EP43: The One Where We Tell Creepy, Weird Stories Because It’s Halloween

Ready for some goose-bumpy adventures with Business Blasphemy? 

This week we steer away from business as usual and cross over to the realm of the unexplained. We're bringing you a Halloween special filled with eerie and weird stories shared by our community. From haunted office spaces to unsettling vacation experiences, we promise this episode will leave you with goosebumps!

From ghost stories to UFO sightings to being lead by something from the beyond...the question isn’t if you believe in the unknown, but how much you’re willing to be swayed by the inexplicable.

Whatever your stance on the supernatural, this episode guarantees to challenge your beliefs and keep you riveted! So get comfy, stay alert, and let's traverse the spooky unknown together in our blasphemous Halloween special!

Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:03

Welcome to the Business Blast for Me podcast, where we question the sacred truths of the online business space and the reverence with which they're held. I'm your host, sarah Kahn speaker, strategic consultant and BS busting badass. Join me each week as we challenge the norms, trends and overall bullshit status quo of entrepreneurship to uncover what it really takes to build the business that you want to build in a way that honors you, your life and your vision for what's possible, and maybe piss off a few gurus along the way. So if you're ready to commit Business Blast for Me, let's do it. Hello, hello, blasphemers. Wow, what a journey this has been.

Speaker 1: 0:44

I have been trying to record this episode for so long. I have had nothing but tech issues since I decided to record this episode. My microphone has not worked on any of the platforms that I'm used to recording things on. Even now the sound is a little bit weird. I've tried new cables. I have tried everything that you could possibly think. I've tried different platforms, new equipment, everything has just kind of been. It's made it difficult and I don't even know what to think. But we're here and I want to make sure this episode gets out and, honestly, I have tried absolutely everything. Like I'm not even gonna lie to you, I've tried absolutely everything. So I finally said screw it, let's just do it However it sounds it sounds. I know that you out there will forgive me if it's not up to its usual pristine quality, but we, you know what? Sometimes you just got to do it messy and get it out there. So hello, hello, blasphemers Once again, welcome to the Halloween episode.

Speaker 1: 1:49

Today I wanted to kind of take a departure from the usual. I wanted to have a little bit of fun. It's Halloween, let's do something just a little bit outside the box, because you know, that's how we do things here. Today I wanted to share, you know, just a bunch of stories and I go it's weird things that have happened, because, why not? It's weird season. So, in keeping with the season, I put a call out to social media, as one does, and I was pleasantly surprised.

Speaker 1: 2:13

I got a lot of stories from a lot of people. The challenge was actually getting them to agree to either tell the story to me in a recording or have me read the story on the podcast myself. A lot of people did not want to do that and I don't know if it was like a superstitious thing or if you know there were too many details that would have outed who they were, or they didn't want people to freak out or associate them with it. Because you know how people can be about a lot of things, especially stuff like this, right, paranormal stuff, unexplained stuff. I think there's always this fear that it's going to create a stigma of some kind or that people are not very comfortable with it. I mean, we create issues about minor things, something like this. I can totally understand how it makes someone uncomfortable. So, whatever the reason, I'm going to honor it. And I mean there were a lot of. I mean there were a lot of stories, right, stories that I read, stories that people sent me in voice notes and they were so good. But I did get a couple of people and a couple of stories who were like yep, absolutely, let's do it. So they're going to record, they've recorded it in their own voice, and a couple have actually just written it out and asked me to read it. So I'm going to do that for you.

Speaker 1: 3:19

There's just, you know, anecdotes, stories, weird things that have happened, unexplainable things, and I'm going to start with my own story, but before I do, I want to preface everything by saying I like scary but I don't like gory. So I don't do horror movies, I don't do gross things like that. And you know full disclosure. I have watched the entirety of Game of Thrones twice. I've watched House of the Dragon. I didn't have any problem with that. But like horror, gory I just don't do. I can't stomach it. Like I could not get through the first season of the Walking Dead, uh-uh, even though the story was like super interesting to me.

Speaker 1: 3:55

What I like is a psychological thriller like the one you know you can see gore and you can be like ew, gross, whatever, but the psychological thriller, like a really, really good one, that shit will fuck you up, right. That's the kind of thing where I'm like, oh, that's a good story. So these stories that I'm sharing, all things that have happened that were just, you know, I don't understand how that could have happened. Also, the other thing you need to know about me is I don't believe in ghosts. I don't know why I don't believe in ghosts, but I don't. I don't believe in ghosts like poltergeists or anything like that. And for someone who doesn't believe in ghosts, I have a lot of fascination with ghost stories. I prefer things that I can logically or rationally explain, and when I can't, I'm fascinated. So, having said that, there's a lot of stuff I can't explain, particularly my story, and then, listening to other people, it's like that doesn't even make sense. How is that possible? Anyway, buckle up, here we go. This episode has taken a lot of work to get to, so let's just get to it. Here we go.

