2002 (APPROX.)

At a particularly dark time in my youth I worked at the local convenience store. This was a depressing job to have after a while, serving scratch tickets to hopeless lotto junkies and exchanging packs of cigarettes for piles of coins from folk really desperate for a nicotine fix, interspersed with the moms getting milk on the way home. Compounding the effect of the humanity I was faced with each day was the lack of prospects in my uncertain future, having just dropped out of college, and after 8:30 or so on any given closing shift the store became a quiet place where I was left alone with my thoughts. At least, I think I was alone – but the poltergeist activity I was met with constantly there made me question it!

I was no stranger to poltergeist activity. I experienced it often growing up, sparking an early interest in parapsychology. Nights at the store helped to convince me that since the activity seemed to follow me, perhaps I had what they call Recurrent Spontaneous Psychokinesis, or RSPK. That is, perhaps I was unconsciously manifesting these strange events.

Puzzling things would happen, such as the paper coffee cups which stood stacked in sleeve near the decanters would jump straight up and float to the floor, landing with a plop sound upside-down. Sometimes the spinning wire rack that held those cards people would buy to put minutes on their cell phones would flutter off the hooks in every direction, giving me an aggravating mess to clean up. One such event was witnessed by the delivery guy who was stocking up a shelf, during a particularly hectic, line-out-the-door afternoon rush. I caught him looking slack-jawed and dumbfounded at the little wire prong on which the beef jerky packs hung, as they jumped one by one from where they were to the floor, seemingly of their own volition. He looked at me and I said “don’t worry about that. It happens all the time here.” I understand the man changed his route after that, I never saw him make a delivery there again.

The most dramatic event occurred one night when I failed to stock the milk shelf from inside the cooler and a woman demanded a gallon of whole milk. I rushed into the cooler, where I had gone several times already in an attempt to stock the shelf, but this time a crate full of gallon jugs was right in the path I used through the cooler. I tripped over it and nearly hurt myself badly. I know that crate hadn’t been there before.

Years later my girlfriend and I had eaten dinner and had a few drinks nearby and I decided to stop in for a pack of smokes. Feeling a little goofy I asked the teenage clerk at the register if he ever saw anything weird happen in the store.
“Oh, you mean the Slush Puppy Ghost?” He replied. I was floored. The slushy drink machine was near where the coffee stand had been when I worked there, years earlier, and according to the kid cups and lids had a tendency to take flight from that counter when no one was near it.

So did I cause these phenomena? Or is there actually a Slush Puppy Ghost? Or both, perhaps… I guess we’ll never know.

Submitted by A.P. Strange, Liminal Ambassador