Bad Vibes - 1. Chapter 1

I’d never really believed in ghosts, but up until recently, my scepticism had never been tested either. Weird phenomena began shortly after we moved into our new office; a self-contained unit inside a former Victorian granary building. My web design company was one of the first tenants, so much of the place was still empty.

To get to our unit on the second floor, a flight of stairs led upward from reception onto a corridor around twenty metres in length. Large glass panels along one side faced onto several other empty units, dark and shadowed, their only illumination a glimmer of daylight from the distant windows.

It was on my third or fourth trip up from the car with a box full of files, I first noticed it; an impression that as I walked, someone was walking along with me. A reflection, I thought. Just then, a couple of loose pieces of paper escaped. I had to stop to pick them up but as I did so, the movement on the other side of the glass continued for just a few seconds. It reminded me of one of those objects seen out of the corner of an eye, which disappears when viewed straight on. For some peculiar reason, I didn’t want to look any closer. Anyway, I had a lot of work to do, or so I justified it to myself at the time.

It was the very next day when one of my staff experienced something similar. As I was reading through my emails, Maria knocked, then stepped inside the door.

‘I hope you don’t mind me disturbing you, Luke, but I think I saw someone inside that empty office next to ours. He seemed to be skulking about in there. Perhaps we should call security?’

‘How would he have got in?’ I’d assumed the doors were locked on the empty units, but maybe someone had been shown around and the agent had forgotten to lock up.

‘No idea, except I got the impression he was up to no good.’

We went out to see if we could spot an intruder, but it was just a dimly lit, empty space. Still as the grave, as my granny would have said. I tried the door and found it locked, as expected. ‘Maybe it was your own reflection,’ I suggested. ‘I saw something similar yesterday.’

‘No, I don’t think so.’ She sounded doubtful.

I called security anyway and they had a look around, but found nothing amiss. When I got home, Steve had already prepared a chicken pasta bake for dinner. While we were eating, I told him about it. It was the first time I’d mentioned my own uneasy feelings, not because I’d thought he might dismiss them, more because I already had. Now, I wanted to know if he had any ideas.

‘It’s an old building,’ he said. ‘I suppose it could be haunted.’

‘You believe in ghosts?’

‘I’m not sure. I’ve never seen one, but I know some fairly level-headed people who say they have.’

‘Hmm. I thought I saw something a couple of days ago, but put it down to a trick of the eyes. If Maria’s seen it as well, perhaps it isn’t.’

Steve took a sip of wine. ‘See what happens. It might just be a one off.’

‘Maybe.’ I hoped so, anyway.

We settled in during that first week and no one else saw anything out of the ordinary - or if they did, nothing was mentioned - so the incident was largely forgotten. Sometimes though, when I was last to leave, I had a sense of being watched. I felt singled out by virtue of being brilliantly illuminated by the overhead lights. I couldn’t see inside the unlit space, but anyone - or thing, my imagination muttered - could see me. My scepticism diminished rapidly as I found myself hurrying along the corridor, gripping my laptop bag like a talisman, as if the power of technology had the ability to protect me against the lurking terrors of a November night.

The following week we started on a new project. A few of us stayed late on Thursday evening. We had an important meeting with the client early the following morning and everything needed to be just right. Dan and Clare finished before me and said goodnight, although I hardly registered them leaving. I was well into that zone where I was so immersed in a task, I was barely aware of what was going on around me. It must have been a good half hour later when I finally finished and realised that in order to go home, I would have to face the long corridor alone.

I gathered my things together, then checked around the office and made sure the meeting room was set out for the morning. All the time, my feeling of uneasiness grew. The prospect of turning off the lights and locking the door behind me filled me with a sense of dread. I didn’t believe in things that go bump in the night. ‘But maybe they believe in you,’ a little voice of doubt whispered in my ear.

Out in the corridor, the lighting was bright as ever. It also felt unusually chilly. A fault with the heating, maybe? For a moment, it seemed the lights flickered, echoing my own uncertainty. As I walked to the stairwell, I became convinced I was being stalked. On the periphery of vision, shadows coalesced into amorphous shapes. All the images I had seen in horror films added to my terror. It took a huge effort of will not to run, even though I was convinced at any moment something would break through the glass and pounce.

By the time I got to the car, I was sweating despite the cold. My hands shook slightly as I tried to put the key in the ignition. It took several minutes before I started to feel more like myself again.