Speaker 1: 5:00

Now my story takes place back in the early 2000s. I had graduated from university for the second time and I mean I was a professional student for a long time. I'd gone back to work for my alma mater, so I was working at the same university. I was employed by the Alumni Association, working as an event planner, so putting on donor events, fancy teas, dinners, that kind of thing, soliciting donations. It was a lot of fun. I got to travel, I got to do things that I really enjoyed. I got to work with a variety of different sporting teams and entertainers and things like that, and I think I'd been on the job probably a few months at that point, not very long.

Speaker 1: 5:33

The Alumni Association offices were housed in an old home ec residence, so we were not lucky to have offices in one of the big, fancy, newer buildings. We were housed in an old two-story house and it was a small house. It wasn't big but it was a house that back during the war, was a residence for the home economics students who were living on campus. Obviously, at that time it was only women who were taking home ec. And so the story goes that one of the young ladies who was living in the house, in the residence she had a fiancé who had gone off to the war and unfortunately she had received notification that he died in the war and she was so distraught she took her own life in the upstairs closet. That's all I'm going to say about that.

Speaker 1: 6:17

Fast forward a number of years, a number of decades actually. My colleagues and myself were working in this house that had been remodeled into offices. Now the layout of the house we have a basement. It was a small basement, it was just storage. It wasn't very big, not a lot of room. Down there we had some boxes and things like that stored away. Then on the main floor we had four offices and a foyer that was like the reception area. Then we had an upstairs. Again, the upstairs was not very big, it was open plan. It was used as a boardroom and we had a bunch of student ambassadors who were working as volunteers. They would come and go and work out of that space. On occasion We'd have board meetings up there. There's a big giant oak table up there. Now, obviously there were stairs to the second floor and there was a door at the bottom of the stairs.

Speaker 1: 7:03

Also worthy of note, my boss at the time had a golden retriever beautiful dog. She would bring the dog around on a regular basis. The dog would go in and out of all of the rooms of the house, but there were two rooms that would never go in. It would never go upstairs and it would never go into the boss's office. It would sit at the threshold of the door and whimper. That was super weird. I didn't think anything of it, because dogs are animals. They do what they want. Anyway, keep that in mind.

Speaker 1: 7:32

One night I'm getting ready to fly out to Victoria BC. I'm doing an event there for the alumni. I was just putting some finishing touches on some things, just finishing up some paperwork, making sure things are ready to go. So I stayed late that night and around 5.30, the last of my colleagues leaves and I remember him saying to me goodnight, sarah. I'm going to lock the door when you leave. Just turn the alarm on. The door will lock behind you. I was like cool, not a problem. I'd stayed many times before. It wasn't a big deal. I did not have a key to the house. That's why he locked the door. So the door would lock behind him, but only him, and the manager actually had keys to the residence, so it's not like I could lock and unlock the door myself. Anyway, the house itself was not tucked away anywhere on campus. It was actually right on the quad, right across from the main university building, so you could see the house from pretty much everywhere. So it was about 5.30, six ish. I'm still working.

Speaker 1: 8:24

Suddenly I hear someone walking around upstairs on the hardwood on the second floor and I'm like that's weird. I didn't realize anyone else was still in the house, must be one of the student ambassadors, I didn't think anything of it, but I clearly hear footsteps walking upstairs. So just to be on the safe side, I go to check. I get to the door and it's locked and I'm like that's really weird. It shouldn't be locked. It's never locked. But whatever, knocked on the door a couple of times, didn't hear anyone, went back to my office sat down. Now my first thought is never ghosts. It's usually like serial killers, like but who's going to come into the house? And like whatever. I'm sitting there, I get back to work and all of a sudden I hear the big oak conference table upstairs that we used in the boardroom being dragged across the floor. Now, I didn't see it and, to be honest, it was literally the only thing up there that could have made that noise. But I very clearly hear someone dragging the table around upstairs and I'm like that is really fucking weird. So I go again to knock on the door and just instinctively grab the door knob. It's unlocked. So I go upstairs yes, I went upstairs and, yes, the table has moved. It's usually on the left side of the room, now it's on the right. That's weird. I get the heebie-jabies. I go back downstairs, shut the door to the second floor, go to my office, close the door there.

