELL!
All right, that title is complete and total bullshit.
See, that night with the lights is where the main part of my story ends. There was no final confrontation with any beasts from hell. There wasn’t even a priest sprinkling holy water around the stockroom while reading passages from the Bible. Here’s what happened…
… I got transferred to another store.
Not for anything to do with the events we’d experienced. Like I said, Tim and I kept it from the other employees (even though Sarah and Bonita took to accompanying one another on their trips to the employee restroom). Nope, I was transferred because there was an opening at a store closer to my home. Simple as that.
The odd thing is, once I left the store, all reports of strange activity ceased. The garbage cans stayed put in their storage room. The alarms didn’t go off at 3 a.m. anymore. No one heard footsteps, and no one saw tall, dark men at the top of the stairs. Tim seemed to think I may have been the cause of the haunting – not that I actually did anything to cause it, but that my presence may have triggered the activity somehow. I’ve since had a number of other “ghostly” encounters, and my friend Steve has come to the same conclusion as Tim. I’m some sort of catnip to spooks. He believes it so fervently that he wants to accompany me to so-called “haunted” places and see if anything happens.
I’m not sure I buy into that theory. Though I have had a number of strange experiences I believe may have their basis in the paranormal, I don’t have them wherever I go, and I haven’t had one in more than ten years.
In the years since my experiences at the Thrifty Drug in Escondido, I’ve done a small amount of research into ghost sightings, and have come to believe that what we witnessed was a “residual” haunting. This is the type of haunting that runs almost like a tape loop, repeating itself over and over and over again. I believe the man in the stockroom walked the same path continuously – from the small room with the garbage cans… through the stockroom where I heard his footsteps… to the top of the stairs where Bonita saw him… and down the hall to the employee restroom, where so many people suffered identical feelings of being watched. I don’t know who he was, what era he came from, or why he was there. But I don’t think he was there to harm anyone. I think he just hadn’t found his way home.
EPILOGUE
See! I told you this story had an epilogue!
About a year after I’d transferred out of the Escondido store I drove out to pay Tim a surprise visit. As I entered the store I was greeted warmly by Bobbie and Bob and everyone I’d worked with. Tim was running a few minutes late and wouldn’t be able to leave for another half hour or so. I told him I’d sit in my truck and wait for him.
I’d been sitting in my truck for about ten minutes when I became aware of sirens in the distance. I didn’t think much about it until I noticed they were getting closer. And louder. And closer. And louder. I perked up as a big red fire truck screamed down the street – and turned into the Thrifty parking lot, stopping directly in front of the store. I watched in amazement as firemen hopped off the truck and hurried inside. Concerned for my friends, I watched anxiously, wondering what had happened.
After a few moments the firemen walked out of the store, climbed back onto their truck and drove away. I was about to head into the store when I saw Tim exit, eyes wide and white as a sheet.
“What happened?” I asked, rushing to him.
“The fire alarm went off,” he said. “For no reason. No fire, no smoke, no nothing. It just went off.” Then he gave me a cockeyed grin as he shook his head. “You showed up, and it went off.”
So who knows, maybe that was my friend in the stockroom welcoming me back to the store.
Catnip to spooks? You never know.
(Author's Note: The story you've just read is true, but I changed some of the names because putting peoples' real names on the internet without their knowledge or permission is a dick move.)
