The Lodge, where the incidents took place
Although I study the logical and rational topics of biochemistry and biology, I’ve had many illogical or unexplained circumstances happen to me around the world. While I do watch frilly documentary ghost hunting style things, I do it mainly because American ghost hunters tend to be worth hunting themselves. (Hello Zach and Ryan)
But one summer in Colorado I ended up on what is commonly known as the grave yard shift – funnily enough in a hotel that was on the land of thousands of years of Indian living and burial grounds at Mesa Verde – the USA’s largest archaeological site. I’ve had ghost experiences before, real ones that made me questioned everything I ever learnt about life and death. But I had never seen one – until I started working there a few years ago.
At first I tried to dismiss the odd telephone calls. The phone in the downstairs office would ring constantly between 2 and 3am. No one was there except me and I figured that since it was a hotel people probably had the number and were ringing from a different time zone until I realised it was ringing from the managers telephone that no one really had, especially not guests. In general you called the front desk to be transferred down there. I followed the ringing sounds one night and as I got to the door the ringing stopped. I walked back to the front desk and it would start again.
One night around 2:30am, I went into the kitchen to grab some dinner one of the cooks had left for me. I pulled it out of the fridge and turned around to heat it. As I turned, I saw a man standing behind me about 4 feet away. He was caucasian, wearing a white chef uniform and was about 6 feet 1. After I caught my breath I said, “Sorry I didn’t see you there, the…” I trailed off as I realised that I kind of see through him. He had this luminous transparency but his features, his clothes, were all defined. He looked human, I thought he was human which is why I started talking to him. He just stood there and stared at me. After a few moments the man vanished, dissolved..and I ran out of there as fast as humanly possible.
The Metate Room – the Restaurant at The Lodge by the front desk.
I stopped at the soda machine and walked out the kitchen door to the four steps just outside of the kitchen which led through the restaurant back to the front desk. As I walked up the stairs I felt this WHOOSH in front of my face, as if someone had walked past suddenly and tried to hit me. The soda cup flew out of my hands and all over my shirt. I heard a whisper in my right ear, “get out.” I ran. Sitting behind the front desk I was shaking. It was freezing and I was freaked out.
Another night entirely, I was not really in the mood to be at work at 3am so I put my head down on the desk for a few minutes. I never slept, I was wide awake. A voice told me to look up as something was walking towards me, I did in case it was a guest. I lifted my head only to see an Indian male walk past me and threw the wall into the restaurant. He had long black hair, a leather beige thing wrapped around his head and he had no shirt on. I wanted to go home.
A photo I took of one of the cliff dwellings the Indians lived in AD700
I walked across the lobby to the restroom to wash my face. I sat on a closed toilet to think – what was happening? Then I heard the large heavy door push open and the wind skimmed my feet. I looked under the next toilet stall and the door hadn’t moved but I heard it. The lock in the stall next to me clicked as if someone had just locked it. I looked underneath and no one was there. But I heard the door in the stall close and lock. Then I had an uncomfortable feeling something was watching me from above the stall looking down. I jumped up and ran – but as I did, I glanced to the side into the stall next to me – the door was slightly ajar. It had never been locked. or closed for that matter. I pushed the door open and ran back to the front desk.
On the way back to my house after the shift, I was later informed a maintenance man saw the same “Chef” as I did in the other building about 2 miles away. He said he was in the kitchen working on some things, he turned to look around the corner and the Chef was standing there, watching him. He said he hears voices in the building, whispering his name. (This happened to me too) He is in his mid forties and a sturdy, hard-to-scare kind of guy and he refuses to go there by himself. I spoke to a Navajo friend I had about what happened and she said there was a curse on the land as white people have used a sacred native Indian place for profit and they are now malevolent towards white people. Another resident told me they see Indians “all the time” and often hears them rearranging the chairs in the restaurant at night. I convinced another Navajo friend stay there with me one night and after an hour or two he said, “I want to leave this place is freaking scary. They are everywhere.” Then at 2am the phone started to ring constantly, we followed the sound but this time, the ring led to nowhere. It was neither upstairs or downstairs, it seemed to be coming from beyond a wall.
I’ve had grown men say, “I don’t know how you stay here from 10pm til 7am by yourself”. Now I look back on it, either do I. The thing is, once you see something, actually SEE something there is no going back. You cannot “unsee“. I’ve been raised closer to an atheist than anything else, so seeing proof that there is something after we die, not only scared the crap out of me, it made me question everything I have ever believed in. I know what I felt, I know what I saw. I wasn’t tired, I wasn’t ill nor was I looking for it. I discussed the issue again with a guest at my bar last summer, who said, “If you know there is an afterlife without a doubt because you saw it, then that has to come from something – some source.” And logically speaking, if does. But for someone who was raised an atheist*, what is that source?
*I am no longer atheist (due entirely to these experiences, which are, by the way, a snippet of what I have experienced)
Have you ever seen a ghost? What are your ghost stories?
