Yesterday I rolled up for an early shift and chatted with a colleague. The subject turned to ghosts, especially those believed to haunt our depot, and he told me about something he'd experienced that very morning.
Seems he'd been walking down the service road towards the depot and had heard the front door swing open and slam shut on its spring. A distinctive sound, and there isn't another door within hearing distance.
He naturally assumed someone had walked in there before him; but there was nobody in, and the lights were still out.
Thinking someone was intruding or stealing, he put the lights on and searched the place: nope, empty.
There's only one way in and out, apart from a heavy sliding metal gate at the far end, and that hadn't been disturbed.
Andy is a hardheaded railwayman of 40-odd years' service, not given to yarns or imagining things. I believe him.
We enjoyed a
frisson together.
He then told me a different station ghost story, new to me.
On the same road there is a service lift for taking goods etc between the road and the underground staff walkway.
The lift is in use all day for moving cafe supplies one way and mobile crates of rubbish the other. Andy told me that a couple of workers he knew refused to travel alone in the lift because they'd had a
fright.
They wouldn't discuss what had gone on but one went so far as to say 'I know what I saw!'
This was a serious problem for staff whose job involved moving goods and rubbish all day. They'd get around it by either taking the long way round the station, involving a substantial walk and two unhaunted lifts, or blagging a colleague to escort them in the
scary lift.
'I know what I saw!' - next time I'm in work I will certainly take a ride in that lift.
Have to say that as my much-anticipated recent ride in the local hospital's well-known haunted lift passed uneventfully, hopes are high for a sighting of the
station lift apparition.
He knows what he saw.
(Edited for typos)