No matter how much I wax poetic about the rare joys of homunculi, it seems like all the average person I encounter who hears I have any level of sixth sense abilities wants to hear about is "ghosts." I can't mention the slightest whisper of the occult around everyday folks without getting the whole rigamarole of, "have you ever seen a ghost?" "What's your spookiest ghost story?" "Can you tell me if my house is haunted?" and so on and so forth. Their eyes glaze over at the mention of homunculi or artifacts, and the fact that literal magick is real doesn't pique their curiosity nearly as much as hearing a decade old "ghost story" about how there was some spooky invisible asshole that fucked everything up in some old building.
So, fine. This "ODDITIES" entry is about ghosts, or what I generally refer to as "entities" (extradimensional/astral beings with a high degree of sentience, akin to at least a stupid human). This is ignoring random haunted objects, or haunted places and things I have sought out. This is just the rundown of the bizarre encounters I had before I really started in my metaphysical journey when I was just another poor asshole getting trolled by extradimensional dickwads and struggling to fit these new experiences into my at-the-time very close-minded worldview. The exception is the final entry, which was made after I was actively training to be a magician. It's included here anyway because fuck Kevin.
I don't know the ghosts' names but they needed names for this article. Kevin was what everyone called Kevin, and "The Lady in White" was a moniker adopted long before I'd heard of her. The others are just random somewhat fitting titles I came up with either at the time of encounter (Reginald) or for this article (the others).
Most of my encounters with what are traditionally considered "ghosts" came when I worked in an old hotel that had seen very little renovation. This job was integral in the initial formation of my occult awareness and beliefs--I would hear guests consistently, without collaboration, over the span of months complain about encountering the same entity in the same half-floor and nowhere else. The staff called her "the lady in white." As much as I love to coin my own personal occult glossary, I cannot take credit for this one--it was in use long before I started working there.
The lady in white appeared the same to every guest who encountered her--an adult woman in a white dress clinging to the ceiling like a spider glaring down at them. The stories the staff members who hadn't seen her themselves would tell secondhand grew into elaborate backstories of her being the ghost of a woman who leapt to her death from that floor's window after some oddly specific heartbreak and added details like her being covered in fresh blood, but these details/embellishments never showed up in the actual stories from the few staff members and many guests who encountered her. I never encountered her myself, much to my dismay, because I never had a reason to ever be inside the rooms in question and therefore never did. There was a definite "presence" through the hallway connecting the rooms where she was active, however, that I could feel before I even started my journey to become a magician. The most fun report of her came from a straight-laced clean-cut businessman, who RAN out of the elevator to my desk, pale as a sheet, to demand a change of room. "You're never going to believe why I'm asking, but I need to change rooms," he stammered at me, barely able to get out the words. "I swear I'm not crazy, I've never seen anything weird before, I'm not mentally ill, but on the ceiling--"
"The lady in white?" I interrupted him.
His eyes grew to the size of flying saucers. "HOW DID YOU KNOW!?" He then went on to describe exactly the same entity as everyone else. I was able to get him a new room, and he was thrilled to hear others had encountered it in the same area and that he was not, in fact, just hallucinating for the first time in his life for no reason. She never hurt anybody, and there seemed to be no real rhyme or reason to when she would show up, but it happened often enough I just assumed whenever somebody from those few rooms came down asking to change that it was because they'd seen her on the ceiling. That guess was right more often than it wasn't.
The other three most-known ghosts there, I am proud to say I have encountered. Riser is what I call the asshole who always hijacked the staff elevator to take us to the secret top floor containing only the penthouse, which hasn't been used or touched in decades and, last I had been in, was a bizarre stretch of molded carpet and peeling wallpaper littered with toppled and broken Roman style busts. Riser, perhaps a vaporwave afficionado, was particularly fond of this room, as he would constantly hijack the elevator and force it to go this top level. Going from one basement floor down to the second basement level? Tough shit, welcome to the penthouse. Want to go from the top "real" floor down to the lobby? EAT MY ASS, BITCH, WE'RE GOING TO THE FUCKING PENTHOUSE. You could be the only one in the whole building and trying to go down to your car at midnight and Riser will decide it's actually time to go, guess where? Yup. The. Mother. Fucking. Pent. House. Everyone hated this incorporeal milquetoast piece of shit. You know that one guy who wanted to be the class clown but only had one "joke" and everyone got sick of his totally EPIC prank that they'd already seen a dozen times? Imagine that but if you couldn't punch the dude because he was possessing an elevator.
