Hide & Jump

Since the age of one, I have always accompanied my father to work at the hospital. To protect the hospital's reputation I will not say the name. But out of all the years that I have been there only once has anything out of the ordinary happened to me.

My father is a respiratory therapist. His department or lounge is located in the basement of the hospital. Next to his department is the morgue. My father always has a story about it. He use to tell me and my cousin Tavia that if we ever got locked in there to not scream or we would wake the dead. We knew my father was a colorful man so we didn't pay much attention.

Daddy worked a lot of overtime shifts, sometimes he wouldn't leave work until three in the morning. Those were the times that my cousin and I would take the train late at night and surprise him. We would always hide in the hallway where the morgue was. Since it was always such an empty hallway. We would always jump out when we heard him whistle and scare him half to death.

One night Tavia and I were bored. So we decided to call my dad and ask what he was doing. He told us that he was working late and wouldn't get of until twelve o' clock. My cousin thought that was perfect and said "lets pull the old hide and jump trick". I thought it would be a perfect night. So we got dressed and hopped on the train. Within twenty minutes we were in front of the hospital. We flagged the security guard a wave and took our positions.

We giggled at the different faces my father would make at our surprise. As soon as we were done with our cackling it grew really cold in the hallway. My cousin kept tormenting and stretching the idea that when it gets suddenly cold that ghosts are present, I told her to shut up, not believing her colorful imagination. For a twenty year old her imagination grew wild. She kept going though and I finally told her that if she kept talking so loud that she would wake the dead. I mocked my dad's tone of voice and waved my finger in my cousins face like my father would do to us. We both burst out laughing, at that point the hallway was hot again. We finally heard my daddy's song that he whistled. He always whistled a Luther Vandross or Gap Band song. But what was so funny was this time he was whistling Mary Jane By Rick James. I took that as my signal to jump and we did. But to our surprise there was no one there and the hallway grew cold again. The whistling was still going on and the colder it got the louder the song got. Finally I told my cousin to move out my way because I was hauling butt outta there! She followed my league. We got to the other hallway which was mysteriously warm when we heard a door slam. The sound was so loud it made the department door shake. We waited until my father came and told him the story. It took some doing but we finally got him to go look. We grabbed on to an arm as he walked his way towards the morgue door. That is when he turned around and told us to never go in that room again and that we could have gotten locked in there. We explained to him that we didn't go in there and no one we saw went in there. He replied with an "Oh really? Then why is that light flashing green when it's suppose to be flashing red". My cousin and I stood there in amazement.
We never pulled the old hide and jump trick again.