When it comes to a certain locale where one might possibly encounter a ghost, a haunted house may tend to readily come to mind for most people, and not too many of them may readily think of their own workplace in this regard. Yet there have been a fair number of reported instances in which people say they’ve spontaneously experienced ghost sightings in their own work environment - figures which often seemed to resemble a past (or even present) co-worker of theirs. Here are three examples which seem fitting to share on the occasion of the Labor Day holiday:
Store Specter
Many people strive to not be late for work, and that was the aim of a woman in Canada, for as she put it:
I had been reprimanded for taking off too much time and I didn’t want to be late. But that morning, after a sleepless night, I was still in bed at 8:30, the time I was supposed to report for work. My guilty knowledge that the store was short-staffed would not let me stay in bed for long, but when I finally reported to [the store] at eleven, I went virtually unnoticed even when taking my place as clerk-cashier on the second floor. Soon, however, the manager came up to me. He had seen me come in at 8:30, but then he had been unable to find me. “But I just came in a few minutes ago,” I explained. He looked at me as if I needed psychiatric attention and stalked away. At lunch time I joked about Mr. Keeler’s strange delusion with two friends. To my utter amazement, both Jessie and Trudy corroborated his statement and reported seeing me come in. Rose, the downstairs cashier, too, insisted that I had entered at 8:30, and that she had greeted me as I came in, “dressed as you usually are.” But my daughter-in-law confirmed that she had seen me in bed at 8:30. [1, pp. 127 - 128]
Some PDN readers might recall an article by Cat Ward in which she introduced a kind of spectral encounter known in Scandinavia as vardøgr, which refers to a premonitory phantom noise or vision that precedes someone’s arrival at certain place (for this reason, they are also sometimes simply called “arrival apparitions”). The preceding account represents another such instance of vardøgr, as the woman’s spectral figure seemed to represent a premonitory vision of her actual arrival at the store about two and half hours later.
Office Ghost Sightings
Another example, which comes from a small collection of cases gathered by University of Virginia psychiatrist Ian Stevenson [2], tells of a spectral encounter that occurred close to the time when a former employee of a Welsh company had died. The employee - whom we’ll refer to here as “Trevor” - had abruptly left the company some months before and was in the hospital when his spectral figure was apparently seen by his former co-worker, a woman we'll call “Rhonda.”
This encounter represents an instance of a spectral figure being seen in the daytime, as it occurred on a July afternoon in 1989. Rhonda was meeting with a fellow employee in her office when the phone rang, causing her to get up and walk over to her desk on the far side of the room to answer it. The far office wall by her desk was made up of a full plate glass window, which looked out onto a outside walkway that led up from the parking area to the front entrance of the office building. While she was talking on the phone, Rhonda glanced out the window and happened to notice a man walking by on the walkway who looked notably like Trevor: He was dressed in navy blue sailing attire, and she especially seemed to recognize his characteristic “sailor’s gait,” which he’d developed in his active pursuit of sailing. She also noticed that he seemed to be in a hurry and that he “...looked very troubled. He appeared perfectly solid, and I did not attract his attention through the window. I thought no more about this, it was nothing unusual” [2, p. 355]. It was only the next day that Rhonda learned from an office secretary that Trevor was in the hospital and had died the day before - the very day she’d apparently seen him in spectral form.
Of course, there’s the chance that Rhonda had simply mistaken someone else for Trevor, although that seems rather unlikely given the fairly close distance at which she’d seen the figure. It also seems unlikely that she’d seen Trevor in the flesh because his medical records indicated that he’d been lying unconscious in his hospital bed throughout the course of that particular day.
Assuming on this basis that Rhonda had indeed seen Trevor in spectral form, her encounter would seem to represent a “crisis apparition,” in which the witness sees the spectral figure of someone they know at a time when that particular someone has been in an accident, has suffered a serious illness, or has had a close brush with death (see this PDN article by Richard Clements for more on this particular kind of spectral encounter).
