The Speakeasy Ghost

There was an old store in Pueblo, CO that had some paranormal activity. My girlfriend's mother had a religious store and leased the building next door for storage. They were small storefronts so she needed them both to make it work. My girlfriend and I needed an emergency place to live so her mom let us move in the storage side since it had a one bedroom apartment in the back. It had been neglected for a while and very cluttered. We didn't mind straightening it up for a place to live. Most of the inventory fit up front and after getting rid of junk, we had a nice little apartment.

Living there wasn't bad. It was awkward living in a business district and having an occasional homeless person sleeping in the alley, but we dealt with it. What was strange was once in a while you could feel something, like a force or wind that would just brush past you. We figured it was a ghost but we didn't feel frightened. The whole front of the store was filled with religious items, so you'd think that would protect the place.

An interesting phenomena to the store was customers would go to the store looking for protection items at the same time. So I came up with a hypothesis that maybe ghosts travel the sewer lines. To test the idea we exorcised the toilet. This coincided with the front bathroom toilet getting clogged for no apparent reason. So we did an exorcism on it. What's crazy is that it seemed to work. It did clog a couple times afterward, so we repeated the exorcism, and the toilet would flush. I still wonder if that was coincidence.

This store had the main area up front with a little bathroom, next an office area that led to a living room. There was a kitchen to the right and straight ahead was a bedroom with a bathroom. One day we were coming in from being out and about. I was walking into the living room when I saw a woman peak out from the bathroom (as if she was looking to see who was there) and then she disappeared. It looked like she was about to take a bath. She had red hair and had to have been naked the way she peaked around the door. We immediately checked and there was no one in the bathroom. The experience was surreal and it's hard to describe how I saw the woman. It felt like I had seen half with my eyes and half with my mind.

Some nights were restless for us. We'd wake up feeling the urge to go somewhere, so we'd take long walks around the neighborhood. Our walks usually took us around this little vacant medical building on a huge lot. We found out latter that was the site of the old St. Mary's hospital. What is strange is businesses never last in that building. The place is usually empty or being repaired to this day. I don't know why we ended up there, but it was fun and romantic.

We moved when the pipes burst in the winter. My girlfriend's mother was transitioning into opening a restaurant so it was time for us to move on.

Years later, we're married with a son, living about a mile away. There was a liquor store across the alley from the old store that had been there forever. One day my wife had the urge to stop by the liquor store and pick something up. I waited while she ran inside. She talked to a long time worker about the owner who was an elderly lady. The worker told her the lady had past away and her daughter was ready to retire. The worker asked how my wife's mother was doing and why they closed their store. She told him how her mom started a restaurant and how she had always felt weird in that building. He asked her if she knew that the owner used to own that building. Apparently, the building used to be the liquor store before it moved to its current location. Going back further it had a speakeasy in the back where a red headed woman had died. It made sense. Behind the building there was a section that was boarded up. It had two stories and looked like there were a couple rooms. Who knows what happened in that alley. Maybe it had a brothel too?

My wife was excited to tell me what she learned. She had worked at her mother's store for seven years and finally had a reason for her eeriness toward that place. As for me, I can't believe it wasn't something that I just imagined.