Speaker 1: 9:44

I call my mom, as you do At this point she lives in another city Like what's she going to do, right? But I'm like, hey, mom, how's it going? I tell her the story and she's like the table was probably already moved and you probably heard the house shifting or pipes settling. It was a really old house. There were a lot of noises and creaks and weird things that it did. And she was like you probably didn't realize that the table had been moved. You're working late, you're preoccupied. I'm like, yeah, you know, you're probably right, because that's what we do, right? We talk ourselves out of stuff like that because it's so hard to believe the alternatives. It's terrifying to think about the alternatives. So I'm talking to her, I'm telling her about my trip and in the middle of the conversation I hear it again the table is being dragged across the floor.

Speaker 1: 10:27

Now I'm just angry. Someone's fucking with me. I get up, I tell my mom hold on. I storm up the stairs. The door is unlocked. I'm ready to tear into whoever's up there. The students are obviously messing with me. Somebody's there, nobody's there. But now the table is on the other side of the room. I go and check that one closet because I'm like maybe someone's hiding in there. They're playing a joke on me. This is what people in horror movies do, right? They go downstairs with the lights off. Yeah, I go and check the fucking closet. I go and check the fucking closet. There's nobody there. Now I'm legitimately terrified. I go back downstairs, close the door to my office, pick up the phone. My mom was still on the phone and I tell her I'm like, mom, the table's moved, there's nobody upstairs. She's like get the hell out of the house. So I'm like, okay, I grabbed all my stuff, I walked out the door. I closed it behind me. The door's already locked. Remember? I don't have access to the house. Students don't have access to the house.

Speaker 1: 11:21

Whatever I get on the plane the next day I leave for Victoria, I come back a couple of days later when I return to the office, I tell my boss all about my experience and she's like, really. And I'm like, yeah, she's like, while there were no notifications of the motion sensors going off after you left or anything like that, so there was nobody who left the house after you. And I'm like, well, who moved the table? The door was locked first and then it was unlocked. She's like there's no lock on the door to the second floor. I'm like what? I go and check, lo and behold, there's no lock on that door.

Speaker 1: 11:53

So now I'm like freaking out and the receptionist kind of pipes into this point. She goes you don't know the history of the house, do you. I'm like, no, she's like we have a ghost here. I'm like, well, let's know, we don't. She's like, yeah, of course we do. And then she tells me the story of the home economics student and her fiance. And then she says why don't you think the dog ever goes upstairs or goes into the boss's office? Because he senses the presence in there. I'm like, why wouldn't you tell me something like that when I start working here? She's like well, not everybody believes in ghosts. Blah, blah, blah. And so, yeah, it was just one of those really weird things.

Speaker 1: 12:27

And I'm telling you, even after all these years, I still tell myself there was probably somebody in the house.

Speaker 1: 12:33

Like there must have been something that I was missing, because the table moved twice while I was there. To this day it creeps me out. No idea what happened, but I've learned since then that the house has been demolished. They've put up a brand new shiny residence there. So I don't know if you're a ghost story believer or if you have any insights you want to try and talk me into or out of, but like I really have no idea. That's my only ghost story. But it's one of those experiences where you're like I really don't know what to think of it and, as somebody who is incredibly logical and rational and likes to know the house of things, that's one of those stories that has stuck with me and has freaked me out pretty much the entirety of my life Still have no idea what happened. All right, this next story is from my friend, megan, and she's gonna share all in her own words about a really creepy experience with a Ouija board. Enjoy.

Speaker 3: 13:23

This story starts the way that all good ghost stories do, with a creepy ass basement and a Ouija board. I just want to preface this by saying that our basement has always been very creepy, so we refinished it several years after we'd moved into our house, so it wasn't like one of those kind of creepy basements. It very much was like a living room and crafting area and a storage area. Then there was a large living area and my sister her entire childhood, was really creeped out by this basement and hated to go down there, especially if she had to go down there by herself, and she would avoid it as much as possible. And she confessed in her early twenties that this was because she would always hear like a woman laughing whenever she was down there by herself. I know I've heard that before. My brother confessed to hearing that before and just thought it was like one of us messing with him, and my mom has confessed to that. She will hear footsteps down there when, like, no one else is home and there obviously shouldn't be any footsteps. And so when I was in high school, we had friends over and, as high schoolers do, somebody whips out a Ouija board and I didn't want to play. But I also didn't want to be like a big wimp and so I was like okay, fine, like we'll play Ouija board, that's cool. And so almost as soon as we get it out of the box and set it up, we start hearing these like weird noises. So we had a pellet stove down in the basement, because most of the basement was like completely underground, and so we had a pellet stove down there to keep everything warm, and the stove had not been making these weird noises. It was making weird like groaning and creaking noises and it had not been making those all night. Like those were new from the time that we pulled out the Ouija board. So that was creepy.

