Vortex in a Bank

This ordeal happened two years ago when I was in my freshman year of high school. My mom has always had stressful jobs, but one year right before Thanksgiving she got laid off from her government job because they were downsizing staff. This dealt a heavy blow to her because she was dealing with false accusations from her employees. So, needless to say, she was down and depressed. A few months later, she was hired to work for a bank, but since the position for manager was not open, she reluctantly accepted working as a teller.

Before I even go into telling what happened, I need to describe the look of the bank and the kind of people that worked there. The suburb that this building is located in is known for great landscaping. However, if you start driving down the street that passes by the bank, the plants and trees look like they are about to croak. This is especially true around the bank itself. I can't count how many times I've seen gardeners tear out half-dead plants and replace them with new ones, only to see them die about a week or so afterward. The inside of the bank looks as if it has stayed the same since they first built it: ugly, foul-smelling carpet, wood paneling on the walls, and outdated furniture. The other employees who worked there, including my mom's boss, were extremely negative people and seemed to enjoy backstabbing each other. One in particular was caught several times filching money from the cash vault.

Meanwhile, I was dealing with the problem of adjusting to a new school. I made a few friends, including a senior girl whose mom works as a reflexologist and a psychic. Because of the friendship I had with her daughter, this woman offered me rides after school and had let me stay at their house until Dad picked me up late in the evening. Naturally, as I got to know her, she started telling me about spirits, guardian angels, past lives, and all that. At the time, I was rather skeptic, so I would be polite and do the classic listen-and-occasional-nodding-of-the-head trick.

Mom started coming home complaining about work. She has always had the habit of venting about work while she and I are in the car together during the weekends. However, each story she told was stranger than the next. They first started out as things like the other employees suddenly falling down and being nasty to each other. But soon she was telling me stories like this: A customer walked into the bank to make a deposit in her checking account. As she stepped up to the counter, she froze and starting shivering. Mom asked her what was wrong, and the woman replied saying that she suddenly felt extremely cold. This was odd because when they checked the thermostat, it read that the room temperature was 75. The woman said that she would come back and make the transaction later that day. She never did.

Another was when Mom was in the restroom. She couldn't go into the stall closest to the door because all it had as far as toilet paper was the brown roll. When she walked into the second stall, the door slammed behind her and locked her in. As she tried to get the door to open again, she could hear the toilet paper roll in the other stall, as if someone was spinning it on the rod with a finger. She was forced to crawl underneath the stall to get out. She did not waste time in leaving the bathroom.

Still another was when she carried papers down to the basement. According to her, that basement was the most haunted thing in the building. I never ventured down there (she wouldn't let me), but she said that even the feeling you get from being down there is evil. The ceiling was always leaking, and off in one of the corners was a dead potted plant. Not even the leaves were left; it just looked like a big stem that was sticking up from the soil. There was a small card table nearby it. When she set the heavy crate of papers on the floor, her back started to ache, so she sat down at the table. She rested there for a while, and then she felt as if someone was trying to pull the chair out from underneath her. She screamed and ran upstairs.

There are many others that she told me about: more customers feeling cold and frightened, faint laughter coming from the basement, and insects flying in through the door, landing somewhere, and dying. What was amazing was that the other employees did not notice anything.

Because the place was so trashed, Mom was making the effort of cleaning things up. At some point she got rid of the dead plant. From then on, things got worse. She and several people started feeling sick, and she was having dreams about a barn being burnt to the ground.

One afternoon, the lady who was giving me rides said that she would like to meet my family. I told her what bank Mom was working at, and so we drove over there to say 'hi'. As we waited in line, the bank manager came in though the front door. I watched her. Just as she started complaining up a storm, she fell down to the floor. To my astonishment, the way she fell did not look like she had tripped. It looked as if someone had grabbed her leg and tried to pull her down. The woman I was with saw this as well. After she and Mom had a friendly conversation at the counter, she invited us over for dinner.

That evening, Mom told her everything she told me. The lady suggested that there is a vortex in the bank, possibly created by someone dying in the barn fire. She said that it was feeding on the negative energy being sent out by the bank's employees, and that removing the dead plant was what made the spirits upset. She told Mom that she would be able to protect herself if she wore an amethyst necklace or even just a small bead of it in her pocket. It did help, but customers were still experiencing things as they came in.

Mom was telling me that what she noticed about the strange activity was that it seemed like things children would do: spinning toilet paper rolls and pulling chairs from underneath people. I joked, 'Yeah, they're ghost children who are upset because they did not get candy when they wanted'. To my amazement, Mom said that maybe it wouldn't hurt putting out little bowls of old-fashioned jellybeans, peppermint sticks, chocolate kisses, and licorice. She placed a bowl on each desk there, and there were no longer any reports from customers. But what was rather interesting was that within weeks, the other employees were fired by the people in charge of the bank branches in the district.

What happened next made me lose my skepticism. I was home alone one morning, and I was in the bathroom brushing my teeth. All of the sudden, I felt a gust of wind around my ankles. This wind was so strong that it caused my hair to fly up. I looked over at the window above the toilet and was shocked to see it closed. My bathroom door was also closed. At the moment, I just shrugged it off.

All throughout that day, however, objects kept falling off of shelves and walls. In our living room, we have a large framed painting that hangs on the wall above our couch. I was napping on that couch until the picture fell right on top of me. The books I had on a shelf in my room were tumbling off and crashing onto my desk. When I saw that happen, I heard someone laughing. Our cats were behaving strangely as well.

When Mom came home that evening, I told her what happened. She began to freak out and say that 'they' followed her home. This time, instead of buying candy (since she knew that Dad would eat it all in one night), she went to the toy store and bought a little doll that had a frilly blue dress and tiny black shoes. She laid it next to the lamp in our living room. A few nights later, while I was lying in bed, I saw in the darkness a bright blue light, about the size of a tennis ball. It floated there for a few moments before it zipped off and faded into nothing.

I'm not sure if that last part is related to the rest of the story, but we did not experience anything else after that.