The Walmart Ghost

I'm going to start off my story with this: the very LAST place I expected to see anything paranormal was in a public corporate store. Up until this point, I had only ever caught vague glimpses... Never enough to warrant a story to. I think perhaps the most intriguing was the time I stepped into a giant ghostly, bearded face in the dead of night as I progressed through the living room to the kitchen. Needless to say I had gotten exceedingly creeped out... But you were here to read about a Wal-Mart ghost!

Now, I actually live in Oregon, and not Arkansas, which is where this all took place. I was only in Arkansas because I could not, would not, absolutely refused to watch my boyfriend walk away from me, get on that plane, and leave to his home for another full year. Our relationship was first lit up over the internet in the game World of Warcraft, but he lived seven states away, making things difficult. Finally, after four years... He visited. And left. This last year, he visited again. I went back home with him, even taking a term off of school in order to be with him. I could only stay for three months, however, so I made it my goal to get a job as quickly as I could and get as much money as I could to bring us back home. I had to deal with my school in the same time, letting them know I WAS going to come back. I had never been that far away from home before; I was close to having a nervous breakdown with all the problems that kept coming up. This is where Wal-Mart comes in to play.

I wasn't working there for long. It took me a while to get a job, and I was trying to avoid Wal-Mart... Because everyone in Oregon really hates that store. It's a local-store killer. I'd gotten a temporary job, just to remodel the store. You know... Cleaning up the mess all the REAL employees had made of their building... And even getting paid more than the actual employees! I won't get into detail, stories about work and all aren't that interesting. But what WAS interesting was when I experienced something very odd and unusual one day while working there.

It started off in the morning. I'd be re-organizing things on the shelves, ripping off labels to replace them with updated versions, and polishing up the shelves when I'd catch sight of movement in my periphery vision. I'd look sharply around... And no one would be there. Shrugging, I figured it was my imagination. After all, my imagination had often carried itself away at times. But I kept catching glimpses, more and more, always in the corners of my eyes. I couldn't help but look. It was like a nervous twitch. Completely automatic. Only after I had turned my head did I realize I shouldn't have. I wanted to just try and see if I couldn't 'watch' from the corners of my eyes, and study this apparition that way.

Over time, however, I decided what I kept seeing was a woman in a bright orange shirt and long, brown, curly hair. She was always facing away from me. I don't recall seeing legs, really. There may have been, I think there was a faint gray smudge beneath that orange shirt, but it wasn't the focus of my attention. I started to prowl the aisles once I had run out of things to do, looking for anyone in an orange shirt, but I was the only person there. I got startled when my supervisor rounded the corner and announced it was time for lunch.

I headed outside to enjoy some chicken, thinking on what I had witnessed. None of my supervisors were wearing orange shirts, nor had I seen any customers wearing one. While out here, enjoying a meal, I didn't see any more of those periphery vision creepers. I figured maybe I had just been hungry, or the cleaning chemicals had killed a few brain cells.

When I got back to work, I was due to organize womans' stockings and underwear on the shelves. Once again, I was working here alone, and spending much of my time just replacing tags. I started to glimpse Mrs. Orange-Shirt again. This time, however, she was always off to my left, next to this row of shelving that contained nylon leggings in small packages. Twice, even, I caught a glimpse of the orange shirt and a white one, but every time I looked over, no one was there.

Finally, fed up with it, I got up and moved over. I observed the shelves. Maybe someone was trying to tell me something? The shelf looked fine. So I knelt down and began to clean off the dusty frameworks. Only then did I see a crumpled paper underneath the shelf. Confused, I reached to pick it up. The instant I touched it, I realized it was tissue paper. Considering the department I was working in, there was absolutely no kind of paper of that quality around that general area, or even in the sections of the store around me.

So as I stood up, with a considerable amount of trepidation, looking around in bemusement... I pulled open that crumpled piece of paper. And I felt an odd chill to see what was written across it, line after line in cursive, repeating exactly one phrase:

"A day lived without laughter is a day lost."

I never saw Mrs. Orange Shirt or her counterpart with the white T-shirt after that. I knew the white shirt was male, somehow. I didn't spend much time looking for them at that point, for I felt somewhere in my subconsciousness that they had relayed their intended message to me. It made me realize I had been stressing too much about bringing my boyfriend back home with me, and I slowly started to relax over the coming days.

I am now back home, with my boyfriend, and I could not be happier. I still don't know who visited me, but I believe the woman might have been family at one point... For I also have curly brown hair, much like her's had been.