Post #487376 by Cammo on Sat, Oct 10, 2009 10:44 AM

Hey GROG, this gonna be LONG story. You not read it all at once, your eyes get tired and fall out.

**Angie's Ghost Story part 3 **

My name is Angie Nettleton. This all happened at least 30 years ago, when I was in my junior year of high school in Ottawa, that’s the capital of Canada.

Summer jobs are hard to get in Ottawa and I hadn’t had a job before, so it was really hard getting something that actually paid real money. There were lots of volunteer jobs at museums and stuff, but who cares? I didn’t want one of those. I wanted to make moolah. There was a ‘temp’ agency that specialized in high school kids, it was connected with our school’s guidance department, and my guidance counsellor kept telling everybody that they had the best jobs. I put my name in with them, and Mr. Claren, our guidance guy, said he could get me a great job, a really amazing, high paying job with a government agency really fast. That’s what I wanted.

But Mr. Claren never called me. Ever. I waited and waited. And all the jobs I tried for were either messy, cheap, or not available by the time I got there. The last thing I wanted to do was babysit my sister for a dollar an hour all summer, like I had done the year before.

On the last day of school I went by Mr. Claren’s office and he looked up at me, kind of surprised. He had been trying to find me, he said. He had a perfect summer job all lined up for me at a youth hostel in downtown Ottawa. This hostel was a giant luxury hotel designed for other high school and college-age kids, and it was funded by the federal government, so it paid double minimum wage, almost 12 bucks an hour. To me that was like millions of dollars in gold bullion. And it was only 4 days a week, plus they paid overtime on weekends.

It was like winning the lottery.

Next Monday morning I went off to work, my parents lent me their old Volkswagen to boot around in and at 9:00 am I was standing there on Nicholas Street in front of the Ottawa Youth Hostel. It was huge. It was a giant, old building. It looked like a rich guy’s home from the 1800’s, only bigger. This was the place. I walked in, and there was a strange little desk in the front hall with some ladies standing around looking official. They were Mrs. Aldon, who was in charge and Cindy, who was my age, and had worked there for the last couple of weekends. Mrs. Aldon told me that I had to wear this simple blue uniform that looked sort of like an old fashioned dress. I didn’t mind. Everybody had to wear them, and it meant I wouldn’t get my regular clothes dirty. Cindy showed me where I could change, and then gave me a tour.

Nobody was in any of the rooms, because it was Monday and the first real day of summer, so Cindy and I had fun exploring the place for a while.
“Can you BELIEVE how much we’re making at this job?” Cindy kept saying as soon as Mrs. Aldon couldn’t hear us.
“What do we have to do, anyway?” I kept asking.
“I don’t know. Nobody’s told me yet!”

Cindy was SO happy.

It turns out that it wasn’t a rich guy’s house, it was an old jail. Cindy explained that they didn’t want the kids staying there to know, but the whole place was the old Carleton County Jail, and the rooms were the jail cells. There was construction work being done on almost all the floors, redoing the rooms to make them better. Some of them were in pretty bad shape still. Cindy said that our job was just to avoid cleaning up before the weekend started, and sit at the desk downstairs, listening to the radio, making sure nobody snuck in. It was easy. She said it was the best job she’d ever had. As long as we didn’t screw up, we both had it made in the shade.

She took me up to the different rooms, and the first thing I found out was - the elevator didn’t work. It was being fixed. Actually, sometimes it worked, sometimes not, but we weren’t allowed to go inside it in case it froze up between floors. So we walked up and down the stairs, and room after room looked exactly the same, beige walls, carpet on some of the floors, wood floors otherwise, double beds, huge shared bathrooms. It wasn’t very luxurious.

We tramped up and up into the hotel, all the lights were on in every hallway, but it was deserted. Sometimes we’d see some paint cans left behind, or some equipment covered in canvas, some walls were being torn down, but that was about it. It was pretty boring.

Then she took me to the 8th floor. We weren’t supposed to go up there, she said, but I had to see it, because she said it wasn’t fixed up at all. It was still exactly like the original jail. Nobody was allowed on the 8th floor. Mrs. Aldon didn’t want anybody hanging out there, because it was “dangerous”. We trudged up the stairs, and the first thing I noticed was that even the door leading off the stairs to the 8th floor was old and beat up. It was a really filthy dirty, thick wooden door with big iron hinges. I didn’t want to touch it. It looked like it was locked, but Cindy just walked right up and pulled it open.

And - it was the must disgusting, horribly dark and smelly room I’d ever seen. It wasn’t a hallway we were looking into, it was a big brick wall. A gaslight was mounted up high, next to the curved ceiling, burning and giving off the only light. I looked at it because it was the first gaslight I’d ever seen. The floor was wet. There were pools of oily water all over, the walls were almost black with dampness. The whole place reminded me of the inside of an old garbage can. It was really dark. I didn’t see any windows, but there must have been some. And it was cold. It seemed air conditioned in there.

“Wow!” I said, “They sure fixed the rest of this place up a lot! I mean. if this is what it looked like...”
“Yeah, come on in, check this out!” Cindy went inside, around the corner to the left. I followed her just to keep her in sight, I didn’t want to get lost. And it was even colder inside.

There she was - Cindy was standing in front of some other doors, they looked like a long line of old jail cells, and here they were, windows - it was a bit lighter inside now.

I stopped, because something moved way back at the far end of the hall. It was somebody working, he seemed to be wearing a big dark coat. He was crouched over something. We must have surprised him, he looked up at us and his face was angry, I could see his mouth starting to open and his eyes glared right at me.

“Hey, Cindy, we shouldn’t be up here.” I said, pretending that we had stumbled onto the floor by accident. I didn’t want the guy in the coat to think we were goofing off and disobeying the rules. The last thing I wanted was to get fired on the first day.

“Yeah, duh. Why, what’s wrong?” Cindy asked, looking back at me.

I jerked my head, looking past her over to the worker, trying to get her to notice him, but when I looked right at where he was suddenly he looked like he didn’t have any feet. Then his head sort of looked funny, like his neck was too long, and his coat didn’t seem right either. I tried to make sense of what I was looking at, and then realized that it wasn’t a person at all, it was a short ladder with a broken chair next to it. The coat was just a big stain on the wall. I kept looking at where the face had been, and the eyes were some light colored bricks on the wall behind them. The more I looked at it, the less it looked like a person.

“Hey, what do you see?” Cindy asked me. She came up beside me, paused, then walked back down the hall towards the end. There was nothing there. It was totally silent.

“C’mon, you gotta look at these.” She shrugged her shoulders and ran back to the jail cells. I went over to them, but wasn’t too interested now.

“See? This is where they kept the murderers and rapists! How cool is THAT!” she said, pointing. There were cells in the center of the room, they went down the whole building, they were all locked up, but Cindy went right up and opened one. The sound of the lock echoed in the room.

“They’d probably put them in here for years. Yuck. Let that be a lesson to you, Angie. Aldon’ll put you in here if she doesn’t like you.”

Yuck is right, these cells were hardly big enough to stand in. They were a bit bigger than my closet at home, and just as filthy as the rest of the place. What was all the black gunk on the walls and floor, anyway?

“Yeah, jeez, these are really interesting but lets get out of here, if Mrs. Aldon catches us...” I started to say.

“Aaaaah, she never walks up past the first floor,” Cindy said, “she’s too fat. But lets get back down. I just wanted you to get the full tour. You scared?”

“No.”