Post #488190 by Cammo on Wed, Oct 14, 2009 11:15 AM

Angie's Ghost Story Part 6

That same night at about nine, just as it was getting dark, one of the guests - a girl - came up to the desk and told me she wanted the crying to stop.

“What crying?” I asked.

“Somebody on the floor under me is crying and yelling really loud. It’s driving us crazy, one of my roommates is trying to get some sleep and I’m getting ready to go out and it’s driving us nuts!”

Her room was on the fourth floor, so I just left the front door open and walked up with her to the third. We went to the right, down three doors and stopped. We were right under her room. At first there was no sound at all, which is what I expected because there was almost nobody in the hostel. We stood there listening really hard, in dead silence.

Then I heard something. It was somebody breathing, or sobbing, quietly. I looked over at the girl, she nodded her head and pointed at her ear. “Listen,” she whispered and moved down the hall, “it’s louder over here.”

So we shuffled down the clean lighted hall, listening. It did get louder, it was a lady crying and getting all choked up trying to sob between the crying. We tried walking around and listening to the doors, I put my ear on some doors but it wasn’t coming from any of the rooms. It was loud now, we didn’t have to strain to hear it, and I could actually feel my feet vibrating with the sound. Then I got an idea. I kneeled down and listened to the floor, just like Nancy Drew would. Nancy would have been proud.

It was coming from underneath us, the next floor down.

“C’mon,” I said, “it’s on the second floor, lets go.”

“Um, she sounds really sad and angry. You can handle it by yourself, right?” The girl looked at me, and tried to smile.

“What do you mean? I’m not going down there alone, c’mon!” I headed to the stairs. She wasn’t following me.

“Look, what’s your name?” I asked her, getting a bit mad.

“Stephanie.”

I pointed to myself, “Angie. And how old are you?”

“Twenty.”

“Well, I’m only seventeen, so you gotta come with me.”

“Why? You work here! Go take care of it, that’s what they pay you for.”

The whole time we were talking, the sobbing kept up. It would stop for a second, then start again, Stephanie was right. It was really annoying.

“They pay me to sit downstairs and... jeez! I forgot, I left the front door open, we got to go back down there.” We headed to the stairs, and ran down them back to the front hall and my desk. It felt better there. Stephanie looked at me, she didn’t seem to want to go back upstairs.

Then we heard the crying again. Now it was coming from the kitchen area. That was really weird, and the first thing I thought was that whoever was crying had come downstairs ahead of us. They must have.

She was listening, probably wondering the same thing, and then Stephanie asked me -
“You want to go see where she is?”
I thought for a second and asked her, “You coming?”
“Yeah, I guess.”

And we slowly, really slowly moved down the hall together.

It came from the end of the hall, past the kitchen, where the offices were. Then we passed the offices, and turned to the right down another short hall.

“Where are we? What’s this part of the building?” Stephanie asked.

“I don’t know. Never been here, maybe its the maintenance room?” There was a door at the end, the sound was definitely coming from the other side. I hoped it was locked, but when I tried the handle, slowly, it turned and opened a bit.

Then the crying stopped.

I opened the door, and on the other side was a flight of stairs leading down. I actually looked around for a light switch, because there was a light right over our heads, and yup, there was the switch, and I flicked it on. The stairs weren’t too long, they led down to what looked like a dirty bottom floor. It was dark down there.

And the crying started again, but now we could hear that it was right below us, in the dark room.

Then the sobbing got even louder, and it turned into loud grunts and cries of pain. We couldn’t move, we were so scared. Then the cries turned into screams. They were so loud it sounded like somebody was yelling right into your ear, only louder, it seemed so loud the walls were shaking. I still had my hand frozen on the light switch, but when the second round of screams started we both jerked back at the same time and ran all the way to the front hall, and out the front door, onto the street and it was raining, so we paused and then ran to the bus shelter that was half a block down, and Stephanie grabbed me hard and yelled

“WHAT the FUCK was THAT! SHIT that was scary! Who the fuck was down there, huh? You hear those screams?!”

I was pretty much too scared to talk, but said something like I don’t know, I’ve only been working here for a week, I’m not going back in there, you go back there, I’m calling my mom to tell her I’m coming home early, forget this fucking place.

Well, we stood out there and noticed that there was a somebody else in the bus shelter with us, that’s how scared we were, it was some older guy who was staring at us like we were dangerous or something. Stephanie looked at him and said the first smart thing I had heard all night.

“You gotta smoke?” she asked him.

He looked at us, said something like we shouldn’t be out late at night, then reached in his coat pocket and brought out some cigarettes. Stephanie showed me how to light it and I took my first ciggy puff, but didn’t bring the smoke into my lungs cause Steph said it would make me sick the first time. It was sort of fun, and calmed us down right away, and the man didn’t ask us any more questions. But he sure listened to us all right. I don’t know if we made any sense.

“Here’s the thing. I gotta call the cops.” I decided, suddenly.

She thought for a second, smoking. “Yeah, you probably should. But, like, look, you think it’s still crying?”

“That’s what I was thinking. See, it couldn’t be for real, cause you heard the noise up on the fourth floor. It must have been right under you then, the floors are too thick to hear something that’s three, no, five floors down.”

“You mean four floors down.”

“It’s below the first story, in the cellar. So five floors.”

“Four.” She counted off the floors on her fingers for me, “Floor three, two, one, cellar, four floors...”

“So what? Who cares? You can’t hear that far, and when you came down we didn’t hear anything on the first floor, right? So it wasn’t coming from there.”

“You have any security guys on staff there?” she asked.

“Uh, yeah. That’s me. I’m the security girl.”

“Then you got problems.” she said, and then, to our friend in the bus stop, “thanks for the smokes, bye.” And we walked back. I didn’t want to go in, but Stephanie’s friends were waiting for her at the front, two other girls, and they were asking questions as I sat at the desk looking at the telephone. Should I call the police?

Then I decided to just call Mrs. Aldon. It rang only two times, and she picked up right away. I explained that we had heard some strange lady crying, and had gone back past the offices, and the sound was coming down the little hall, and...
“You didn’t go in the basement, did you?” she asked.

That was funny. Why would she ask that?

“Uh, no, we didn’t want to. But that’s where the sounds were coming from.”

“Don’t go down there. I’ll lock the door from now on.” then she paused, “there aren’t any lights in the basement and it’s dangerous.”

Jeez, why were there so many places at the hostel that were “dangerous”? What was this, downtown Ottawa or the freaking Lower Amazon River?

“Should I call the police if I hear any more screams?”

She didn’t say anything for a while, and I though the connection had gone dead, but then she said “No. I’ll take care of it,” which I thought was a really weird thing to say. Then she asked me if I wanted her to come back out there. I said no, I didn’t want to be any trouble or seem like I couldn’t do anything by myself. Then we hung up.

“What did she say?” Stephanie asked.

“Nothing. She really didn’t say anything. She said don’t call the cops.”

Stephanie and her friends left pretty fast, they were planning to get back before eleven and wanted to go just about anywhere but the hostel before then.

I sat there looking at the radio. More people were coming and going now, and I was checking their keys for something to do, but once in a while I was alone with that radio and I’d sit there hoping the sobbing noise wouldn’t come back. The only things I could think of was that a crazy person was loose in the hostel, or that somebody was trying to scare me, or that somebody was really hurt in the basement and I should go help them. The night went on and on. It was impossible to read my Nancy Drew book, I kept reading the same sentence over and over.

I got pretty scared, and just hung out on the steps outside for a while. Then the Australian guys came back in, just after ten, and other people came back too, and I was out of there at exactly eleven, locking the door and running down the steps to my car.