Speaker 3: 15:17

And so we are playing with it and we're like asking it questions and nothing is really happening right, like we're not getting any real logical answers. It's just kind of like moving all around the board. And then also at one point, like the lights start to flicker and so, of course, like half of us are freaked out, half of us are not freaked out, half of us think this is really stupid, half of us are like, oh, my God, what the hell. And so when the lights start flickering, we're like okay, like it's just my parents messing with us. So I go upstairs, like I stomp up to the first floor to be like you know, leave us alone, we're just hanging out or whatever. No one's up there. My parents and my brother are like all the way upstairs on the second floor and my sister's not home. So, like no one's on the first floor flickering the lights at the top of the stairs, right, Nobody's doing that. So I go back downstairs and everyone looks sufficiently freaked out, but no one like tells me that anything happened.

Speaker 3: 16:20

So we all hunker down again and we start asking more questions. Again, we're not getting any real answers or anything, and so the people who are like this is dumb are like you know, can we just like stop this now please. So we ask one more question and again nothing happens. Right, it's just moving all around the board, but it's not actually spelling anything, it's not saying yes or no. So we have one friend who's like y'all are pushing it and you're not even doing a good job and like this is dumb, we should stop playing. And so all of the people who are freaked out are gonna like yeah, right, great idea. So we decide that we're just gonna stop and so we walk away from it. But we don't like sign off. So you're supposed to say a specific phrase that I can't remember and like move the little planchette thing to the bottom of the board.

Speaker 3: 17:11

And we don't do that, we just sort of everybody gets up, we walk away, and as soon as we do that, the lights go out completely, and so this is a windowless basement. It has a sliding glass door that leads out to like the lower part of the backyard and the pool that we have out there, but there's no windows and also I grew up in a like rural part of the county so there aren't any street lamps or anything. So when it is dark it is dark and it kind of takes your eyes a second to adjust because you've still got like a little bit of the light coming from, like you know, like electronics and stuff, but the pellet stove has gone out and it shouldn't have. All the lights are out and like it's dark. So once my eyes sort of finally adjust to the lower light, I swear, I swear I see a shadow figure, and I watch a lot of those like ghosty shows, and they're always like explaining how they're in the pitch dark. But they can see shadows and that's never made really sense to me, but like now it makes sense to me. And so I see this shadow figure walk from one part of the basement to the other. So, like I know, everybody at this point is sort of like behind me and to my right and I see this person walk in front of me from like the craft area office there's like a computer, my mom's craft supplies part of the basement across the bottom of the stairs and disappear into the closed door of the storage room.

Speaker 3: 18:40

I'm super freaked out. I immediately am like okay, we need to like close the board and turn it off and whatever, and like be done with this. And as soon as I had to say that we have to like say goodbye and close this all out, the lights come back on. So now everybody's screaming again because that's really fucking creepy. And I'm still like staring at where this shadow figure has disappeared into the storage room.

Speaker 3: 19:05

And my one friend has been very vocal about how stupid this is is like what are you staring at? And I was like I swear to God, I just saw a person over there like was somebody over there? And everybody's like no, of course no one was over there, and so she thinks that I'm making something up. So she goes over to the thing. She yanks open the door, turns on the light there's nothing in there, obviously and she's like you're just trying to scare everybody. That's not cool. Like, let's just, we need to just like put this away and be done and do something else. She comes back over to like the main area where everyone is. She again is like let's just put this away. This is so dumb, it's not real.

Speaker 3: 19:41

And as soon as she says that the little planchette that's just sitting in the middle of the board because that's where we left it it flies off the board, smacks into the wall so hard that it breaks in half, and we all immediately freak that out, gather up all of our stuff and run upstairs to sleep in the living room, because there's no way in hell we're sleeping in there.

Speaker 3: 20:06

I do think the friend who brought the board like picked up the planchette because we're like oh my God, we don't even know if this is going to work now, and she like said the thing and he was holding the two halves of this stupid thing together and like whipped it down to the bottom of the board and like said the things, and then we all run upstairs because we're like, absolutely not, we're not sleeping down here.

