ok fine i have one more damn ghost story.

I tend to think long and hard about things for years. Arriving at a final decision about, say, art or religion-you know, the inconsequential tiny shit that housewives regularly sit around thinking about-after all that means that it's a pretty solid damn decision. I rise rejoicing and move on to something else, like cleaning the lime scale off my toilet bowl. And yet I can't escape one nagging fact....that just because I know with complete certainty that any given conclusion I've arrived at is absolutely right DOES NOT MEAN that I'm not full of shit.

My last 'ghost story' is pretty short and falls squarely onto 'total flake' territory. This is the kind of 'ghost experience' that happens to hormone-poisoned 13-year-olds named Jordan (dEtHdArK666) or Tiffany (69sweetsadangel69) who sneak out at night and hang around in cemeteries scaring the crap out of themselves.

So.

One hot July afternoon about four years ago I'm sitting in the Lone Jack Saloon waiting for my pizza. Now the Lone Jack is a genuine old-west dance hall-saloon, complete with a long bar, a stage and a gallery that runs around the main area, exactly like the saloon in 'Gunsmoke'. I mean it. There really were places like that, and this is one of them.
After having sat unused for decades it was re-opened for dining and gambling during the last big Canadian economic shift. At this time it was only months away from closing down again after a brief six-year run.

I sat in the main area, facing the 'grand staircase' which leads up to the gallery. All I had on my mind was my pizza. The very last thing on my mind at that moment was drainage reorganization during the breakup of Pangea as revealed by in-situ Pb isotopic analysis of detrital K-feldspar. Second to last was 'anything supernatural whatsoever'.

This is when I glanced up at the grand staircase and 'saw' a woman who was not there.

The woman who was not there was wearing a dark green floor length dress with long sleeves. Over this she was wearing a black pinafore. Her hair was up. I couldn't have described her face but she seemed to be Caucasian.

And boom, gone.

Shocked me so bad my heart jumped and my hands and face tingled.

Now I did not actually register a visual, here. What I mean is, imagine the emotional impact of seeing a person unexpectedly, AND THE MEMORY OF THEIR APPEARANCE, but subtract from that experience the actual 'seeing' and that's what happened. It was the goddamnedest sensation.

I asked my husband to look at the stairs and tell me if he saw anyone. Nope. Then I had to tell him what had happened and he kind of sighed. I did too. Who needs this? All I wanted was a damn pizza and a glass of pop. Now here I had this unwanted haunted shit that was going to bug the crap out of me for the rest of the time we're there.

I got up from the table a couple of times and rambled around looking for anyone who fit the description, or even the general description of what I'd thought I'd seen...a tall man in a green shirt, a woman with her hair up, anyone in a dress or an apron....nope. Nada. Nothing. Took in the entire place...the bar, the gallery, the back pantry area, even peeked into the kitchen.

'Well, good. I'm nuts," I said, and ate my pizza.

Nowadays the Lone Jack is 'Ship Happens'...a shipping warehouse open to the public. The interior has been remodelled; once you enter the door you're in a small reception area; the rest of the space is walled off into freight storage. We do business there frequently; they're locally owned so the Yummy Biker throws them all of his large freight shipping.

One day, after ascertaining that I was the only customer in the place, I finally got up the nerve to ask them if anyone had ever seen anything out of the ordinary there.
"Oh yes," the girl replied. "There's a lady in a ball gown up on the second floor. She walks around and opens the safe."
"Lots of people say they see a lady in a long dress walking around," agreed another kid, stacking boxes. "She used to own the place or something."

When I'm very tired I see what I call 'mice' out of the corner of my eye...small moving shadows or hints of motion that when looked at squarely turn out to be an electric cord or the toe of a shoe sticking out from behind something. It's caused by eye fatigue. Your eye muscles tremble and this makes your vision go out of focus for a half-second. That tremble gives dark objects in the periphery of your line of sight the illusion of motion. It's the same effect on a smaller scale as that shitty 'MTV' hand-held cinematography. The objects being filmed aren't in motion; it's just that the camera is being held by someone with a hangover.

This wasn't that.

I wasn't drunk or stoned; all my medications were balanced, I was well fed and rested. Not stressed, having a good day, in good health (for me, anyway.) And then this happens.

Is there perhaps a name for this kind of mental phenomenon? Can something cross-connect randomly in the brain and register a visual impression in context like that? Because remember; this wasn't anything terrifically out of the ordinary that you could conclusively call a hallucination or a seizure artifact, like an angel or an alien or the floating head of Oz the magnificent; this was a woman in a dress standing on the fourth step from the bottom of a staircase.

Except, you know, not.

Never happened before, never happened since.

As an adult, I've been in lots of places that were supposed to be haunted...Colonel Ebeys' house, the Coronation Hotel, The Crystal Ballroom, the Whatcom Museum, Pittock Mansion...the list goes on...and nothing. Nothing at all. Even when I really had my mind on the subject too...nothing. So why, then, would I get struck with some 'phantom impression' while sitting in a sticky chair on an ugly carpet waiting for a goddamn pizza?