Ghost Sightings in a Haunted Hallway
In a third example, involving a reputedly haunted radio station [3], five employees all reported having similar apparitional experiences (at separate times) in the vicinity of a certain hallway area in the station. Each of the employees reported seeing the shadowy spectral figure of a man, with four of them describing him as being nearly 6 feet tall, and being fairly heavyset (around 180 - 200 pounds). Based on the way it was dressed and the way it seemed to “slump its shoulders,” two of the employees thought the figure resembled a former co-worker they’d known at the station, who’d left his job there a few years before and had died of a heart attack several months after leaving. Although there wasn’t really anything about this particular hallway which made it visually stand out from any others in the station, it turns out that the man’s office had been located right off the hallway where these employees had their encounters.
A Role for Memory in Some Ghostly Encounters?
Although they occurred in different contexts, one particularly notable thing about all of these examples is that the spectral figures had all exhibited certain details in their appearance which specifically reminded the witnesses of a particular co-worker they knew: In “Store Specter,” the Canadian woman’s co-workers had told her that the spectral figure they’d seen of her had appeared “dressed as you usually are.” The spectral figure of Trevor that Rhonda had seen in “Office Sighting” was recognized from his “sailor’s gait” (and perhaps partly by his sailing attire, as well). And in “A Haunted Hallway,” some of the radio station employees seemed to recognize their former co-worker’s figure from his attire and posture.
This seems to suggest that each witness had perceived the spectral figure of their co-worker in a way that they were accustomed to seeing that co-worker look. As a specific feature to focus on, let’s take the way some of the figures were dressed. The Canadian woman's co-workers said they saw the woman’s figure in the same work attire that they were typically used to seeing her wear everyday. This turns out to be something found fairly commonly in other apparitional sightings, from those reported as far back as the Victorian Era, all the way up to those reported in the modern time.
For instance, in discussing the features of ghostly figures seen back in the 19th century, psychical researcher Frederic Myers noted that “...it is usual for a witness to say ‘he appeared to me in the dress he habitually wore, and in which I knew him’” [4, Vol. II, p. 295]. Similarly, in talking about ghosts of the dead seen in more modern times, parapsychologist Richard Broughton noted that “...the clothing that the ghost appeared in was what the deceased customarily wore, not necessarily those in which the person died” [5, p. 150]. This similarity may offer us a hint that some sightings of spectral figures (particularly those of a familiar person) may be mediated in part by the memories that the witness has of the person whose spectral figure is seen [6 - 8]. If that is so, then this suggests that memory is not just handy for remembering things that we've learned in school - it may also play a subtle role in facilitating encounters of the spectral kind, as well.
References
[1] Evans, H. (2002). Seeing Ghosts: Experiences of the Paranormal. John Murray Publishers Ltd.
[2] Stevenson, I. (1995). Six modern apparitional experiences. Journal of Scientific Exploration, 9, 351 - 366.
[3] Cameron, T., & Roll, W. G. (1983). An investigation of apparitional experiences. Theta: The Journal of the Psychical Research Foundation, 11, 74 - 78.
[4] Gurney, E., Myers, F. W. H., & Podmore, F. (1886). Phantasms of the Living (2 vols.). Trubner & Company.
[5] Broughton, R. S. (2006). Why do ghosts wear clothes? Examining the role of memory and emotion in anomalous experiences. European Journal of Parapsychology, 21, 148 - 165.
[6] Roll, W. (2006). A discussion of the evidence that personal consciousness persists after death with special reference to poltergeist phenomena. Australian Journal of Parapsychology, 6, 5 - 20.
[7] Irwin, H. J. (1979). Psi and the Mind: An Information-Processing Approach. Scarecrow Press.
[8] Broad, C. D. (1953). Phantasms of the living and of the dead. Proceedings of the Society for Psychical Research, 50, 51 - 66.
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