 Amazon.com, Extremely hot, hot spot |
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 Feb 17 2005, 04:54 PM
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Can dowse the moon everytime that it's full!
Group: Full Member
Posts: 720
Joined: 17-February 05
From: Puget Sound, WA State
Member No.: 7586
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Originally I had had hopes that this topic would find it's way out on it's own,but information has only found it's way out peripherally.
In 1999 I was working on the then new headquarters of Amazon.com. I soon discovered that the building had a huge reputation for being haunted. Elements of the location and reputation have since shown up in two movies: Rose Red, and the remake of, The House on Haunted Hill. The original building is hugely haunted and I suspect something odd is going on with the location, ( it is truly extraordinary ).
I am sensitive to "atmospheres". I can usually identify some sort of aliveness to a location right away. This place was the same in that it had a glow, but it was colder and more neutral than some, but that may have been due to my being there during the day, and it's always differient during the day.
The building used to be the Veterans Hospital, and some other hospital, I think, before that. During the 80's (?) it stopped being the Veterans hospital and became the Pac-Med center. Probably for financial reasons it was closed and sat empty for 10 years or more. The upper floors sat empty for many more years prior to the general closing.
Have to go, more later
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Take this kiss upon the brow!
And, in parting from you now,
Thus much let me avow---
You are not wrong, who deem
That my days have been a dream:
Yet if hope has flown away
In a night, or in a day,
In a vision, or in none,
Is it therefore the less gone?
All that we see or seem
Is but a dream within a dream.
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Feb 18 2005, 03:08 PM
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Can dowse the moon everytime that it's full!
Group: Full Member
Posts: 720
Joined: 17-February 05
From: Puget Sound, WA State
Member No.: 7586
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Sorry for running off before I had finished.
The old hospital, best known in the Seattle area as the "Pac-Med" is an extremely tall old brick building constructed in the early years of the 20th century. It has been added onto a number of times and sits on one of the most fantastic views imaginable. It has a "conference" room at the back in the most recent wing from which most of the aerial views of Seattle used in the movie Rose Red were filmed from, and it LOOKS a lot like the hospital in the movie House on Haunted Hill, neither of which I believe to be coincidental.
The Pac-Med was supposed to maintain a hospital in the building in exchange for extra money from the government, but did a fan dance around their legal agreement and sub-let the above-ground levels to Amazon.com for use as their new center of operations while maintaining a clinic in the two more or less below ground levels,( the back of the building is signifigantly lower than the front where the fancy front lobby is located).
The building has 6? passenger elevators and one service elevator. The service elevator is to be avoided, especially at night.
I came upon the scene as a construction worker in 1999 when the remodeling as a computer office building was underway. There were two electrical contractors on the job. One was responsible for installing a new main electrical room and upgrading the existing electrical service. That portion of the work was being run by a one-time friend of mine. The second electrical company had contracted to do all of the tenant work throughout the rest of the building. I worked for the second outfit.
I've been in the trade quite awhile, and for a time was a semi-big-shot. I've met a lot of people on the client side of the aisle as a consequence. I was very pleased to find someone I knew running the Pac-Med's maintenance crew.
I asked him about his new job and how he liked it, and he began to tell me stories about how the place was blatantly haunted and that hey had a hell of a time keeping nighttime janitors; most left after the first night.
Neither the management of the Pac-Med or the Construction bosses encouraged this sort of talk, so getting information was difficult until the lid blew off the whole thing. As the job entered it's final stages crews were working around the clock, and Amazon had hired it's own security people when their mainframe computers went into the sixth floor. One morning when I came to work they were leading out an hysterical security guard, one of the new Amazon hires. She claimed that her cell phone lifted itself up off her desk in front of her face. Whatever else happened was hard to determine as the woman was flipping.
