Sutcliffe

Willie sighed audibly, standing up to stretch out the tired muscles of his back. He had finally finished his work for the day. Being a janitor for Sutcliffe at Centre College seemed like a never-ending job. He stowed his mop bucket away in the janitorial closet and locked it, checking the classroom doors one last time as he made his way to the exit. Turning around at the main door to lock it, he felt his annoyance rise as he saw a man walking up the steps towards the ballroom. No one was supposed to be in the building this late at night.

Willie unlocked the main door and walked back in. “Sir,” he called, “no one is supposed to be in the building this late. You’re going to need to leave.”

The man never turned around. In fact, the man seemed to vanish in front of Willie’s eyes. “It must have been a figment of my imagination,” Willie thought. “I just need to go home and have a good hot meal.”

As he was relocking the door, Willie looked through the glass to see the same man walking up the stairs towards the ballroom. “I really don’t have time for this,” Willie sighed, but he opened the door again to call to the man.

“Sir, I’m sorry, but you need to leave. No one is allowed to be in here this late at night.”

This time, the man turned around. All the blood drained from Willie’s face, and he turned and ran, not even stopping to lock the main door or make sure the strange man left the building.

Willie never returned to the Centre College campus, and he refused to talk about the incident with the strange man in Sutcliffe. However, close friends of Willie’s have testified that Willie told them that the man he saw had been shot in the face.

Upon investigation, it was discovered that a few years earlier, a Centre professor had shot and killed himself in Sutcliffe. Apparently, Willie had seen the ghost of this man who is forever forced to walk the halls of the building where he took his own life.

Joy Beth Woods

Oneida Baptist