by Tim Moorhead
There are things we will come in contact within our daily lives and there will not always be a way to explain what they are in reasonable terms. Numerous individuals throughout history have had encounters with aspects of the paranormal that have come to challenge their views on reality, as well as challenge their personal and spiritual beliefs, leaving them to question just what may lay beyond our current existence.
I have had more than one encounter with what I believed to have been a ghost, and or spirit being, in which I could not come to a logical explanation for how and why they occurred. Though I did not go looking to have these encounters, I have been left plagued by curiosity all these years and have been on a quest to try and understand better this perplexing phenomenon.
The account I share here is probably the one that haunts me the most, and though I am not ‘hamming it up” for dramatic purposes, I do share it as I recall it. My first encounter involves a former place of employment in downtown Louisville. in the late 1990’s.
It was near the end an evening shit I was working alone at a hotel front office in downtown Louisville. It was a quiet Sunday night, and I was pacing the floor in anticipation of my relief showing up when I heard my name called out in a woman’s voice. It seemed to come from the balcony above the desk that overlooks the lobby. She just said “Tim.” There was another male employee working in a different area of the hotel, but no woman were working at that time.
I looked up to the balcony and all around and thought this was quite curious as I knew I had heard my name called out. I came from behind the desk, walked out into the lobby and went as far as to walk up a flight of stairs to see where this voice emanated from, though I could not find anyone. I filed it under “strange” and went home after the end of the sift.
Some time later I was in the same location of the hotel during a busy afternoon shift and had another strange encounter, though this time I was working with someone else. There can be a good deal of traffic in and out of the lobby and a decent influx of guests coming in. Iit can get a bit chaotic at times. I heard my name called out once again, in the same woman’s voice,”Tim,” coming over the security radio at the desk. I stopped what I was doing and immediately asked my co-worker if she had heard it. “Yes,” se said.
I called out to the security guard and asked him if he had heard it as well and he confirmed that he had. I began to feel quite odd and a bit uneasy though I continued on with working.
I hadn’t told anyone of my prior experience and was a bit afraid to as I didn’t want to appear crazy. I wasn’t a complete believer in ghosts or spirits, though I was beginning to consider it as a possibility. I had considered myself fairly open minded, though I was and still am a nuts-and-bolts kind of guy. I appreciate knowing how things work and there just didn’t seem to be any readily available answers, which was a bit frustrating for me.
It was some time later that I actually came to discuss my first two encounters with someone working at the front office. I was having a casual and open conversation with another co-worker, telling them of my experiences, when a housekeeper standing close by overheard me and jumped in, “Oh you just heard Mrs.Converse.” I didn’t realize she had been listening but when she said that I stopped and froze for a moment then asked for her to tell me more.
The housekeeper said that Mrs. Converse was an older, eccentric woman who lived alone in the hotel for several years and eventually died there. She was related to the Converse shoes family. She didn’t have a home of her own but chose to live in this particular hotel. She had occupied an entire floor for many years and would pay to occupy every room on that floor for as long as she stayed there and would move around from one room to another. She would order out every night eating mostly White Castle or pizza. It was malnutrition that she eventually died from .
The housekeeper said that many employees had come to have encounters while cleaning the second floor rooms, in addition to a few guests from time to time. There was one thing that the housekeeper mentioned that stood out to me. She said that at times, when she was lonely, she would come over to the balcony and call out to talk to who ever was working at that time.