I sent him back up for flashlights because not all of the basement was lit. Only the areas that had shelving and equipment had any wired lights. We each set off in different directions into the very large basement, and after a few moments I heard him cry out my name. When I went over, all the boxes were thrown haphazardly around on the floor in a far corner of the basement that you could hardly move around in. We picked up the boxes and loaded them back up on the rack and he grabbed what we needed. Heading back upstairs, he asked me what I thought had happened. I told him I thought someone was playing a joke on us. He just smiled a little and nodded. We finished for the evening and shut down for the night.
Two days later our soda fountain stopped working. This usually happened if the bag-in-the-box ran out of syrup and had to be changed. We checked them daily before we left to make sure this wouldn’t happen so I was surprised one had run out. I sent an employee down to change the box, which fixed the fountain, but when she came back up, she had a strange look on her face. She explained to me that two of the boxes had been unhooked and were still about three-quarters full. Fortunately the basement was large and airy; of all the carbon dioxide the machine was pumping out could have led to disaster if the area had been more confined. She mumbled something about spirits and that she wasn’t going down there again as she walked by me back to the seating area. She was one of the two that had been comfortable going down there but now I was down to one and I wondered who was pulling these damn pranks.
I’d had enough. I called an employee meeting to see if I could find out who our prankster was. Everybody looked surprised and swore they’d done nothing. I decided to have them all go down into the basement with me where we could talk some more and hopefully some of them would get over their fear. There was a light switch at the top of the stairs and I turned it on as we headed down. When we were all down there and standing in a group and talking about what was going on, the lights went off. A couple of people started yelling, and a few others started heading back up the stairs. I told them to stop—it was too dark and someone could get injured.
I sent my kitchen manager up the stairs to see if he could figure out what had happened. I gave him my cellphone to help light the way and asked him check out the circuit breaker to see if one of them had tripped. He stuck his head down the stairs and told me they were all still on and asked me what I wanted him to do. I told him to check the switch and when he did, the lights came back on. I didn’t get it—we were all downstairs when the lights went off and there was no way someone could’ve sneaked back up there to turn them off. My employees were looking at me with fear on their faces and I let them go back up to the restaurant. I stayed down there with my kitchen manager after telling him to grab the flashlights again. I wanted to search the place top to bottom in case we had a squatter or something like that down there.
We searched for forty-five minutes and found nothing and no one anywhere around. I sent him back up and sat down on the bottom step of the staircase. I had no explanation for any of this and I began to wonder if there was some truth to the legend of ghosts down here. I laughed, climbed back up the stairs, finished the day, and went home.
The next day we needed some more to-go boxes and I sent my kitchen manager down to the basement to get some since he was the only one now who would go down there. He came back up with two sleeves of boxes but waved me over to talk to me. When I went to him, he told me that the box had fallen off the shelf just when he was grabbing for it and he thought he had heard laughter. I just stared at him and he shook his head; he had no explanation either. Like me, he didn’t believe in ghosts and that’s why he didn’t mind going down there.
I took the next day off and put him in charge while I was gone. He needed supplies from down below but couldn’t leave the kitchen. After a fair amount of arguing, he got one of the waitresses go down to get it for him. When she didn’t come back up for almost ten minutes, he got worried. He couldn’t leave the kitchen; we were having our lunch rush, and he told another employee to call me. I hurried down; I only lived about a mile and a half away so I got there pretty quickly. While I was on my way he had one of the dishwashers go down and
