Yep.
I’ve told the story before on this board, but I don’t mind repeating myself. In the early 2000s, my boyfriend and I lived at the Baldwin House, a cheap residential hotel on the corner of 6th and Mission streets (widely thought of as “the worst address in San Francisco”). It’s a somewhat dark and eerie place even for an SRO, but that’s beside the point.
On the night in question, I was at home in our room alone, lying on the futon reading The Big Nowhere and smoking a cigarette. I was NOT high at the time, and hadn’t been for several days; also, I was wide awake. Of a sudden, I glanced up from my book and saw a strange man standing in our doorway. There was nothing unsubstantial or ethereal about him, I saw this man as clearly as I see my cockatiel right now. Nor did he look weird or frightening–he was just a youngish black man wearing a red flannel shirt and khaki pants, with a moderate Afro such as was pretty common in the 1970s (think Lionel from The Jeffersons), standing in the doorway looking down at something in his hand.
In the next second, two thoughts came into my head. The first one was that he’d wandered into my room by mistake (perhaps a customer of Raymond the dope dealer across the hall), and then remembered that no, I had locked that door earlier, we always kept our door locked. Simultaneous with that, he looked up and apparently saw me–a startled look came over his face, and then he was gone. The entire event took maybe a second and a half.
I just laid there on the futon with my eyes and jaw wide open and my heart pounding. A ghost, I thought, a freakin’ ghost! I didn’t feel fear, rather wonder and a sense of rare good fortune: lots of people talk about ghosts, and now I’m one of those people who’s actually seen one!
That’s the first part of my true ghost story. The conclusion came a month later, and consisted of three sentences of conversation – I was coming home from somewhere, and when I got to mine and Racer’s room, Raymond was standing out in the hall, deep in conversation with two young women I’d never met. I overheard him say something about “spiritual presences” in the building, and said “Y’know, I think I’ve seen that here too.” Without batting an eye, Raymond said “It was a young-ass black guy, right?” That threw me for a wider loop than the actual sighting had when it took place–that my neighbor knew about this entity or phenomenon too, and well enough to mention it casually.