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AAM: our office may be haunted — how do I keep it from distracting from our work?
A reader writes:
I work for a small, conservation-based nonprofit with four full-time people, five contract employees, and a summer program of up to 16 young people. We work out of a tiny office located inside 20 beautiful acres of land with which we are creating a public park. The office is a 110-year-old private home that was a rental for decades before being converted into an office. It’s cramped, loud, and far from ideal, but the location is perfect for our work. Unfortunately, it also has a reputation in our small town for being haunted.
The haunting tends to become the focus of conversations, including those that are meant to be interviews, donor meetings, and other business-related things. Former residents of the house often stop by to visit the park and inevitably tell their sometimes-harrowing stories. People have asked about it during interviews and indicated that it might make them uncomfortable. Admittedly, it’s kind of fun to talk about, but it should not take precedence over our mission, goals, and other important issues.
So, what do I say when people ask if it’s haunted? Truthfully, it probably is, but A) we have no real proof and B) it’s generally not scary. Yes, we hear the occasional noise (thumps, crashes, scraping, etc.) from unoccupied rooms, and sometimes — including during staff meetings where every employee is seated around a table — the lights/fans in the bathroom will go on and off by themselves. The copier has been known to turn itself on when no one was in the room and, once or twice, when I was alone in the office late in the evening, I distinctly heard what sounded like an elderly lady mumbling in Spanish.
The thing is, it doesn’t feel malevolent. The only thing that’s really scared me was when my unattended phone began blaring heavy metal music (not music stored on my phone or any streaming source I listen to) and would not stop until I turned it off. Another employee and I were alone in the office on a weekend evening at the time, and she was seriously freaked out.
And what do we say when people ask about having to be alone in the office? As a nonprofit, we often have evening and weekend events, and sometimes staying late/coming in early/coming in a weekend is an excellent opportunity to get things done in relative peace and quiet. Obviously, we don’t force people to be alone in the office, but with such a small staff, it’s rather inevitable at times. And I suspect that the fact that we’re far from the road/other buildings and surrounded by park land can make things even more creepy.
Is there a good way to re-direct such conversations? This is especially important as we have at least one employee who is super bothered by anything even vaguely supernatural-related. And this isn’t like Amityville Horror or The Shining. Yes, some former residents seem to have more frightening stories, but since we’ve moved in, it’s all been fairly benign.
I think you’ve got two different types of conversations to figure out — conversations with people who are interviewing to work with you, and then conversations with everyone else — and the approach to each of them needs to be different.
With people who are interviewing for jobs with you, I’d be transparent but also as matter-of-fact as possible — “Yes, we’ve had more than the usual unexplained occurrences, like lights going on and off by themselves, but it’s all felt pretty benign. We do have weird things happen here, though, and people who don’t work here ask us about it a lot. It’s something you’d want to be comfortable with if you took the job.” Because the thing is, you don’t want someone to start working there and be utterly freaked out by the situation. So if a job candidate is uncomfortable, it’s better for them to self-select out before that.
I think it’s trickier with other people. You’re right that you need to keep it from distracting from the work you’re there to do. Your best approach in those conversations might be to take a “who knows?” posture. Your stance could be slightly bored — yes, the stories are fun, and yes, some weird things have happened around the office, but we’re here to do XYZ and nothing has ever interfered with that. That doesn’t mean you have to shut down every interesting conversation on the topic, but when it feels like it’s taking up too much time or becoming the focus of a meeting that’s supposed to be about business, you could do a sort of verbal shrug — like, “Well, who knows! It’s fun to think about, but I know we need to talk about X.”
Most people will take their cues from you, and if you’re signaling that it’s just not a big conversation topic for you, they’ll likely respect that.
If visitors stop by with their own tales of eerie happenings and/or you get the sense they’re looking for you to make some definitive “yes, it’s definitely haunted!” statement or/and are hoping for a lengthy investigative discussion of the goings-on there, you can always lean on, “It’s interesting, but it’s not really our area of expertise. Our work here is focused on XYZ.” (My husband, who is interested in the paranormal, said this to me when I read him your letter: “Nothing dampens a paranormal conversation faster than basically saying you have no idea what the excited person is taking about. Anything else is just drawing out the conversation.”)
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2. "Obviously, we don’t force people to be alone in the office, but with such a small staff, it’s rather inevitable at times. And I suspect that the fact that we’re far from the road/other buildings and surrounded by park land can make things even more creepy." -> This feels like it's an issue separate from the ghost? Like, if you're expecting people (*especially* teenagers on a summer program, augh) to be comfortable working alone in an isolated building in a dark wilderness at night, you should probably have that in the interview even if there is no haunting issue.
3. I would be really tempted to shut down conversations with "Fred doesn't like it when we talk about him with outsiders" even though that's tempting fate. (Fred is not my work ghost's real name but it's what they named him before the body was ID'd and we still call him that in conversation because joking about a rl murder victim's unsettled rest seems skeevy. And, you know, tempting fate.)
4. It sounds like part of the problem she's asking about is ghost conversations (and visits) distracting other staff from their work. But if your receptionist is spending hours a day gossiping about ghosts with visitors and not doing work, the problem you have is not a ghost problem, it's a staff-won't-stay-on-task problem, and should be dealt with as such.
Or maybe it's not a problem? You're all working for nonprofit wages and sometimes have to go into the creepy house on weekends to catch up on work, let them have their nifty folklore?
If the problem is that is seems like other staff are working themselves up about the ghost and getting more scared than they should be, that's tougher. If you can ID one staffer who's doing most of the working up, maybe talk with them. If not - idk, my best advice is probably to take control of the narrative. Talk about how friendly they are in every conversation, have ghost sleepovers for Cub scouts, leave a coffee for the ghost on the breakroom table every morning. Make them a mascot.
Honestly make them a mascot anyway - lots of small nonprofits would love to have a local folklore story drawing people in! And it's a lot harder for staff to be scared-in-the-bad-way of the ghost who just brought in 10,000 dollars in donations from the haunting-themed cocktail night...
(I would be pushing to make Fred a PR thing for us if he wasn't a real, relatively recent murder victim and thus, it still feels skeevy.)
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(I grew up going to cemeteries, I have weird priorities.)
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But the murder was never solved, so...
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I also work for a non-profit which renovated an old building 20 years ago. there was never any community commentary on haunting, but soon after we moved in, staff began talking about the building being haunted and refusing to stay alone after dark, or to go to the basement by themselves at any time. over the years, that's mostly faded - the most frightened have all moved on, and there are just a couple who get twitchy about staying at night. I've never personally experienced anything that would prove a haunting, but the building's over 100 years old and it wouldn't surprise me much.
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Once that was done, I'm with
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Me too!