This is actually a genuine story.
I grew up in Boston, but my mother decided to move south to North Carolina, and though I was already prepared to move out of the house, even at a younger age than most kids do, I decided to go with her. After we moved she chose to go through BLET (Basic Law Enforcement Training; the Police Academy) but during school she picked up a job at a southern-style steak house named Madison’s Prime Rib. It was located in Mount Olive, a town about twenty minutes from where we lived.
She had been working there for several months without incident, and I and my sister visited her pretty regularly to eat and help clean up when she was about to get off. Being that BLET was not that demanding (which explains the lack of capable cops) she took a manager position and started working a full time schedule. Not soon after she took the position she requested I go with her every night, to help close up and sit with her while she did the books; which were done well after everyone had left. I obliged, of course (on the basis that I be paid for services rendered).
So, I helped her out for a few weeks and nothing particularly amazing happened. Then, one night, as I was taking some of the buffet trays from the main dining hall, I heard what sounded a lot like a baby crying. It didn’t occur to me then what that might mean, and so I put down the trays and began searching for what I thought was a baby someone had left behind. Now, a bit of explanation is in order. Between the two dining halls there was the door to the kitchen and the main foyer. The place I had just come from was the non-smoking section, and was well-lit and in a generally welcoming disposition. Where I was standing when my heart dropped from my chest, was right in front of the kitchen door.
I looked into the dark room of the smoking section and in the back right corner, against the far wall, there was a wrap around banquet. The tables had been relieved of their tablecloths, but the area underneath the table was almost completely shrouded in darkness. I heard the crying again, and I had a very sickening sensation in my stomach, as it now sounded a bit…unnatural? Well, I sat there, staring into the room, when I saw the image of a small child outlined in the shadows underneath that corner banquet. What was amazing to me was that it didn’t quite register, and I actually stepped a little closer. The shadow then moved, or rather writhed, and disappeared back under the table. Then, the crying again, and the moisture, as I had now wet myself.
I was going to scream, but it came out as a mix between a yell and a sob. I have never, and probably will never be, as scared as I was at that very moment (and that's impressive, considering I grew up in a violent project area in South Boston, and have seen quite a bit of death in my life). There was no warmth in my body at all, and if I could explain the feeling I had it was like stepping off a very twisty rollercoaster. My stomach was in knots.
When my mother yanked me by the arm I was thankful I had nothing more inside my body to soil myself with, as it scared the living daylights out of me. She said nothing at all, just looked at me in a way I can still not explain. She grabbed her purse, practically threw me out the door, locked up, and directed me to the car, which she started, put in gear, and drove as quickly as the old Blazer would go.
My mom was a Mass. Girl from Dorchester Heights, born and raised, old school Sicilian Italian, her parents right off the boat. To say she’s a skeptical, hard-boiled woman would be an understatement. She was moody, aggressive, and generally scared of nothing save being without a glass of wine at dinner. But, when my mom got back home, she didn’t look like my usual mother anymore. To put it bluntly, she looked terrified. I know in most situations kids are supposed to ask all kinds of inquisitive questions about things they don’t understand, but I couldn’t find my voice or my stomach, and so I went to my room, turned on the light and tried to sleep; I failed miserably.
We didn’t talk about what had happened for a very long time and the only reason we had was because the restaurant had been closed down. All the windows had been shattered and the place was completely destroyed (in an attempted robbery, but after what I’d seen, I doubted that). She was put on paid leave until they fixed it back up, and she sat me down to explain.
After she had been working there for a while, she started hearing the cries and moans as well. She let them go, as she was unconvinced anything strange was going on. One morning, she came to open up the store, and found that the entire assortment of crab-leg tongs had gone missing; overnight, when nobody had been in the restaurant. A bit perturbed at that point, she literally screamed out for them to be put back. These kinds of odd things happened quite a bit, and I learned that was why she had been asking me to come with her at night. She was scared.
She explained that another waitress under her employment had also worked at the restaurant previous and, coincidently, the one prior to that. It had been a Mexican restaurant by the name of El Korita (I don’t know if that’s the exact spelling) before it had been Madison’s, and originally it had been a place called Charlie’s. This waitress heard my mom talking about what she’d been hearing…and seeing…on the phone with a family member, and decided to approach her. She explained that El Korita had had similar problems, and that the business had been broken into several times and had to close. They had also lost quite a bit of their staff, who complained about “strange occurrences.” I don’t know if this is a stereotype, but my mother said the waitress referred to them as being a very superstitious people.
The crux, as it were, was that the restaurant prior to it, Charlie’s, had been a family owned business and a staple of the community for years. The story this woman told was that the owner at the time it closed had two small sons, and that they had been playing hide-and-seek when one of the sons went missing. They searched and searched for the boy, but couldn’t find him, and eventually had to return home. In the morning the kitchen staff had come in and started warming the ovens, and it wasn’t long after that one of them smelled something peculiar and opened the questionable oven, to find the badly burned and unfortunately deceased son of the restaurant’s owner. I’m not privy to the details, but my guess is that he had hid in one of the ovens and could not get out, as I’ve seen ovens of the sort, and they click locked when closed, with a small button under the handle that has to be pressed to open them. He had probably suffocated and died long before being burned, but either way, the story made the hair on the back of my neck rise (and still does, even as I type this).
I honestly can’t tell you that the tale is true, as there are some factors that are a bit hard to swallow; namely, no one being in the kitchen to see the young boy get into one of the stoves, or the stoves not being on and hot during normal business hours (this is my assumption, they could very well have been closed for the evening). But, what I can assure you of is what I saw and heard. I never believed in ghosts and I certainly never wanted to be proven wrong in a “see-it-to-believe-it” sort of way, but there it is.
I have seen some thngs since, but nothing of that sort. I hate to sound melodramatic, but I still think about it on a consistent basis, and maybe someone else that's had a similar experience can vouch that something of this ilk is never forgotten about.
