Wednesday, April 6, 2011

I wonder...

There are things I spend some time wondering about. Like... Why do buildings make such weird noises when you are all alone in them. Are those noises there all the time and you never notice them till the you are in the building all alone? It should be quiet in the place when all the kids are gone and your wife is away at a conference, shouldn't it. Peaceful right? But I find as soon as I am all alone in the a house, the house starts to make weird noises. Like it misses all the activity so it decides to make up for it. In the first church building we pastored we were sure it was haunted. Really, a haunted church. The church had originally started out as a hospital back in the early 1900's and in the 80's was purchased by the church and remodeled. Well remodeled was a loose term, the patient rooms soon became small sunday school rooms with a table instead of a patient bed. The childrens Pastor's office was originally the room where they shot the x-rays. There was an upstairs area where the nurses would sleep when not on duty, a kitchen and all sorts of little nooks and crannies that hospitals always have. All of that is well and good till you start realizing that people actually died in that place. Souls were seperated from their physical bodies all over that building. So when weird noises started happening when you were all alone in the building, you said a little prayer and moved the 9 iron a little closer to your desk. I know you are thinking, the 9 iron? Well yeah, if an aparition appears I really need a club that I can hit, so the driver stays in the bag. Anyway I digress. So not long after I took the pastorate I am in my office in the back of the church and I hear this noise sounding like someone running on the hall upstairs. It starts loud right over my head and then slowly gets quieter as the runner heads to the other side of the building. I did not count the steps but I am pretty sure it was 13 exactly, like I said I did not count them but I know if I did it would be 13 steps. So one day I am sitting in my office and I hear the "runner" going down the hall. Clutching the 9 iron I walk into the large expanse of the hallway and say with all the authority I have in my voice, "hello?". It kind of croaked out, it sounded more like Dorothy when she landed in Oz than Sylvester Stalone in Rocky. Of course received no answer, that would have been really frightening. I went back to my desk and attempted to resume my work. But just as I was about to sit down, wham wham wham again going down the hall. I jumped and ran to the hall to pear outside to see if the upstairs runner had decided to come downstairs. Again I said "hello?" with no answering call to ease my mind. At this point my adrenaline is running on overdrive, I am so thankful that the women's leader wasn't dropping by my office, it would have been really hard to explain how I accidentally bashed her head in with a 9 iron as we were makign the funeral preperations. So after I returned to my desk, before I even got halfway across the office I hear the runner again sprinting on the upstairs hallway. Finally fed up, I headed for the stairs to confront whatever was up there. The church really never did much with the upstairs area, it was a collection of rooms for the nurses to stay overnight, a small bathroom and a few storage areas full of stuff. But I climbed up those stairs and found myself standing on the very hall that the runner had been running up and down on. There was a fine layer of dust over everything, and thankfully no footprints going up and down the hall. Although footprints left in dust, as I learned on Scoobie Doo were a sure sign that it was not a ghost I was dealing with. So I made my way down the hallway just to make sure there was no one there when I heard it, a slam that made my heart jump into my throat and my pulse go into racehorse mode. That slam was followed by another and another as it reverberated down the hall. But there was no apparition that was apparent at that time. I know that I closed my eyes at the first slam but after the third slam or so I realized I was still breathing so I took a peek and saw nothing hovering in front of me. So as the slams slowly lessoned I worked my way toward the origin of the sound. I ended up at the end of the hall where there was a large closet, a couple of storage boxes and an old hospital bed. As I was examining the area I heard the slam again but this time from really, really, really close. It was right behind the closet door. So I opened the closet door, ready to fight for my life and saw nothing at all. It was just a closet with normal closet things in it except it had a window in the back of the room. Later I would find out that the last addition to the hospital had been made on that side and that window was the access to the attic. So as I made my way to that window which was propped open I finally solved the mystery of the runner in the hallway. It was not an aparition, thankfully, not really sure what a 9 iron would have done to a ghost but I am sure I probably would have pulled my head when I swung and hit it thin anyway. There was no ghostly activities happening, there was an old attic fan set into the side wall of the attic that we had never used. And apparently whenever the front church door opened, it created a vacumn in the building with enough force that the building would "burp" through the attic fan, 13 times starting very loud and slowly getting less forceful till the atmospheric pressure balanced. I realized this as the attic fan started burping as I was looking right at it. What had happened was one of the church parisioners was opening the front door and dropping off supplies into the foyer. She opened the door, laid down the supplies and went back out to her car, as the front door closed and the attic fan burped. Every time I came out of my office with the lame, "hello" she was back at the car getting another load. By the time I got back to my office she had opened the door, dropped off her packages and headed back to her car starting the cycle all over again. Again I am thankful that no one was injured by a poorly swung 9 iron. Although I did have a lot of fun messing with other people who were all alone working in the church by themselves.

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