Since it's that time of the year, when scary movies are on the TV, haunted houses are open for frights, and ghost stories are told by the fire on a chilly fall night, I decided to share my personal encounter with a "ghost."
I began working at WKAI/WLMD/WLRB in Macomb in April 2003. Not long after I started, I began to hear different stories about the building being haunted. The radio station was located just off the square in a large, old brick building. It sat next door to Magnolia's restaurant and Two Dogs bar, and just behind the old Illinois Theatre (now The Forum). All of the previously mentioned establishments have a long history of being haunted. In fact, many of these old brick buildings in downtown Macomb have different ghost stories attached to them.
One of the first stories when I began working there, was a salesman who had been walking upstairs to the attic. As he reached the halfway point, two darts came out of nowhere and stuck into the stairs right above him. The attic was empty, with the exception of several pieces of junk, and a couple large bins of old records (some of which were later used as frisbies during downtime). Those darts would later be thrown into the wall in various games over lunch. A lot of spackle was used to fill tiny dart holes in the wall.
Throughout my tenure, various stories would emerge, mostly just eery sounds in the radio station, or footsteps coming from the attic. The radio station was very odd shaped on the inside. There were two entrances, an "on-air" entrance and the lobby entrance. The employee, or on-air entrance, was located along Carroll Street, while the other door was off of the large parking lot.
Walking into the employee entrance, there were two offices to the left. One was a large office, and then the newsroom. If you walked straight from that door, it took you into a large conference area, dubbed "Studio Center." If you swung a hard right upon entrance, you could swing around the studios. The three studios sat next to each other, one by one by one.
If you snaked around the studios, it would take you back into Studio Center, or you could take a right and snake through the hallway, many visitors called a maze. There a few doors through this hallway. One was a bathroom that would later be inaccessible (not by my doing, I swear), another was the door to the attic. There were also doors to an engineering room, and a couple storage closets. The sales office, front desk, manager's office, and my office were all up front.
Until the summer of 2008, I had never encountered any mysterious footsteps, voices, or ghostly sightings. During the summer months of '08, my schedule had me coming in late at night to record the morning sportscasts. The sportscasts aired in the 6:00 a.m. hour, but my shift was not starting until 8:00 a.m. during this time.
One night in July, I had gone into the studios just after midnight to record the sportscasts. Of course, it was completely dark, as no one worked during this hour. Had this been in October, when our guard is up on the spookiness of the night, I may have been a little more skeptical coming in at this time....but not during the humid month of July.
The studios are lined right next to each other, with K100 being the first studio from the employee entrance, then the production studio, and finally the WLMD studio. Each studio had a large and heavy soundproof door. The K100 and WLMD studio doors did not make any noise, however the middle studio door did. It was a sound that could not be replicated, just a high pitched, squeaky sound.
Instead of turning on the hallway light as I walked into the employee entrance, I walked straight into the K100 studio to record my sports. I turned the light on, grabbed my content and walked toward the mixer board and computers. As I turned the monitors on, I heard that squeal of the middle studio door. Immediately, I froze in absolute horror. The hair on my arms and legs shot straight up like a cat. It felt like I stood there frozen in time for an hour, but it must have only been 30 seconds. I convinced myself it was not the door I heard, but something outside, or maybe one of the many radio stations playing throughout the building.
After a few minutes, no other sound was heard, though I was still on full alert. Approximately five or ten minutes later, I began recording my sportscast. One minute into the read, I heard a thump from above me....in the attic. At first, I shook it off, but just as I did...I noticed something. The light ballasts above me were swaying. Whatever I heard...I did indeer hear! It was not my imagination playing tricks on me. I finished my sportscast at a pace that could only be rivaled by the Micro Machines guy, and got the heck out of that radio station.
When I went to work the next morning, I told all of my co-workers of my experience. I insisted that I am not one to make up ghost stories, and that I have never claimed to have heard or seen anything at the radio station in over five years.
One of my co-workers half jokingly mentioned that another one of our co-workers had claimed they saw a man in the hallway just a couple weeks prior to this incident. Could it be? Was the radio station really haunted??? The other incident occurred early on a Saturday morning, and it was dismissed as just seeing things.
The next day, my co-worker, Joe Roderick and I, headed off to Bourbonnais to cover the Chicago Bears training camp and later their practice at Soldier Field. Halfway there, I received a phone call from my General Manager, exclaiming that I wasn't crazy, and I wasn't hearing things!
Was it a ghost?
Upon hearing my story, coupled with the earlier incident of seeing a "man" in the hallway in the wee hours of a Saturday morning, the GM and another co-worker went into the attic to investigate. It was there, where they found an old dirty jacket, a five-gallon bucket, and cigarette butts in the location above where the K100 studio was. A window in the attic was found to be broken near the fire escape. The police were called, and they knew who it was. Apparently, Macomb has a homeless man and this wasn't the first incident the MPD had with him.
Well....that's as close to an encounter with a ghost that I've had....but it makes for one good story!
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