The house was empty when I got home. Steve had gone to London for a business meeting and wouldn’t be back until tomorrow. I’d have loved to tell him about it while the experience was still fresh in my mind, but it wasn’t to be. After a few drinks and an evening of watching TV, the whole experience seemed more like the figment of an overactive imagination.

I didn’t say anything to my colleagues the following morning. It seemed so stupid; so irrational. Plus, I had no intention of putting ideas into people’s heads. As it turned out, I didn’t need to. Later that day, it happened again.

Clare had gone down to the mobile catering van to fetch everyone’s lunch order. We all heard a scream and rushed out of the office. Sandwiches littered the corridor. Clare slumped against the far wall, hands covering her eyes. It took two strong cups of coffee before she felt ready to tell us what had happened.

‘I saw something. A grey thing, with huge black pits for eyes. It was coming for me.’

‘From that empty office?’ Matt asked.

She nodded.

‘Like me, just the other week,’ Maria said.

‘You thought it was a burglar,’ I tried to keep things in perspective.

‘Well, it sounded silly otherwise.’

‘I’ve seen things down there too,’ Joanne said.

‘And me,’ added Dan. ‘It’s always cold in that corridor. There’s a weird feeling as well.’

It was as if we’d all given ourselves permission to admit it. Everyone’s experiences were slightly different, but what came through was the feeling of being watched and a sense of deep unease. The question was, what could we do about it, if anything?

Now, if life had mirrored a horror film, research would reveal that there had been some terrible tragedy inside the old building over its lifespan. Workers killed in freak accidents; someone falling through a rotten floor at that precise spot in the corridor, that sort of thing. But despite trawling the Internet and a visit to the local history section of the library, I found nothing. Now that we’d all admitted what we’d seen and felt, the sensation seemed to intensify. I becames determined to have an answer and finding one became something of an obsession to me.

Yet when it happened, it was totally by chance. December eighteenth, a few days before we broke up. Cold, icy, a hint of snow in the lowering sky. Just the day for ghosts to walk. And at four in the afternoon, the power went off. A call to the utilities company confirmed it wouldn’t be back on until well into the evening. There was no point in anyone staying, so they went home in dribs and drabs, until only Clare and I were left.

‘Just so you don’t have to lock up on your own,’ she said. I appreciated the gesture, for she was clearly scared. Yet, when we went out into the corridor, lit only by a few emergency luminaires, it felt somehow… different. Not at all spooky, or even unnaturally cold, despite the heating having gone off with the power. As we walked along, I glanced into the empty offices, unthreatened by any half seen presence.

‘It’s gone,’ she said, sounding surprised. ‘It should be worse, in the dark, but it’s not. That’s odd.’

Even stranger, the next morning when the power was restored, the feeling was back again. I tried an experiment; turning off the lights, in case it was reflection from the glass panels causing the effect. This time, the darkness felt extra menacing. The hairs on the back of my neck started to prickle within just a few seconds. I forced myself to walk along slowly, finding the feeling increased up to about midway along the corridor, then gradually decreased the closer I came to the door into our offices.

The Christmas break stopped me thinking about the phenomena, as I’d now labelled it. It was only when we returned to work in January it became clear something had to be done. Clare came into my office to tell me she was about to start looking for a new job.

‘Any particular reason?’ She was a good worker and I didn’t want to lose her.

‘Well…’ She hesitated. ‘This sounds so silly, I know, but it’s that corridor. It gives me the shivers every time I have to go through it. I like this company and you’re a good boss, but I don’t think I can carry on like this. It’s affecting my nerves.’

‘Leave it to me. I’ll see what can be done. I’d like to get to the bottom of this, too.’

I had no idea where to start. Practical matters, such as dripping taps or locks that didn’t work, I could take up with the building management. Whatever this was seemed beyond their jurisdiction. In the circumstances, I did the only thing that seemed sensible; ask Google.

The first article I found, from Psychology Today, was about haunted houses. Okay, this wasn’t a house, but it was an old building, no matter how much it had been renovated and modernised. I began to read.

From a psychological point of view, the standard features of haunted houses trigger feelings of dread because they push buttons in our brains that evolved long before houses even existed.

