It didn’t take very long for Nancy to tell me all about her husband, Carl, and then about how they had ended up owning the building. They hadn’t meant to buy a haunted building, she said, but they happened upon it in an auction, and they decided that they couldn’t pass it up - it was a good price, and Carl had had high hopes of renovating the building and starting a bed and breakfast. Unfortunately, though, Carl had passed away before they truly got a chance to start renovations, and Nancy didn’t know the first thing about renovating a building, so she had been starting to build up the funds needed to have it professionally renovated.
Nancy told me this last part herself - as soon as he had gotten the message across to his wife, Carl’s spirit started to vanish. That was a pretty common occurrence - once a spirit completes their business, most of them don’t tend to stick around for long. But as Nancy lit up and started talking to Carl, I wasn’t about to tell her that.
“So anyway, it was not too long after Carl passed that I started to notice some odd things happening in the building, didn’t I dear? I thought at first it might have been Carl, but I kept hearing things drop, and Carl had never been a clumsy man. Besides, I knew if he were around and were able to move things, he would have been helping me fix up this place.” She smiled gently, and I almost looked away - there was something so intrusive about seeing her rejoice at talking to her husband again. But it had been part of my life for so long that I had grown used to it. Luke, Liam, and Caitlin had not, though, and they all started fidgeting.
“Oh, you’re all so anxious to get into the house, aren’t you?” Nancy said, misreading their movements. “I’ll be quick, but we don’t want to do Andi an injustice by not telling her what she’s walking into, do we?”
“We don’t,” Caitlin agreed. “We were just hoping to set up some of the static cameras before midnight.”
“Well then, how about the boys go in and get started, and the three of us can wait out here for a little while?” She suggested. Luke and Liam barely waited a heartbeat before running off. Nancy just watched them, shaking her head. “If we could figure out a way to bottle that energy, we’d be millionaires in minutes,” she chuckled. “Anyway, where were we? Oh, yes - before I fully decided to leave the work up to the professionals, I would go into the building after work and do whatever work I could manage. That’s when I started to notice strange things happening when I was in the building. It was small at first - the sound of something dripping when the water had been turned off in the building, a few pebbles hitting the ground, a cold breeze whipping by me when I was working. It was all things that could be explained by being in a building that was slowly falling apart.
“But, I’m not sure how to explain it,” she continued, looking to me as if for guidance. I just nodded along - every story was different, and while I’d heard some that started out like hers, I didn’t want to risk manipulating hers by telling her others. “It’s like there was something in my bones that just knew it wasn’t a normal building. Every time I walked around in here alone, I felt someone’s eyes on me. It got so bad that I even had one of my friends come with me, just to see if I was imagining things, but she felt the same way.”
“Oh, tell her about the people in the windows!” Caitlin jumped in.
She nodded. “That was when whatever was happening in the house really started to escalate, I think. It wasn’t too long after I gave up trying to renovate the place myself and hired a maintenance crew. I immediately started getting complaints that the place was haunted. I know it sounds ridiculous, but there was part of me that thought that they were just imagining things, too! But they agreed to continue working, haunting or not, so every morning, I would drive out here early and unlock the doors for them, and every evening, I would drive back and lock the doors back up. There’s no getting in or out of that building without this,” she said, holding up a large, brass key. “And this hasn’t left my person since Carl died, aside from the occasional ghost hunting group. But I had the keys in my hand when I drove up one morning, and I saw a face in the window.”
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Interesting, I thought. An escalation from small noises to an actual corporeal ghost was a bit unusual, but sometimes construction will raise the nearby spirits - it’s one of the few ghosts myths that actually turns out to be true, but I don’t think they expected it to happen as often as it does. People always talk about it when renovating old buildings, but no one ever thinks of the people who was killed in a car crash coming back to haunt the road construction. “And you checked all the windows and everything to make sure someone wasn’t just staying in the building?”
“Even better, I called the police!” she laughed. “They came and inspected every inch of the building while I waited outside by the one open door, and they didn’t find a thing. One did almost fall through the floor in that one area, though,” she said, her eyebrows knitted with worry. “Do you think Luke and Liam remembered to steer clear of that area?”
“I’m sure they’ll remember after they almost fell through last time, too,” Caitlin giggled. “I wouldn’t worry too much about them - they’ve been in way worse situations than this.”
“That doesn’t instill me with much hope,” Nancy said, but she smiled lightly regardless. “But ever since then, the ghost activity has definitely increased. Workers' tools go missing constantly, only to turn up in weird areas, people see others out of the corner of their eyes, and one worker even claims that they saw a grizzled man who didn’t belong with the crew in the building while they were working. He wasn’t alone that day, though, and no one else saw it, so I thought he was just imagining things until I actually looked through the history of the building.
“It was an office for many years, as I’m sure you’ll see when you get in there. Before that, it was an old clinic - the only one in the area. And that clinic had been around since before I was born.”
“So not super old?” Caitlin said with a grin.
Nancy grinned widely. “You flatter me, dear. But no, not super old in comparison to some of the other haunted buildings. But I also found that, while it was a clinic, there were a couple of people who died here. Mostly, it was elderly patients that were rushed here in an emergency, plus a couple car crash victims and mothers who died during childbirth. There was one death, though, where the victim looked exactly like what the man had described. His name was William Grady, and he died after a farm accident. His wife managed to get him here, but there was nothing that the doctors could do for him.”
I nodded. “That makes sense - quick, traumatic deaths do have the tendency to create the strongest of ghosts.”
Nancy nodded back. “And he definitely is strong! Since the workers got the floors up to code enough that we can walk everywhere except parts of the third floor, I’ve been doing tours to help pay for the renovations. Most of the time we don’t see anything, but Grady is pretty reliable - even if we don’t see a full body apparition, it’s not unlikely for us to see something thrown right in front of us.”
“Have you actually seen Grady, then?” I asked.
“Me? No, haven’t been lucky enough to. Or maybe I should say that I’m lucky enough not to, considering I’d probably never make it back into this house if I did?” She giggled, cut off solely by Luke and Liam popping their head out of the door and waving to us. “They must be ready then?” She asked.
Caitlin looked at her phone. “I doubt it - if they have everything set up by now, it’d be record-breaking. Maybe they just need help with something.”
They stood by the door, waving us over to them, so we walked over. I offered Nancy my elbow so she might be able to better keep her balance on the uneven grass, but she waved it off, making some comment about how she wasn’t that old yet.
As soon as we got close enough to them to be able to see their expressions, I noticed that Liam had a huge grin on his face, and Luke looked more confused than anything. “Guys, you have to fucking see this!” Liam cried, gesturing for us to follow him into the house.