Once this happened everyone started sharing. It turns out that the night crew had all had extremely weird experiences which they refused to relate, but guaranteed us that if we worked nights we wouldn't have to wait long. One of the big scaries was having a mystery voice call out your name. Our parts handler had something call his name and say, "Wait, wait!". The crew working on the downstairs service kept up a complaint that security wasn't keeping weirdos out of their work area. The foreman was livid when he was told not to worry, they were only ghosts, and a persistant dead night nurse who'd been walking the halls since the '30's, and oh ,bye the way, you're working in the old morgue. The security guards were the most interesting, the old hands that is. The building had been vacant for some time but they were required to patrol each floor every night. They would just finish a floor and be in the service elevator heading down when they'd see someone run past the door, or hear one or more voices call their names and laugh. They'd get off and search but never find anyone. On many occaisions the elevator would stop, trapping them between floors for hours , while they heard running, laughing, talking, etc. on the floor they'd just left. There were a lot more stories, and by the time we left the Amazon employees were well aware of their new buildings rep and wanted tours and such. Doubtless some of this was passed on to Stephen King who had a tour of the place I understand. Oh, last thought . The worst places in the building were the morgue, the stairways, the service elevator and the 6th floor. The 6th floor had been the old ER and later the mental-health lock-up. The service elevator transported patients to and fro in the hospitals heyday. I hear Amazon is moving HMM...
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Take this kiss upon the brow!
And, in parting from you now,
Thus much let me avow---
You are not wrong, who deem
That my days have been a dream:
Yet if hope has flown away
In a night, or in a day,
In a vision, or in none,
Is it therefore the less gone?
All that we see or seem
Is but a dream within a dream.
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Feb 20 2005, 01:59 AM
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Can dowse the moon everytime that it's full!
Group: Full Member
Posts: 720
Joined: 17-February 05
From: Puget Sound, WA State
Member No.: 7586
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Please forgive my clumsiness in this medium. I have never used a bulletin board before.
What did I see and feel. I was present one night when two security guards from the two differient agencies had their cell phones ring simultaneously. When they answered they were talking to each other, and please remember, they didn't know each other and had not been calling each other. That same nightI had to go down to an unoccupied floor for parts by my self. Why I was waiting for the notorious elevator to show up I could hear something shuffling through the rubble on the floor approaching my location. I felt "fear". Feel free to quote me on that. I saw the cell phone go up, but frankly at the moment of occurrence it was too confusing to make sense of what I was seeing. The guard was following the phone up with her right hand like she was trying to catch it, and I couldn't figure out what she was playing at until she started screaming.
More on feelings: To me haunted places have a definite "feel" to them, and the atmosphere seems thicker and colored. A reasonably decent place seems "warmer", "yellower", thicker, and friendly. A bad place seems "thicker", "grey", "colder", and unfriendly. This joint was out of my experience. I told my partner about some of this, but only kinda-sorta believed me. However his mother had worked at the Pac-Med for years and knew which parts of the building were original and which weren't. He checked me, and I could always tell the original structure from the old. Usually in cinstruction that would be easy, but for some reason a lot of respect had been paid to remodel the hospital in the style of the original structure. The hallways of the old building seemed to absorb light, but for a fact it wasn't brightly lit. I never felt alone in that building. What struck me about the place was that there didn't seem to be much of a wait for the action to start, just show up at nightfor two or three days and expect to be amazed. I tried to get men from my night crew to tell me what had happened to them. All I got was," Don't ask me, just get on the night crew, it's a BAD_WORDing fun-o-rama!" The maintenance guys treated it as a joke," How long do you think this janitor will last? Ha HA! ", stuff like that. Whatever is going on there doesn't seem to be a recording. There seem to be quantities of whatevers there and they seem to want to screw with people. People heard the weird calling out even during the day. I have pretty good nerves, but I wouldn't want to work late or take a nocturnal stroll through the grounds.
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Take this kiss upon the brow!
And, in parting from you now,
Thus much let me avow---
You are not wrong, who deem
That my days have been a dream:
Yet if hope has flown away
In a night, or in a day,
In a vision, or in none,
Is it therefore the less gone?
All that we see or seem
Is but a dream within a dream.
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