A Clean Ghostly Tale

I do not wish to frighten or disturb my dear bloggie frens.

I have had quite a few times of meeting or seeing what I think would commonly be termed "spirits" or "ghosts."

For myself, I think portents, signs, and ghostly communications are through the work of God and His Heavens. We are far from "Biblical Days," but the Bible has many occurences that might be considered "supernatural." I agree with the term "supernatural," as long as the glory and authorship is known to be God's and the term is not used to denote man's handiwork (unless given power by God, such as was given Moses, or Jesus' giving of powers to his Apostles to do things in His name), and certainly never meaning the lowly Devil's handiwork.

Back in March, I promised a tale of my ghostly experience at the adobe building I had been working in before COVID hit, when I first moved back to this city. This is from that post. It is not scary:

The building where I worked before COVID hit has been everything from a jail to a tortilla factory and was built in the 1830's. Now it's a snotty "media" company. I had no idea, when I interviewed, that the structure DID NOT CONTAIN A BATHROOM OR ANY RUNNING WATER. It had one hell of an outhouse, though.

Nor did it have cooling or heating, because the systems broke and the owners would not pay to repair them. 

Adobes have thick, thick walls, but thick walls are not enough when it is 105 degrees out or 30 degrees out. It was miserable, winter and summer.

Inside, the ceiling was palm fronds held in by vigas -- big pine beams. The fronds rained down stuff all the time. Dry rot, I guess. And roaches. Cockroaches. The walls were whitewashed adobe, and the floor was bricks, no mortar, just old bricks on dirt. The floor was like a topographical map, with hills and valleys, and a couple of cliffs, and was very difficult to walk on if you're old like me. 

Windows were old glass etched with the memories of hundreds of dust storms. I couldn't find what, but something was eating the adobe inside, by the corners of the windows. They would eat it, and leave tiny round balls of adobe mud. I mean tiny, tiny spheres, like non-pariels you find on candy, but even smaller. Adobe is reinforced mud, if you've forgotten. They were probably eating the straw that is the "reinforcing" part.

It was haunted, of course. The first thing I felt when I arrived there was that a back portion of the building had an unusual presence, an unhappy presence. And I'll say no more lest someone get scared. Seriously. I will save that tale for autumn. 

I am barely making it under the wire to finish the story!

The back entrance of the old adobe building was not used, at all. Both ends of the building were identical, but one was "the back" and one was "the front." Both the outer door to each foyer, and the inner door, were heavy wrought iron, with the outer part also having a wooden door, too. Very leaky doors. All the interior doors were wrought iron, with no wood. In the "back," the wrought iron doors were locked for the two rooms flanking the foyer on either side, and those rooms were never opened and didn't even have keys on the keyring. 

This place had been a jail, remember. In those permanently locked rooms, dust and detritus were thick, thick upon the floor, and on the bancos (adobe built-in benches) that lined the walls of these former cells. It was hard to see into the rooms; you had to look in through rents in the black curtains that had been put across the doorways inside the rooms. Dismal.

The boss and her husband were scared of that area. The entire building has a dark feeling, actually. They did not go back there, or even look that way. They had no way to unlock it (great, if there's a fire!) and those cells were not included in the portion they rented. That whole area of the place was just a dead zone and they were scared to go into their own business unless it was fully daylight. Their kid was scared of that end of the building. Neither husband nor wife wanted to be the one to "open up" the business each day, and they certainly didn't want to close up alone. They were too spooked.

One of my (surprise) jobs as the new administrative assistant was to sweep the adobe and keep it as clean as possible. I would sweep the whole place every day. I would spray spring water to settle the dust, too. I used beeswax to seal the deep ledges by the windows. I secretly sprayed Bug Stop across the front threshold, and outside the locked doors of the back. The boss didn't believe in using chemicals but I didn't believe in having cockroaches run over my feet and gallop happily across my desk.

When I first got there, no one had swept that adobe in years. It was horrible. It took literal shoveling of dirt and dumping dustpan after dustpan of it into a bucket, then hauling it out, to even get it sweepable. MILLENIALS. What can I say? The young lady business owner always was blowing her nose and miserable, without the sense to think, "Maybe it's the DUST!" Instead, she thought it was PROBABLY MY SOAP OR PERFUME, although her allergic reaction predated me exactly the number of years she had rented the adobe. 