That sounded sensible. I carried on. It said haunted houses make people afraid because, in a situation where a threat might exist, we always fall on the side of thinking that there is one. In evolutionary terms, the hypervigilance caused by feeling scared might mean the difference between being eaten by a hungry predator or not. In large, empty old houses, the creaking of boards, the sighing of wind passing through cracks, ragged curtains fluttering in a draught and cold spots put a person into this hypervigilant state.

I could identify with all of that. It reminded me of a time when I was out walking alone in some woods. It had been still and quiet, until I heard a rustle in the dense shrubbery to my right, shortly followed by a second, closer noise. All my senses went on the alert. I didn’t know what it was, but my fight or flight response kicked in automatically. Relief followed shortly, when a large bird erupted from the bushes, taking flight between the trees.

However, these offices didn’t have the triggers that existed in a spooky old house. There were no draughts, or wind noises, or ragged curtains. Although, there was definitely a cold spot in the corridor. I was mulling over what I’d read so far when Dan popped his head around the door.

‘Are you busy?’

‘Not really.’

‘Could I have a quick word?’

‘Sure.’ I hoped he wasn’t going to tell me he was looking for another job, too.

He sat down. ‘This is… er, well, I dunno. A bit weird.’

‘Go on,’ I encouraged him.

‘This, well, thing in the corridor. I was talking to a friend over Christmas. She belongs to a group who investigate stuff like that. Hauntings. I told her about what’s been happening lately and she said they’d love to come in and see if they can find out the cause.’

There was no harm in it, I supposed. ‘How soon could they do that?’ No point if they had a massive waiting list. I had to solve this problem before a rival company snapped up Clare.

‘Oh, any time. They mostly do it in the evenings.’

‘Well, let’s get it arranged, then.’ Doing something was better than nothing. ‘Can you give her a call to see when they’re free and let me know?’

‘Will do.’

As it turned out, they could come in on Wednesday evening of the same week, at seven-thirty. After they’d all finished their day jobs and had their tea, I assumed. I told Steve about it when I got home.

‘You realise it might make it worse?’ He sipped his coffee and stretched his toes closer to the fire.

‘How do you mean?’

‘Well, in horror films, things usually start out fairly small until someone messes with forces beyond their understanding . Then it’s blood running down the walls, corpses rising up from the bath and ‘here’s Johnny!”’ He gave his best impression of Jack Nicholson in The Shining.

‘Oh, shut up!’

Thursday arrived and after meeting Steve for a meal in a local pub, we went back to the offices. The heating and ventilation had gone off at seven, so the air felt still and slightly chilly as we stepped inside the building. At the top of the stairs, I switched on the corridor lights.

‘This is it,’ I said quietly. What was I doing? It wasn’t as if the ghosts could hear me.

We walked toward the office. I expected to feel the usual sensation, but tonight there was nothing. Typical, now we had proper investigators coming in. It reminded me of the warning light on my car’s dashboard, which always went off when I took it in to get checked out.

‘Doesn’t feel spooky to me,’ Steve said.

‘It isn’t, right now.’ As I unlocked the door, he goosed me. ‘Hey, cut that out. I’m at work.’

‘You’re the boss and we’re alone,’ he said, with a familiar look in his eye.

‘Leave it for later. I don’t want these people to arrive and find us looking like we’ve just had a quickie in the stationary cupboard.’

‘Spoilsport.’ He grinned. ‘Where is the stationary cupboard, anyway?’

I pointed to a waist high grey cabinet. ‘It’d be a bit cramped in there.’

‘Not like the one at college, eh?’ He gave me a knowing glance.

‘We were young then.’ My phone rang. ‘It’s Dan. They’re here.’

The psychic investigators turned out to be two young women and a middle aged man. The man had several cameras slung around his neck and carried a smart case.

‘Lovely to see you.’ Phyllis gave my hand a slightly limp shake. She wore a long, black coat, with a beret tilted askance atop her long, black hair. ‘These are my colleagues, Eileen and John.’

‘Great. Where would you like to start?’

‘I can sense something already.’ Eileen’s nose twitched like a rabbit’s. She walked a few steps along the corridor. ‘Yes, it’s definitely getting stronger.’

John readied his camera. Without warning, he took a barrage of shots. ‘Orb,’ he said.

‘What?’ asked Dan.

‘An orb is a transparent ball of energy, often found in haunted locations,’ Phyllis explained.

