At long last, I'm finally getting around to editing and posting this.
My office is in the middle of nowhere, or at least as close to nowhere as you can get on Cape Cod. From the entrance, I can walk five minutes on the road in one direction, and be at the ocean. If I walk in the other direction, I'll pass a handful of summer homes, one other business, and then be surrounded by conservation land. I can walk to the back of our offices and jump down into the salt marshes.
Our office building used to be a single-story house with a finished basement. Now it's all been chopped up and converted. Most of my department's activity takes place in the finished basement section. About half of the basement is above ground, half is below ground. I sit by the back entrance which is the part above ground. This part of the house is poorly insulated, and I can hear every whistle and moan of the wind blowing off the marshes and past my little window and the back door. The cold from the ground seeps up from the basement floor. Happily, we're allowed a liberal hand with the thermostat, which we take full advantage of.
The building is drafty, which is why I'm usually complaining about my coworkers leaving doors open. If the door to the stairs is left open, all the warm air in the basement whooshes up to the rarely used first floor, leaving us warming our hands over our monitors.
It will not surprise any reader that a poorly insulated, indifferently converted building has a lot of odd noises. That it shakes in the wind coming from the nearby ocean and rattles in the wind and produces bumps and creaks and curious sounds that set the imagination grinding.
For scheduling reasons, I've been working by myself in the afternoons. It gets dark early these days and the gloom seems to press in, but I like being by myself, I'm familiar with the noises of the place. I've worked here for several years, I know the irritating thunk-thunk of the stair door shaking in the draft, sounding like someone walking up the stairs. I know the moan of the wind hitting the gaps of the window behind me just right and the accompanying little bursts of cold air and the ways that noise travels when the upstairs windows are open.
But, I swear I haven't heard this before.
Yesterday, as evening came early with the rain, I kept hearing the sort of noises you hear when someone is using the upstairs space. The trouble is, no one is up there currently, they're all on travel. The noises never resolved into anything definate like footsteps or a chair being scraped back from a table, but throughout that long afternoon, I'd think that I heard something, stop to listen, and it would all go quiet. I'd go back to what I was doing, and then I'd think I heard it again.
This went on for several hours. I know it doesn't sound like much, but that sort of waiting and listening wears on you. By the time quitting time rolled around, I locked the door and ran out of there. Half telling myself that the place was haunted and half grumbling at myself that it was a freakin' window that wasn't closed all the way and I was spooking for no reason. At any rate, I wasn't going to investigate in the dark by myself.
So today when all was bright and cheery, I went upstairs to investigate. The section I suspected of causing trouble was the converted porch. It's a place that people sit during the summer, it has a nice view of the marshes and the water, and is battered by wind at this time of year. I was thinking that maybe some patio furniture was getting dragged in the wind, or a window was open or something else equally explicable.
Nope, nothing. A casual investigation showed me that the furniture was much too heavy to be shifting around, and mockingly, books and papers showed no sign of having been disturbed or moved or anything that would be consistent with an unusual draft blowing through loudly enough to cause noise.
Nothing in the back rooms either. No open windows, nothing loose, and nothing disturbed.
The one item that seems like a likely possibility is a sort of poor-man's French door that is a separate entrance onto the converted porch. It's only a glass door and a screen, and it doesn't look very secure to me. Maybe it rattles in the wind. As I said, the upstairs windows when open do cause noise to travel in a very odd way to the downstairs.
I guess the only way I'm going to find out is if I hear it again, and go upstairs and check to see if that door's the problem. Yes, I'll go upstairs in the dark by myself to see if the strange noise really is what I think it is. Yeah right. I'll sit right by my desk near the entrance, prepared to head for the hills at the first opportunity.
Now that I've had a chance to reflect, it occurs to me that my "ghosts" could be projection. I'd rather be working somewhere else, and this is a thought that I try not to let dominate all of my time at work. Some days I succeed better than others. Small wonder that I hear things that go bump in the night, it's an externalization of my feelings about the place. Yes, keep up that thought. It's all projection. So, I won't have any trouble heading upstairs in the dark by myself next time I hear noises. Right?
