A Ghost Story

T-6…

Today’s Halloween countdown post is a scary story I have to share with you all. This is actually a true story. The events in this story occurred to my friend and I when we lived together in college. This story takes place the fall of 2004. It was a truly horrific and unfortunately memorable happening. So let’s all gather ’round the campfire and listen to this tale…

It was my first summer vacation in college and as it was coming to a woeful end, I was starting to get ready to go back to school. I was packing up my belongings, and mapping out how I would fit everything into my family’s minivan (Loser Cruiser). One of the larger things I was bringing back to my dorm room was a mini-fridge I had used the year before. From what I heard, as my brother and his friend were taking the fridge from a closet, the fridge’s door came open. Out came a stench like a rotting animal. The frigde was quickly cleaned and packed into the car. We all just assumed that would be the end of the stench, but that was just the beginning…

When I got to school, I unpacked my belongings and put my mini-fridge in the corner of my suite’s common room, which I shared with my roommate. When I got around to putting food and drink in my fridge, I opened up the small door and was once again greeted with the smell of rotting animals. I quickly devised a plan to scour the fridge with every cleaning supply I could find. I had to rid this cursed fridge of whatever happened to be rotting in it over the summer.

The stench was so great that it wafted into my floor’s hallway and even into my building’s stairwell. I spent a few days cleaning the fridge, but nothing seemed to work. It seemed that whatever died in my fridge was not keen on my trying to get rid of its remains. It was as if a pungent ghost of whatever had died, had taken up residence in my fridge.

The one thing I have learned from this is that you should never bother a ghost. If you irritate the after-life, you better be prepared for worse things to come. At the time, I had no idea that more bad news would be coming in my future. But I did know that I wouldn’t be able to stand the fumes for much longer. So I just closed the fridge door, and shared my roommate’s mini-fridge for a while.

After some time of having an empty fridge that I had to constantly warn people not to open, my roommate and I grew curious. Maybe the stench had left. Maybe I should just buck up and use my fridge anyways. So on a day very close to Halloween, I decided to revisit my ghastly problem. I wasn’t afraid of no ghosts. I could handle this. It would be fine. I got my roommate to be there with me as back-up in case I couldn’t handle the stench and passed out. We gathered together, held our noses, and I very carefully pried open the door I had previously taped closed…

.    .    .    .    .    .

Ever since that vision my roommate and I shared, we kept the fridge on a watchful lock-down. As a caution to anyone who came into our room, I taped a warning sign to the front of my fridge:

Since I didn’t have the right equipment or state of mind to deal with whatever had manifested itself in my fridge, my roommate and I chose just not to deal with it. From that day onwards, that fridge got stored away in a locked up closet in my parents’ house. It wasn’t until this year that the mini-fridge was taken out of hiding. This year my little brother took it to his dorm for his freshman year of college. Hopefully that spirit has moved on, but you never know. Ghosts can be so unpredictable…

Texts From Last Week Part 10

Welcome everyone! Come one, come all, to the greatest show of texts in the blogosphere. Last week turned out to be a disaster on the Metro rails for me. Major Metro fails always leave me with a plenty of time to text myself whatever is going on with the situation at hand. Last week was also a week for multiple dates and last-minute plans. Hoorah. Let’s get started shall we?

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” ‘It’s really loud where you are. Are you at a bar?’ – Matt (Way to assume I’d be at a bar. Though granted,  he was right.)”

“Wow. Second time I’ve been to Buffalo Billiards for a date and the guy is super late. Maybe I should stop suggesting this place…”

“What the heck. I go to a sports bar in DC and they aren’t showing the Caps game. Then, I go to the bar (actually two different ones) and both times the bartender ignores me. Ugh.”

“I don’t understand that if a train is being off-loaded, why would the train in front of it be held stopped? Maybe for scheduling reasons, to keep the trains all evenly timed.  But through a domino-effect, that would mean that all trains would thus be stopped, and that just doesn’t make any sense. So why delay passengers in front of the problem at hand? They are beyond the situation.”

“I found this amusing: I was in the bathroom at work putting on eyeliner, while there was a mother exclaiming how she was trying to wipe marker off her child’s face. Funny how at one age you’re trying to avoid marking up your face, while at another age, you are purposefully putting marks onto your face.”

“The thing is, using the excuse, ‘I’m running late because my train offloaded’ multiple times in one week, isn’t even that preposterous, if you remember that this is the never-fail-to-always-fail DC Metro.”