Speaker 3: 20:24

I think the creepiest part, though, is my friend, who brought the board swears up and down, that she took it with her when she left right Like she went back downstairs to pack up all the rest of her stuff, you know, packed up the board into its box or whatever, and took it with her, but my sister and I found it underneath my bed three months later or something like that, and it took us several tries of taking it out to the trash to get rid of it before it actually was gone. It was the creepiest thing, and I hope never to see a Ouija board in person ever again, but that is my super creepy ghost story.

Speaker 1: 21:02

Oh my gosh, right, like freaking Ouija boards. And we used to play Ouija boards when I was a kid. I never believed in them. I always knew that either my friends were pushing it around or, let's be honest, I usually pushed it around too. So Ouija boards, you know they were never a big deal, but I've heard a lot of stories since then about Ouija boards doing things on their own and that has perpetually freaked me the fuck out. So now I just don't fuck with Ouija boards.

Speaker 1: 21:25

All right, this next story is from a friend. She asked to be left anonymous, so I will leave her anonymous. She wrote the story out for me, so I'm going to read it for you in her own words. Now, this is not so much a ghost story as it is a paranormal story. So here we go, back in the early spring of 2015,.

Speaker 1: 21:41

My husband and I were in Eastern Washington, kind of out in the middle of nowhere, near a town called Odessa. We were driving back from our visit to Grand Coulee Dam and it was night. We stopped to take some pictures and we're just kind of be andering and making our way back to the hotel it was around midnight on a two-road lane in the middle of nowhere. We're just talking and looking at stuff, and this is the part I'll never forget. We're both kind of just looking at the windshield and we see a red blinking light off in the distance. Both of us thought it was just a cell phone tower there were lots of cell phone towers with red blinking lights so didn't think much of it. But as we're looking at it we realize the light is moving not in one direction but back and forth, so it couldn't have been a plane.

Speaker 1: 22:23

As we're getting closer we're cresting a hill and as we came to the top of the hill the light starts to move towards us. But there weren't any other lights on it, it was just the red blinking light. We noticed there's a white farmhouse just off the road to the right and as we're coming up on it the red light gets there first. And all of a sudden, when we're about 50 feet from the house, the brightest lights I've ever seen in my life pop on. They were not house lights. These lights were attached to the red blinking light that we'd seen. These lights were attached to some sort of ship floating above the white farmhouse. It wasn't an airplane or a drone. It made zero noise. I don't know what it was, other than some kind of ship. Now, I'm not a UFO expert, but it was about the size of what I would expect a single piloted ship to be a little bigger than our car at the time.

Speaker 1: 23:15

When the lights came on, it floated towards our car and it was about the distance from the street to the top of a street lamp. It was above and slightly in front of us to the point where, in order to look at it, we both had to kind of scrunch down and look through the windshield, but kind of look up. And I remember looking up and thinking what the fuck? I was in shock. I knew it wasn't an airplane no sound, no engine, no, nothing. Underneath it were these black circular areas that looked like they could be, how it hovered, and the bottom part of it was shaped like a triangle. And then there was this rounded top where the thing that was driving it would be sitting, and there were weird markings on it. It was only above us for maybe a minute, but it felt like an eternity.

Speaker 1: 23:54

We had our son in the back of the car with us and my husband, who's a photographer, wanted to grab his camera and take a picture, but I was freaking out Like I don't want to be abducted by aliens. So I'm screaming at him to drive, drive. And after the shock wakes off and he's jolted out of it, he hits the gas and we take off and as we're looking in the roof we see the light just kind of floating across the road off into the field, and then suddenly it was gone. Now, of course, we didn't know what we'd just seen and honestly, to this day we still have no idea other than it was something we'd never seen before or since. The craziest thing about it is the next day my mind kept trying to justify what we'd seen, almost making me feel like I needed to not believe it. I was just trying to make whatever I had seen feel believable in my head, but it was just so weird. We don't really tell this story, which is why I'm remaining anonymous, because obviously I don't want the men in black or any other people knocking at my door over what we saw. We've never been back to that part of Washington again. We've been to other areas, but not that specific spot, and we've never seen anything like it that close ever again.

Speaker 1: 24:56

I spent a lot of time on Google trying to see if there were images out there that looked like what we saw, and nothing is quite like it. There were things that have come to light in the news and other avenues that look similar, but nothing exactly like what we saw. Okay, now that story. Aliens I got to tell you I love sci-fi, I'm a huge sci-fi buff, I love alien movies, but the prospect of aliens coming down to Earth kind of freaks me out because it's such an unknown quantity, right Like you don't know whether if there's life out there it's going to be benevolent or friendly or whatever. And, to be honest with you, if it can make its own, if it can make its way here, it's probably more advanced than we are, which is frightening. That messes with your head. I mean, I was a huge ex-files fan and it was always like really weird to see what the possibilities were that they were dreaming up. Anyway, I've had a similar experience, not nearly as intense as that one, but I remember driving home one day from university. All these things happen in university.

