This story a part of the True Ghost Stories page on Obiwan's UFO-Free Paranormal Page. Please do not copy or distribute without permission from Obiwan and/or the original author!
Date: Mon, 10 Aug 1998 23:07:30 -0500
From: Lydia Netzer (playgrnd@ais.net)
To: obiwan@ghosts.org
Subject: Alternative Music Ghost
When I was in college at Bowling Green, Ohio, I played in a rock band. We used to practice late at night in one of the older academic buildings, setting up our gear in a large theater which had been converted to a lecture hall. This same building housed both the college radio stations, so the building was open and at least minimally populated all night long. Our band played fairly cheery alternative pop music (no songs called "I Summon Thee Oh Scary Demon Ghost" or anything) but the other guitar player was my then boyfriend, who is one of those ghost magnet people you hear about. The only strange things that have ever happened to me in my life happened while I was dating him.
Our experiences started in sort of a vague way. Eerie feelings, cold drafts coming down on our heads, lights flickering, the sensation of being watched from the control booth at the ceiling in the back of the hall. Sometimes, objects would move... like a heavy speaker cabinet that suddenly leaped six feet forward off a table and fell to the ground, as if someone had pushed it from behind. Also, just about every time we practiced our normally happy band got into terrible arguments. I can remember crying and yelling about almost nothing, and having several bass players walk out permanently, enraged over trivialities. One night, after the usual lights flickering and cold draft (which we attributed to the age of the building) all the lights went very low and the exit sign over the door started to flash. I got incredibly creeped out immediately, and demanded that we stop practice and leave.
I asked to be driven home right away, and my boyfriend complied, but before I left I packed up my equipment and put it on the cart we used to transport our stuff back and forth from stage to car. He drove me home and then went back, finished packing up with the bass player and drummer. Before they left, they did an equipment inventory and noticed that one of my effects pedals was missing. They went back into the building, looked into the theater hall, and there was my effects pedal, in the middle of a square table, which was in the middle of the stage. They felt as though they were being asked back into the room. My boyfriend took out a notebook and gave everyone a piece of paper, and the three of them sat down in various places in the room. He told them to write down their impression of this presence, including age, gender, species, appearance, blah blah blah, and also tell where they thought the thing was in the room. Keep in mind we hadn't SEEN this thing at all -- it was all just impressions. Without discussing it, he and the bass player wrote down chillingly similar descriptions. The presence seemed to them to be a young man with brown hair and glasses. My boyfriend wrote down a maroon sweater vest and the bass player wrote down freckles. The drummer came up with a different description -- a vaguely human shape in a black coat -- but all three of them placed the presence within two rows and three seats of the same location, in the "audience" section of the theater. At that, they immediately left.
After talking to a couple of the late-night DJ's, who said they'd heard strange noises in the boiler room, seen lights flickering, felt creepy, etc., we decided to move our practices out of the theater, and into the office space of one of the radio stations, which was in the basement. In this space, our practices were more peaceful until one night when in the middle of a song our normally mechanically correct drummer skipped a beat and faltered. My boyfriend and I also ground to a halt, and the bass player, whose back was to the door, was left asking what was up. The three of us started in on "Did you see that???" and "What the hell was that???" and discovered that we'd all become aware of a human but entirely black shape near the door, which seemed to be observing us, and when we fully concentrated on it, it had zipped out the door in a accelerated but human run. At this point we were all so depressed and horrified that I suggested quitting music and college, moving to another country and becoming goat farmers. But my ever curious and calm boyfriend decided to talk to one of the building security guards.
We found one, a woman probably in her late thirties. We asked her if she had ever seen anything odd, or if anything odd had ever happened here in the past. She told us that a high school senior had shot himself in the head just outside this building directly after graduation. Furthermore she herself had been a junior in the same high school when this had happened. FURTHERMORE, she said she thought she'd seen him in the mall that summer after he died, wearing the outfit he wore for his senior picture. She said she had a particular interest in patrolling this building because of what had happened and what she'd seen. We asked her what he looked like: brown hair, glasses, freckles. What had he been wearing in the senior picture? Maroon sweater vest.
Since this basically confirmed that we had been unwittingly interacting with a suicide ghost, I again strongly advocated the immediate relocation and career change, but my staunch boyfriend told us that everything was going to be okay. The woman told us the boy's name was Patrick Christie. Just typing the name even seven years later gives me chills. After that, every time we came into the building and went downstairs to practice, my boyfriend would holler out cheerfully, "Hello, Patrick! We don't mean to bug you or anything but we're going to practice now, down in the basement!" and stuff like that. The ghost never gave us any more problems, and our arguments and difficulties stopped.
When we graduated and moved, we went back into the theater and said goodbye to Patrick Christie, always staying very cheerful and upbeat when we talked to him. He never gave us any more trouble.