Daily writing prompt

What’s a secret skill or ability you have or wish you had?

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For a ghost story to be scary it needs to be believable for it to be believable you need to have credible witnesses that independently can corroborate each other’s stories and in today’s ghost story we have three police officers that do just that.Dave murphy had just become a police officer in salt lake city utah his first role was as a protective service officer which meant he’d be in charge of physical security at a number of the county facilities dave’s first facility was the capital city theater which is a landmark inside of salt lake city it’s been around since the early 1900s it’s this beautiful grand theater so in early august dave reports to the capitol city theater for his first day on the job and he meets his partner an officer by the name of morgan matthews he gets there on this first day and right away dave would say that morgan was just strictly business the first place that morgan takes dave is the control room which sits on the first floor of the theater the theater had three floors and then it also had a basement as well so the control room was on that first floor inside of the control room were all of these security monitors because there was all these cameras set up inside of the theater the cameras weren’t great though you pretty much could only tell what was in frame if there was a light on and most of the time at night especially lights were off once they were done looking at the control room morgan says to dave now we’re gonna go do our rounds this is something we do every time you get to the theater you do a security round and make sure everything’s locked all the lights are off before you come back to the control room you’ll do that at the beginning of your shift and at the end of your shift morgan brings dave downstairs and it’s the first time dave is seeing the basement and he’s shocked by how big it is it is this massive hallway that stretches way down in the middle of the hall it’s a piano that’s just sitting out in the middle and the lighting’s not good down there this is a very old theater you know everything in the building was pretty old and dave remembers thinking that he was immediately creeped out by this scene.This long hallway with all these doors in this piano right in the middle of the hallway and he’s thinking to himself i don’t want to spend much time down here this is so creepy but they go down the hall they check all the doors they make the way up to the main floor the second floor the third floor everything gets checked and so after they do this security round dave and morgan go back to the control room and dave is anticipating getting to know morgan a little bit this is their first night they’re going to be working together a lot and dave would say that morgan just seemed really cold and just did not want to talk to dave very much and as soon as their shift was almost over morgan was very eager to just knock at the security rounds and just get out of that building at the end of that night dave remembers thinking that there’s just something off about morgan’s behavior it seemed like morgan really didn’t like being in the theater it would turn out that he was onto something because morgan didn’t like being in that building but it would take him a while to share with dave why over the next couple of days morgan and dave would do their security rounds together because dave’s in training morgan’s teaching him but on august 9th which is two days after dave’s first day on the job morgan was confident that dave knew how to secure the whole building and so at the end of the night he tells dave why don’t you do the security rounds yourself dave feels very confident that he knows how to do it he goes down into the basement make sure all the doors are shut and locked the lights are off finishes the basement goes up to the first floor where the control room is and checks all the rooms on that floor he goes into the main auditorium space he’s checking all the different nooks and crannies to make sure there’s nobody hiding in there he goes up to the second floor he checks to all the different rooms up there and the balcony makes his way up to the third floor where there’s all the offices of staff that work at the theater at the end of the search the last room he would check was the rehearsal room and it was the only room where there was no door to it so you’d poke your head in kind of look around make sure no one was in there and then you would leave and that’s the end of your check so dave gets to the rehearsal room he flips the light on and he looks inside doesn’t see anybody is satisfied that no one’s in there turns the light off and as he’s about to turn back into the hallway he hears a door slam with tremendous force right across the hallway from where he was and it was the bathroom door his first reaction is someone just ran out of the bathroom someone who had snuck into the building must have run out of the bathroom and they’re making a break for it to get out of the theater before i catch them and so he instinctively picks up his radio and he calls to morgan and says someone’s on the third floor but when morgan looks at the camera he doesn’t see anybody at this point dave’s drawn his weapon you know he’s looking down the hall he doesn’t see anybody and as he’s waiting for morgan to come upstairs to back him up so they can go look for this person that’s just ran down the hall he realizes two things one just because he heard the door slam doesn’t mean they left and slammed it they could be in the bathroom and so he’s thinking to himself someone could be in the bathroom right now maybe that’s why we didn’t see him on the camera and then the second thing he thought of is that door the bathroom door can’t slam it’s got this huge hydraulic hinge to it it can’t slam so his gun is drawn and he’s aiming it at the bathroom door right as morgan comes up on his right morgan draws his pistol he’s got it on the door as well and they make entry into the bathroom they clear all the different spaces in the bathroom and no one’s in there and there’s no way to get out of there morgan and dave are like okay well they must not have come in here they must have run out of the bathroom they’re somewhere in the theater and so they decide they’re going to search the entire building and find this person that clearly was just in the bathroom and that’s how they slam the door we’re not going to worry about how they slam the door with the hydraulic hinge we just know it was slammed somehow so they leave the bathroom gun’s still drawn and they