Speaker 1: 25:50

A long time ago I'm talking maybe 25 years ago I was driving down the road driving home from school. We lived in a newer development, so there was like a big stretch of unfinished road between where sort of the university area ended that neighborhood and where my neighborhood started, this long stretch of unfinished road with no lights or anything like that. So it's pitch dark. And on the right-hand side of the road was this enormous expanse of farmland. It was near midnight and I you know because I just finished studying in the library, for those of you who know what I'm talking about. I was studying in the library till midnight.

Speaker 1: 26:25

Anyway, I'm driving down this road and I thought it was an airplane. I saw this pair of lights. It was two white lights. We have an airport nearby. We also had a military base in the area at the time, so I figured it was probably a military aircraft or an airplane of some kind, but these lights were very bright. There were two lights side by side, flying in tandem, so right next to each other, and they made this sort of weird dip down really, really fast. They went down super fast and then they stopped. They hovered for a second and then they shot straight back up and then leveled out and zoomed off over the horizon and I was like that was super weird, never really thought anything of it again. I've tried to lodge to get away, aircraft, military base, whatever.

Speaker 1: 27:09

But even to this day, 25 years later, as far as I'm aware, as far as the public is aware, we don't have any kind of craft that can maneuver the way that that thing did at that speed. And, funny enough, I was listening to a podcast earlier this week. It's called Science Versus, and they were talking about all of the alien stuff that's just recently come out with the Congress and blah, blah, blah, and they were talking about from a scientific perspective, is it possible for craft to maneuver like that? It would have to pull thousands of Gs, according to a couple of the scientists on there, and if a human was sitting in that craft, it would basically liquefy their bottom half. So ew, first of all, and I don't know, weird though right. Okay, time for another ghosty story. This one's from my friend, erica, and this is all about her experience with an unhappy shopper.

Speaker 2: 27:58

So this was probably 2006. I was the manager of the Calvin Klein store north of Seattle and in our mall we had a separate accessories store just for the higher end accessories. Well, our store was thriving. That store was not doing great, and so corporate had decided that we were going to close it up. That meant that we had to, you know, pack up all the inventory. But we also had to pack up all the supplies to have them sent back to corporate, and one of those supplies was the camera system, the security camera system inside the store. So our store didn't have one, because most of our merchandise was not of a price point that really deemed it necessary, but because these were the higher end accessories, they had one over there. So we also absorbed those employees from that store into our store because it was a much, much smaller store than ours was.

Speaker 2: 29:08

So I was over there one night helping them pack some stuff up and get ready to ship it back, and I had heard this story from the managers over there that that location was hot, and I'd heard them tell this story about the purse on the floor and how it had been seen on the security camera. So I was like, okay, well, I want to see it. Do you remember like where it is, or anything? And they did so they remembered the date that it had happened, so they could go back digitally to the date and basically what had happened, how they even initially saw this on camera. And I'll tell you what we saw was the opening manager came in and there was a purse just laying in the middle of the floor and they basically were like what the fuck? There's not that much to do at closing, it's very easy, it's just accessories, you don't have to like fold shit down. So like how could this have been missed, right? And so what they realized was that the person was lazy, was the night crew, that they left a purse just right in the middle of the floor, and so they went back through to see if they had left it that way, so they would have proof, so that they could, you know, talk to the closing manager about why the fuck would you leave the store with a thing right there?

Speaker 2: 30:24

What they realized when they went back to closing time on the tape is that the purse was on the shelf. So then they skimmed through to figure out at what point. Like how did it happen? Because it wasn't just below the fixture that it came from, it was like on the other side of the store so it wouldn't have just like fallen in the night. And so they looked and that was when they realized that it was thrown.

Speaker 2: 30:50

So when we found the spot on the tape where it had happened, we watched and basically, if you can imagine, the camera angle was pointing to the back half of the store and on the left and the right walls were shelves where there were purses. Then in like in the middle, over to the left, was like a standing fixture that had belts hanging straight down on it. And so in the middle of the night was probably around like two or three AM, you can see like if you've seen the movie Predator, you know when the Predator is like invisible, they still like distort whatever. They're walking in front of it like distorts it, you can see through it, but it looks wavy. So if you can imagine like a figure like that, like invisible, predator style, moving from right to left in front of the belt fixture, so you can see the belts, they start to look all wobbly and then it gets to the shelving on the left and this purse shoots straight out in the air like from the higher rack. So straight out into the air didn't, didn't like tip down and then slide. It shoots straight out, then down and then slides on the floor and comes to a stop.

