The Ghost In The Bakery

My name is João* and I used to work in a bakery in Belo Horizonte, Brazil. I'll let you know about something really scary that happened to me. This changed my life and definitely made me a believer. I'm 28 years old now and was 26 when the events happened.

I was hired to work in a big bakery in my city in this neighborhood called Buritis. My job was to take care of the place during the night and also leave it all clean for the opening the next day. I used to do my job all alone. First two months were totally normal: nothing unusual to worry about. Things really began to get strange by the ninth week, during a rainy evening. I was all by myself and heard this noise coming from the basement where they used to stock food and ingredients to make cakes and stuff. I instantly went down the stairs and faced this scene: one of the shelves was broken and the flour that was stand on it was all over the place. I didn't really think about anything wrong. Just thought that it had been broken by the heavy flour bags. It was an old shelf anyways... Made out of wood. My only concern at that point was to clean the area and that would take me a very hard work! Damn it!

I was about to rest a little when this happened and I decided to follow my previous plan before cleaning everything. So I went back upstairs, watched some TV and ate something... About 25 minutes passed and there it was me making my way back to the basement with a bucket and a mop. As soon as I put my feet on the last step something scared me to death: there were several footprints on the flour. Human footprints! My first reaction was to go upstairs real quick and call the cops! Of course there was a burglar in the bakery! Cops took about 10 minutes to be there and I waited for them outside the place because I really didn't want to be shot by anybody during my shift. By waiting outside I could be sure that nobody could leave the building. The guy was stuck inside! Cops searched the whole place. Nothing! Security cameras were also checked: nothing. According to the cameras outside the building the only person who had entered or left the bakery would have been me. A detective even talked to me the other day and didn't seem to be really convinced that it wasn't me joking with the police. Luckily my boss didn't seem to really care about the situation and since they found nothing I just decided to forget about it and move on.

Two more weeks went by and everything was normal. Until the night I was doing my cleaning and someone called out my name. This couldn't be real. I was all by myself! It was a male voice. I didn't want to warn my boss or even the police because this time I'd be surely fired and my job was very important to me. I searched the entire place and didn't get to find anybody or anything that could have performed such noise. I could find something even more interesting though: the recent broken shelf had not been fixed yet and right behind it I could get to see a small door on the wall, hidden by the shelf in the corner. It wasn't large enough for a man to pass so I didn't fear facing a burglar nor any other criminal. I just couldn't hold back my curiosity. I grabbed a flashlight, opened the door and pointed it to the darkness inside. If the door wasn't large enough for a man to pass, the whole space inside wasn't large enough even for a medium size dog. Besides spiders and spider webs there was just a paper box. I took it, removed the strings and opened.

What I found inside of it really freaked me out! A newspaper published back in December 1986 had brought a post about a bakery whose owner had to sell its place to have its debts paid off. He never really accepted the situation and died a few months right after the sale. The cause of the death: suicide. Place of death: the bakery that had once belonged to him. He managed to enter the place and sneaked to the second floor. Placed a rope around his neck, attached the other side of the rope to an oven and jumped off the window. It happened during the day and about twelve people witnessed everything. The scene was really shocking because with the impact his neck was broken and his body turned around itself in an instant twist shaking a lot afterwards. Something brown had come out of his mouth and blood flowed out of his eyes. A picture of the dead body taken afterwards in the morgue was also published and I noticed something really scary: the bakery they were talking about in the news was the same place I was working at!

The former owner had so many debts that selling the bakery wasn't enough. He had lost everything and eventually became a beggar: a homeless person with no options in his miserable life. Poor man! But I still couldn't believe I was being haunted by a ghost. I wasn't a believer at all!

Next night a new event even more intense happened: a tap in the basement started to flow water out of nothing. I swear I had not touched it! I closed the water and someone called out my name again. I still don't know if it was real but I could clearly feel a cold hand being placed over my shoulder and someone was breathing really close to my left ear. I had had enough! I left the place and waited outside until sunrise. The other employees came early in the morning to start their shift and I resigned. Never again I went back there.

*I changed my real name in order to keep my identity classified.