Around the end of January of 2017, I had to transfer to a new store due to my family moving. The town we moved to was a small farming community in the middle of nowhere, with only a few chain businesses located around the interstate that went through the town. I had only been working there a few months when I found out about the store’s morning ‘dead air’ phone calls. Normally, I worked the night shifts, so for the first few months of working there, I had no idea of any of the problems that had been going on. All the employees who worked with me had about the same hour availability as I did, so I don’t think they knew about the problems either. I worked as an associate in the women’s department, cleaning the fitting rooms and folding clothes.
One day after a holiday weekend, one of the managers asked me to come in the next day before the store opened to help with straightening and folding the merchandise. The shift started out normally, but around 9am the store’s phone suddenly started ringing. The phone was set up so that whenever someone called before opening or after closing, a loud buzzing sound would go over the speakers throughout the store. One of the ladies who worked in the office area answered, and the manager asked her over the radio who it was. Her reply was simply “Dead air”. Noticing that the manager seemed unusually upset by this, I asked her what was wrong. She told me that every morning around the same time, someone would call the store and when they picked up, no one would answer. Apparently, this had been going on for quite some time. As my time with the company went on, I learned about the many odd occurrences that went on there.
At first, it was things that could be just written off as malfunctions. Such as one of the security scanners randomly going off when no one was around it, computers suddenly freezing up and then shutting down, and our scanners that we carried around with us not working. I didn’t think much of it at first, it wasn’t until my co-worker from the children’s department came running to the front of the store one night swearing she heard a child’s scream that I began to suspect anything. At first, I jokingly mentioned that maybe it was a ghost, but we all just put it off to being either some toy or a noise from outside. However, days after the event, she held firmly to the belief that it was in fact a ghost. Had this been anyone else I would have just rolled my eyes, but I knew her, she wasn’t into the superstition or paranormal stuff, and was a pretty tough girl. Soon after she requested to switch departments and changed her hours to only morning/afternoon shifts.
About two weeks after that, despite there being not a cloud in the sky, one night all the lights in the store went out and our electric devices suddenly went out, the only thing running was one of the computers at register 3, the screen went blank then suddenly started glitching out. It looked like it was struggling to reboot itself, with words and window boxes flashing and a loud buzzing noise coming from it.
With no way to run the store, we closed early and went home. Only the night manager stayed, saying she was going to call the electric company to see if they could send anyone out. When I arrived a few days later for my next shift, I heard that no one had seen or heard from that manager ever again. Our general manager gave us the excuse that the other manager had probably stolen stuff and run off. However, none of the cash was missing and since we were a pretty decent size store, no one could be 100% sure none of the merchandise had been stolen. I had even heard from a fellow employee that the manager’s family came forward and said that they hadn’t heard anything from her either.
Strange things continued; our phones stopped working once we stepped inside the building, dead air phone calls began happening more frequently, and our bathrooms kept flooding. Most of the employees just put it off to pranks or the building needing repairs. But something felt wrong, I asked joking if there had been any murders or accidents at the store, but no one seemed to know anything. However, I did learn that almost all the employee had been hired within the last three years. The only person who had been there since the opening date was a janitor who worked through an agency. When I asked her, she told me that the only thing she could think of was an accident when some shelves fell on a little girl, but the strange thing was that when they inspected the shelves, the screws and hinges were completely missing.
After learning all this, I tried my hardest to stay away from the children’s department and only focus on my work. A few months past with the strange things continuing, and I tried to work around it. I hadn’t thought about the accident with the girl until one day, one of the customers tripped and banged their head hard enough to bleed on a display and we had to file an accident report. The manger was showing me how to fill out a report when he got called away by another employee needing an override on the computer. As I was putting the report in the filing cabinet, I suddenly remembered about the little girl and decided to flip through and see if the story checked out. Not only did everything the janitor told me check out, but I also found out that the shelves had heavy kitchen equipment on them (which shouldn’t have even put in that area) and that the little girl had to be brought to the hospital and died there soon after from her head injuries.
Soon after the accident with the customer, our store started having more random inspections and I noticed some of the higher ups visited us more frequently as well. This left most of the manager on edge and things were tense for a while. We suddenly saw more customers getting hurt around the store and stuff either stopped working or broke completely.
Nothing truly paranormal happened until the price changes happened and some of us had to work overnights. The price changes take place between 10pm-6am and after the store closes and the price changing crew are the only ones left, no one is allowed to enter or exit the building. The first few hours went by normally, however, around 3am one of the girls who were working in the children’s department suddenly yelled over the radio that she swore she saw a mannequin move. We all laughed it off at first, then a couple of minutes later another girl said she saw the same thing. Figuring that the platform was probably loose or something, a couple of us went over to see what was going on. We met up with the girls as they were on their way to ask the manger if they could switch departments. As we walked over to the mannequin in question, we noticed that it was in a strange pose. Its head had been turned around backwards and its hands, which had been resting on it’s hips, were now raised above its head, as if trying to shield itself from something.
We quickly fixed the mannequin and started working where the two girls had left off. The rest of the shift was nerve racking. Although we didn’t want to mention anything to the anyone, the rest of the time we were in that department, we kept hearing rattling sounds and a couple times heard footsteps when no one was around.
My last day there was what convinced that there was a ghost haunting the store.
With the holidays coming up, a lot of us sales associates were being forced to learn how to do ship-from-stores. After our instructor demonstrated how to pack the items, she left me to pack a couple of things while she showed the others how to use the devices to pick the items in the store. Our packing area is right next to the storage area, which has these close together, heavy, metal, about 15 ft tall, shelves that were on wheels on a track. On these shelves were heavier merchandise, like kitchen appliances and vacuums, other shelving items like boxed shoes and toys, and any merchandise that was waiting to be packed.
I had pushed some of the shelves to the side while I grabbing some of the merchandise waiting to be packed, when I heard a squeaking sound. I turned around and realized that the shelves were rolling back on me and I quickly put my hands out to stop them from squishing me. As I started pushing the shelves back, I looked up and I swear, I saw a little girl standing on the top shelf, pushing a heavy KitchenAid box over the edge. I woke a few minutes later with my co-workers surrounding saying I blacked out and an ambulance was on the way. I quit soon after that and haven’t returned to that store since that day. I asked the managers to bring any paperwork I had to sign to the hospital (which wanted me to stay overnight to make sure I was ok), and had a friend pick up anything I left in my locker.
That was some time ago and I’ve been trying to put it all behind me since. I honestly hadn’t thought about it in a long while until a few days ago when we had a friend, whose lived in the town for many years, over for dinner. The topic got brought up and I found out a bit of new information. About three years ago it was found that almost all the employees working at the store at the time were involved in backdoor drug dealing. Apparently, one of the employees came to work one day extremely high and began putting up and stocking some shelves. A short while later, they all came crashing down on a little girl which sparked an investigation which got almost all the employees fired and the store had close briefly as they had to hire and train new employees.
I didn’t really talk much to the other employees except a handful, and from what they tell me, there is still strange stuff going on to this day.
Written by ManticElla
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