A creepy story from DS forum:
I once temped at an extremely old Royal Institution in Holborn in London, which pre-dated the Great Fire of London.
The Building itself was built & rebuilt a number of time on the same spot & housed absolutely fascinating paintings of old Fellows of the Institution, dressed in 'Dick Turpin' style attire.
It also housed a pathology museum & lecturing halls which contained deformed fetuses in jars & all form of medical macabre'ness dating back centuries. Anyone who knows Holborn in any level of details already knows exactly where I'm talking about - and a quick google search will enlighten the rest of you you.
However, what may surprise people is that in the basement, is a Mortuary. If you donate your body to science, this is where you may end up - serving as a learning tool for visiting lecturers - who have accommodation in the levels above the museum.
My role was a very last minute Security Guard. Though I had absolutely no experience in Security at all, I was at a loose end & the temp who was supposed to be there 'let them down very badly at the last minute' - so I agreed to go in for their Graveyard Shift - knowing nothing about the place other than it's address.
It was easy money. I locked up a few doors separating the museum & lecturing halls from the accommodation part - and buzzed in a few visitors, stumbling in from the pubs after the 11pm 'curfew'. Apart from that, I sat on the net and made myself coffees all night.
Nothing remarkable happened the first night, and in the absence of another placement I agreed to stay on for a few weeks.
Thereafter, things started getting odd.
I'd be sitting on the security desk and my bag (which I'd popped under the desk) would vanish. Id later find it exactly where I left it. My coffee would move to the opposite side of desk. Shadows would appear in well lit places or appear to move.
I was quite prepared to put all of this down to my imagination until one night, just after I'd finish locking up the doors between the museum & accommodation - I went back to the Security Office to return the keys when something on the CCTV monitor caught my eye.
In the corridor I'd just locked (which was adjacent to the office) was a man dressed in 1800's garb, walking very calmly towards to dividing glass paneled doors. He was in his mid-to-late twenties and had very pale skin, but was otherwise very solid. Outfit asides, there wasn't anything otherworldly about him. As he approached the door, light shone through it on to him as if he were solid.
'Sh*!' I thought. 'I've locked someone in!' I thought - having no reason to think otherwise.
I grabbed the keys again and jogged out of the office towards the doors, called ahead
'I'm so sorry! I didn't realise anyone was still....'
My apology was cut dead however as a floor to ceiling column of really dense shadow emerged through the glass doors (almost like watching a rain storm on the horizon) and passed silently across the foyer.
I looked through the doors and saw noone. I looked back at the shadow & it continued very deliberately through the foyer to the guest bar area.
The column threw me, but I was still thinking I'd locked someone in. Maybe they'd seen the column and freaked out. But where to? The corridor was locked. As were all the rooms off the side of it. I'd just locked them.
I unlocked the dividing door and went back to check. One of the rooms was unlocked but was completely empty. The street lights from outside lit the room up to almost daytime brightness. Definitely no one there. An intruder maybe?
Having no experience of this I rang up my emergency 'Out of Hours Contact' - who was the Building Manager.
'I've locked someone in the museum - but I can't find them.'
To say he was pissed off was an understatement. Half an hour later, he arrived and we both carried out an extensive / fruitless search of the museum.
'But he was on CCTV!'
We rewound the tapes to the time I saw him - and saw nothing but a dense column of shadow pass in front of the screen.
The building manager left, seething that I'd woken him & gotten him to come in for nothing a worst - a shadow at most - and left me to sit out the rest of my shift alone. But I knew what I saw. It was a person. I could make out the detail on his outfit. His hairstyle. Eveything.
When the Accommodation Receptionist arrived at 7am, I decided to very nonchalantly ask her in a round about kinda way (so she wouldn't think I was mad) about the place.
'So, this place is really old, huh...' I ventured lamely 'Bet these walls could tell a few stories?'
She immediately shot back with -
'What have you seen? What happened'
'What do you mean?' I asked.
'You've seen something. That's why the other guy before you left in the middle of the night. That's why they all leave You're asking me for a reason, not out of the blue.' she said, seeing straight through my lame atempts at subterfuge.
'Well yeah...?' I said 'But I didn't actually think I was right?! What... what did I see?'
She went on to tell me how the place is notoriously haunted. (The unlocked room especially.) The guy before me (who's shift I'd covered at the last minute) had legged it in the middle of the night when he looked out of the security office and saw a woman in a floor length gown running across the foyer. As all our guests need passes, he ran after her so he could sight her pass.
'Excuse me?!' he yelled a number of times as she lifted the hem of her skirt and ran up the stair case, which wound it's way around the rear of the foyer.
As he reached the landing in the middle of the stair case and she neared the top - she vanished into thin air, right in front of him. He scarpered mid-shift and when he refused point-blank to ever return - so I was drafted in to fill his shift.
Admittedly, this did freak me out a little - but as I said in my last post, I'd had other supernatural experiences in the past - and what set this apart from those, is that I felt no sense of malevolence from what I'd seen. If it were a 'bad' spirit - you get a real feeling of 'this thing wants to cause me harm' - and I had no such feeling. Yeah, it was unsettling - but I was intrigued more than terified.
So I did return - and it was the start of what was one of the most fascinating experiences of my life.
The next time I saw it, a week or two later I was locking up the guest bar on the far side of the foyer. As I was about to exit - again a floor to ceiling column of shadow emerged from the museum corridor opposite & rushed towards me, in the darkened bar. There was nowhere to run except further back into the dark - or straight into it - so I stood rooted to the spot.
As it passed through me, it was extremely suddenly cold and felt like static electricity passing over me. (Like when you take clothes out of the dryer & pass them over your hair.) It litrally crackled as it passed through me.
Again, I didn't feel it was out to hurt me - but it definitely wanted acknowledgement that it was there. So I eventually caught my breath & said out loud...
'Seems like you want a drink even worse than I do!'
At that, there was a massive thud behind me in the dark.
My heart was almost beating through my chest at this point, but I called out
'Well, make yourself at home. Have one for me!' - so I walked out, locked the bar & went back to my desk on the far side of the foyer.
I sat staring into the bar, which seemed extremely dark now. A short while later - the column of shadow emerged out of the bar and edged into the centre of the foyer - as if it were eying me.
We stared each other out for about half an hour or so until the shadow eventually faded away.
This is far from the end of this story - but I'll continue it another time.