Speaker 2: 32:11

Saw it with my own eyes, was like what the fuck? That really fucking happened. So, yeah, that that was my scary story. And then maybe nowadays, like if we had phones like we do now, I probably would have filmed it, but our phones were not that robust at the time, I didn't even think to film it. Then we unplugged all of that, packed it up and labeled it for corporate. So I'm sure that footage is long, long, long gone, but that is the 100% true story of I saw it with my own eyes some sort of entity that walked over and threw a purse off the wall.

Speaker 1: 32:49

Okay, that's super creepy. And the fact that it's caught on camera, right, those are actually way harder for me to dispute. Like, how do you explain something like that, especially if it's been caught on camera? Nowadays it's a little harder to believe because there's deep fakes and all sorts. You know you can video edit really pretty much anything. It's very easy to do that. Now, some skeptical nowadays, even if I see things on video like I need to see them with my own eyes. This one was taken long enough ago and I trust Erica immensely so I know it was legit. So if she says it was a ghost, believe me there's some something weird going on. I don't know, maybe I do believe in ghosts. I don't know. I'm rethinking all of this. All right, this last story is from a friend named Jordan and it was an interesting family vacation. No-transcript.

Speaker 4: 33:34

So a few years ago, my family, a family friend and I took a multi-day vacation in the Florida Keys. I think it was supposed to be five days, but in any regard, the key words here are supposed to be when we got to the townhouse that we were renting now keep in mind this was about four o'clock in the afternoon and the check-in time was two pm or something. We were told that it wasn't ready yet, which was pretty weird, but okay. So my dad ended up going to Publix and getting a bunch of snacks and we just hung out on the front porch of the house eating snacks while the cleaning crew was inside. Two hours later, several Haitian women come out with their cleaning supplies. They spoke very little English, but as they were leaving they were giving us blessings or something. It was enough to make the hair on the back of your neck stand up. We thanked them and then went inside the house and kind of just brushed off whatever had just happened, because we were pretty relieved just to be out of the humidity. So it was kind of easy to immediately forget and just move on.

Speaker 4: 34:54

Now, in this townhouse, all of the bedrooms were on the second floor. This is a very important detail. My brother and his friend shared a room. My parents had their own and I had my own right at the top of the staircase. I don't remember if it was the very first night or the second night, but I'm pretty sure it was the first. Around midnight, all of a sudden, I hear what I can only describe as a shit ton of horses running up and down the stairs. Meanwhile someone is pounding on the walls. It was so incredibly loud I thought my brother and his friend were just playing a prank or something. So I fearlessly opened my bedroom door, expecting to see them right there, because my door opened right to that staircase. There was nothing there. Okay, little, little freaked out now. This went on for hours. Nothing was ever there. I think I checked one more time just to make sure that you know no one was playing any tricks here. But as soon as I would open the door to peek, the noises would stop. And then, as soon as I closed that door, a few minutes later, it would start back up again. I do not even know how I fell asleep that night, but somehow I did so.

Speaker 4: 36:21

The next morning I walked downstairs into the living room where everyone is and I said hey, did anyone hear anything? I don't know Little fucked up last night and no one heard anything, which was just mind blowing to me. How could no one have heard this? So I'm thinking okay, somehow it was a prank and I just didn't catch them or something. I don't know. You start to go into denial, so we go about our day. Nothing happened that night.

Speaker 4: 36:54

But the next morning my dad, brother and the family friend were going fishing on the boat that we had brought. Now, unbeknownst to me, pretty early on into that fishing trip the boat battery died and that has never, ever happened as long as my family has owned boats. So they were all just floating out at sea for hours. My dad ended up getting violently seasick. Sea Toe eventually came and got them. I don't even know really how, because I don't even think they had cell phone service, but thankfully Sea Toe was able to get to them and we were pretty taken aback, like are we cursed? What is going on here? Now?

Speaker 4: 37:39

That night the phantom running up and down the stairs thing happened again, starting around one o'clock in the morning. I did not therapy this time, I was absolutely paralyzed with fear. Now the next morning my brother's friend said did anyone hear these really loud pounding noises on the stairs last night? And I was like, oh my God. Finally, yes, someone else heard it. I've been vindicated.

