Just for fun, on Halloween I used to tell ghost stories to my students at Normandale College, where I taught English. Inevitably, every year a student or two would share their stories with me. One of the most dramatic was from a young woman who had a very unsettling experience while waiting for her father at his office in St. Paul, Minnesota.
The office was on the first floor of a Victorian house on historic Summit Avenue. The entire ground floor was office space; the second floor was an apartment inhabited at the time of the incident by a young couple. Emily, the student, had arrived at the office in late afternoon on a cold winter's day. Emily and her father had planned to meet there to go out to dinner together.
The last vestiges of daylight were fading as Emily let herself into the office. She sat at her father's desk in the front room and began to read. She had been reading only a few minutes when out of the corner of her eye she sensed something moving by the door to the hallway. She glanced over at the door just in time to see it swinging shut. Emily's first thought as she rose from the chair was that her father or some other tenant had entered the building and was waiting in the hallway.
Curious, Emily crossed the room, opened the door, and leaned into the hallway. To her surprise, she could hear muffled voices coming from a room down the hall. It sounded like several people were talking and laughing in the room. Yet when she opened the door to that room, it was completely still, dark--and vacant.
Emily stood by the door for a moment, puzzling over the source of the voices. But she didn't have long to ponder, for from the front end of the long hallway she heard heavy, deliberate footsteps coming toward her. Emily stared in the direction of the sound, but could see no one, just an empty hallway. The sound of the footsteps kept coming nearer--slowly, and as it seemed to her, menacingly.
Emily began to beat a hasty retreat toward the back end of the hallway. As she hotfooted it to the door at the end, she kept glancing over her shoulder. The hallway appeared to be empty, yet the footsteps continued ever closer. When she reached the rear door (which led to the basement), the terrifying episode reached a climax. The instant before she reached for the door knob, she could feel the oak floorboards underneath her feet sag slightly, as if someone's weight were pressing down on the boards right behind her.
Close to panicking, Emily pushed open the basement door, hurtled over the threshold, and slammed the door closed behind her. Fearing that the invisible visitor might pursue her, she half-tumbled down the stairs into the basement. With trembling hands she dialed her grandmother's number on the extension phone down there. She was greatly relieved to hear her grandmother's voice on the other end. Looking anxiously up the staircase, she recounted to her grandmother the series of incidents that had just occurred. Her grandmother was very reassuring and sympathetic, and Emily felt calmer simply hearing her voice. While they talked, Emily could still hear the deliberate, ominous footsteps on the wooden floor overhead, slowly crossing and recrossing the hallway and office areas.
Emily knew that her father was due to arrive any minute, and her coat and backpack were upstairs in his office. Needless to say, under the circumstances, she was not going to venture up the stairs to retrieve them. Finally, after talking to her grandmother for about ten minutes, Emily heard the front door open upstairs and father's quick tread as he entered his office.
Emily hung up the phone and dashed up the stairs and down the hallway. Breathlessly, she poured out to her father the story of the unseen pursuer. However, unlike her grandmother, her father was not impressed. To her dismay, he just laughed and replied, "Well, the next time you run into this guy, please collect rent from him. We can't have anyone hanging around rent-free."
Like many ghost stories, this one has an epilogue. Shortly after this incident, the couple who lived upstairs in the house told Emily that during the few months they had lived there, they occasionally heard footsteps. And on one very scary night, they were awakened to find a tall shadowy figure at the foot of their bed. It vanished when they turned on the lights.
Emily was crestfallen that her dad made light of her story, but she was heartened that her grandma and the tenants believed her. Since that day, Emily has never ventured back into that old house by herself, nor has she had the slightest inclination of trying to collect rent from the heavy-footed invisible tenant.
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