The Pub
UK
November 2006
I'm not usually worried or frightened by anything 'paranormal', I tend to just let it be. However, sometimes some things get me really spooked, as did this.
This happened about 4 years ago, when I was about 20 years old.
I worked in my local pub and over the weekends and some times during the week I would stay over there with the other bar manager. We shared a room. It wasn't strange to us to hear things at night. Sometimes the juke box would come on, sometimes you could hear voices and laughter coming from the bar. I used to like hearing that, as if those people who had really enjoyed coming to the pub still liked to pop in for a late drink!
Every morning, no matter how much you had scrubbed and polished the bar top the night before, you would find three water marks, as if the landlord and two regulars had stayed and had a drink together. Then other things started happening.
When I was in the bathroom there would be knocks on the door. I would call out but get no answer, and sometimes find there had been no one upstairs but me. I would hear running footsteps and a child's laughter. The sash window in the room I stayed in would never close fully and condensation used to build up on my full length mirror. In the morning you could see two small hand prints at the bottom of the mirror. Again, these occurrences didn't bother me, in fact it was quite comforting.
At night I would sometimes feel someone get into bed with me and feel two little hands in the small of my back. However, things started happening that DID bother me.
After locking up one night me and the other bar manager were cleaning up. Now, in the ladies toilets there was a door that opened up into a courtyard, however no one had ever found the key. As I was checking out the toilets, I saw the door handle move. I thought someone had managed to get into the courtyard and called to my friend to look through the window. He didn't see anyone. Then the door handle started moving much more violently and I ran out to my friend. We both watched through the window as an unseen hand rattled the door handle. We took off upstairs quite quickly, put all the lights on and slept in the living room that night. I hated having to go to the toilet at night from that point on.
The bathroom was at the end of a corridor and I would always feel as if something was walking right behind me. I once saw a tall, dark shadow walk around the corner and into the kitchen, but there was no one there. I started to feel scared to be upstairs on my own.
Downstairs, in the bar, it had a much more friendly atmosphere, but upstairs felt oppressive and claustrophobic. One night I woke up to find my sash window open and the tall figure standing on the balcony, looking out across the town. It then jumped off the rooftop. The child I had sensed, in such a comforting way, now began to scare me too. It was a little girl, and it seemed that with the appearance of this dark man she became intensely scared. I would see her standing in the doorway screaming while the black shadow approached behind her. I would hear cries and screams in the dead of night. My friend ended up pulling down the old fireplace that had been bricked up in the room we shared. That did it for I sensed something dreadful in the entire pub after he did that. I never worked or stayed there again.