Speaker 4: 38:09

But that joy was cut pretty short because, as he's talking, it's about nine o'clock in the morning and the sun is shining perfectly through the living room windows. And I look up and I say what, what's that? And I get up and go look at it at the living room window and there's a cross painted at the very top of the window. Uh, what To anyone who's unfamiliar, painting crosses on the top of windows, doors, basically entry ways, exits, whatever is done to ward off evil spirits. So this is not a great sign. I start frantically going and looking at every window and every door in this townhouse. Every single one has a cross painted with oil on the top of it. Understandably, this was not a morale booster.

Speaker 4: 39:15

So that day we went down to Key West to get this Go on a haunted house tour. Not kidding, nothing notable, though, happened during that trip, except right before we were getting ready to leave to drive down there, this random ass black cat crawled out from under the house and then just disappeared into thin air. Honestly, at that point in time it was like, whatever, that is the least of our worries at this point in time. So by the time we came back, I was pretty wiped out and I just went to bed and I didn't hear anything, but others did. The next morning my dad said around 3am there was this insanely loud pounding noise outside my parents' bedroom door. Now their bedroom had a balcony attached to it like an outside balcony, and my dad said that he seriously considered jumping over the balcony onto the pavement beneath to get away from whatever was waiting for them outside their bedroom door. It finally stopped about 15 minutes later, but my dad said he was just laying there wide awake until the sun came up just terrified.

Speaker 4: 40:29

So the next morning we understandably decided to end the vacation early. We were not having a good time. Also, the family friend had ditched us by this point and I don't even know where he went. Now, as my dad was checking out, he went to the front desk and straight up was like did someone die in this house? What is going on? So he relayed the horrors of this vacation to the manager, beginning with the Haitian cleaning crew who kept us from checking in for 2 hours, to the oil crosses, to the noises and everything, the manager straight up informs my dad that they don't have a Haitian cleaning crew and he had absolutely no idea who those women were. We were so flabbergasted by that we left that place so quick, never even looked back.

Speaker 1: 41:23

Okay, seriously, that just gave me the shining vibes. Anyone else, all right. We had a couple of shorter entries that were submitted, and this one I want to share with you is from my friend Jessica. It's the final story that I'm going to read for you. She wrote this to me in Messenger and I'm going to share it here.

Speaker 1: 41:39

To set context, my maiden name was Gilson. I grew up on a farm, a grain farm in southwestern Manitoba, and I had a big dislike for graveyards. My husband and I were out camping in the interlake area of Winnipeg, which is where we live. This is about 2001. In the afternoon we went for a drive around the lake and in the backside there was a tiny old community grave plot, middle of nowhere. As we drive by, I blurt out that we have to stop and we have to go in there, so we reverse back and go in. I get out and immediately walk straight in, make a right hand, turn to the first row and I feel the whole time like I'm making this as a subconscious choice. I'm being led so as I walk into the row to see the first stone, I see a name come into view behind the grasses that are growing. I read off one letter at a time G-I-L-S my whole last name is there For a moment, I think.

Speaker 1: 42:37

Did we crash? Am I dead? I check for a first name who? Okay, not me. But what the fuck Out of? Maybe ten stones total in that plot? I immediately walked to the stone of a relative that I had no prior knowledge of.

Speaker 1: 42:54

When we got back to the city I called my parents and they did some asking of grandparents. Their best guess is it was maybe a cousin of my great grandfather. A chunk of the family went that way in the late 1800s, early 1900s, and others stayed where I eventually grew up and to this day I don't know why I went where I went. Okay, yeah, so some weird, unexplainable, super creepy incidents, and I gotta tell you, it's stories like this that I don't actually like hearing or reading when I'm in my basement, which is where I am now, and it's dark out, which it is, and I'm by myself, which I am, because, even though I do not believe in ghosts, I am a giant chicken shit.

Speaker 1: 43:35

On that note, I hope you have a wonderful Halloween. I hope that you are warm, wherever you are, if you're going out to trick or treating tonight on your own or with kids, or if you're just handing out candy. We're going to be doing both. Stay safe, stay warm and when you get home, maybe keep a light on. All right, I will talk to you next week and we'll be back to business as usual. That's it for this week. Thanks for listening to the Business Blast for Me podcast. We'll be back next week with a new episode, but in the meantime, help us to stir out by subscribing and, if you're feeling extra sassy, rating this podcast. And don't forget to share the podcast with others. Head over to businessblastformepodcastcom to connect with us and learn more. Thanks for listening and remember you can have success without the BS.