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Brandford Hall

Jenn, Connecticut, USA
September 2004

This summer I've been helping out at a friend of a friend's cleaning service, not a bad job for extra cash between semesters. Mainly I just vacuum for a couple of hours a day at Branford Hall in Southington, while the guys do all the hard work.

Branford Hall was once a movie theater and a bowling alley, I am guessing it was gutted around 30 years ago if not more; now it is home to a technical college, various law and medical offices and gift shops. One of the law offices I clean on Saturdays is shaped like a letter U. Usually my co-worker Josh will mop and clean the bathrooms while I collect trash and vacuum. I plug in at the beginning of one hallway, when I reach the bridge I will have to replug the vacuum across the "bridge" of the U. Now these are two long hallways using the entire length of a commercial vacuum cord.

Over a month ago now while cleaning that office something odd occured. I had finished the first hallway and offices that extend from it, but when I went to unplug the vacuum, the plug had been moved to a different outlet, one in a more impractical spot underneath a small table. I figured Josh wanted me to use that plug for some reason and switched them on me, so I brushed it off. Then a couple weeks later the vacuum was mysteriously unplugged in the same hallway, when I mentioned it to Josh he told me little strange things happen like that in the building often. I told him about my earlier experience, and decided it could not have been him plugging in the vacuum elsewhere on me, as the vacuum was on the entire time I was down the other end of the hall but for the 10 seconds I shut if off to bump up over a door frame, and Josh would have had to have been waiting with his hand on the plug for such an opportunity, not to mention the fact that I think he was in the other hallways when it happened. So Josh and I got to talking about creepy things and ghost stories that day, and I showed him a very old wooden beam in the law office coincidentally in a conference room right across from the outlets in question. Now I know this building had been dramatically renovated, but I believe that part of it pre-dated the movie theater/bowling alley, as this wooden beam is definitely not from those days, it is a dark rough-hewn wood and has several gaps in it where other beams once connected.

My boyfriend lives in a historical farm house that was built in 1750, and the beam in the law office looks very similar to the ones in his house. Upon further investigation I did find some more of the old beams down the hallway. As Branford Hall is in the center of town, I'm sure it was once an historical house or town building. I'd love to know what went on there hundreds of years ago.

Jenn, Connecticut, USA
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