Post #490295 by Cammo on Mon, Oct 26, 2009 6:25 PM

Angie's Ghost Story Part 16

And that creeped me out.

That was the first time at the hostel that I got scared and stayed scared, because if Bridgett knew about the vampire thing then it wasn’t a joke or our imagination. Because that meant there really was a vampire, we had seen something, other people had seen it, people knew about it, and I looked at Cindy, who was staring at me now - “Did you tell her what happened last night?” she asked.

“No!”

“What happened last night?” Bridgett finally asked us.

So we spent the next half hour going over what we remembered, it was hard to talk about and it turned out Cindy hadn’t seen the exact same stuff I had, the way she described the thing’s hands were different, and she had seen other scary things in the stairwell, red eyes glowing in the cracks of the bricks and stuff I had missed, but it was pretty much the same story otherwise, and when we were done Bridgett who asked us to call her ‘Bree’ cause that’s what everybody called her, told us the whole story.

The hostel was haunted top to bottom, Bree said. Not just the 8th floor, the whole place. The cellar was bad, they still couldn’t get electricity working down there, no matter who they hired it didn’t work. Even experienced old guy electricians wouldn’t go down there during the day, their tools would disappear, wires would get disconnected, they always had a feeling of something being right behind them, looking at what they were doing. Bree said there might be hundreds of skeletons buried down there, the floor was dirt and had never been touched since the jail days.

The 8th floor was the worst. People had waited there on death row, she said only three people had been executed over the years but hundreds, they don’t know how many, had been hung by the jailers at the back of the room. They were hung for any excuse, it was usually done in the middle of the night and the bodies were dropped through the trap door. Once the jail had been closed, they had tried turning the 8th floor into a hostel area but nobody could sleep there. They’d see things moving in the halls at night, people sitting in the cells looking back at them, asking them questions. Horrible people with no teeth, blind eyes and torn blankets for clothes. Sleepers would wake up with someone bent over their bed, staring at them, angry at them for coming into their cells. They’d even had a bet for a couple of years that anybody who could sleep the night on the 8th floor wouldn’t have to pay.

Not a single person has EVER made it through the night up there.

The rest of the hostel was no better. Things would get lost or broken all the time, objects would fly out the windows smashing the glass, lights would stop working, then start again, then burst, the water was always a problem, it was a nightmare. Things would be fixed, then stop working minutes later. The elevator was bad, it still didn’t work and would always go up to the 8th floor. It didn’t matter what button you’d push, it always went there. The doors would open and not close again, leaving you up there. One girl got stuck on the 8th floor, tried the stairway to come back down and saw a man coming up the stairs, slowly, looking at her, with a red mouth and no eyes. She almost committed suicide trying to escape it by jumping over the stair rails, but she finally ran out onto a different floor and left that night.

That was the problem, Bree told us, there was always the chance of somebody getting hurt or dying and authorities asking questions about why the hostel made people suicidal.

They didn’t want to get shut down, but they didn’t want anybody hurt. Nobody knew what to do.

“I thought Mrs. Aldon had told you all of this,” she said, “I’d asked her to that one day. When you went in her office.”

She told us crap, Bree,” Cindy said, disgusted. “She didn’t even say there was a vampire.”

“The strange thing is, the vampire almost seems to have come before the prisoners did. Or it goes right back to the early days of the jail, I don’t know.” she explained. “There were rumors of an evil ghost among the prisoners. They said it would push the soul from your body.”

“It would WHAT?”

“Push the soul from your body. The last head of the jail guards told me about it the year after it had closed and was being made into a hostel. The first year we were here. And he heard it from the last head of the guards, so it goes way back to the early part of the century, even the late 1800’s. Here’s the thing, though - vampires just weren’t known back then.”

“You mean there were no vampires?”

“I mean it wasn’t until 1931 that the movie Dracula came out, with Bela Lugosi. That’s what made them famous. The book Dracula was from 1897, but it wasn’t popular until the 1920’s. How would poor prisoners in Ottawa even know about vampires before that? In 1890?”

“Unless...” I tried to think.

“Unless it was pushing souls out of bodies back then. Just like last night.”

I started to understand. “Unless it’s a real vampire, more than a hundred years old...”

“But that’s what the Cindy Plan is ALL ABOUT!” she yelled, standing up and smiling, “We’re gonna Vampire-Proof this whole PLACE!” And she walked over to the crosses, staring at them happily.

Bree paused, then said to us quietly, “I guess you don’t know about the inscription.”