When I went to college, I did some work on the school paper, which was housed in one of the older buildings on campus. It had a basement that housed a collection of govenors’ wives’ gowns on the north end and on the south end, a testing facility for the nutrition school. In between the two was a small foyer with snack machines (the reason we went down there) and a tiny little stage with a piano and some folding chairs in the audience area. Now, for stress relief, I would often go down below, get a coke and some chocolate and then pound on the piano. (Don’t be impressed. I only know parts of two songs, and I played those over and over and over again.)
It was always dark down there and extremely creepy. There were proverbial cold spots - not just the occasional cold draft from a vent, but freezing cold pockets of air nowhere near a vent. A lot of times, I’d play for a few minutes, get the distinct impression that someone was watching me, look around and see no one. On two occasions, I heard the piano being played as I walked down the stairs, but when I got there, the room would be dark and empty. Several other women on the paper said they heard voices talking down there when there was no one else in the building (usually late, late at night when we were trying to put the paper to bed).
Once, when I went down in there in the middle of the morning after pulling what was nearly an all-nighter, I went over to the little dress museum. It was almost never open, but when it was, I did like going in. The dresses were all lovely and elegant in their glass cases.
That morning, the little museum was locked up. I glanced in and went over to the coke machines, dropped in my money and got my can. As I straightened up, a reflection in the window of the door to the museum caught my eye. In the split second of my double-take, the reflection I saw was of a young woman in a yellow dress from the 20’s wearing her hair up. After my double-take, I looked at the window again, but didn’t see anything. I walked over to the window and peered in. Yes, one of the dresses was a 1920s yellow chiffon number, but there was no way the mannikin it was on could pass for a real woman. Not only that, but I couldn’t figure out anyway for the mannikin to have been reflected on the glass. The museum room was darker than the foyer, and usually the reflection on the window was of the stair way.
More than a little weirded out, I went back upstairs. As I was climbing the stairs, another little details started bugging me. When I looked in to the museum, the sleeves of the yellow dress were fluttering a bit - as though they were in a breeze. Except that all the mannikins were behind glass with no vents.
Intellectually, I chalk it up to sleep deprivation and an overactive imagination. But even the memory of how the hairs on the back of my neck literally stood up still gives me the heebie-jeebies.