start making their way down the hall they’re checking all the doors everything is locked when they start making their way downstairs to the second floor dave recognizes through the door because there’s a door leading onto the second floor he can see that the lights are on and he had turned them off and so as they’re walking down the stairs he says to morgan hey did you turn the lights on on the second floor and morgan’s like no and so they think that whoever was here whoever was in the bathroom is on the second floor they must have turned the lights on they go into the second floor and not only are the lights on but all the doors on the second floor had been opened they search the entire second floor they search every single room no one’s in the second floor.They turn off the lights they shut all the doors everything’s locked when they went down to the first floor everything was the way it should have been locked lights off nothing down there and they go down to the basement and even though it was creepy being down there because they’ve now searched the whole building and they’re anticipating coming in contact with whoever is here assuming they haven’t left the building yet and there’s no one down there they decided to review the footage from the third floor to see if they could pick up someone running in the hall around the time that that door slammed but the camera was not trained on the bathroom door so you just have this view down the hall you can’t see the bathroom specifically not to mention the hallway is dark and the cameras are terrible without light and so all they’re able to see is the light go on in the rehearsal room while dave is doing his last check in there the lights turn off because dave’s about to turn around and then after that you just hear this massive slam of this door but you can’t see what happened so they don’t know what to make of it they’re both very much on edge that someone might still be in the building and so they do another sweep of the building and no one’s there and so they decide to just chalk it up and say we were hearing things and seeing things i’m sure it’s fine let’s just get out of here and they leave a couple of days later on august 11th morgan is working alone dave wasn’t coming in that day so morgan’s alone in the theater doing a shift and at some point in the night as he’s sitting in the control room he thinks he hears whispering in the hall right behind him and so after the experience he had with dave a couple nights ago he’s on edge so he draws his pistol right away and so he goes out into the hallway and immediately when he steps into the hall the whispering seems to go farther and farther away from him down the hall so he gets out there he’s looking around he can’t see anything he makes his way down the hallway towards the stairs that go down into the basement or if you wanted to go up the second floor when he gets to the top of the stairwell he’s you know gun drawn looking down looking up he hears what sounds like coughing coming from the basement at this point morgan said that he was actually pretty scared i mean imagine being alone in this theater just a couple of days earlier you’ve had this weird experience with slamming doors and doors being opened and lights going on that somebody else another police officer witnessed with you you’re alone in this theater and you’re hearing coughing coming from the basement after hearing voices behind you that’s pretty terrifying so he very slowly starts going down the stairwell he’s getting ready to clear the corner and just as he does the copping stops he turns the lights on and he looks down the hall and there’s nothing there he starts making his way down the hall he’s checking every door making sure it’s locked you know making sure that everything is secure and he gets all the way down the hall and as he’s almost done checking the basement he smells smoke and it’s coming from a door right next to him and so he unlocks that door and he goes in and there’s no fire but all he can smell is smokes he turns the light on he’s looking around there’s no fire he’s convinced that somewhere down in the basement there’s a fire he goes to every single room and he keeps checking and there’s nothing and then at some point the smoke smell dissipates he checks every space in the theater to look for a fire and there’s no fire he’s wondering if he should call the fire department but he’s thinking what would i tell them there’s no fire and so he ultimately after checking three four times and being very confident there wasn’t a fire he just says okay no fire i guess i was just smelling things a few weeks later on september 4th dave has just arrived at the theater he’s there a little bit early their shift started at 5 00 p.m he was there at about 4 30 and when he walked into the building he sees that there are three staff members sitting at the front desk talking to each other and as he walks past one of them is talking about ghosts inside of the theater and it immediately piques his interest and so he walked over to the guy talking about ghosts and he introduced himself and it turned out that this guy was a man named blair fuller who was a senior accountant at the theater and so dave asked blair what are you talking about with ghosts in the theater because i provide physical security here and i’ve seen some strange things here i just love to hear what you have to say about it so they head up to the third floor where blair’s office was and they sit down and blair says okay i got a doozy for you this happened to me a couple years ago i was actually in this office it was about nine ten o’clock at night i was doing some work and i heard the elevator kick on now the elevator was right outside of his office and anytime it was on the engine was really loud it was really obvious if the elevator was moving around and so he’s doing his accounting work and he hears that that engine kick on he doesn’t think much of it but then it clicks that he’s the only one in the building and so he kind of looks out the glass window of his office he had a closed door office with two windows looking out into the foyer where there’s this elevator and he looks out and you can see that the little lights above the elevator showing what floor it’s on have lit up and it’s going up so the elevator was in the basement and now it’s in the first floor the second floor third floor the doors open and there’s no one there at this point blair says that he wasn’t concerned he figured okay maybe there’s some maintenance maybe it’s scheduled to do that who knows but after a little while the alarm goes off in the elevator to signify that something is