19.

I have a bunch of these.

I used to work for the national park in Pennsylvania. My job was toll collection. My shift started at 3 AM. My duty was to assess a small fee from commercial vehicles traversing the park at that god forsaken hour. The neat thing is the first commercial vehicles wouldn’t really even start coming until like 5 or 6 AM (with a few regulars who were in before then). It was the best job and paid very well for what you had to do. The only difficulties of 1. Staying awake and 2. Not allowing your imagination to run away with you and creeping yourself out.

The booth was right next to the Delaware river. So in the early morning, the fields and the road and the woods would take on a mist that hung close and low to the ground, like ghostly white hedges. Staying awake was hard, but the second difficulty was the worst. I would write horror stories while I was in the booth. The setting was too creepy not to channel what I was writing.

One night while typing out a few paragraphs I had this crazy feeling that I was being watched. It was a night with mist like I described. It was cold too. I think it was November (and it must have been as I was home from College at the time). I looked around, sorta bleary eyed. Could not shake the feeling.

The booth was a box that sat squatly in the middle of the road going south on Route 209. A small parking lot was off to the left. The windows allowed you to see in up the parking lot and fee assessment lane, the up the road, and the travel lane ( ). Like a dunce I sat there looking up the road and looking out into the travel lane. Couldn’t see anything but the white mist and the lone street light about a quarter mile up the road.

After a few moments I looked to my left into the parking lot and the assessment lane to see if anything was there. Nothing. I stood up to get a better look and as I did a head of horns and nostrils popped up in front of window and scared the living shit out of me. A deer had wandered up to the booth and had been sorta grazing at the grass that grew near the door. I screamed like a little girl when I saw him and he sorta just meandered quickly away. I had no further need for coffee that morning.

20.

My mother started working at the hospital right out of college. It was the only job she had ever known. On moving day, she was determined to walk through every hallway before leaving for the last time. She had her camera and was taking pictures as she went. On one of the empty patient wings, she stopped and was getting ready to take a picture when the door to the room right next to her slammed shut as though someone on the other side had thrown the door as hard as they could. My mom decided she was done taking pictures.