Home
Up

Charlie

 I have no explanation for what happened that night. I could put it down to youth, as all this happened so many years ago. But I have found that there is nothing quite so skeptical as a 20-something girl who thinks she’s smart, and as I’ve gotten older I’ve become, if anything, much more open-minded. Otherwise I would not be offering up this tale, a nugget of time that I have often studied over the years, turning it over and over in my hands, hoping its secret would reveal itself to me.

 Fresh out of college, I went to work at a small but reputable historical museum. The museum was housed in a hundred-year-old building, set into the side of a mountain like a castle, with three levels of galleries and a fourth, partially underground level of offices.

I made friends quickly, and soon found that the prevailing office culture featured a jokey belief in a poltergeist named “Charlie.” Charlie, it was said, was the ghost of the original founder of the museum, who was overthrown by the board of directors and banned from the museum in his old age. In revenge he haunted the place, always unseen, causing things to topple over, paperwork to suddenly slide off desks, printer trays to eject from their printers and fly across the room. Every time something went wrong in the office, it was Charlie’s fault. When I protested that all the Charlie phenomena were just as easily explained by the fact we were in a 100-year-old building settling into an unstable hillside, my coworkers just smiled and shook their heads.

 I worked hard at my job, often staying late in my subterranean office. When we worked late, the museum groundskeeper, Louie, stayed at the museum until we were done and locked up behind us. Louie had worked at the museum for over forty years, and enjoyed having an excuse to stay late, as he liked to play his guitar and sing in one of the upper galleries. It was comforting, too, to hear his faint singing voice above us as we toiled away in our damp offices.

 One night (was it dark and stormy? No, it was a clear, sharp autumn night) I was working late, again, struggling to finish a grant proposal that was due the next day. I was almost finished when I decided to take a quick bathroom break. This was a bigger decision than one might think, as the only ladies room in the museum was on the first gallery level. This meant to get there I would have to walk down a pitch black hallway, climb of flight of stairs, navigate my way through the darkened gift shop and into the gallery, then find the door to the restroom. Then I would have to do it all in reverse to come back to my office. I considered just waiting and visiting the bathroom on my way out, but decided I needed a break anyway.

 So I set off. Down the completely black hallway I went, without incident. At the stairs I flipped a switch that lit up the stairwell, as I have never been graceful and climbing stairs in the dark seemed to be tempting fate a bit too much. I climbed the stairs and turned into the gift shop, where I realized I should not have turned on the stairwell light – now my eyes were adjusted to the light and the gift shop looked darker than ever. The gift shop had two massive stone pillars in the center, equidistant from each other and the two gift shop doors – one door leading to the stairwell, the other door, almost directly across from it, out into the gallery. I knew from experience that if I stayed to my left, I would avoid running into the pillars, but too far left would result in a collision with a series of glass display cases. I crept along, my hands out in front of me, and by the time I reached the far door my eyes had adjusted enough that I could see the restroom door quite clearly.

 When I approached the gift shop on my return journey, the stairwell doorway was brightly lit from the stairwell light I had left on, spilling light into the shop and illuminating the glass cases and the pillars. Louie was coming through the door, clearly having been down in my office looking for me. He waved at me and I called out cheerily that I was almost done as we approached each other from opposite sides of the gift shop. I was staying close to the glass cases, but Louie was slightly off-course in the other direction, and passed out of my line of sight, behind the first pillar. I continued chatting to him, expected him to reappear on the other side of the pillar as I approached.

 Except he didn’t. He went behind the pillar and simply did not reappear on the other side. I stopped where I was. I could see the pillar, I could see either side of it, I could see the door he had come through and I could see the area between the pillar and the glass cases. In short, I could see everywhere in front of me except the area directly behind the pillar. I solved that problem by taking two quick steps to the side, which allowed me to keep an open line of sight to the door and still see behind the pillar. He wasn’t there. I walked all the way around the pillar. Twice. He wasn’t there. He couldn’t have gotten past me or turned back to the door; I could see the whole shop from where I was. There was just nowhere he could be. He had vanished.

 And then I realized something else. I could hear Louie playing his guitar and singing far above me, in the upper gallery. In fact I had been hearing him all night. I had been hearing him in the background as I navigated to the bathroom and started back, had been hearing him even as I chatted with him in the gift shop. It could not have been Louie I saw, because I could still hear Louie singing above me. There was a stranger in the museum! I quickly tried to fix what he had looked like in my mind, to tell the police. He was a tall guy, slender, and while the backlighting prevented me from making out his face or any details, the line of his shoulder suggested he was wearing a suit coat of some kind, something with structured shoulders. But where had he gone? How had he gotten in, how had he gotten past me, what was he doing there? I ran upstairs to get Louie.

 I told Louie I had seen a stranger in the gift shop; he had to come down right away. He shook his head. I insisted, the police had to be called, there was an intruder! Louie shook his head again. “They won’t find him.” I gaped at him. Louie sighed. “Was he an older guy, tall, very slender, white hair?”

 “I… I don’t know about the hair or his age, he was backlit. But yeah, he was tall and slender. But Louie-“

 “Was he wearing a brown corduroy suit, kind of old-fashioned with squared-off shoulders?”

 “Well, I don’t know the color or material, but… yes, he had on a suit. Louie, what’s going on? Do we have a homeless man living in our offices or something?”

 Louie stared at me, intent. “No, there’s no one living in our offices. Did he wave at you?”

 “Well, yeah. He did. He waved at me and then he just… he just vanished. But he couldn’t have, that’s not possible. Where did he go?”

 “He’s still down there,” Louie answered. “He’s always down there. He’s always been down there. You saw Charlie.”

 “But Louie…” I sputtered helplessly, “I don’t believe in ghosts!”

 “It doesn’t matter. He believes in you.” Louie shrugged. “He shows himself once in a while. Lots of folks, they see him, and by the end of the week they quit their jobs here and move on. But not the people he waves to. The ones he waves to… it’s like a blessing. He approves.”

I considered this. “So… does that mean things will stop falling over in my office and the printer tray will stop flying out of the printer?”

 “Oh, no,” answered Louie, “that’s just from being in a hundred-year-old building settling into an unstable hillside.”

THE END