The ghost in the office

The ghost in the office/ By Claire Safran

“Believe them or not, ghost stories carry a thrill, a chill, a fascination that is centuries old. This is the story of a modern-day apparition. It did not haunt the dark corners of an old house; it moved along the corridors of a streamlined office building. It was seen and heard by a group of average people who never thought the supernatural would happen to them. Whether it did actually happen or whether they imagined it, the effect on these men and women was real –terribly real.”

            Nick Ramon looked up from the papers on his desk and listened. There it was again. The sound of footsteps moving slowly past his office. A door opening along the corridor. Then the creak of a chair, as if someone had just sat down.

            Nick was working late again, anxious to finish a report. An hour ago everyone else had left the offices of the Community Development Corporation (CDC), a social-service agency in Brownsville, Texas. Had somebody returned?

            Pushing back his chair, Nick paced down the corridor, looking into each one of the suite’s ten small, windowless offices. They were empty –just as they’d been all those other times that he had heard noises. The front and back doors were locked. When Nick looked out of the window of the reception area, he saw only his car parked in front of the long, low slung building of office suites.

            “You’ve been working, too hard,” Nick told himself. Executive director of the CDC, Nick is a well-educated, level-headed man used to dealing with the hard facts and figures of low-income bousing construction. He knew that buildings creak, even fairly new ones like this, sighning with the wind and groaning as walls expand and contract with changing temparatures. Eventually, he felt sure, he’d find an explanation.

            A few months later, in October 1981, Nick ran a fund-raising festival in a Brownsville park, and afterwards he, his wife Karen, and four others returned to the office to stack the festival equipment and count receipts. It was close to midnight as they sat around the conference table. Suddenly Nick felt a presence, as if somebody was approaching the room. He remembered locking the entry door, but there, framed in the open door way, was a smoky, grey-black apparition. “ It was more than 180 centimetres tall,” he says. “ I could make out the thin oval of its head, the shape of shoulders; then it went straight down. If it had arms or legs, I couldn’t see them.”

            Nick blinked, but the apparition was still there. He glimsed the astonished face of his friend Ruben Quintanilla and asked, “Did you see that?” Ruben nodded. But the figure he later described was undefined, more like a shadow. When they looked back to the doorway, the apparition was gone. The group made a quick search through the offices, but found nothing.

            The next day Nick asked a collegue tp stand in the doorway and take different stances. The fluorescent lighting is the same day or night in those windowless offices, but the men could not recreate the spectre of the night before.

            The following day Nick called a staff meeting. Matter-of-factly he asked, “Have any of you had experiences here that you felt were unusual?”

            Quickly, half a dozen hands were raised. For three hours the staff members talked of sounds, of a strange cold that lingered in a back office, of a dank, musty smell –“Like sulphur,” someone said. “Like a dead person,” said another. Estela Von Hatten, Nick’s secretary, had felt someone standing behind her, only to turn around and find no one there. Yolanda Garcia had been in the women’s toilet when the walls seemed to move –and then a roll of toilet paper flew around the corner and hit her.

            Local lore. Brownsville sits at the border of two cultures, North American and Mexican, and many of its citizens accept the idea of life at the edge of two worlds, this one and the next. Stories are told and retold of restless spirits. When there are strange sounds, people say that a house has “problems.”

            None of the people at CDC had a ghostly experience before the organization had moved to its new quarters in June 1978. Since then half of them had been seeing and hearing strange things that the other half did not. Were they more “receptive?” they had felt embarrassed about telling others. Quietly, two or three secretaries had confided in one another, seeking reassurance that it was only a mischievous little spirit. Now they weren’t so sure. Nick had described the apparition as “greyblack,” and in ghost lore, that meant an evil spirit.

            Once it was admitted to and talked about, the strange activity seemed to increase. One day Yolanda felt the seat of her chair begin to shake. “Estela, come here!” she called in panic, and when Estela tried the chair, she felt the vibration too. Then the empty chair began to move, and the women ran from the room.

            Because the toilet was next to the “strangely cold” back office, the women began going to it in pairs, never alone. Before, staff members willingly worked overtime. Now nobody wanted to be alone in the office.

            As 1981 ended, Father Tim Ellerbrock was asked to come and bless the building. “ Let us pray for any lost souls wandering the world,” he told the staff. Then the priest went from room to room, blessing each office and sprinkling it with holy water. At the women’s toilet, he drew back. Was it propriety, or had he, too, felt something? Father Tim would say later of his visit, “I could sense a sad presence, something not at peace.”