Steve stood in the doorway of our offices, behind her. He caught my eye, his expression showing what he thought of that. I was sceptical, too, but also desperate. If these people could shed some light on the situation, I didn’t care how odd their ideas were.

John began shooting again, swivelling round like a gun turret on a tank. I couldn’t see a thing, but the two women followed his movements.

Phyllis pointed at the suspended ceiling. ‘Did you see that big red one?’ she asked Eileen. ‘Definitely a disturbed spirit.’

I began to feel as if I was missing out on this supernatural light show. Dan’s face showed he was as baffled as I was. Steve shook his head slowly.

‘So that’s what these orbs mean?’ I asked, trying to keep an open mind.

‘Oh, yes.’ Eileen sounded enthusiastic. ‘The more there are, the stronger the haunting. Do you know if anyone ever died here?’

‘Given the age of the building, I wouldn’t be surprised. Although I couldn’t find anything when I did some research.’

‘Cover up,’ John said. He was evidently a man of few words.

Phyllis elaborated where he’d left off. ‘It can be bad publicity for a company if a place gets a reputation.’

‘I’m sure.’

They followed me into the office, where John unpacked equipment from his case; various sorts of sensors and gadgets whose function I could only guess at. He went back out into the corridor, alone, while Phyllis and Eileen sat at Maria’s desk, holding hands with their eyes closed.

Dan, Steve and I went into my office, not wanting to disturb them.

‘Do you think they know what they’re doing?’ Steve asked.

‘They look fairly professional.’ I had my doubts, but didn’t like to say in front of Dan. Eileen was his friend, after all.

Dan peered out through the vertical blinds. ‘Nothing happening that I can see. Those two are just sitting there and John hasn’t come back yet.’

‘Maybe the ghost’s got him?’ Steve suggested.

‘No, I can see him now.’ Dan pressed his nose against the window. ‘He looks fine.’

We sat around for a while. As is usual these days, we all started looking at our phones. Fifteen minutes elapsed before Phyllis appeared at the door.

‘We’re almost done,’ she said.

‘Oh, good. Did you find anything?’

‘Very much so.’ We followed her back out to the office.

John had returned and was packing away some of his equipment. ‘High EMF in that corridor. Temperature gradients, too. All good signs.’

‘Good?’ I asked, cautiously.

‘For a haunting,’ Eileen said. ‘And there’s definitely been at least one death here. Phyllis made contact with a man who was buried under a mound of grain during the eighteen-sixties.’

Phyllis nodded. ‘Given time, I could probably discover a lot more.’

‘That’s great.’ I didn’t want to discourage them. ‘But what can we do about it? To stop it, I mean?’

Eileen looked shocked, as if I had suggested bulldozing a listed building. ‘Oh, you can’t do that.’

‘It might diminish once the building’s fully occupied,’ Phyllis suggested. ‘Or we could try a blessing. Sometimes they work. But often, you just have to learn to live with the phenomena. They don’t mean you any harm.’

‘Well, most of the time they don’t,’ Eileen added.

It was hardly reassuring. They left shortly afterwards, promising to write up their findings in their monthly newsletter and to send me a link.

‘Bit of a waste of time,’ I said, back in the car. ‘I thought they’d be more helpful than that.’

‘I reckon, for them, the investigation’s more important than finding a solution.’

‘What am I going to do? Clare’s going to leave. How long before someone else does as well?’

‘Don’t worry. Let’s have a good think about it. Get all the facts down.’

Once we were home, Steve pulled an A4 pad from his laptop case. ‘So, when did you first notice this thing?’

‘The first day, when I was making trips to and from the car. I thought I saw something in those empty offices.’

He scribbled that down. ‘What did it look like?’

‘I’m not sure, really. Like something was moving, just out of the corner of my eye. Then, the next day, Maria saw something similar, but she thought someone had broken in.’

‘All visual, so far.’ Steve wrote some more. ‘When did the odd feeling start?’

‘Over the next week or so. It was worse when I was alone. And never in the office, just in the corridor. That’s where Clare was frightened, too. She saw a grey shape with big eyes. It scared her so much she dropped all the sandwiches. That was when everyone started to admit they’d seen and felt things, too.’

‘Okay. You think they really did, or were they just riding on her coattails, so to speak?’

‘I don’t think so. They started talking about it right away, not after they’d had time to mull it over or anything. It was after that I took it seriously enough to do some research to see if there’d been a tragedy connected with building. Which turned up nothing.’

