Do you believe in ghosts?
What if I tell you that once I was able to prove the existence of a ghost?
Considering this is spooky season, I want to share with you a real ghost story that happened to me a long time ago.
I consider myself a man of reason, but sometimes there are holes in the facts that cannot be explained with the logic of the world as we know it. The house at the end of the backyard is one of those.
Years ago, I was hired by a company located in a big warehouse which had a house at the end of the backyard. The house had been built by the previous owner of the property, conceived as his rest house for the weekends, but he died before completing it.
The employees referred to him as the fat man, and when asked about him, everyone said, “You'll meet him.”
Everything went fine with my job until strange things started to happen to me. Objects started disappearing mysteriously and re-appeared days later in the same place where I had left them. The door of my office often locked itself with me inside. I started seeing on the reflection of my computer silhouettes of people passing behind me when nobody was there. I tried to give logical explanations to those experiences, even when I was truly lost.
It was not strange being working serenely and suddenly hearing the screams of despair of one of the female employees. I always ran from the office to the production floor fearing the worst—an accident in the product line—but always found the person in shock or unconscious above the floor. After calming the victims—or waking them up depending on the case—I asked them about what had happened, and I always got the same answer. Victims told they headed outside—mostly to smoke a cigarette—through the back door of the warehouse that was the access to the house at the end of the yard. All confirmed seeing a fat man coming close to the window of the main bedroom on the second floor and calling for them. After recounting the happenings, most usually left and never came back, not even to claim the week's pay.
Deciding to demonstrate a logical explanation behind the happenings, I assumed that the girls might be influenced by the stories told about the ghost, causing a suggestion. I devised a way to statistically prove my hypothesis. Most of the girls working at that company were contractors, working for a specific time frame as each project demanded. This caused a high rotation of personnel and many of the girls were new and were not yet aware of the story, so I started recording the descriptions of the ghost, this fatman, after being scared. The result was that the description of all matched 100%. Everyone described him as a bald, fat man, very tall and white skin, and particularly mentioned the same wicked smile of crooked teeth that matched the description of the neighbors who knew him in life.
My experiment worked and my hypothesis was statistically validated; there was a ghost living in that house and it was frightening everyone.
I was often the first employee to arrive at the warehouse and many times I crossed paths with the guard of the night shift. One day, I arrived earlier than usual, and as I entered, I saw the TV set of the guard turned on and high volume, so I left my things in my office and descended to the production floor to say good morning to him, but peace before I could reach it, the TV was turned off. It was weird, considering that the security booth was empty, and I wanted to point out that it was no fancy TV with timer for turning off, it was an old TV set, which required the knob to be manually turned. I stood in front of the TV, flabbergasted, trying to make sense of what had just happened when someone called at the front door. It was the guard who confessed to having been absent the whole night shift because one of his children became ill.
On another occasion, I received the most unpleasant of the calls. It was the company accountant, who worked in a nearby building of the company. He asked me to fetch a few documents from the dead files with urgency due to an audit, to which I accepted, but then he revealed that the dead files were stored in… the house at the end of the backyard.
At that point, I was one of the few employees who had never seen the fat man, so without option, I braced myself to finally meet him. That afternoon it was pouring, so I took an umbrella and marched towards the house, eyes fixed on that window.
When I opened the door and set foot inside the house, an overwhelming sensation invaded me. I felt observed by a multitude, like if I had stood before a crowd and all eyes were on me. But I was alone, or at least I wanted to think so.
The interior of the house was uncared and dirty. The concrete walls were partially covered with plaster but no paint. The place was quiet, only the droplets of the multiple leaks of the roof echoed, generating a humid stench.
I inspected the first floor in a hurry, trying to find the documents and leave as soon as possible, but I realized the files were on the second floor. And a chill ran down my spine at the thought of the archive being in the main bedroom.
I inhaled deeply and climbed the stairs convincing myself that everything would be fine. I pushed the creaking door of the bedroom, revealing a room crammed with piles of the cardboard boxes of files running along the walls and no sign of the Fat Man. I realized that no real person could stand before the window, as the girls had described, because the boxes impeded it. But I approached the window anyway, curious of the view that the Fat Man had of the warehouse.
Overwhelmed with uneasiness, I rummaged the boxes in search of the requested files, looking behind me every now and then to ensure I was alone. Finally, I found the papers and ready to leave, I stood and glanced through a window in the opposite wall framing the backyard of the house, which was not visible from the warehouse. Amid the undergrowth an elm tree with a single thick branch had a piece of rope still tied to it.
The neighbors told the story that the owner of the property—the fat man—was married and had a prosperous business. The wife fell in love with a taxi driver and both devised a plan to get rid of her husband, which consisted of giving him daily doses of poison mixed with his meals, until he finally went mad. Eventually, the Fat Man found out about his wife's affair and during his last manic episode, he hung himself from that tree. The police cut the rope to retrieve the body, but they left the noose tied to the tree, and as time passed, the branch thickened, eating the noose, and only a small section of the rope hung out until that day. After his suicide, his wife sold the property, and left town with her lover, the taxi driver.
Beholding the bizarre view of place where the Fat Man had died and remembering his story, I felt nothing but pity for him, wondering how much suffering he had endured. Then, I left the house carrying the papers with me, and when I reached the warehouse door, I glanced back at his window, expecting him to show up, and to be able to say to him: I'm sorry.
I never returned to that house again and even when I have continued scaring people, the Fat Man never frightened me again.
Maybe because all he wanted was for people to know his story, but more importantly, to empathize with his suffering.
M. Ch. Landa
