Ghost Stories & Paranormal Encounters

It so happens that across from the restaurant I used to waitress at, there is a building that was constructed in the early 19th century. Now vacated due to structural weakness, at the time it was used by the government’s Lands department. One night myself and my housemate (who worked with me at the time) saw something there I still cannot quite explain.

My housemate and I were on the street outside after the dinner service, waiting for my boyfriend to pick us up. We were idly looking across the road, watching through the windows of the dimly-lit Lands building as a shadowy somebody moved along the bottom floor, and then the top floor, then the bottom floor, then the top floor, over and over. This didn’t seem overly unusual to us, most government buildings were cleaned late at night when the staff and public were not around.

We first started to wonder if something weird was going on when the “person” started to speed up, until he was almost jogging along. I asked my housemate whether he thought we should call the police, thinking that since it seemed like such odd behaviour for a cleaner, it may have been somebody who was robbing the building. We didn’t want to cause a fuss though so we just kept an eye on the situation

The figure had been at jogging speed for a minute or so, and then they suddenly started sprinting. And not only were they sprinting, but they were rapidly moving faster and faster. They seemed to move from the last window on the bottom floor to the first on the top floor instantaneously, despite presumably having to go up a flight of stairs to get there. And then they started moving a lot faster than it would be possible for a person to run. The speed seemed to reach a crescendo, and then abruptly stopped. The person was not there anymore, and did not reappear in the five minutes it took for my boyfriend to pull up. By that point my housemate and I were terrified and excited at the same time, reassuring each other that what we’d seen couldn’t be normal.

We told my boyfriend the story on the way home, but we could tell he wasn’t really sure whether to believe us. He does know a bit about local history though, and he told us that the building had originally been our city’s first hospital. Thinking he was making fun of us, my housemate and I checked the internet when we got home and discovered that it was true – the building had been a hospital for just under fifty years in the 19th century.

Since then I’ve done a little digging into the history of the building. The most persistent legend that pops up around it is that a surgeon who practiced there was in the habit of dissecting the recently deceased down in the morgue, against the wishes of their families. I’m not necessarily willing to believe that, but there is an eerie postscript to our experience.

Recently, the city council announced its intentions to knock down the building and erect a new cultural centre there. They released an information pack about their plans, looking for public feedback, and given my history with the place I downloaded it from their website. Included in the pack was a plan of the existing building, the one that my housemate and I saw our shadowy figure in. I was most interested to note that while a hall spans the street side of the bottom floor, on the top floor there are several rooms against the windows – all divided by thick walls. It appears our figure can walk through them too.

Sent in by Ella, Copyright 2011 TrueGhostTales.com