Unexplained Happenings at Townline

Let me start off with a little information about myself. I grew up in a Christian household. My father became a pastor when I was around 5 or 6 years old. I went to a Christian school, and I am now a sunday school teacher at my father's church.

The weirdest things I would experience were not about ghosts, but I would frequently have dreams that would come true. And sometimes they would happen more than once after I dreamed them. It is quite similar to deja vu.

I also have times where I just know something is going to happen, but I have no way of knowing that it is going to happen. The best example of that is when I was much younger, I always had this thought in the back of my head that my mother was going to leave my family. When I was 13 my mother took me aside one saturday and told me she was leaving my father. I was very upset, as most anyone would be, but after the initial shock, I was fine with it, because I had been conditioned to it by the years of that voice telling me that it was going to happen. The reason that is important is because that was my first introduction to the Townline store.

My mother worked for this oil company that also had convenience stores that they owned. She got a very small apartment over the Townline store of this company. There were two apartments over this store, and my mother got the much smaller one because the bigger one was already occupied by a lady.

My mother made me help her move in the day she left my father. I was very close with my father, and I didn't like that one bit. My mother lived in that apartment for around 9 months. Every weekend, I would go and spend with her. I never felt anything in that apartment. After the 9 months my mother and sister moved back in with my father and I in the new parsonage we had just built.

About a year or two after that, my mother became the manager of the Townline store. I will give you a quick setup of the store downstairs. When you walk in the front doors, you are immediately in the store. If you go behind the register counter, there was a deli. From the deli, if you turned left there is a room with the cooler on the left side and a storage room on the right. From the deli again, if you go straight, there is a bathroom on your left and a closet on your right. If you continue straight, you end up in a fairly large back room with an office all the way in the back on the left. The back of the store had once been an apartment for the original owners of the store.

The store had originaly been a car garage, and then turned into a convenience store. Okay, now that you know the setup, I can explain some of the things that happened there.

My mother would be in her office when she would hear someone calling her name. She would go all the way out front to the store part of the building and ask the people on what they needed, and they would tell her that they never called for her. She never got freaked out by this, just thought of it as a friendly ghost.

After my mother had been promoted to supervisor, my older sister became manager of Townline. In the first back room across from the cooler, they had a tall silver freezer. On top of this freezer, they had one of those really big rolls of toilet paper that you see in public restrooms. It had been on top of that freezer for a couple of months, but one day she went into that room and the roll of toilet paper came falling of the top of the freezer and landed right behind where she had just stepped.

She would also be in the deli working when she would see something like a shadow going from the cooler to the back room, but when she would look there would be nothing there.

Now my mother and sister told me about these things, but I never truly believed them. I had never encountered anything I would label as a "ghost". My philosophy was that ghosts were really just demons or angels and I couldn't see any reason a demon or angel would do the sort of things that they told me were going on.

Well, when I was 19, my fiancee and I were looking for a place to live. We wanted to rent a house and we were going to live with my sister so that we could split the rent. Any time we found a house that looked promising, it would already be rented. The large apartment had been empty for a couple of years by now, because the company was using the large living room as a conference room and the large bedroom was being used by my mother as an office. At about the same time we were looking for a place to live, my company decided to rent that apartment again, because they had a brand new office building and didn't need to use it anymore. I didn't want to move in there, but my sister persuaded us to because the rent was really good and I could transfer to that store to work. We moved in right before July in 2000. My now husband and I had just gotten married and we were happy to have a place to go to.

I started working at Townline immediately, and I immediately felt something wasn't right in there. When I would be working in the deli, I would see a shadow go from the cooler to the back room, or I would see someone watching me out of the corner of my eye, but when I looked no one would be there. This happened several times a day every day. Needless to say, I started to believe what my family had told me about this place.

The thing that happened to really make me a believer, happened over two days.

My manager and I had been putting an order away in the back room across from the cooler. There is a tall shelf in that room and we had put up some 5 lb boxes of mixes up there standing up. One didn't fit, so we laid it on its side on top of the others and pushed it all the way back. It was a good 4 inches away from the edge. Later that day, I went into that room to get some bread and the box that we had laid down came falling down and landed right where I had just been. (I was walking so it landed right behind me) Well, that really freaked me out, because I knew that I had put it up there. I would not go back in there for the rest of the day.

The next day, I had 3 cheeseburgers all wrapped up and sitting on the top of the pizza oven. They were not stacked on top of each other but all laying flat. I was about 2 feet away from the oven, leaning over the deli table talking to my manager for about five minutes when she said in a startled voice for me to watch out. One of the cheeseburgers had gone airborne and hit me. It didn't hurt of course, but it freaked me out.

