Workplace Ghosts

The Ghost of Cloth World

This novel involves some ghostly encounters.

In the 1990s, I had a part-time job at Cloth World — a fabric store in South St. Louis. One back corner of the store was haunted. It was the corner with the bargain fabric, so of course I was back there frequently. (I made minimum wage and made all my clothing, including historical garments that required many yards of fabric. I often bought an entire bolt of clearance fabric.)

Sometimes I sensed someone nearby. But when I turned and looked directly, nobody was there. Like before and after working at Cloth World, I typically saw ghosts out of my peripheral vision. Or I sensed a presence without seeing someone with my eyes. When I did see it, it was a shadow, a moving shadow.

In conversation with coworkers, I learned that other employees frequently saw this ghost. The theory was that this was a clerk, from the days when the building was a J. C. Penny’s catalog shop, or something like that.

The Bookstore Ghost

In the 1990s (apparently the decade in which I had my most ghostly encounters — at least in part because I worked in theaters), I worked at a tiny B. Dalton Bookstore in St. Louis, Missouri. Although it had just been built in front of the old location of the bookshop, it was already haunted.