Oh my Ghost [YiZhan FF]

Chapter 1 - How I came to my job

Even then, when I was just 11 or 12 years old, my fascination for urban exploring began. I loved to go with my big brother and friends to old abandoned houses and look around there. At that time it was quite harmless and just for fun. At some point it became a kind of hobby.

But as the years went by, it was no longer enough to just go to abandoned houses. It had to be bigger, more exciting and creepier. I was always looking for the next adventure. But first I had to go to school and do my homework. Because if I didn't, my dad would probably have grounded me until never-never day.

My parents cared a lot about good grades and a good education. Please, thank you, good day, all that was part of the good behavior that we learned from a young age. But also to stand up and give way to older ones when on a bus. Or to offer help and not wait until asked. Everything that belongs to a good education.

Besides the pressure to always have good grades in school and to study every day, as well as to be polite and always helpful, my parents also gave my brother and me a lot of freedom. They even encouraged our interests and sometimes my dad would even take me to an abandoned house and look at it with me.

But while my brother's interest in old abandoned houses eventually faded as he developed other interests, mine continued to grow. Often I was no longer simply interested in what the house looked like, but also in who lived there and whether something had happened there at some time. Just the history of the house.

However, my possibilities of researching these houses were very limited. For one thing, I was too young to know where to start researching. And on the other hand, we had gotten Internet access at home only late. Practically only after there were flat rates for it and online time was no longer charged per minute.

There was also a time when I didn't pursue my hobby. Two years to be exact. At that time it was the last two years of school and I had to study a lot and wanted to concentrate on school. I also had to think about what I wanted to study one day.

In my last year of school, while I missed my hobby very much, I thought about how I could combine my hobby and later profession. I wanted to know what profession would allow me to pursue urban exploring without risking penalties. Because it is forbidden to go into old abandoned houses or other abandoned structures without a permit.

Eventually, my father suggested the profession of architect to me. I couldn't imagine that at first. But my father explained to me that as an architect I could also specialize in creating new things out of old buildings. Because then I would also be allowed to go into these old buildings without having to fear trouble. That rather aroused my interest. But I was still not convinced.

In the end, I studied journalism and, after graduating, started working for a television station that made documentaries about old buildings, for example, and even got permission to film. This also taught me how to research properly and gave me access to many great properties around the world. And that was despite the fact that I started out as an assistant at the station.

Or, actually, I worked for a company that was always selling new reports and documentaries to the TV station. Or the company was getting orders for a new reportage or documentary from the TV station. Either way, I was in the middle of it instead of just being there. And my monthly income wasn't bad either.

A year ago, it was my second year with the company, we had received an order for a new documentary series that was completely to my liking. We were commissioned to visit alleged haunted houses and check whether they were really haunted or whether, as so often, the alleged witnesses of the haunting exaggerated or lied.

We made several interviews, drove to all objects in which it is supposed to be haunted and spent partly one or even several nights at these places. But only rarely did we find anything unexplainable. This was often due to the fact that we did not have enough information about the objects.