17. WOMAN IN A NIGHT GOWN
“I watch security cameras for a transport company in Detroit. It was roughly 2:00 AM. I’m watching the cameras and notice a woman in a night gown standing (also barefoot) at the end of the driveway (the facility is fenced and gated). I kept an eye on her, and she hovered there for about five minutes; not really moving, just swaying back and forth. There weren’t too many people working that late, but I let everyone at the facility know there was a woman standing outside of the gate. One driver decided that he didn’t care, he needed to hit the road. When he exited the gate, the woman walked in front of the truck, blocking him. i immediately phoned the police. He blared his horn. She then rushed to the side of the truck and attempted to open his door aggressively. He sped away, leaving her standing there. She continued to stand there, in one place, not really moving for maybe ten minutes. She eventually walked away, never to be seen by us again. The police never showed up.”
18. SEIZURE AND BLACKOUT
“Night shift in a dormitory for sick and autistic children. Reading Night Shift by Stephen King and thinking this is actually not a good idea, the stories made me nervous in a half lit corridor full of dark rooms and strange noises. And suddenly. Some strange rattling noise from one of the rooms. I put the book down, there is this 9years old young boy tangled in his sheets and shaking like hell, eyes inward and mouth wide open and…Bang! Blackout in the whole building. I hear alarms in the distance, that means electricity went out in the district too not just the building. And the fear comes in, I reach for my pocket light, get it in my mouth but I feel my teeth making clinging little noises on the metal Im shaking so much. So that is how I handled my first epilepsy situation around 2 o’clock. After the kid got calm, I run down the dark stairs, speeding trough a 70meters long hall with a lamp in my mouth and half screaming for a nurse. I really thought the boy gonna die it was a grand mal (bigger seizure), but I handled the situation well.”
19. THE EMBALMED CORPSE IN THE DARK
“As an undergraduate at a state university, I got a job on campus as a custodian assistant. The shift was 6p – 2a. They were good about letting you get your max 20 hours/week just about any time in between those hours. In theory we were helping out the full time state employee custodians, but in practice once you knew what to do, you were responsible for a area by yourself. Some of the buildings I worked in were kind of old, early 20th century classroom buildings with faculty offices in between. One building had a nice little movie theater dedicated to silent film legend Lillian Gish, who was born nearby. I think film classes would meet there. In the lobby were stills and posters from Lillian Gish’s movies. I had to go on there, pick up, and vacuum one night a week. In the quiet dark theatre, at midnight, with no one else in the building, the old-timey movie stills and posters of the actors wearing the ghoulish Carnival of Souls pancake make p kind of creeped me out. No big deal just feel a little unnerved with the freaky eyes of the now-dead actors looking on. I graduated and a year later returned for graduate school. During the summer semester I got my old job back and one night got assigned to clean the building with the theater. Later in the evening I go to clean the theater. I unlocked the door and saw some of the posters and stills on one wall in the light streaming in through the opened door way. No big deal. Just a little creepy. I flipped the switch for the lobby lights and just about had a heart attack when I saw Lillian fucking Gish standing a few feet away! It turns out they added a new exhibit while I was away: an incredibly realistic life size wax statue of 90-year-old Lillian Gish. For half a second I didn’t know who was there in the dark, or whose embalmed corpse was in there with me.”