            For some weeks after Father Tim came, there was calm. But early in 1982, at a barbecue in the rear car park after office hours, Ruben’s wife, Dalia, happened to glance over towards the building. “ Look!” she whispered to Ruben. She described a mist, “something trying to take shape,” at the back door. Ruben saw nothing, but he heard noises, “like someone picking up chairs and dropping them.” When they looked again, an office chair that had not been there before was framed in the doorway. “ He’s sitting there watching us!” Dalia whispered in horror. Then a bright light suddenly flashed in the corridor. The party ended.

            Unfinished business. “ The power of suggestion can be awesome,” says Nick Ramon. What he knew was logical struggled in his mind with what he was certain he had seen. He continued to look for explanations. Pulling away a ceiling panel, a staff member probed under the building’s roof. An electronics expert went over every bit of the building with a detector. They found nothing. Nick questioned Andy Cortez, the owner of the building. Cortez had long wondered why earlier tenants had moved out of that suite so quickly.

            If there was indeed a ghost in the office, whose spirit was it? The builing stands on the edge of the Media Luna, or Half Moon, section of town, site of a bloody battle in the 1846 – 48 Mexican—American war. A few years before, when a river-bed was being widened, skeletons of soldiers had been unearthed. Was one of them haunting the office? Some people believe ghosts are spirits of those who died suddenly and still have unfinished business in this world. Nick wondered about the building’s first owner, who was killed in a car crash, and the tenant who had shot himself to death in the car park.

            From the beginning Nick had worried about what would happen if word of the ghost spread. What would people in his profession think? Yet as morale fell and work suffered, he could no longer keep the story from his board of directors. When he finally told them, he could feel their scepticism. But the board gave him a vote of confidence. “We know you’ll find a way to handle this,” they said.

            But what could Nick do? An uncle in San Antonio told him about a local medium and psychic healer. Feeling sheepish, Nick went to see her. The woman placed her hands on his head. “Whatever is there has been there for a long time,” she told him. She advised him to place crucifixes in the offices. “And tell the staff to pray,” she said.

            New beginning. Nick had drifted away from his faith, but now, each morning before work, he recited the 23^rd psalm, “The Lord is my shepherd…” Slowly he built a new inner strength. He started to work late again. When he heard footsteps, he would look around, but he wouldn’t allow them to chase him from the office as before.

            “It knew that it could no longer terrify me,” Nick said. Instead, it seemed to turn against the other staff members who were still frightened. Now the strange events usually took place when Nick was away. A woman saw a shadow move past her, go through a wall, and then come out again. Organ music was heard. Someone else, shaken and scared, told of a cold hand that moved down her back.

            By the spring of 1982 nerves were rattled; friends snapped at one another. As head of the office, Nick had to act. In May he made a decision: they would move to new offices. Publicly, he talked about the need for more space. Privately, he hoped the move “would give people something positive to think about.”

            But as the staff busied themselves with the move, word of the ghost spread, finally reaching a local newspaper reporter. The story, published on a steamy day in June, brought crowds to stare at the haunted offices, and strangers came forward to say that they too had seen the phantom.

            Some wanted to contact the ghost, find out what it sought and put it to rest. Nick gave his permission for a retired US Army colonel to spend a few nights at the office. The colonel felt the ghost’s presence, but when he was unable to get it to speak, he grew frustrated. “If you don’t want my help,” he finally shouted, “then go to hell!” Immediately, he felt a cold terror and, even after he fled the office, the fear kept its grip. A week later he suffered a heart attack.

            Then a Brownsville preacher arrived at the offices, said a prayer and stamped his feet forcefully on the floor. He explained that he was trying to crush the head of a serpent, a form that Satan is said to take sometimes. Returning the next day, the preacher took off his shoe to display two punctured marks on his heel. “A snakebite,” he said.

            During the staff’s last week in those troubled offices, Nick called his people together in the conference room. They held hands around the table and prayed. “We are here at CDC to help the less fortunate,” Nick told them. “And we have to work as a team. Let us think good, positive thoughts. We are off to a new beginning.”

            On moving day, a few minutes after five o’clock, Nick and a co-worker were taping the last cartons when they heard a crash in the back office. They looked at each other. Another crash. Without a word, they left, closing the door and turning the lock on a haunted time.

            The ghost has not appeared to the new tenants of those offices. Nor has it followed Nick and his staff to their new offices, although it has left its mark on all of them. Nick has rediscovered his faith. His people now work together with a special intimacy; they have faced the unknown together. They have quarrelled and learnt how to forgive. They will always remember the moment of communion, when they held hands and prayed together.

            Was there truly a ghost who worked overtime? Buildings do creak and groan. Sounds do carry in the night. And shadows can become substance. Yet more than a dozen people believe they heard ghostly sounds and saw eerie sights. Whether it was a ghost or not, a spirit touched and changed their lives.

”We learn to walk by stumbling”

                                                                                                            -Bulgarian proverb