Elmira is a blip on the map of New York; unless you’re a Mark Twain nerd, you’ve probably never heard of it. But this tiny dot on the map is hiding a morbid story. 

In a town like ours, one has to keep busy. My friend Viki hit me up on Facebook and asked me if I wanted to try out for a haunted house. 

This place had a fascinating backstory. The home was once a functioning orphanage. It was also a rest home; there were hundreds of deaths within the walls. The owners, upon learning of its history, were confident that it would be a perfect haunted house. 

The story goes that when the hometown hockey team, The Elmira Jackals, moved into the boarding house, they insisted on moving out after less than a week because they were too frightened to stay. 

I was a bit surprised to learn that this place was now a rooming house. And many of the haunted house’s actors were people who lived there while they were in a transitional phase of life. 

Many of the renters would sit around before we got into our places. They would tell stories that seemed to have simple explanations. Like, “I set my keys on the table and they wound up in my dresser,” or something else mundane.

I arrived early one night and was sitting on the picnic table, eating an apple and chatting with one of the handymen. The handyman was a resident who did maintenance and help set up the haunted house instead of paying rent. The handyman told me and another resident that he had to clean tiny handprints off of the wall. No children were living there. That story gave me an unsettled feeling, but it was nothing too extreme. 

One night I was talking to another border, and she said that she and her husband would often find blond hair in their shower; neither one of them had blond hair. And no matter what they did, there would always be a clump of blonde hair the next time they got ready to take a shower.

I ended up, sitting in what I presume to be a parlor. The room had big French doors and a very stately feel. I would sit in an old fashioned wooden wheelchair with my head tucked into my chest. When people walked halfway through my room, I would spring up and scream bloody murder. I love scaring the crap out of people, 

One night, one of the ghosts turned the tables on me. During a lag of customers, I was sitting in my chair, drinking water and checking my phone. All of a sudden, the chair started moving by itself! I could feel the wheels of the chair turning, and it felt like someone was pushing it from behind. I looked behind me and no one was there. I was a little dumbstruck. I just said, ”I know you have a job to do, but so do I. Can you please leave my chair here until after I go home?” 

Later that night, I told one of the showrunners and she just said, “It wouldn’t surprise me. The chair was here when we got here,” and walked away smoking a cigarette.