Haunted Thrift Store

Haunted Thrift Store - Preston ID

This happened me and three coworkers while we were working at the Deseret Industries thrift store in Preston Idaho. The day started out just like any other day at the store. We punched in and went into the conference room to have our usual meeting that we before the store opened. Being a Wednesday, our manager Dennis was down in Logan attending administration meetings as he usually did on Wednesday's leaving Karen, the assistant manager in charge, Mikal and I on the sales floor and Jim in the back room where donations were received and sorted through and placed into bins.

After the meeting we went downstairs and opened the store. Karen went back upstairs to do some book work while we puttered around the sales floor. We had been open about an hour when the intercom went off. When I picked it up it was Karen. She asked if I wanted something and I told her no and asked why. She told me that her intercom went off and when she picked up the receiver, nobody was there. She thought one of us needed her for something. I told her it wasn't us and told her to see if it was Jim. She checked with him and he hadn't called her either. So she shrugged it off and went back to her work.

A few minutes later she called down to us again and asked what we wanted. Again I told her we hadn't called her. Well Karen finished her paper work and came down and joined us on the sales floor. She asked us if we were sure that we hadn't called her on the intercom and we assured her that we hadn't.

A few minutes the intercom went off and I picked it up and it was Jim. He asked us if we had called him. He said the intercom went off and nobody was there. I told him that none of us had called him. Then we started hearing a bell. A soft but very clear ringing could be heard in the store and it was coming from the As is section. Whenever you walked over there it would stop. But as soon as you walked away it would start again. Mikal and I went through every bin and looked on every shelf to see if we could find anything that would make that noise. We never found a thing.

Shortly after that Jim came out and told us that the lights in the back room kept going off on him. The back room was a windowless room and when the lights went out it was dark as night in there. Karen went back and check the lights and couldn't find anything wrong. Several times through out the day we watched as all the lights on the telephone lit simultaneously. We only had two lines and they lit up when someone was on the phone. This time the whole phone was lighting up right before our eyes.

Karen was the first to leave for lunch and when she got back she called down to us and said "Your not going to believe this but the time clock is dead." She told us that it was working fine when she left but now it was completely dead and that we would have to write down our hours until the time clock was fixed.

Well I left for lunch and when I went upstairs to my locker I felt really uneasy and scared. I have experienced these kinds of things since I was a child and they have never frightened me but whatever was there made me really uncomfortable. I grabbed my lunch and hurried back downstairs and went into the back room where Karen and Jim were working. The lights had gone out on them again and only one of the lights had come back on. Normally eating in the back room isn't allowed but under the circumstances Karen understood.

When I finished eating I hurried upstairs to my locker, wrote my time on the time card and hurried back downstairs. Something was there and I wanted nothing to do with it. Mikal then went to lunch and when he came back Jim left, leaving just the three of us in the store. All of us were sitting at the registers talking about what was going on and we were all really feeling creeped out by then, when all of a sudden the intercom went off and we all just froze. We looked at the phone and then looked at each other, eyes wide and mouths open. We were the only people in the store. Jim was gone and terror gripped us as we wondered who was on the other end. Slowly and nervously Karen reached for the receiver and picked up. "Yes?" she said. Then hung up and turned to us and said "Nobody was there." We were really creeped out by then.

About five minutes later Jim came in the back door with his lunch having just returned for Subway where he usually went. On my last break of the day i went to some of the other stores around us and asked them if they had been having any problems with their lights or phones and they said no. I told them what was going on in our store and they didn't know what to make of it.

That day we had all of two or three customers. The store was just dead the whole day. Sorry about the pun. Anyway we were all eager to close up the store and get the heck out of there. As we turned off the lights and headed down the hallway to the stairs, I stopped and turned around because I got the feeling that someone was there, watching us and I felt it was a man. That uneasy feeling came back and I hurried up the stairs quickly. When I got upstairs I heard Karen say "I don't believe it, the time clocks working again." As mysteriously as it had stopped it started up again. We got our stuff out of the lockers and hurried our the door and down the stairs to our cars. When I looked back at the store I shivered because I could still feel somebody watching us.

The next day when we came back to work we all told Dennis what had happened. He didn't know what to make of it and assured us there was some logical explanation for what had happened. Through out the day we saw the phone light up again and eventually it stopped. Nothing happened after that day. Though we never forgot what we had experienced and we knew there was nothing logical about it. The store was haunted.

I later learned that several of the stores along main street are haunted and it came as no surprise to me!!

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