I managed to rest until almost two in the morning, at which point I was startled awake by a huge crash. I sat up in bed immediately, looking around for the source of the sound - in my tired state, I immediately thought that Poe had knocked something large off my nightstand. As it turned out, that wasn’t all that far from the truth, as the slightly distorted spirit of a man in his late 50s stood at the side of my bed. How he had managed to make the noise, I wasn’t sure, as nothing appeared to be out of place, but his intense stare let me know that he was the one who was demanding my attention. “Well, good morning,” I grumbled.
The man just stared at me, as though he wasn’t sure I was real. That was something I was used to - especially if a spirit had been around for quite a while, sometimes they had a hard time discerning that someone was actually talking to them, so I pulled off the covers and walked over to the couch on the other side of the room. “I’m sure this must be a lot for you,” I started, “but if you need any help crossing over, or even if you just want to talk through something, then I’m here for you. I would like to get some sleep tonight, however, so I will stay up for…” I glazed at my phone - 2:00 AM, which meant that I’d technically been asleep for around 3 hours, but it felt like I’d just barely closed my eyes. At least if this interruption kept me up for a while, I might actually sleep in, which might make the investigation easier later in the night. While I didn’t particularly have any qualms about nodding off around a bunch of ghosts, it wouldn’t look great for the YouTube audience. Plus, it can’t be great for your health to lie down in a pile of dust from the 70s. “Let’s go with an hour. If you have anything you want to tell me, you can say it before then, or you can tell me in the morning.”
The old man just stared at me, so I stared back at him. His eyes were slightly bulging out of their sockets, and if I looked closely enough at his neck, I could just barely see a light shadow around it. Must not have been a peaceful death, then.
For ghosts, whether or not you can see the signs of death can be a big indicator of what’s keeping them tied to this plane. As far as I could tell (because for some reason, I’ve never taken the time to ask a spirit - usually I’m too busy trying to figure out what they need to move on to ask them any other questions), ghosts can choose how they want to present themselves, at least for the most part. They can choose whether they want to look like themselves at the moment of death, when they were young, or even in a presentation that doesn’t really look how they looked when they were alive. As far as I’m aware, the only thing they can’t control is the eventual distortion they take on. Granted, I’m not even sure if that is an actual rule - it’s possible that by that point, they’ve been away from this plane of existence for so long that they just forget what they look like as a person.
“You know, a lot of spirits have been in your position at one point or another.” I stood up from the couch and walked to the tiny kitchenette area. If I wasn’t going to be going to bed anytime soon (and judging by the ghost’s reaction every time he heard me talk, I wasn’t going to be going to bed for quite a while yet - probably even longer than the hour I promised, if he ultimately started to talk), so I might as well make myself a cup of tea. I popped a coffee mug into the microwave and started selecting my tea from the surprisingly large amount of tea packets they had available. “Lost, stuck, trying to figure out how to get yourself out of this place. If there’s something that’s keeping you tied here, I’d be happy to help, but I can’t help if I don’t know what I’m trying to help with.”
If you encounter this tale on Amazon, note that it's taken without the author's consent. Report it.
The old man made a slight groaning noise and I raised my eyebrows. Making noise of any sort was impressively quick for anyone who hadn’t been able to speak at all. Maybe I wasn’t going to have to stay up half the night after all. “I’m more than willing to help you if you -”
I nearly jumped out of my skin at the knock on the door. I looked at the ghost, just to make sure he wasn’t accelerating at an astounding pace, but he didn’t seem to have noticed the sound at all. The knock sounded again, and I turned toward the door of the hotel room. I guess it wasn’t too late, I thought - a lot of people were in bed by 2 AM, but maybe this was another part of working with ghost hunters that I hadn’t thought about. Caitlin hadn’t said anything about my needing to be awake in the middle of the night, but the longer I was here, the more it felt like she hadn’t told me much about the job at all.
I looked through the peephole to see Liam standing there. His arms were crossed, and his expression was a lot more serious than it had been earlier that day. It was that change that made me open the door for him - I thought something must have shocked him out of his jovial mood.
“Liam?” I asked, cracking the door open. “It’s 2 in the morning.”
“And yet I heard you talking through the wall. I seem to have gotten the room next to you,” he said, pointing with his thumb to the room on the right. “You sounded serious, so I just wanted to make sure there was nothing going on.”
The ghost of the old man was clearly not happy that I was taking my attention off of him. As Liam spoke, I heard the light rattle of some of the other coffee cups in the cupboard clinking against each other. If he wasn’t careful, he was going to knock one of them off, and then I’d have to pay for the damages. Well, I guess technically the Luke and Liam account was going to be paying for the damages, but I wouldn’t be surprised if they forwarded that cost on. I looked over at the ghost, trying my best to give him an “in a minute” look, which didn’t work to satisfy him at all.
“Is there someone in there with you?” Liam asked, trying to poke his head in the door. I sighed and opened the door to let him in - I know they had talked about him being a bit gifted with ghosts, but unless he could fully see them, there wasn’t much for him in my room anyway. “Man, I didn’t know Luke worked that fast.” The joke died on his lips as he saw that I was indeed alone in my room, and he turned to me quizzically.
I figured the best answer would be the truth, so I just shrugged my shoulders and nodded slightly in the direction of the old man who still had his hands in my cupboards. “There’s a ghost in here.”
“No shit?” Liam asked. I was expecting him not to believe me, especially after this afternoon, but he sounded instantly interesting. “Where is it?”
“Over in my cupboards,” I said with a sigh. “He was mad that I was talking with someone else rather than giving him attention, so he’s threatening the glassware.”
“No shit,” he said again, with his voice full of amazement. He walked over to the cupboards and opened them up. “So he’s right in here?”
“Er, no. You’re kind of standing on top of him.”
He jumped back, looking around in the general direction of the old man, but clearly not seeing anything. “Shit, if this is true, we’ve got to start recording right here, right now. Depending on how the Peters Building goes, this might be the best evidence we’ve got. You promise you’re not making stuff up?”
“I promise,” I said, but the ghostly man lightly knocked the cups again, and this time Liam was close enough to hear the movement. His jaw dropped as he stared into the cupboard.
“Shit,” he said again, and I started to wonder if his language was just because he was actually experiencing something for the first time, or if they just did a great job of editing. “We have to get Luke in here, right fucking now.”