We had the elevator inspected and checked over and everything was fine, it was just haunted, and what the fuck do you do with a haunted elevator!? Answer: you ride wherever Riser tells you to, meaning the goddamned penthouse, every time. Riser is such a fucking asshole, but he's the Mother Teresa of hotel ghosts compared to Reginald.
Reginald took a liking to me when I was working front desk in the off-season and was my first repeated encounter with a spirit. A trickster spirit of some kind that appeared to be bound to the lobby, this little motherfucker had one power: sound recording/playback. There were legends of his existence for a long time, stories passed down from decades past of people hearing horses racing through the lobby (the hotel used to be a dirt path). He never did anything half as cool as ghost horse sounds to me, though. He was just a prick, though eventually I would come to miss him.
Imagine you're me. You're finally able to eat lunch at 10PM during a shift that ends at 11PM. You have Watchmen pulled up on the staff PC in the back room, because this is long ago, you haven't read it yet, and your friend won't shut the fuck about it. You're getting into it, actually, about to reach a massive plot twist, when--
Footsteps and rolling luggage approaching the desk. Fuck. A late arrival. You dash out to the desk, but nobody is there. You race from one end of the lobby to the next, but nobody is there.
You go back and resume reading while eating your burger. Mid-bite, you hear somebody come up to the desk again. You run out, reaching it at the same time as the sound does, but there is NOTHING THERE.
This was my reality, and not just for one night. This happened every time there was a slow night shift. The worst part is, every 25th time or so, there would actually be somebody there. I'd say "I'm not falling for your shit, Reggie!" and run out fuming to face the VP of Sales of a major company standing there in the non-dead flesh, looking at me like one would look at somebody who greeted them with "I'm not falling for your shit this time, Reggie!" Without fail, if I actually went to check, it was Reginald. If I didn't, it was some late arrival who thought they were god and wanted a free trip to the Himalayas because it took me 20 seconds to realize they weren't a ghost and step out of the back room.
But Reginald, as much of a cheeky motherfucker as he was, I respected. He didn't scare me, he just pissed me off for the cheap laughs, and I'd let him know how pissed I was and feel him cackle in response. He was a dick, but it got kind of cool to be on practical joking coworker terms with some invisible ghost asshole dude guy. By the end of my time working there we had more of an old pals fucking with each other relationship. I kind of miss him, though I don't think I'd ever want to go back to hotel work.
That's not the case with the Sunken Demon. Fuck the Sunken Demon.
Let me give a bit of background. The pool in this hotel was on the lowest basement level. It was a late addition to the hotel, filling in what I've been told used to be underground caverns. At night, everyone is kicked out of the pool, the houseman investigates every nook and cranny after to make sure no teens are hiding in the trash can to have locked-in pool sex after they leave, and then the whole area is locked down tight. Nothing opens it but a master key. I forget the exact time this always happened, but I want to say it was 9PM. An hour after, so about 10PM, I got a call from the phone in the pool area. I knew it was from that phone because it was labelled, very clearly, as "POOL" on the caller ID.
Baffled, I picked up the reciever and was greeted with the sounds of rushing water (the pool water is normally still, this should not happen if empty) and a deep grumbling demonic voice saying absolutely nothing comprehensible. I demand answers and it hangs up on me.
I immediately assume this is a prank by our houseman, so I radio him. He steps around the corner, confused why I'm radioing him sounding pissed, meaning he was on this floor with me the entire time. For reference, it would take an absolute minimum of two full minutes to get the multiple elevators and hallways it would take to get back to the lobby from below, and I would 100% be able to see this process from where I was as he came around. Instead, he was in the room on the other side of me, which would be literally impossible to happen if he had come from a lower floor. Something unexplained was actually in the pool.
