My Balsam Mountain Inn experience

     I worked as a cook at the Balsam Mountain Inn for a couple of years, and I heard all of the stories from the other employees of strange occurrences, unexplained footsteps, all of the typical hallmarks of a haunted space. I hope to delve into some of those in the future, but for now I want to talk about my own experiences. Most are fairly low key and I assume all of them could be explained away easily enough. There are a few instances that I simply can't rationalize away, but I understand if you, dear reader, disagree with me.
   

     Firstly, I'd like to address a big issue: The Inn has a history, a certain gloss of the supernatural attached to it, and that is bound to color the perceptions of anyone who is aware of it. It also looks the part; like a miniature Overlook Hotel from The Shining, with creaky wooden floors, wavy glass in the windows and an overabundance of shadows. My own personal experience with the Inn also alters my perception of it; my first time in the building was an illegal entry through an unlocked window with friends and a Ouija board when the Inn was boarded up and unused. (I'll talk about that when I'm sure the statute of limitations has expired.) All of these things modulate the way that I react to and interact with the space, and I understand that. I guess what I'm trying to say is that the building itself might make one believe in ghosts.
   
     So, here's the easy to explain stuff: Footsteps. Sometimes near, sometimes far away and loud, but footsteps were very common. Many mornings as I sat the kitchen up alone in preparation for breakfast, I would hear someone crossing the large dining room. I would pop my head out to explain our breakfast hours only to be greeted by an empty room. The entrance to the dining room had an infrared door alarm that sounded a chime in the kitchen. This was tripped on many occasions without an obvious source, and many footsteps were heard in the dining room without the alarm being triggered.
   
     There was also that odd feeling of being watched, which undoubtedly has many potential causes. The odd thing about the Inn was that the feeling would come and go. Some nights, the place felt light and airy, like any other building. But other times there was an oppressiveness to it, a sense of foreboding that made the place see darker than it really was. And this feeling wasn't dependent on the staff; some nights I would work alone and feel just fine. Other nights with a full staff present and the whole building seemed to be watching you.

     More difficult to explain was the situation with the gas stoves. One more than one occasion, a cook would walk to the stove only to find an eye turned on, but not lit. I assume that some rational explanation could be found for this, but it seems unlikely. The control knobs were old and difficult to turn, and this normally happened quickly. My experience was this: I walked from the stove to the sink to dump out some water. When I returned to the stove seconds later, one eye had been turned on fully; the smell of gas was immediately evident. Could I have somehow bumped the knob and turned the gas on? Perhaps. But in two years of cooking, I had never done that before and I never did it again. Similar experiences happened to the other cooks, and frequently in situations where no one was using the stove.

     The last experience that I will mention is probably the most perplexing. To understand the story, I'll need to explain the layout, and that's probably easiest with a diagram. When the incident occurred, I was standing in the kitchen, talking to the head chef. It was early in the evening on a fairly slow night. The chef had his back to the walk-in cooler, I was facing him and could see over his shoulder and had a clear view of the short hall that connects the laundry room to our dry storage room.

     As we talked, I saw a person cross in front of the cooler door, as if they were walking from the laundry room into dry storage. There is an exterior entrance into the laundry room, but dry storage has only windows and is several feet off the ground. My initial thought was not of the paranormal. I assumed that someone had simply walked in the laundry room and slipped into storage. I interrupted the chef to explain that someone was in dry storage. Again, there was no thought of anything paranormal, no weird vibes or anything. There was a person, and they weren't supposed to be there. The chef and I walked into storage quickly to find an empty room. No windows were open, nothing was out of place.  Whoever I had seen had simply walked into the room and vanished. I tried to explain what the person looked like to the chef and other cooks, but there was nothing that really distinguished him. It was a man, but beyond that I had nothing. The whole sighting had lasted maybe two seconds, but it was absolutely real to me. Can that be explained? Sure. I had some sort of hallucination, maybe a visual disturbance. Does that seem probable? I suppose it's just as likely as me having seen a ghost, but the clarity and absolute realness of what I saw still makes me wonder.