I later became manager of this store and I would be in my office doing paperwork, when on several occasions I would see a shadow go past my office door. Now this is impossible for anyone to walk past my office door because the door opens into my office on the wall to outside. No one can walk by it.

One day I had my door closed and locked, when I heard the handle rattle like someone was trying to get in. I got up and opened the door and no one was there. I looked in the room and there was nobody. I closed the door and it happened again, but this time with more urgency. I got up again and opened the door, but there was no one there. This time I left the door open.

I have some employees who claim that the ghost has knocked all the boxes of the shelves in the back room while they were out front. I have also been told that the last cooler door in the store will open all on its own sometimes.

These have always happened on the overnights. (We are open 24 hours a day) We have taken out the deli and moved our register counter back, but I don't experience the shadow or the figure watching me as much. Maybe they are glad that we got rid of the deli.

Now, let me tell you about my apartment. When you walk in the door, immediately to your right is a kitchen. On your left is a long room that we use as a dining room/ living room. Off the living room on the right is the bathroom,that when you walk into, on your right is the bathtub, on the left is pushed back some and on the left further down is a closet, on the right a sink and then the toilet. At the end of the long room is a 2 foot hallway with a closet at the end. There are 2 bedrooms whose doors are directly across from each other. The one on the left is exactly half the size as the one on the right. My sister had the smaller of the two. In the larger bedroom, there are 2 closets and an air conditioner.

I had never felt comfortable enough to go to sleep in my bedroom alone, but I never really knew why. Once inside that room, my husband and I could not here anything from the rest of the apartment or outside. It was on the backside of the store away from road. One morning, I woke up and my husband was still asleep. I kept laying in bed so as not to wake him up. It was then that I heard three knocks directly over my head. I thought that maybe I had imagined them, but then they happened again. I woke my husband up, but then it stopped, so he didn't believe me. About a month after that, we were laying in bed talking, when we heard knocking coming from over our heads. (Our bed was positioned so that our heads were at the wall that connected with the bathroom. My head in particular was by the place right before the closet in the bathroom.) Well, we thought we were the only ones in the apartment, but thought that maybe my sister had come home. When it happened again, he got up and went out to see if maybe she was knocking on the front door. There was nobody else in the apartment. I started to get a little uneasy.

The bathroom also made me uneasy. Any time I took a bath, I would have this feeling come over me of great sadness, and that someone was watching me. I also had the sense of death. If I took a shower, I only had the feeling of being watched. My sister just told me a couple of days ago, that she to, felt uneasy taking showers in our apartment.

Well, back to our bedroom. It was always hot so we kept the air conditioner (the only one was in our bedroom) on all the time. It worked great. My sister moved out the end of January 2001. The same time she moved out, I started getting long red lines on my left leg right above the knee. The skin wasn't broken, they didn't hurt, and usually faded in a week. I always got them in the same place and I just assumed that it was my husband doing it somehow in his sleep. Well, in March, my brother-in-law spent the night with us one time. He stayed in our room with us because we had a futon couch on the other side. In the morning, my husband went downstairs to work. I was supposed to go down with him, but I was very sick so I stayed in bed asleep. (Quick note: It usually takes A LOT to wake me up when I am sleeping normally, even more when I am sick.) Well, for some reason, my brother-in-law (who was only 15 but already bigger than me) raped me in that room. We turned him into the police, and all that. My husband's family wouldn't talk to us for the longest time because they thought I should have kept quiet about it. Well, my husband and I didn't sleep another night in that room, because of what happened to me. We moved into the smaller room. I was completely comfortable in there. No uneasiness. The red lines on my leg disappeared and never returned!

Two years later, I was thinking about that and I think that something in that room knew what was going to happen to me and was trying to scare me into the other bedroom, because my brother-in-law would not have been able to sleep in the same room if we were in the smaller one.

Once we moved out of that bedroom, the air conditioner could not be used because it kept blowing the fuse. We found this odd, because more outlets were being used when we were in that room than now, but we still can't use it. Also, when my mother had her office in our bedroom, she never encountered anything odd. Her and my sister spent the night in our room one night while we were gone, and they complained that they could hear the traffic all night which was really odd, because my husband and I couldn't hear anything while we were in there. We couldn't even hear the TV in the next room, but they could hear the traffic from across the entire apartment!

The other rooms in my apartment I am fine in. I have not encountered anything else wierd up there since we moved out of that bedroom. The only things that did happen can be explained away rationally.

Thank you for taking time to read about my haunted work place and home.