True Ghost Tales

Hello my name is Nick, I’m a 43 year old male from Cincinnati, Ohio. I do security work for the Carew Tower in downtown Cincinnati which now is the tallest and one of the oldest buildings here. I’m going to tell you a story here that’s made me a believer of ghosts, before I didn’t believe in that junk mostly Hollywood, smoke and mirrors I use to think until I worked the Carew Tower.

It all started when I started working here six months ago, while being trained by a fellow guard we will call “Ed” he told me that the building is haunted on some of its floors and he added that the 15th floor is where most of its encounters happen. The Carew Tower, if you Google it, is 46 stories and it has a jagged climb up. Well the Carew Tower is famous for suicides dating back to the 1920s, back then the windows opened like they do on your house unlike most high-rise buildings. Now, to try and prevent people from jumping to their deaths, the windows are solid double pained windows. The Carew Tower just recently, in 2005, replaced most of those windows to the modern ones.

Carew Tower

So story has it that the 15th is haunted because back in the 1940s a man jumped from the 32nd floor and landed on the 15th floor where the building extends near the bottom. Ed told me while doing your rounds (rounds being we check every floor top to bottom once every shift to check for lights being left on, coffee pots, safety hazards etc etc.) that I could avoid 15 if I wanted too. I laughed and told him I’ve guarded empty warehouses and tree houses more scary than this. Ed chuckled and said. in time Nick. So with that constantly replaying in my head I kept doing my building rounds with that eerie feeling until I’d say a month ago when I started experiencing things… On 15.

While one night, comfortable doing my rounds, I walked on to the 15th floor with my mind on getting my car fixed when I noticed that a window was opened, hmm being that this was an empty floor and this window isn’t an ordinary window you need a special kind of key to open it with, a key that only the engineering staff would have nor guard or anyone else would have. Hmmm, I thought not thinking a ghost had anything to do with it, “maybe an engineer left it open,” so I closed it and finished my rounds up and went back to the security desk. About an hour later at about 10 pm I keep trying to figure out why that window was open. Could it have been a ghost? I thought. Hmm, no Nick there are no such things as ghosts. I’m going back up to look around to prove that there’s nothing to be scared of and I’m not going to let this silly story keep me from doing my job.

So I take the elevator to 15… “ding” the elevator arrives on the dark quiet floor, only the light from inside the elevator lights up the floor. I walk out and around the corner to go to that window. As soon as I turn that corner, wow that window was open! I stop in frozen cold sweats as I looked at it saying, I know I closed that thing tight. I take a closer look and I see a wet spot near the open window and hand to the all mighty I turn to just get a look behind me I see, about twenty feet away, a figure of a body and light image of what I can remember of an older mans face. I bolt to the stairwell leaving my keys and radio and run down 15 flights of stairs.

The next day I called Ed from home and told him I’m transferring to another building and never been back in there.

Sent in by Nick B., Copyright 2009 TrueGhostTales.com