After Dark, All Alone

Our sons have all worked in food service, mostly for the same local people. Occasionally, this has included some contract work for other local businesses. One year, they did the food at a local dinner theater, associated with the Wyoming Territorial Park, where the old Territorial Prison is. The dinner theater is housed in a renovated barn near the main building, and was used when the site was part of the University stock farm. To my knowledge, the barn has no connection with the prison from when it was actually a prison.

The Territorial Prison has its own ghost who appears only rarely, and since there were no executions at the prison and it didn’t have many deaths, there is no real reason for it to be a hotbed of ghostly activity. The barn that houses the theater has even less reason to be haunted, unless there are ghostly travellers going through, attached somehow to the Interstate highway that runs nearby. The highway has seen more than its share of fatal accidents.

Of course, the barn did house an interesting collection for a number of years. For a while, it held the U.S. Marshal’s Museum. This display included equipment actually used by the Marshal’s service, and items they confiscated from criminals in the performance of their duties. These items, used in violence, might have had something attached to them and  might be the source of an experience one of our sons had, late one night.

One of our boys (whom I shall not name because he’d be annoyed with me) was the last person there one night, and was cleaning up and washing the dishes left from the dinner theater. It was quite late at night, and except for him, the building was empty. He came into a room, looked up, and standing there was a man, dressed in black. Or rather, it was part of a man. Part of him wasn’t there.

Our poor son was more than startled; he was terrified. He left the dishes, the cleaning, and the building then and there. He did call his boss and tell him what happened, and either the boss or my son called another of my sons who, grumbling, went out and finished the dishes. This other son was quite derisive in the classic manner of brothers, and considered the whole thing an excess of imagination on his brother’s part.

The son this happened to swore that it was real; it was a while before he would agree to work there after dark alone. These days, if you ask him, he’ll say that no, he doesn’t believe in ghosts. But if you sneak up on the topic and he’s in the right mood, he’ll talk about the experience in a manner that suggests that he really does believe it happened – and it wasn’t his imagination working overtime!

-She Wolf © 2008