A TALE



Strange sounds led the first tenant to leave the office building. Sounds of bumps, moans and sudden slammings interrupted the underlying drone of computer terminals.

The sounds so unnerved the businessman and his employees that he paid the remaining balance of the lease and left the building within a month.

The second business left the building after a series of odd occurrences. Water poured from every faucet. Vacant toilets would simultaneously flush. On three occasions, the lights flickered on and off like a child trying to re-create the flash of a night club dance floor.

But there was no child at the light switch, no one standing by the faucets, no one in the bathroom stalls.

This tenant refused to pay the remainder of the lease, citing not only what had happened to her, her employees and customers, but the incidents that had run off the first tenant, too. She refused to pay and she moved her business elsewhere.

The third tenant complained of barking. The barking complaints started on the first day of the third tenant’s occupancy. The building’s owner told the tenant to call animal control. Animal control noted that the office was located in a mostly residential neighborhood and that some barking was to be expected.

On the second day, the barking was more persistent. Animal control was called again. This time, the supervisor demanded that animal control come to the office building. Animal control drove around the building and throughout the neighborhood but found nothing out of the ordinary. No dogs barking any more than dogs bark in any other neighborhood.

On the third day, the barking was non-stop and sounded like it was coming from somewhere inside the building. The frantic supervisor called animal control. By the time, animal control arrived, the barking had stopped. Insisting a dog was somewhere in the building, animal control inspected the office from attic to crawl space. No dog was found. The barking started again as soon as animal control left.

On the fourth day, the barking seemed to come from under each employee’s desk, or their trash cans, or from the break-room refrigerator. Employees could hear the dog barking on their phone lines, making business calls impossible. When a female employee swore a dog barked from inside the toilet as soon as she had taken a seat, the employees were sent home for the day.

By the fifth day, the tenant’s company refused to pay the remainder of the 12-month lease. The company demanded full reimbursement of its deposit and threatened to sue unless the building’s owner also paid for all expenses for both moving in and out of the office space.

The fourth tenant lasted a day. Well, half a day.

The office workers were getting situated in their new environment, sharpening pencils, trying out the phone lines, checking computer files and Internet access. The building owner visited the offices to ensure that everything went smoothly with this new tenant. He hoped to find no barking dogs, no flashing lights, no strange noises.

The building owner watched as the office workers experienced a typical first morning in a new office location. At least, it was typical until 11:23 a.m.

At that moment, power failed in the building. Lights, computers, phone lines, everything died. Within seconds, as everyone adjusted to the power outage, the blinds shut at each window. The doors locked themselves.

Faces swirled about the offices. They were faces without bodies. Faces larger than a normal human face, flatter, they were like faces from newspaper photographs, etched then stretched in Silly Putty. Angry faces livid with ghostly rage, impatience, frustration, agitation.

In many voices, from many directions, the faces said, Get Out. Get Out. Get Out. Get Out. Get Out. GET OUT.

By 11:30 a.m., every employee, as well as the building’s owner, had done just that. They had gotten out.

The building’s haunted, the owner thought, but he didn’t know how or why it would be haunted.

Though he had never believed in hauntings until this particular day, the owner searched for a reasonable explanation for the inexplicable. This was a new building. Just built. It wasn’t some old house that had served as the dwelling place for generations of families or the departing point for a long-time resident. It was an office building.

The offices had been built on a lot that had never been the site of anything else, ever, in the past, save for an empty field and likely trees before that.

No one had died in the building. No one died during the building’s construction. Yet, the building was haunted, the owner thought as he watched the last piece of the fourth and final tenant’s furniture being loaded into a moving van.

Haunted. All that money to build the stupid thing and the place is haunted, the owner thought as he locked the building’s door. He adjusted the For Sale sign by the highway. He gave the building one last look and spat, cursing ghosts, as he drove away.

Had he driven through the neighborhood, the owner may have realized that it hadn’t been haunting ghosts but a curse that had fallen upon his building. Had he spent a few minutes there, he may have recognized most of the faces from the haunting as belonging to the very-much-alive residents of the neighborhood.

He had spent no time in this neighborhood. He had simply bought a lot, had some building designs prepared, got his building permits, hired a contractor and built his office building. Had he taken the time to learn the neighborhood, he may have realized what an intrusion his building had been to the community.

For several months, the slow pace of construction had interrupted the rest of several nearby residents who worked nights and slept days. One resident lost his job because he fell asleep at work one night following a day when the office building’s construction was terribly loud. These residents cursed the office building.

Next door to the building was a church which had long eyed the empty lot as a place for possible expansion. The construction of the offices ended any plans for the church expanding at its current location. Many church members cursed the office building.

The owner had a fence erected that separated his building’s parking lot from the church lot and the adjoining neighborhood. For years, these lots had served as a pathway safe from the passing highway’s busy traffic.

Now, the neighborhood’s many walkers had to walk alongside the road. One walker’s dog was hit and killed by a passing car. This walker and all of the other neighborhood walkers cursed the building.

The owner had several motion-activated security lights affixed to his offices because he didn’t trust the neighborhood where he had decided to build. Passing cars kept the lights activated throughout the nights creating a devastating light that neither curtains nor blinds could completely keep out. As several more residents tossed and turned throughout the glaring night, they added their voices to the chorus of curses heaped upon this building.

The building became the focal point of so much hostility that it had become haunted not by the departed dead but cursed by the collected frustrations of its living neighbors.

These residents knew they had cursed the building under their breaths and had fixed it with their hostile stares, but they did not know the combined energies of their anger had translated into a palpable curse and a tangible hex.

The building stayed for a few more years. It served as the location for several businesses that never really took off.

It became one of those locations known for being the site of failing businesses rather than being remembered for any particular business.

Finally, the building was torn down. As it fell, the curse lifted. The residents were so privately happy, so collectively pleased, to see the building go that wild flowers quickly claimed the empty lot. Throughout the city, these wild flowers are still the first to bloom in spring and the last to fade come fall in that site which once felt the shiver of a community’s curse.



Dean Poling is The Valdosta Daily Times assistant managing editor.