Meet Sam

My apologies for my month long absence, my Internet has been down for, well, a month. So here's a post intended for the week before Halloween. Once again fate has reared its ugly head and intercepted my plans. The rescheduled ghost tour in Salt Lake won't be ha Owning this weekend after all. Oh well. At one point I was even considering going alone, even though I've been on this tour already this Halloween season.  Why am I so compelled by the supernatural that I would go on a smelly, crowded bus tour, to fend off the drunks that act like the trouble makers sitting in the back row of English class, by myself? Why sit through an hour and a half of poorly recited stories for a chance to take twenty pictures at a cemetery at night?  I started this blog to share my many experiences with the unknown but for some reason I have spent the majority of my posts questioning my fascination with the topic at hand. Perhaps I'm afraid to subject my tales to the scrutiny of the skeptic or maybe, just maybe, I'm afraid to put it all on the line and be ignored by the masses. I can defend my encounters but I can't defend being overlooked. The fear stops tonight. I work in a haunted store. We like to call her Sam (my manager's mother claims to be psychic and told us that's her name and who are we to argue?). For about a year now I've known that we are not alone in our store. I first met Sam one day when I was alone on the sales floor and I heard my name, I turned around expecting to see my manager coming out from the back but found no one. When she came back out I asked if she had called me and she hadn't. She swore she had been on the phone the whole time. A few other things stared happening around the store; the door would open on it's own, a purse fell off the shelf when no one had been in that part of the store in an hour. I was in the back emptying the trash one night and I felt something touch the back of my head. I couldn't figure it out, it wasn't my shirt collar or the tape measure around my neck slipping.  After being touched I told my mom who told me I was imagining things and to ease up on watching "Ghost Adventures". I tried to convince myself I was letting my imagination get the betterr of me until one day a coworker came up to me saying she was afraid of the ghost in the store. Later that night when I was alone in the back I told the ghost off. I told it, her, to stop scaring my coworker, that it was cowardly to pick on someone who scared easily and if she wanted to be heard to do so in front of someone who isn't afraid (aka me). After I said my piece, there was a loud clang a matter of feet from me. After that night I didn't have a doubt in my mind that something or someone else was in the store. After that night I talked to others at work and discovered that everyone has had their own run-ins with Sam. I was ever so relieved to find out I was not alone! And I noticed more little things that I hadn't noticed before. Clothes on certain racks would turn perpendicular to the other shirts on the rack. And believe you me, I tried everything I could think of to recreate this phenomomen and it just doesn't happen naturally by removing clothes from the rack. I've heard women's footsteps in the store when I'm the only one out there. The most amazing thing happened a few weeks ago. I was hanging pants at the front of the store and I was must staring off into space when I saw, with my own eys, some tank tops move back and forth on the sales rack. I immediately went over to the sale rack to check for drafts. There was nothing, no moving air, nothing. The only thing I noticed was that the rack was cold to the touch.