The Back Room (1)

About eleven years ago, my mother worked at a small town craft store, owned by my aunt. The shop had once been someone's home but that was at least forty or more years ago. I used to hang out at the store after school. It was my job at closing time to shut off all the lights and lock the doors while my mother tallied up the day's sales. It was always a pain finding the light switches in the seven cramped rooms because they (the switches) were in such strange places, most often behind things, but I made it a game to find them every night.

One night when we were closing up, I was in one of the rooms and was reaching for the light switch when it clicked itself off. I thought that was strange so I tried to turn it on again, but before I could, it clicked itself back on, switch and all. Figuring that my mother had shut the light off some other way, I called out to her that it wasn't fair to click the light off for me. As I said that, the switch clicked itself off. Completely unnerved, I ran back out to the main room and told my mother what had happened but she only laughed and said that the lighting in old houses can be very strange. I knew about faulty lighting in old houses, but that didn't account for the switch itself moving too! As we were leaving, we did a quick walk though (as we did every night) to make sure things were ready for the morning. It was then that we noticed the light was on in the same room in which I'd had my scare. My mother scolded me for leaving the light on, and as soon as she finished the scolding, the light clicked off. Feeling brave, I yelled something like "stop that!" and to our amazement the light switch started clicking on and off again and finally stayed on. We quickly moved to click the light off again (which it did for us) and left the building as quickly as possible. Thinking this was strange; we mentioned it to my aunt the next day. She said she wasn't surprised, often as she was closing, the string of sleigh bells on the main door would jingle like someone was coming in but when she looked, the door had not, or was not moving. She'd had other strange things happen too. I should also mention that before this, my cousins and I were often told to occupy ourselves in the storage room as we had a habit of getting underfoot. Theoretically, this was an ideal place for us to be as there was a fridge, a table, a TV and a ton of junk to look at. What was strange was that we always had the feeling that we were not alone. The room had a kind of an unhappy feeling to it that we could never quite explain. I remember that my cousins and I avoided that room at all cost. Needless to say, we had always figured it was our imaginations until my aunt and my mother admitted much later that they too never felt comfortable in that room. To this day I still don't know why all of those strange things occurred.

My aunt sold the business about eight years ago and since then, it has been home to at least three other businesses. She told us several years later that legend had it (but it's best not to believe small town legends) that a woman had once lived in the house and had hung herself in the backroom, but as I said, it probably isn't true. It certainly would explain a lot if it were true though.