The dishwasher didn’t come up either. When I arrived, my manager told me briefly what was going on and I grabbed a flashlight and headed down before he was done talking. I flipped the light switch on and hurried down, which made me do a double take. Why would they be down there with no light? When I got to the bottom of the stairs, I didn’t see anyone and I began to get worried. I flashed my light around the basement and called out their names. I heard a faint cry for help; hairs standing on end, I headed over to where I thought the sound had come from.
I reached my waitress who was huddling in a corner looking terrified. I knelt down beside her and asked what happened. She told me that when she came down she thought she heard the sound of a child crying and went to look. I asked her why she had come this far with no lights and she told me she had crept slowly, holding on to the wall, because she was worried a child might be down here and hurt. I helped her up and started to head back to the lit-up area when I heard another voice calling out “boss” with a tremulous quality to it. I asked her to stay right behind me and followed the source to where the dishwasher was.
When asked, he told me that he had looked around for the waitress and while doing so, he heard children laughing and went to see what was going on and how they got down here. The voices seemed to get farther away the more he walked in their direction and then he got lost with no lights and just sat down hoping someone would come down and find him. He was pretty frightened, as was the waitress, and I led them back to the lit area and up the stairs. My mind was moving a hundred miles an hour know and I knew this wasn’t some kind of joke; these people were really scared. In fact, the waitress quit on me right then and there.
Early in the morning the following Saturday when were all in doing prep work, one of the waitresses came to me and said that there was a terrible odor in the seating area. Not thinking about anything else, I headed over, almost gagging when I got there. This was an old building and some of the floors had small gaps in them by the walls; we’d tried to plug them best we could, but hadn’t been entirely successful. The smell was coming from one of the remaining gaps. It smelled like something had died and I went downstairs to check. There was absolutely no odor anywhere down there—I even checked all the wall gaps all throughout the basement.
As I walked back to the stairs, all of the boxes holding my paper goods crashed down around me and I jumped. There was nothing there, not even a small breeze; boxes just don’t fall off the shelves by themselves. They weren’t stacked high and were set firmly on the shelves for just that reason. I walked up the stairs and hollered at my kitchen manager to come down. When he did I told him what had happened and he looked confused and a bit frightened now. We picked up the boxes and put them back on the shelves and headed back up, agreeing to not say a word about this. When I went back into the front seating area, the odor was gone.
When we were real busy one of the waitresses braved the trip and went downstairs to grab some more supplies and came up crying and bleeding and bruised. I stopped what I was doing and hurried over, grabbing the first aid kit on the way. It took her a while to stop crying but when she did, she told me that right after she got to the bottom of the stairs the lights went off and she started getting hit by pieces of something. Whatever was going on down there had to stop or we were going to leave this location no matter what it did to my business. I patched her up as best I could and told her to go to the hospital and get checked out.
When I went downstairs to see what had happened, I saw a bunch of small pieces of wood scattered all over the floor. I picked a up a few and could see her blood on a couple. While I stood there thinking, I heard a noise and a wood piece bounced off my back. That was it! I ran back upstairs and called the guy who owned the building and told him I wanted out of the lease. I explained to him what had been going on and there was total silence for about thirty seconds, then his voice came back weakly telling me that it was OK, I could move out. I expected more trouble from him about cutting the lease short but he must have known some of the things that had gone on there before. We’d renovated the entire top floor and I had originally intended to buy the building when I’d built up enough capital, but there was no way now that I’d do it.
It took me a week, but I found another place to move to and we were up and running in two days. I had luckily found a space that had had a restaurant in it before so it didn’t take much to get it running again. Fortunately I wasn’t sued by the girl who was hurt and she even came back to work for me. We never had a problem again and I guess what happened at our old place wasn’t a legend, but real. A year later the owner tore the building down and it sat as an empty lot for
