Your
True Tales
April 2006 – Page
11
Ghost
at the Bar
by Dave H.
About four years ago, I moved to an apartment that was right across from a bar with a very peculiar name, "Shiminski's". It was a weird little dingy, lowlife sort of tavern with a certain 1970s dive nuance to it; you had to see to understand. One night I was bored with TV. It was about seven o'clock and I looked out my window to the old ratty tavern with the yellow sign on the corner, and for some reason I just had to go over and have a beer. I got my jacket, throwing regard to the wind and headed down the two flights of stairs and out the front door across the street over to the old place.
I finally got there and pulled open the 1970s dingy-looking solid door and entered a really foul-looking dive, which was almost entirely barren. I said what the hell and went up to the bar at a stool as an old bartender came up who looked pretty damn weathered himself as I ordered a Budweiser. The beer came up and I paid him, with a tip, and sat there for a few minutes and drank my beer, looking around the place as the curmudgeonly bartender was talking with an older black man at the other end of the bar.
Suddenly I felt the deepest, most depressing sadness overcome me as I caught something out of the corner of my eye next to me. I turned and there was an old woman in a red knit sweater with a really leathery skinned look to her sitting right next to me that I didn't see or hear come up and sit down. Her face was staring down at the bar, then up to the area behind the bar like she didn't see me at all. I looked at her for a second as the energy of sorrow and negativity was almost just like pouring off of her. It was such a miserable feeling like a great loss or something. Her hair looked like she was perhaps living on the street all black and in matted strands and her clothes looked like they would smell, but there was no scent to it. I looked back forward and sipped at my beer again thinking maybe I'd have a conversation with her, but then when I turned to maybe talk to her there was not only no one at all there, but the nearest barstool wasn't even that close to me.
I just shook my head as I then stood up looking around me as the bartender caught my eye and came up and asked me if I needed something. I was nearly choking on that last sip of beer. "I'm gonna ask you a crazy question," I said to the bartender. "Was there just a woman here?" He just looked at me cockeyed and gave me a humorous anecdote with a smile about a woman being in this kind of place, but I asked him again seriously and he said to me confidentially that it has been rumored to have happened before where people occasionally claim to have seen a homeless woman dressed in rags (as he put it) in the bar as he then admitted to have even felt a presence from time to time there like a breeze when he opens and closes sometimes.
The story gained the attention of the older black man who came over and asked what was up. After a bit of a conversation about it for a few minutes, he said that he thought it was a woman who killed herself out back of the establishment after it opened in the early 70s. He has been in the neighborhood for decades and said that was the only thing he remembered that it could be. The woman jumped off of the roof supposedly and used to live in the same building somewhere. They told me about a man that claimed he saw a woman sitting at a table with him then disappeared and then about a bartender that walked to the end of the bar to serve an older female customer and when he got there there was no one there. He thought she had fallen or something but there was no one in the bar at all. I just finished my beer and went to head out after a bit of talk but that was the freakiest thing that I have ever encountered. There is no doubt that there was an old haggard gypsy-looking woman sitting right next to me and I looked directly at her face (which appeared solid) as she stared off in her own world at the bar back. And even weirder (???) was she floating in midair beside me with no stool under her? The thought really freaks me out with absolutely no explanation for it whatsoever.
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