I told him the story and he didn't believe me until it rang again and he saw the caller ID himself. I lifted reciever and let him hear the wicked cacophany. It hung up on its own after several seconds, but by now he was freaking out and insisted I accompany him to the pool, so we took the plunge down to the lowest level. The lights were off and everything was locked up like Fort Knox. The water was calm. The houseman cautiously unlocked the door and stepped through; I followed closely behind.
The phone was hooked on the reciever and "clicked" into place. The pool was empty. The trash cans were empty. We even went into the mechanical room and the storage rooms, both of which we had to physically unlock to get into, but checked in case. Negative. Empty. There was absolutely zero possible conceivable way that anybody could have gotten in or out. The being doing this MUST have been incorporeal.
The elevator ride back up was silent. I wasn't an occultist yet, but I was normally pretty cool about ghosts, even enthusiastic--I even secretly valued even my stupid prankster/prankee relationship with Reginald. But in that moment, I was shaken to my core.
When I got back to the desk, the phone rang several times again from the pool, but hung up as I would reach for the reciever, as if watching me, then ringing again when I would put my hand aside. The houseman watched this occur, sweating like a yuki-ona in the Nevada desert as he stammered to come up with with ANY logical explanation, coming up short. When I finally stopped reaching for it, the phone rang a couple more times and then the entity gave up.
I told myself at the time the phone must just have been on its last legs and finally breaking to the point of glitching out, but it never happened again. Neither the phone in the pool nor the one in the lobby were ever replaced and the ghost calls from the pool never occured again. I would have questioned my sanity if I hadn't had a horrified witness for the entire encounter who still seems shaken by it to this day. I think this encounter paved the way for my strengthening belief in the supernatural and my desire to understand and master the forces that I was beginning to see were already surrounding me.
There were other ghosts at the hotel supposedly, but none others that I directly interacted with or recieved firsthand accounts from guests of (just some vague "there's SOMETHING that moves around in the darkest hallway after 2 AM oooooooo" junk), so we'll move on. There's a restaurant where I lived in high school that used to be an old train station. Everyone says it's haunted as shit, but I'd heard that about basically every single spot in that entire city so I didn't pay it much mind. One night about a decade ago now I was meeting a girl there for dinner and arrived way before she did, so was led to my table alone. I was the only one sitting in the entire old wing of the restaurant, which already gave the scene an eerie vibe, but I nearly jumped out of my skin when I looked up from my menu and saw someone suddenly seated in a booth against the wall several tables down from me.
It was a dark-haired rough-around-the-edges man, probably in his late 20s or early 30s, wearing some sort of burlap scarf or the like around his neck. It covered part of his face, but his eyes were fully exposed and nothing out of the ordinary, pretty standard brown or black pupils, it was hard to tell from that distance. I figured at first I must have just missed him walking in and didn't pay him much mind after the initial startle, but I noticed something peculiar out of the corner of my eye that drew my attention back to him.
For reference, at the time this restaurant had oil lanterns on each table with a live flame. There were vents in the top piece of the lantern to let heat out, but no way to access the flame itself from outside without dissasembly. And yet, I watched, jaw agape, as this man lifted his hands and conducted the flame through the glass like a symphony.
I was beyond floored. Without realizing, I lowered my menu entirely and started to just gawk. The movements became more intricate until finally the fire formed a spiral--that was when he noticed I was watching. His eyes locked with mine. I froze. I'm not sure to this day if his eyes glowed red or if it was the flames bursting into a blaze to fill the entire chamber reflecting in his pupils, but I nearly fell out of my chair and cowered behind my menu.
When I got the guts a few seconds later to peek back over it, he was gone. There was no way he could left without walking by me, which he certainly hadn't done. Flabbergasted, I wandered over to where he had been seated and attempted to move the flame myself, by blowing, waving, fanning things towards it--no dice. When the girl arrived, I acted like nothing had happened. To this day I have no explanation for what he was or how he was able to manifest physically--this was before I had any training or had even opened my third eye.
