Happy Halloween and Samhain blessings to everyone! As I’ve done for the past couple of years, I posted a ghost story on Hive to participate in HiveBuzz‘s Halloween Trick or Treat badge, and thought I’d share it here as well. And in keeping with a sort of theme, I’m again sharing a spooky tale from the time that I was a tour guide for the Hammond Castle museum back in the mid 1980s.
However, unlike my past two stories (the first about meeting Jack, and the second about meeting Max), this one about meeting the ghost of a psychic named Irene isn’t nearly as dramatic or detailed. But when I think about spooky experiences I had while I worked at the castle, this is right up there in the top three, so it seemed like the perfect one to share today.
Meeting Irene the Psychic – my Trick or Treat story for a HiveBuzz badge
Part of my tour guide duties also included assisting at functions at the castle outside of the regular tours, like weddings, parties, movie screenings, and such. The night this particular bit of spookiness happened, there had been a small wedding. I divided my time between the lobby area, and walking around the edges of the celebration (if I had a penny for every time I had to tell a guest not to put their drink down on the sarcophagus, I’d be a millionaire by now!).
When the happy couple and their friends and family left for the evening, the staff (my boss, two maintenance men, and three other tour guides) got to cleaning things up to get ready for the tours the next day. If you took a peek at that Hammond castle sarcophagus video I linked above, it actually shows where I was when this took place.
I was standing between the creepy coffin and the doors leading to the great hall (which in the picture above, are the two black rectangles at the top of the picture), as I’d been sweeping the floor in this area. Another tour guide was in the room to the left of the picture (the doorway is just out of frame) and I could see through the doors that the maintenance men were on the far end of the great hall. I wasn’t sure where my boss or the other two guides were, but I assumed they were up in the lobby area as we typically had a sort of “divide and conquer” routine after events like this.
With me so far? Good…lol
Now to backtrack a little bit, I’d heard many stories about how Hammond had invited a psychic named Irene (not to be confused with Mrs Hammond, who shared a first name and spiritual sensitivity with Irene, but I cannot for the life of me remember what her last name was) to help him with some scientific research he was conducting on mediumship and séances. In fact, I might do a part two of this post for next year’s Halloween challenge, so I have time to put together information about his faraday cage and possible pull the psychic’s last name out of my brain (or find the notes and such I still have from my tour guide training). Bit of a spoiler for next year’s post (lol) – Irene spent time at the castle as a guest of the Hammonds, and stayed in one of the bedrooms in the area above where my fellow tour guide (I’ll call her “Jan”) was cleaning.
So there I was, sweeping away and lost in my thoughts (to be fair, there may have been a little beer involved in our cleanup routine), when I suddenly heard a scream.
A scream that lasted only a few seconds, but seemed to reverberate through my entire being.
Like, the kind that chills you to your core and your soul screams back in fear while your brain tries to figure out how to tell your body to run away from something you can’t even see.
It took a second or two for my brain to finish processing, then it decided to kick into rationalization mode. The ungodly sound came from the area above the bedrooms that Jan was tidying. An area that used to be bedrooms as well, but had been turned into office space for the staff, including my boss (who I’ll call “Jeanine”). My first thought (or should I say non-babbling coherent thought) was that Jeanine had been up there, and one of the other tour guides startled her (as we liked to do to each other) and they were probably laughing about it right then.
A conversation like this followed after I took a bunch of deep breaths and managed to form words again called Jan to come out to where I was standing (since my body was still trying to decide if it should run or not)…
“Hey Jan, sounds like Bill got Jeanine good this time! That was a helluva good scream from her.”
“What do you mean, scream? I didn’t hear anything.”
“How couldn’t you hear that? It was wicked loud and I’d swear it echoed, even though it came from upstairs. Are you sure you didn’t hear it?”
“Positive, and it couldn’t have been Jeanine, because look.”
I turned and looked out of the great hall doors to see Jeanine and the other two tour guides talking to the maintenance men all the way down across the room.
It didn’t take long after that for us to agree we were done cleaning that area of the castle, and beat feet over to where the others were. After I told them what happened, someone (I’m pretty sure it was Jeanine) said, “Oh yeah, that was definitely Irene you heard. Plenty of people hear her screaming like that all the time, because of what happened after that séance experiment years ago.”
Needless to say, I didn’t stick around much longer that night…
I hope you enjoyed my little tale (although I don’t think I did justice to just how freaky it was). Thanks as always to the team behind the HiveBuzz badge for putting together another fun, seasonal challenge! Happy Halloween everyone!
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Speaking of witch which…
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Whoa!!!