Haunting At FE Warren AFB [Personal Account]
After posting a fictional ghost story, written with elements sent to me by my morning show radio listeners, I began to get notes from folks with ghost stories of their own.
Justin Huntley sent me a few accounts of the strange goings on at FE Warren AFB here in Cheyenne Wyoming.
Hey Glenn.
Really enjoyed your ghost story this morning. I work at FE Warren AFB as the base housing facility manager and I've heard several stories of strange encounters from residents living in the historic brick homes on Ft Warren Ave, including from the current 20th AF Major General.
I never really given any of those stories any real credibility as most often such things can be explained very easily, especially when you have an engineering background and over 20 years of experience in construction and maintaining buildings. That is, until one Saturday afternoon in August not 2 months ago.
I had come in that Saturday to catch up on some administrative work and was sitting at my desk which is located in one of the oldest structures on the base; an old brick horse stable originally built for the 10th Cavalry division of the US Army back when they were still fighting the advancement of the Sioux Indians into northern Wyoming Crow and Arapaho territories.
I was working at my computer when I heard heavy boot steps walking from the front of the building toward the back on the second floor in what is now plywood floored attic storage space. I immediately assumed it was my on-call maintenance tech and thought he was up there looking for a part. As the footsteps progressed toward the back of the building I got up and walked out to shop area at the back of the building where the only set of stairs leading up to the attic are located.
I stood in the middle of the shop listening to the footsteps progress to the top of the stairs expecting to see my on-call tech start walking down them. The footsteps stopped at the top of the stairs, but my tech never came down. I called out his name and received no answer.
I walked to the stairwell and ascended into the attic space and called his name again, no answer. I then walked all the way to the front of the attic, which is an open area full of spare doors and cabinets and plumbing fixtures and furnaces, searching for my tech who I was sure was screwing with me at this point. Nothing, no answer, no one there, no additional sounds. Then the lights turned off.
This was odd because all the lights in the attic are on a motion sensor with a timer that turns them off after 10 minutes of inactivity. I then remembered the the lights had been on when I ascended the stairs.
Well, I thought, that's not too unusual, electronic motion sensors go bad and malfunction all the time, especially when you buy the cheap Chinese manufactured ones from Home Depot or Lowe's.
I walked back to the stairwell and went back down to the shop, assuming I just missed my tech and thinking I'd find him out in the parking area loading his truck or something. I went outside and found his truck in the lot, parked where it always is, locked up and no technician in sight. So I called him.
He answered on the second ring and I asked him where he was. "I'm at home working in my yard, did I miss a call from the emergency service or something?" "Umm....no, but I thought you were here, I heard you in the attic a minute ago." He asked me to describe what I'd heard.
After hearing my explanation he said to me, "look boss, this has never happened to me, but you should talk to Bob, Jeanine, Mike, Daryl, and David. Every one of them has experienced the exact same thing you're describing. "You've got to be shitting me." "No I'm not boss, over the last year I've heard them all talk about experiencing that same thing."
Since Bob has been here the longest I asked him first thing on Monday. before I even got the details out he said, "Let me guess; you heard boots walking in the attic, went out to see who it was, and found nobody there and the lights kept going on and off." That was a pretty good summary so I let it stand. He then hollered out to the team area for Daryl. Daryl comes in and Bob said, "Tell Justin what you heard the weekend you were on call and you came in to get the gas valve out of m office."
Daryl then described exactly what had happened to me 2 days before right down to the precise detail. I'm a practical and logical man.
Glenn. I'm an engineer by trade and believe in empirical data over all else. There's not one single explanation I can come up with using the laws of physics, thermodynamics, or 20+ years of learning building quirks that can explain what I and 4 other people have experienced here.
Add that to the stories and sometimes complaints we get from various residents in a few specific homes throughout the base, consider their wide variety of backgrounds, rank, home states, cultural differences, and different career fields, and it becomes pretty difficult to deny that something at least un-explainable, if not supernatural, is at work here.