Everyday I look for ghosts.
I’m not actually superstitious. Superstition requires a level of caution that just gives me a headache. If I find myself overthinking something, then it’s time to take a nap until it stops. It’s 2020. Who has time to be anything but reckless?
But I love looking for ghosts! There’s something wonderful about an everyday haunting that makes the world that much lovelier and stranger. Those times when you feel like you’ve pierced the veil of the mundane and seen something old and incorporeal dragging its heels in the dark hallway of your place of work late at night.
Those ghosts are the best kind. The ones you only see out of the corner of your eye, that make the funny spooky sounds, that reanimate old faulty equipment in your lab (I work in a lab) and set them off at unexplained intervals, or at unnatural speeds, or make a funny smell.
There are other ghosts that aren’t as fun, but those are less easy to invoke.
I used to work in a lab operating out of a very flimsy set of buildings built in the 80s on the edge of a wetlands that had somehow survived into the 21st century. The only thing nearby was the psychology trailer — the only interaction we ever had with those fine people was the time they wanted to use our freezer to store brains in. When I first started working there, it had been years and years since anyone had used our space, my new boss having just come into a fancy sum of money from two sizable grants. He hired new people to fill the space so it wasn’t just his one miserable graduate student (this man was also haunted, in the way that miserable graduate students are).
There were a lot of ghosts in that place. The walls rattled like they were breathing! The hallway was long and dark and sometimes you could see a figure standing at the end of it! The radio turned on and off inexplicably! The ceiling had raccoons in it! The floor was filled to the brim with asbestos! Forgotten radioactive sources lurked in the storage room by the womens bathroom! Lizards and frogs nested in the hallways! At all times you felt surrounded by a parade of ghosts, industrious and newly awakened. It was absolute batshit fun.
The lab I work in now was built more recently, in the 90s, and is part of a hospital, so it’s not as infested with wildlife, although I think it is infested with hospital ghosts. Hospital ghosts are a different breed entirely. They are much quieter and subdued. They are harder to catch. Lots of things in a lab space make strange screaming noises late at night, and so these are usually quickly and easily explained.
There are just a few encounters I can place. One is the corner by the cold room, basically a walk-in refridgerator. Every time I have passed that small empty corner, I have felt a Presence, and it is malevolent.
Another is a chair in the microscope room. Sitting in this chair requires you to turn your back on a long stretch of empty space. I always feel like I am being watched wen I sit there.
The third happened today. A rare possessed plate shaker. It shook so fast! It wanted to spin. And spin it did.
In a month, I will move to a new lab space. This one will be the newest lab space I’ve ever been in. The building is older, but the space is newly renovated, and I’m not sure what effect this will have on any existing lab ghosts. I’m excited to find out. I’ll let you know if I see any.