‘Hmm. So, up until that point, we seem to have a gradual increase in phenomenon.’

That was true. I cast my mind back. ‘Yes, except for a few times it wasn’t there at all. Like tonight.’

‘That’s interesting. Let’s see if we can find any connections between those times.’

‘The first was during a power cut. The emergency lighting stayed on, of course, but it was quite dark. I thought that would make the sensation worse, but it didn’t. That made me wonder if it was something to do with having a bright light on in the corridor, while the empty offices were dark. Like when you’re in a lighted room and it’s dark outside. People out there can see you, but you can’t see them.’

Steve nodded. ‘And the conclusion?’

‘When I turned the light off, it felt a lot more spooky. Possibly psychological, except it hadn’t been like that the night before. Then there was tonight. Although that might have been because I wasn’t alone.’ It struck me that the same had applied during the power cut. Clare had been with me. ‘Maybe it only happens when a person’s on their own?’

‘Everyone’s more susceptible to being scared when they’re alone. I reckon we should do a bit more research into things that go bump in the night.’

‘Okay, but first I need coffee.’

Coffee made, we returned to the living room, sitting next to each other on the sofa. I opened my laptop. ‘Last time, I searched for “spooky feelings in buildings.” I got something about the psychological reasons people feel uneasy in a so-called haunted house.’

‘Try it again,’ Steve suggested.

I recognised the page at once. I’d only opened the first link before. ‘Let’s have a look at the next one down.’ The heading read; Five Scientific Explanations for Spooky Sensations. I didn’t expect it would be much help, but anything was worth a look. Scrolling down, the first paragraph was about ‘the fear frequency’. Although humans can’t hear sounds below 20Hz, lower frequencies can cause a sense of dread.

Steve chuckled. ‘That reminds me of stories about ‘the brown note’. You know, like in that South Park episode.’

‘Oh, the one where Cartman discovers how he can make people shit themselves by playing a certain sound? That was funny.’

‘What if there’s some truth in it?’

‘There might be, I suppose. I always thought it was an urban legend.’ I paid a bit more attention to the text, discovering that a man called Vic Tandy had spent a night in a supposedly haunted lab with some colleagues. Many of them felt anxiety and stress and Tandy saw ‘a dark blob out of the corner of his eye’.

‘That’s it,’ I said. ‘That describes it exactly. Feeling scared for no good reason, seeing things that aren’t there.’ The low frequencies apparently made eyeballs vibrate and caused optical illusions.

Steve pointed further down the screen. ‘Says here it was caused by a fan running. When they switched it off, everything stopped.’

‘Hang on! The heating goes off at seven each night. So I suppose the fans would stop at the same time.’

‘And when you had that power cut they wouldn’t have been running, either.’

I could hardly believe it could be something so simple. ‘I’ll speak to the building maintenance people tomorrow. See what happens if they turn the fans off.’

‘Fingers crossed, then.’ We drank to success with the last of the coffee.

Next day, I did just that. It took a while, as everything was apparently automatic and they were worried about messing up the settings, but eventually I persuaded them to give it a try for just a minute. The supervisor and I stood in the corridor. Despite being accompanied, I still had that uneasy feeling.

‘Funny thing,’ he said, looking around. ‘Some of my team don’t like coming up here alone. It sort of feels like we’re being watched.’

‘That’s it, exactly.’

He spoke into his walkie-talkie. ‘You can cut it off now, Sy.’

‘Okay, boss.’

I didn’t hear the fan go off, but almost at once that spooky feeling vanished. Just as it had said in the article, it felt as if ‘a great weight had been lifted’. This was just an ordinary, magnolia painted corridor.

We waited for a minute or two. ‘Turn it back on again,’ the supervisor said.

Within seconds, that feeling returned. I felt vindicated. First thing I wanted to do was to message Steve, to let him know, but the supervisor, a practical man, insisted on repeating the experiment a few more times. ‘Just to be certain.’

Once he was, he told me, ‘We’ll leave that fan off for now. You might find it gets a bit cold up here, as that’s what feeds in the warm air. But I’ll get on to the installation company to see what they can do.’

It took a few weeks, but eventually the ghost was laid to rest. All it took, apparently, was a different mounting plate, which prevented the fan from creating those bad vibes. I’m still not certain if hauntings are real or not. All my experience proves is that sometimes there really is a ghost in the machine.