The Boy

 I sit at the end of a long hallway in complete darkness, listening to the voices at the other end of the floor. I'm in my favorite place to be, the third floor of the Fenton Hotel. Unlike the other two floors, the third floor seems trapped in time. What little wall paper is left is the heavy kind badly faded and moldy with ornate floral designs from the turn of the century. The light fixtures are little better. I swear I've only seen light switches like that in a museum. Most walls are little more than studs and boards the old iron radiators against the walls haven't worked in years. 

The floor is actually hazardous, littered with glass and decades of dirt. Some of the rooms hold bigger debris, old chairs and table from when there was a banquet hall on the second floor. In one room an old recliner has it's back eerily positioned to the door. I was curious enough once to go in and actually look in the chair. A brave task since it reportedly belong to the last caretaker of the place who didn't leave after he died. The seat was torn up exposing the batting and springs. Like everything else on this floor it's insides lie open and exposed for anyone to pick at.

None of this is what draws me to the hotel again and again. It's the ghosts. The Fenton Hotel is easily the most haunted place I've ever been to in my ten plus years of ghost hunting and for a few brief years it was my home away from home. It was also the place of the most profound ghost hunting experience I've ever had.

The ghost group I belonged to at the time had permission to give ghost tours of the upper two floors of the hotel around Halloween. Which is how I found myself at the end of a long hallway in the dark. I was waiting for the next tour group ( the voices down the hall) to reach me so I could explain EVPs and play them a few examples of real EVPs that we acquired on previous investigations. I should also mention that I am what's known as a sensitive, a person who can sense the paranormal or ghosts if you will. The whole reason I joined a ghost group to begin with was to try to get scientific proof of what I knew was out there. Who am I kidding, it's also really, really fun.

So, once again, I'm sitting in a dark room at the end of a long hallway listening to people down the hall. I'm sitting in the dark because that is what we ghost hunters do. We sit in the dark for hours and hope something exciting happens. As I sit there I let me eyes unfocus, because there is not enough light to focus on anything. I stare at the door for a while then drift my gaze to the right of the door jamb just letting myself relax and wait. That's when I see him. One second I'm staring at the wood of the door, the next I'm looking into the face of a little boy. 

He had blond hair cut in a dutch boy. I see his head and nothing more. As our eyes locked his widen in surprise, then he's gone. It took mere seconds for the encounter to take place, but my mind draws it out. I could see the details of his face, his wide eyes and small mouth. He seemed to be as curious about me as I was about him.  It was too quick to get my camera. By the time I would have looked away to retrieve it the boy would have been gone. Besides, I didn't want to look away, my mind screamed at me not to look away. What I was seeing was so rare and so pure, the curiosity of a child who died so long ago, I couldn't look away. There he was the proof I wanted for so many years just staring at me. 

Like I said the encounter took seconds. It took a few minutes for me to fully process what I saw. I got the impression that as soon as we make eye contact, the boy and I, his mother jerks him from my view. Evidently his mother was with him in the afterlife, and she was frightened that I saw him.DId this experience frighten me? Nah, I've seen a lot more frightening things than a six year old boy staring at me.  I was alone in the room, so no one else saw him. The whole thing made me a little sad. The mother was so terrified  she had hide her son away, something she probably did in life. The third floor was not only used as a hotel, but at one point as a brothel and the working women weren't supposed to have any children with them. It turns out that ghosts can be just as scared of us as we are of them. Hmm....

":"x8O�~��o