Tales from the Underpaid: the Haunting of Home Depot
Everybody said that my first Home Depot had a ghost.
I’ve lived in places that I felt were haunted, but free-floating dread is plentiful in apartment complexes where you can still see where the cops rammed the door in, and adolescence is the time of monsters. My high school theater was said to have a ghost, as many theaters do. Her name was Christine and she could be blamed for missing props, suspicious lighting failures, and invoked when some freshman almost said the curséd name of The Scottish Play.
The only place where I’ve spent a lot of time that I’m sure was haunted was that first Home Depot.
No Home Depot building is old. The company started in the late ‘70s and didn’t expand into the west until the following decade, so the 100,000 sqft cinder block big box in which we worked was thirty years old at most. It didn’t have the trappings of a haunted house: creaks were fixed with WD-40 and there was no bust of anybody above any door, no periods of silence in which to creep or be creeped. So for a ghost to make their presence known was a feat unto itself.
Ghosts are supposed to be old-timey, in funny clothes and hats so that we know they don’t belong. How could we know he was a ghost when he wore the same orange apron we did?
There are a million ways to hurt yourself in a warehouse job, and customers get hurt all the time. Forklifts are a hazard, as is piling literal tons of lumber onto steel racking made in China and just trusting it to stand. Many stores have a past fatality they’ll never tell you about; commemorative plaques are bad for business. Especially when they tell the truth.
Our fatalities were predictable: Home Depot offers health insurance but it’s neither good nor affordable. I had one manager die quietly of walking pneumonia after taking zero days off, and another die of undetected stage four ovarian cancer. I saw her eating cup after cup of ice on shift, looking like a ghost already in her pallor, and suggested she get checked out for anemia. Her doctor told her to make peace with her gods.
But neither of them haunted anything other than my dreams and my reminders to seek medical attention. Our ghost was a man, known first to the night crew, only on the second floor of the building. Upstairs was our break room and management offices; customers were not allowed on the staircase at all. The second floor offered a birds-eye view of aisles from a long walkway-gallery, and gave us a place of refuge for our lockers and our lunches.
The night crew said they saw someone up there, someone not accounted for on the manifest of people supposed to be in the store after the doors were locked. He wore a long-sleeve shirt and they assumed he must be management. But when they went up the single staircase to find him and ask him his name, they couldn’t find anyone at all.
Closers saw him sometimes, too. Always up on the staircase or the gallery, too far away to read the name written on his apron. The report was always the same: he was tall and stocky with dark hair. His button up shirt was blue or grey with a standard collar. No one could see his pants, just the orange apron with the square wordmark in the center, the one that had never changed. He looked just like us.
They said they saw him standing up there, walking, or leaning forward with his hands on the railing, looking out over the store like we all did. He didn’t speak. He wasn’t see-through. When someone waved, he did not wave back.
Ghosts are supposed to want something. They have unfinished business or dire secrets they need to tell. Retail employees are supposed to want nothing. We are supposed to remember no insults, be grateful for our low pay, and begin each day anew. “No finish line,” my store manager Dave used to say with false cheer, to remind us that the endless cycle of sales and promotions was going to have to be enough, because no culmination or ending could ever come into view, in this our way of life.
Our ghost wanted nothing, because he was one of us. He never pointed, never wailed, never rattled any chains for justice. No finish line.
I only saw him once. After a closing shift that ended past eleven pm, on a day that had started with a seven a.m. college class, I was so tired I could hardly credit my eyes. Glanced up toward the break room and there he was; looked a second time and he was gone. But I was sure. College was my finish line. I was transferring to a university in the fall. I knew I had to get out of there. I knew that ghost never would.
When our store had been open for twenty years, a local paper ran a retrospective of changes from that time. It was one of the expansion periods of our forgettable exurb; construction had boomed and people thought we might really be something, despite our terrible climate and lack of any culture beyond a public library.
In the photo they ran from opening day, there stood our ghost: tall and stocky, dark hair, strong arms folded over his apron in defiance and pride.
His name was Bill. Five years after the store had opened, he had hanged himself to escape his gambling debts, from the tall rafters of the second floor, using the railing as his jumping-off point. His crew had used the forklift to help the cops cut him down.
I hear they still see him there, sometimes.
(The Home Depot, still extant, 2008-2012)