Next door Neighbours

By Gemma of Junior Paranormal Events

We have an adjoining office next to us, we share a wall, a wall right next to my desk.  This is Office 8, as we move in Office 8 is empty.  There is no furniture, aside from a single office chair and an old rusty fan.  The door to the office is always open – it is cold and draughty up here, but Office 8 has an intense radiator, so we quickly learn to leave the door open to help heat up the whole office space. 

The nature of my day job means that I need to concentrate, Michael has lots of online meetings and he has a habit of speaking really loudly.  For these reasons, I tend to have my noise cancelling earphones on and some background music running – I am in my own little world, and I am very content with that.  However, one day I arrived at the office and realised that I had left my earphones at home (sigh) so I would have to work without them. This made me realise two things – 1. Michael is really quite loud and doesn’t respond kindly to me shushing him every five minutes. 2. Office 8 is not as empty as we thought.

I am sat working away ploughing through emails and marking as usual but then my concentration is broken by gentle rhythmic tapping on the wall between us and Office 8.  It sounded like fingernails rapping on the wall.  We are situated on a main road and there is a tram track outside, trams thunder up and down every 7 minutes during the day and it can be common for things to rattle so, I put it down to that.  But the tapping got louder, and it seemed as though whoever was doing it was aware that I thought it was a tram – the tapping would pause when a tram went past.  

“Ok… you have my attention” I muttered to myself – Michael is very oblivious and in the middle of an intense budget, spreadsheet sounding meeting. I walked out of our office and stood in the doorway of Office 8, the door was open as usual and there was no one there, heading back to my desk I was adamant that it was because we were working in a very old building.  As I sat back at my desk, the tapping started again.  This time I was much quicker off my feet but as soon as I got to the doorway of Office 8 it stopped.  This went on for several minutes – “I hear you, but can you stop please, I have lots of work to do” – The tapping then stopped – “Thank you”. It seemed that we needed to put clear boundaries in place in terms of as and when it is a suitable time to chat. 

But our other worldly office companions don’t always seem to operate on our agenda instead opting to make appearances as and when they feel like it.  

Late on a Friday afternoon, Michael is working away in, yet another meeting and I am busying myself with putting my files away and decluttering my desk.  The tapping on the wall hasn’t happened for a few weeks and the office has been fairly quiet, it brought a sense of complacency with it.  But the spirits do like to remind you that they are around and they, quite frankly, are in charge here because they were here first.  I had a big black file in my hand and was doing some filling when there was the almightiest bang on the wall – so loud that it vibrated the desk and, had there been pictures on the wall I am pretty sure they would have fallen off. It startled me so much that I flew across the room, landing on Michael’s knee still clutching my black file. This then made Michael jump and forced to explain to his colleagues what the shrieking was in the background – I am just glad that he didn’t have the video camera on!  I am sure that any observing spirits would have been highly amused at the sight of a fully grown women flying through the air. 

Office 8 is now occupied by a charity who use the office space for storage.  They don’t work in there and we no longer have access to the room.  The knocking and door handle rattling has eased off somewhat, well that’s what our spirit friends like us to believe until they take catch us off guard. 

I must stress that although it can sometimes be a little unnerving to be sharing an office space with people you can’t see, never once have we felt that there is anything negative here.  In fact, it’s quite the opposite, they are quite mischievous and seem to have a sense of humour.  We have also had experiences that indicate that not all of our visitors are human spirits but more on this in the next article – Dog.