My Friend Donna

From: Laurie Casares (Laurie.Casares@Clorox.com)
Story type: Ghost
Location: Clorox Data Center,Pleasanton,CA
Source: Form Submission

I got my job here at Clorox 20 years ago, through a good friend and ex-neighbor of mine, her name was Donna. I use to babysit her kids, and when I graduated high school, she encouraged me to attend a business college and find a job. I applied to Clorox twice. I got the job the second time. Donna was a kick! She loved to have fun. One day I asked her why she acted so crazy, and she told me that she felt that she would not live a long life, so she was going to enjoy this one and live it to its fullest. Now I knew she was crazy and I shook my head and let it go. Well, Donna and her husband moved away about a year after I started at Clorox. She wanted horses and land, and they moved out to the country. I adored and worshiped her. I felt a loss at not having her as a neighbor, but I still worked with her and saw her everyday. Sometimes when we would leave town, we would stop by her new house to visit.

Well one day, I got a phone call from the big boss at home. He wanted to break the news to me that Donna had been killed in a car accident, and he knew I was close to her. God, I was devistated. It happened that another friend bought a new corvet, and they went for a joyride, and blew a tire and flipped the car. They tried to save Donna, but she died of her injuries, her friend wasn"t hurt.

After this, I felt that Donna was watching over me. I would talk to her, and I just knew that she was one of my many guardian angels. A few years went by and strange things started happening around the office. Things would turn up missing, only to show up in another place than we left them. It became the practice of the office, to blame Donna, she was letting us know she was still around, by playing little tricks on us.

I moved to night shift, in the Computer room, in my climb up the corporate ladder. One night, (I swear and I had a witness) that one of the machines, a "Decolater" starte up, running all by itself. The damn thing wasn"t even plugged in! I told Donna to stop it, that she was scaring me, and it stopped. Things like this happened every so often, and it kinda became the joke around the office. We would blame everything on Donna.

After the Loma Preita Quake of 89, we moved the mainframe computers out to a new Data Center, we built. Come to find out, the night shift operators, would tell of being scared, and of hearing things. I really didn"t pay attention until one day. This day we were celebrating the Holidays, and we had put together a video, filming Holiday related messages and songs, and skits, to greet each other in I.S.. I had wrote, directed, and created the costumes for a skit my department put on film. We had a blast doing this, and I had dressed up as Santa, and we had a big pot luck/BBQ lunch, and everyone in I.S. came out to the Data Center to celebrate.

After lunch, they were playing the video downstairs in the training room, where there is a video player and a huge screen tv. One of the guys, came upstairs to tell me; "Hey Laurie, do you know you have a ghost in your film?". I laughed and told him it must be Donna. She must of gotten lonley and followed us out here to the Data Center. He thought I was kidding, as he never heard my story about Donna. He says, "No, I"m serious, you gotta come see this.". So I went down to have a look. They re-wound the video to the end of our Skit. At end of our skit, I had put "credits" on my grease board in my office and had the guy that was tapeing us zoom in on my board. One guy that was in my department, but who was absent from the tapeing of our skit because he was out sick of something, so I got a poloroid picture of him I had, (taken in the old computer room in the old building) and taped it to my board. As the camera zoomed in on his picture, you clearly see a shadowy figure walk behind him in the video. This is a still photo being recorded on video. "There...do you see it? they asked?" REWIND...REPLAY...

Well, what could I say, everyone is waiting for me to say something, and chills kinda run up the back of my neck, so I tell everybody, It"s just "Donna, up to her usual tricks once again".

Well, I"m back in the old building, back on the 11th floor where I came from, but once a month, I"ll spend a week out at the Data Center. The people who work the night shifts are terrified and are always are talking about ghosts! They always tell me what noises they hear. I thought it was kinda funny at first, but these guys are really afraid. I"ve seen alot of changes here, people come, and people go as they say. But whenever something wierd happens, I blame it on Donna, and laugh...........