Nobody else has reported seeing him in particular, but I came to know later this restaurant was known to be haunted, and not just as an old urban legend. Ghost tours frequently included it on their rotation and a professional ghost hunter friend of mine later in life would spend an abundance of time there with his equipment seeking encounters.
I had one other strange experience related to there myself, but I wasn't actually on-location. This was several years after I'd encountered the pyromancer entity. An old medium staying in the hotel I worked at then confronted me by telling me details of my past life I knew but nobody else could have and tried to talk me into going ghost hunting with her at the same location. I refused, but a random other guest who appeared to have some psychic awareness bubbily insisted she tag along with the medium instead. When they came back, the medium was untouched but the poor girl who had volunteered for the adventure came back covered in bloody scratches... so I was at the very least not the only one to encounter something hostile there.
The most noteworthy takeaways from this for me moving forward were the fact the spirit appeared in corporeal physical human form and the fact it confirmed for me that pyrokinesis was an achievable feat. I've still yet to achieve it myself, but I've seen it demonstrated by another magician before since, albeit not at nearly as high a level of complexity or control as the entity at the restaurant.
To this day, though, that entity is the only I've ever seen appear in human form, let alone as flesh and blood. I have no explanation yet, and even as I've opened my third eye and learned to psychically view spiritual beings and even communicate with them via intention-telepathy, I have never encountered anything even slightly similar since. Of all the occult encounters, allies, enemies, and battles I've had over my life at this point, this guy is the only one that still shakes me and sometimes keeps me up at night just trying to wrap my head around what the fuck was actually happening and how it was possible. The thought has even crossed my mind that he was a flesh and blood magician and had simply mastered some form of physical teleportation, but even with all the shit I've seen in my adventures that sounds like a stretch. I have no good answers or theories here, but it happened.
I saved the worst for last, both in terms of annoyingness and uselessness. Kevin was a poltergeist in my ex's house, back when we were dating. He would randomly flip things over, like full cups or baskets, from very secure positions on furniture, just to make people have to clean them up. You'd be sitting there in a room with a few other people and suddenly feel him go active and realize there was a full cup of off-brand soda on a table in the corner, say "Don't even think about it, Kevin," and then watch as the cup would leap from its perch and splatter all over everything. Every rug in the damn apartment had stains.
He also loved to randomly close people's doors, often with a "slam" just to rub it in. He wanted so badly to scare people, but he just pissed us off. By this point I'd started formal magick training and everyone in the group knew it, so nobody really flinched at these things anymore. Every time Kevin would flip some messy shit over or slam a door in someone's face when their hands were full, everyone would just groan. He's the only incorporeal being I've met with the power to the physically move things that was such an obnoxious asshole and nuisance that nobody would even get spooked or excited about it. It was just like having an invisible cat that would randomly trash the house and then laugh at you for it. People started keeping their drinks within arm's length at all times just to avoid his bullshittery. This guy was a grade-A bonified pain in the ass.
One day he vanished, much to our collective relief, until we realized he'd just jumped from the apartment to my ex's car. He would take delight in randomly fucking up the entire electrical system of the car. He especially loved to "laugh" by turning the overhead light on and flickering it on and off like "ha ha ha ha ha ha" and would do so any time my ex said anything about being fat. Kevin was a dick. I liked Reginald so much better. I wish Reginald had haunted the car instead.
One day my ex got into a wreck, no serious injuries but the car was totalled. The brakes suddenly went out at a low speed; this was never given a suitable explanation so I blame it on Kevin. Kevin never appeared in the several weeks leading up to the car ultimately being deemed beyond repair and scrapped, leading to the prevailing theory that Kevin haunted the car that was crashed into, which suffered damage only to the bicycle hitch or whatever the hell it's called. I hope Kevin lived on because it feels wrong to wish death on anything, even a ghost, and I'm sure he did live because I can't see a car crusher killing a being made of pure energy... so at the worst he's probably haunting a junkyard somewhere now.
Regardless... fuck Kevin.