Those millenials never touched the broom, or the mop. Or a dustrag, or a sponge. Or, evidently, shampoo.

I kept feeling very, very uneasy when I would sweep up to that back entrance area. I felt such an angry presence there, and this is before they confessed their fears about the place. I felt eyes looking at me. I had to be careful, because something would give me a little shove if I had my back to the cells. At first, I thought I must be catching the toe of a flip-flop on the uneven bricks, and started to be really careful and walk like a duck, but no, it was a shove! 

This kept happening, day after day. "You have a ghost. And your ghost is mad," I told my boss, who didn't want to hear it. 

"Don't say that! Don't talk about it!" And then they couldn't STOP talking about it. Oh, to be young again! How strange it was to realize I was certainly a grandmotherly figure to them. They were clearly relieved to find someone else could "feel" the strangeness.

One day not long after, I saw someone inside one of the locked cells, a movement behind the rotted curtains. I tried to look in, and then used the broom handle to push the curtain in and look around as much as I could. It was so dark -- no lighting in those rooms and just tiny, block-sized barred windows. But I could feel a presence. A female presence. 

The next day, I saw someone again. And I heard a "Chhhuh!" and three snaps of the fingers, like someone exasperated. 

The day after, my broom wasn't in its place. Those millenials said they had not moved my broom. I believe it. They wouldn't know which end to grab. I walked around searching for it and found it leaning against the inner back foyer doors. I thought, "My memory is getting weird" and went about my sweeping.

I made a point to put the broom up in its place. I NEVER leave a broom bristles down on the floor.

Next morning, broom is again leaning on the back doors. Bristles down. The ghost had no housekeeping sense. And I heard the fingers snapping again. I looked into the cell, and I could see a young woman, wearing a long bunched-up dark skirt and a very fancy colorful Chinese-looking shawl with long fringe almost touching the filthy floor. The colors must have been practically neon, because I could see them in the gloom. Every inch of her stance said, "I am exasperated." What a haughty ghost! She looked like living glass, is the best way I can put it. She held one hand out, palm towards the broom. So disdainful! As if to say, "Get busy, Grandma." And disappeared before my eyes.

And then I knew! She wanted me to clean those rooms! 

I marched over to my boss and said, "We got to get those doors open back there. Your ghost has had it. She wants those rooms cleaned up and I don't blame her."

There was a little broken-down papier-mache-like box, and it was filled with keys. Everything in that building was GRUBBY. I tried so many keys in that box and finally found the ones that opened the iron doors. At last!

I cleaned, and I cleaned. I could feel her eyes on me. "Mother-in-Law" eyes in a young ghost: so critical. I cleaned that day, and then the next Monday I kept cleaning, including the windows of the back outer doors. For a ghost, yes, "I will do windows."

There were so many pieces of broken tumbleweeds in that back foyer. They must have equalled 30 tumbleweeds, had they been reconstituted. Tumbleweeds make me itch very badly, but I wasn't going to stop. 

After I was finished, I didn't get a thanks from human nor spirit. I never saw or felt the ghost again, and I don't know her connection to the building, but I felt she was connected to the jail somehow. Maybe she had had a loved one incarcerated in there and maybe his spirit was still there, still imprisoned, and she didn't want him in all that debris. The owner's allergies cleared up greatly and no one felt a ghostly presence anymore, although the building still feels dark to me. 

COVID killed that job, so that's the last I've been in that building. It may be that God sent me that experience because working there wasn't good for me, and I needed to look elsewhere for work. Maybe it was to humble me and tame my pride, a lesson I have to learn FREQUENTLY and am kindly taught again and again.

Sorry this story was not scary. I do have some scary ones from the more distant past, but always a lesson from Above in them.

I had better put this disclaimer in lest someone be frightened: In that cell, there were several old fly-specked "sidelights" that go on the side of a door frame, propped up against the wall. And, across the 1-lane street from the old adobe was another old adobe with lots of Mexican clothes and SHAWLS and dress forms out front...and you could see a corner of the front of the yard from the back entrance -- so, what did I see? A ghostly apparition wanting cleaning, or the reflection of some wares? Or BOTH?! It was a CLOUDY day, rare here! WoooOOOOoooo Happy Halloween!

Let me know if you've ever felt a strange portent or had a strange happening! 

Kind regards,

Holly, The Olde Dame