How do you all get such fun jobs?? Teach me!!
I sort of fall into a lot of mine. The porn company job I got through a friend of my mom's. The mystery house gig was basically me impulsively quitting a shitty job, filing an application without even knowing that they were hiring, and getting a call a week later for a group interview. They conducted personal interviews immediately after that, and the manager hired me right away. I had been expecting a much more arduous process, but they have a super high turnover rate, like most places in the service industry. The "interview" for my current job went something like this:
Boss: You should come work for us! We get Chinese food every Friday!
Other employee: And there are hot Italian guys in the tutoring center!
Me: ...you had me at "Chinese food."
Oh, but people wanted to hear ghost stories. I never had anything huge happen to me, no actual sightings or anything, although I can break out other people's experiences and some of the stories I told on tour if you want 'em. As for my own, some of these might be a bit garbled, because the house is a complete maze and it's sometimes hard to describe the, er, geographic features to someone who hasn't seen them.
So, when I was training as a tour guide, we were expected to go through the house and practice giving the tour in the rooms we would actually be speaking in. There's a portion of the house that was closed off after the 1906 earthquake, supposedly because Mrs. Winchester, who had been trapped in that part of the house during the quake, took it as a sign from the spirits that she had been focusing too much attention on the front part of the house. She closed up the front part of the house, including the Daisy Bedroom (called that for the elaborate daisy-patterned stained glass windows in the room), which had been her primary bedroom before the quake, as well as the room that she was trapped in during the quake. Next to the Daisy Bedroom is a set of unfinished rooms that were probably intended to be guest rooms. The doors are directly next to each other, and face out onto a small square of hallway; across from the door to the Daisy bedroom is a set of stairs that lead up, and across from the door to the unfinished guestrooms is a door leading out of the hall. The unfinished guestrooms, as they're walked on the tour, are in the shape of a U; when standing in the final arm of the U, you can see the entire hall, including the door and the stairs, but you can't see into the Daisy Bedroom, right next door.
I was in the final arm of the U in the guestrooms, mostly just walking through, since that part of the tour isn't really used unless the group in front of you is moving slowly and you need to stall for time while waiting for them to vacate the Daisy Bedroom so your group can go in. I very clearly saw someone's shadows stretching up the stairs, so I assumed that another tour guide was standing in the doorway of the Daisy Bedroom, either practicing their tour like I was or cleaning, which is what we did between tours. I yelled out a greeting, and a moment later the shadow disappeared, so I figured whoever it was hadn't heard me and had moved further into the Daisy Bedroom. I walked around the corner and into the Daisy Bedroom, but there was no one there. I checked the whole room -- still, no one. It was a little weird, since there was no exit from the room except for the stairs and the door in the hall, which had been in my line of sight the whole time I was in the guestrooms. Still, I didn't think much of it, until I went to stand by the door and realized that, because of the position of the windows in the room and the light at that time of day, my shadow fell against one of the walls closest to the door, rather than through the door and up the stairs, like the one I had seen.
The Daisy Bedroom was actually the site of a lot of our weird stories, including some people who spent the night in there (they were writing a book, or something) and felt a phantom quake partway through the evening.
There were strange noises once in a while, but nothing that couldn't be explained away, especially since there were tour groups and other guides all over the house, and there are all these windows and doors and quirks in the building, so sometimes you can hear things two floors up and three rooms over as though they were right next to you. The second time something happened to me, I had been working there for several months, and it was summer. The house gets bitch hot in the summer, because the ventilation is crap and, being as it's a historical landmark, putting in AC would be a no-no. Instead, we scatter a few fans throughout the house, which means that it's still unbearably hot but there's a nice breeze in a few rooms.
That particular day, I was going through after the last tour and setting up some of the fans. The last fan I had to place was in the Twin Dining Room. You go into the Twin Dining Room through the pre-1906 kitchen; there are two exits from the room (well, three, but the third leads into the parlor and is always locked). The first exit leads into the entrance hall; that's the exit we use on tour. The second is a pair of glass doors that lead into the foyer outside of the ballroom. Sometimes tour guides would use them as a shortcut, rather than going through the entrance hall, which also leads into the foyer, but I never thought it was worth it, since the glass doors stick like crazy and take forever to open and close. Basically, it's another U shape, with the Twin Dining Room and the ballroom foyer as the tips, and the entrance hall as the curve. There are two other rooms off the foyer -- the ballroom itself, and an unfinished room that was probably going to be an addition to the ballroom. From the Twin Dining Room, you can see directly through the glass doors, into the foyer and the unfinished room beyond it, and vice versa.
I was setting up the fan by the glass doors because there's an outlet there. I knew that this particular outlet worked, because I had plugged a vacuum into it earlier that same day and multiple times before with no problems. I plugged the fan in. No go. I waited, because the fans were probably purchased sometime in the seventies and they could take a few seconds to warm up. I pushed anything that even remotely resembled a button. Waited. Still not working. Unplugged it and plugged it back it. Waited some more, and then finally gave up.
There are phones scattered throughout the house in little hidden corners, so that tour guides can call the guide center if there's an emergency, if someone needs to leave the tour, if the guide misplaces a guest, if a guest misplaces themself (the more likely scenario), if something gets broken, if a guest breaks something, if the guide has a question... for a variety of other reasons. The closest one was in the unfinished room off the ballroom so, with a little sigh at having to stay an extra ten minutes, I went to go call my boss and ask her what the f was wrong with the f-ing fan.
Not wanting to fight with the glass doors, I walked through the entrance hall, into the foyer, and from there into the unfinished room. The walk takes a whole of five seconds, maybe. I dialed my boss, and pulled the chord on the phone to its full length so that I could continue to glare at the fan through the glass doors. As if to mock me, if continued its not working.
"The fan in the Twin Dining Room isn't working."
"Oh?"
"Is the 'on' button in some super-weird place that I didn't think to look?"
"There... shouldn't be any buttons."
Then what the hell was I trying to push? "Okay. It's still not working."
"That's odd. Try again. If you can't get it to work, leave it, and I'll try before I close up for the evening."
I hung up, my heart greatly gladdened by the knowledge that I could leave, even if I couldn't get the stupid thing to function. I walked into the foyer, and another look at the fan through the glass doors. Predictably, it still wasn't working. I walked around through the entrance hall, which really couldn't have taken more than three seconds. When I got into the Twin Dining Room, the fan was going full blast.
So yeah, that's the extent of my personal spooky stories. Nothing terribly explicit, but strange enough that they managed to register on my weird-o-meter. Sorry this rambled on a bit -- I tend to tell stories in type the same way I do in person. At parties. While drunk.
