Post #487591 by Cammo on Sun, Oct 11, 2009 5:44 PM

** Angie's Ghost Story Part 4 **

Absolutely nothing else strange happened that first week. We got to stay up late, our hours were different but Cindy and I hung out a lot when we traded off shifts and we both had the whole weekend from 5 ‘til midnight. We were supposed to be cleaning up, but Friday became our meet n’ greet day, with people arriving that had to be signed in and shown to their rooms. It was fun. We’d just give everybody these keys with little paper circles wired to them with their room numbers on them. When they came in and out, they just flashed us the keys to show us they belonged here.

“Hey,” I asked Cindy, “Why can’t one friend just throw his key out the window to another friend, and then he’d show that key, the same key coming in?”
“Oh, yeah. I never thought of that.”
“Hundreds of people could come in that way, all on the same key.”
“Yeah, you’re right. You think anybody’s doing that?”
“I hope so. Who cares?”

We hardly watched the keys after that. Like I said, it was SUCH an easy job.

The next week on Wednesday I had the five to eleven shift, all by myself. It was the first time I got to handle the front desk by myself, but I had Mrs. Aldon’s number (Cindy’s too) to call if anything went wrong. Nobody came in on Wednesdays, so it was pretty boring, except for these two backpackers from Australia who kept coming and going all night. They were looking for a fun bar. They were out of luck - Ottawa doesn’t have any fun bars downtown.

At about ten I heard the elevator moving. Sometimes foreign people tried it even though it had a “Do Not Use Elevator” sign on it. Maybe they should have printed the sign is some other language than English, but they didn’t do that sort of thing yet in those days. I heard it coming down from way up above, it took forever to come down, and then the door opened. I was reading a book, so I didn’t look up when somebody got out and walked down the hallway to me. I could hear them struggling with their luggage, the footsteps and breathing coming right up to me. Maybe they were going to ask a question, so I turned around and looked up.

Nobody was there.

Now I heard them, I tell you. I sat there wondering what had happened, looking around at the front door, had they gone out that way? And thinking, gee, maybe I imagined hearing them?

Then the elevator door closed. And it went up again.

Now that wasn’t creepy. Maybe somebody pushed a button to order it. So I got up and looked around the front hall, all around the place, while the elevator went back up. Nobody was there. Nobody had gone out the front door, and there was just no place to hide. Then I decided that what had happened was that somebody had gotten ON the elevator, not off, and I had heard it wrong. They were going up to their room now, so I looked at what floor the elevator was going to. It took a while, but it finally stopped.

At the 8th floor.

So I don’t know why, but I pushed the button to call it back. It started coming down right away, and when it got to the third floor I started getting scared for no reason and went back to the desk. The elevator finally stopped at our floor, I could hear it, but the doors didn’t open. Don’t use that thing, I thought. It’s broken. The doors don’t work. Nothing happened. So I started to read again.

It was my mom’s old copy of a Nancy Drew mystery, it was the first thing that came to my hand when I grabbed it off the shelf right before coming to work, which was funny, everything considered. I felt like Nancy solving a mystery. She was in Hong Kong in this one, and she was trying to find out what happened to a friend of her dad’s, her dad is a bigshot lawyer, you see, and...

Then the elevator doors opened.

I held my breath. If anybody got out of that elevator, or if I heard some sounds, I’d yell my head off.

Nothing happened. I sat there, looking down the hall, staring at the edge of the elevator door. It was completely quiet. Then the doors closed.

I got up and turned on our little radio full blast, to the clearest station I could get. Then I sang along with some of the songs, and got up, walked around a bit, and sat back down. Nothing happened until the Australian guys came back, and MAN was I glad to see them. I asked them where they were from, whaere they were going, what groups they listened to, they probably thought I was hitting on them but I kept on going blabbing for as long as they could stand it. There was nothing for them to do either, so they sat around, bleary eyed drunk and talked about how much they hated Canada because there weren’t any fun blokes to Charley a Foster with, or whatever they say in Australialand. So we sat around until eleven, and I said g’day to them and locked the front door behind me.

That was the last fairly normal night I spent at the hostel.