obstructing the door from shutting and he’s looking out the window and he hears this alarm this like ringing sound going off but the door isn’t shutting and he’s like there’s nothing obstructing the door why isn’t it shutting and so he leaves his office and he kind of walks over to the elevator and he walks into the elevator and he said immediately he felt this massive drop in temperature inside of the elevator and as he’s standing there he turns around now he’s looking back towards his office inside of the elevator the doors start to shut and for whatever reason he said i didn’t get off i just decided i’m gonna ride this elevator the basement button lights up as if someone had pressed basement and they start going down and he’s sitting there thinking what in the world is going on it was just on an alarm because the door wasn’t shutting and then miraculously when i go inside of it it suddenly works again and it’s going to the basement so he goes to the basement the door opens there’s no one there he steps out and blair says that it took all of his courage to yell out hey is anyone down here and as soon as he did and he didn’t hear a response he said he didn’t want to make any more sound the elevator sat in the middle of the hall in the basement it’s that huge hall with that piano sitting right in the middle the lights are off and he pokes his head down one way there’s nothing down there he sees the piano barely from the light of the elevator and he looks down the other way there’s no one there and at this point he’s just so spooked he just gets back in the elevator and he hits four three four three four three and he’s hitting like door closed door closed door closed the door closes and he goes back up to his his office he goes into his office and he shuts the door and he sits down and he’s thinking like what was that why did that just happen i got to find out they’re running maintenance or something and as he’s sitting in his chair thinking about this strange experience he hears what sounds like banging sounds coming from outside of his office in that foyer near the elevator he just goes to his door and he opens it up and he pokes his head into the foyer and he looks to the side there’s this big filing cabinet and all of the cabinets are out they’ve all been pulled out he certainly didn’t do this and it was as if someone was one by one pushing each of them shut these big heavy cabinets and he’s watching us one by one these things are slamming shut one by one until the whole thing is shut and so he goes over and he’s like trying to disprove what he just saw that he can open up a drawer and that it will shut on its own but none of them shut on their own you have to shut it something has to shut it for it to shut and so he packed up for the day and left and did not work another night shift at the theater later that night dave would share blair’s story with morgan he wasn’t really sure how morgan was going to react but morgan actually would open up and he would say you know before you started working here i always felt like i was being watched when i was here and then we had that experience obviously where the lights are coming on and you heard that banging from that bathroom door and then just a few days ago i heard voices coming from the hall and i heard someone coughing in the basement and i smelled smoke and and there was no one there and so they start going back and forth exchanging stories of just how uncomfortable this place made them feel and so they’re wondering what they should do about this and dave has this idea he’s like my best friend i’ll invite him to come over here one night and we’ll tell him that we’re giving him a tour of the building and we’ll just see what he says we’ll see if he reacts to anything here who knows you know maybe something strange will happen and then we’ll have another person validate it morgan thinks that’s a good idea and so dave reaches out to his best friend greg greg would say that he was a little bit surprised to be getting this offer to come take a tour of the theater but he was interested and since dave was asking he figured he would oblige him and so greg agrees to come to the theater and take a tour so the next day dave and morgan are at the theater and greg shows up and so they start this tour they go in the main auditorium, they’re looking around and they make their way into the basement morgan turns on the light and morgan and dave instantly see a little ways down the hall on the left one of the doors has been opened and so dave and morgan push greg out of the way they draw their pistols and they’re aimed at the open door and so greg just stays behind them as morgan and dave make their way down to this open door and when they get right outside the door and they’re about to push it open to go inside the door slams shut right in front of greg and dave and morgan and they all are looking at each other like what’s going on but before they can do anything the door handle starts rattling really aggressively after the rally stops dave and morgan look at each other and they nod their head like we got to go in there greg is scared about being out in the hall alone and so he just follows them in and so the three of them go into this room dave and morgan are you know pistols drawn it’s a small room there’s no one in there light switch on …no one in there. Greg suddenly gasps and he points to the corner and he says someone’s sitting in the corner and dave and morgan immediately train their guns on what’s in the corner but no one’s there and greg’s like i i just saw someone sitting in the corner it looked like he had a hood on he had a sweatshirt on i don’t know but he was right there and so dave and morgan they’re freaked out because they brought greg here on some level to disprove the strangeness and now the three of them have seen a door slam that shouldn’t have been open in the first place greg’s claiming to have seen a figure sitting in the corner this scared the crap out of all three of them they quickly left locked shut off the lights went upstairs greg’s like i’m out of here greg leaves and dave and morgan are like now what !!!At this point all the strangeness that was happening in the theater was getting reported but it was being reported in a way that dave and morgan didn’t seem like they were referencing something haunted but rather someone was breaking in ultimately the county installed new cameras inside of the theater these updated cameras had infrared technology which allowed them to see better when the lights were off they were hoping that this would allow them to catch whoever was breaking in practically every time david morgan are