SUMMERSIDE – It sounds like a Halloween story, but for Jenn MacWilliams and other employees at the Tube Fab Aerospace plant, ghosts are real.
“One day I was in the inspection part the facility. We were all talking and somehow the story about a ghost in the building began. It’s when I realized I wasn’t the only one,” said MacWilliams.
She has worked at the facility for over three years.
“The first time I heard it, I was sitting at my desk out front. Everyone in the plant usually clears out at 4 p.m., but I’m usually here until 4:30. All of the lights were off in the warehouse and I face the window looking in so I can see if anyone is there.
“All of a sudden I heard footsteps, but no one was there.”
Before the building homed Tube Fab, it was a Kohltech window manufacturing plant, which closed in 2006. Tube Fab has been in the facility for about five years.
Like MacWilliams, other employees have encountered the unexplained presence.
One employee has seen it – a man, dressed in gray denim pants and a plain button down shirt, said MacWilliams.
“They’ve also had things from the desk thrown across the room and blown around for no reason. While others just know they can feel him. It’s like someone is behind you following you around.”
Maria Salandanan, has interacted with the ghost, who they’ve named Charlie.
“Sometimes my paint printer will spurt out excessive paint … One day, after it was doing it over and over again, finally I was like, ‘Come on Charlie. Don’t play with me. Stop that.’ And once I said that, it stopped.”
While Salandanan didn’t really believe in ghosts, after experiencing the unexplainable, she feels they might be real.
“I don’t normally see him, but I can feel him,” she added. “So I know the feeling that he is here.”
Edward Strongman has felt Charlie’s presence as well.
“When I first experienced it, I was kinda scared. I believe in ghosts and I know there is definitely something here.
“I was working in the paint room one day at like 2 a.m., and no one else is at work I’m here by myself. But while I was spraying a part, it was like someone was looking at me from the door at the other end. I could just feel it.
“So I ran out of the room and yelled, ‘Who’s there? Come on guys this isn’t funny.’ I really thought the guys were in playing a joke.”
Strongman says it’s like the feeling you get when you think someone is watching, but you don’t see anyone, or the feeling that someone is following you.
“I’m a smoker, so at the end of a shift, when I’d go to clock out, I’d get a cigarette out. But with Charlie following me, it made my hair stand up on end, and I rushed out of the building so quickly, I didn’t even get my smoke.”
Strongman was the worker who gave the ghost his moniker.
“I named him after my cousin. He was laughing at me one day when I told him about the ghost and then I told him, ‘I named him Charlie. I hope you don’t take that as an insult,’” said Strongman with a laugh.
While there are sceptical coworkers and those who have encountered Charlie, MacWilliams said it’s hard not to believe he’s real when you hear so many people with so many stories.
“At first I was like ‘Oh yah sure, there’s a ghost,’ but once you experience it, you believe it. It’s unexplainable. Like me, some have heard footsteps, others have heard it calling ‘hey’ out to them, while one employee actually walked into him.”
It’s a spooky thing, but Charlie isn’t mean, said MacWilliams.
“He seems playful, like he wants to play pranks or trick you. If there was stuff coming from the walls and really scary things, it would be a whole other story.”
