The Ghosts of Fort Simcoe Job Corp

I was nineteen when I first set foot at Fort Simcoe Job Corps. I was ushered into the dorm I would be spending the next seven months in, and was corralled quickly into a dorm room with several other boys who took one look at me and gave me my nickname. “We got a Lurch!” they cried. I was six foot eight inches tall at the time and towered over everyone. I smiled, this wasn’t exactly what I was expecting but it was a nice sentiment to someone in a completely new location.

It was already near ten o’clock and I had been on the road since seven that morning, needless to say, I was tired. I got settled and after a string of questions about myself, we all finally went to bed around midnight. It was only 5 hours later and I woke up to everyone moving around. Apparently, we were to be up, dressed, and ready. Breakfast was in the cafeteria around 6:30 and we had to be back in our dorm at 7:30 for roll call.

It was during breakfast I had been asked if the ghosts had messed with me. Apparently, this place has a ghost problem and everyone knew about it. It was almost known that if you didn’t believe, in a week you would. I told them I hadn’t but when I asked for details they gave me all kinds of wild stories. The biggest one was a little girl with a red ball. She showed up at night for people leaving their rooms to go to the bathrooms. She would be in the hall, say nothing, but motion with her ball. If you played with her the next day you would get violently ill.

I, personally, never saw her, but everyone during my stay who claimed to have seen her did wind up severely sick the next day. It was said that when the soldiers of Fort Simcoe wanted the Indians gone they poisoned their grain, and that the little girl died from it, she gives back that pain with contact of the ball. I looked it up online and found the same story across several different Job Corp sites across the states. I now attribute the sickness to the quality of food, but that’s an entirely other story.

Each dorm, there were four of them in total, seemed to have it’s own personal ghost who did something different. The girls dorm had a wispy woman who would sit on the edges of girls beds who were feeling depressed or filled with anxiety and tried to comfort them. Usually only ending up terrifying them. One of the boys dorms attached to the girls dorm, had reported a woman shrieking at them until they awoke with a fright. The third dorm refused to talk about it, but they were attached to my dorm and you could always hear strange noises coming from the other side of the vents our dorms shared.

Our ghost was a mischievous little spirit who liked to turn on the main rooms TV where we congregated to watch movies at night and had our roll call. The only problem we had with it was that it was also changed to a channel we didnt have so that static would play and the volume set to all the way to one hundred. We decided to unplug the TV one night and all had the worst sleep as the TV still managed to turn on and none of us had the courage to go out and try and turn it off until morning.

There were other stories of spirits in the area. We had a football field which was bordered by trees. If you walked about the field at night a big burly man would rush you from the woods and knock you down before disappearing, again, I never saw it but plenty of people claimed to have been attacked. A lot of people also liked to yell at the “Stick Indians” and try and call them out. If you dont know about it I would suggest looking it up, but also to not try it. We had many staff members on the site that were indian and condemned the practice, fearing for the students who unwittingly were essentially calling bad things upon them.

As usual the ghost stories were many, and they all came out at night, but if you went to the Fort, which was only a hundred feet down the road and could be traveled to during the day, you were almost for sure going to be visited by something. Not much at the fort itself, walking around the property into make-shift huts where soldiers used to lay was where the action was. The doors would shut on their own, and there were dark whispers on the wind. If you were alone it felt as if some giant malignant force weighed down on you heavily. It became so notorious they started making it so you could only go with a buddy.

Now I have had spiritual encounters before, though I wouldn’t say I was some official on the whole business, I did have theories on how things worked for ghosts. That was it though, they were the untested theories of a kid who only had a handful of knowledge, most of that being hearsay, television and a very minuscule amount of experience. So, when a couple of guys I didn’t know very well, invited me to their room where they were going to try and talk to spirits and wanted my help, I agreed.

It was fun at first because they didn’t really ask anything super cool, or special. They didn't ask the ghosts anything directly unless they wanted to know their favorite color and the like. I quickly realized we were just going to goof around in the dark and freak each other out here and there. We were seated across from one another. They sat on a couch next to the window in the corner of the room, I sat in a single chair at the table across from them. The guys asked me more questions about my theories and asked how I thought some ghosts get into buildings if they aren’t summoned directly or attached to a place.

That’s when, looking back, I realize I should have just kept my mouth shut.

“I think if you invite them in, if you say it, they will come, haha”

I hadn’t even finished my field of dreams quote when the guy with the old recorder, let's call him Dave, hit record and said: “I invite every ghost on this site into this room right now, let us see you!”

I didn’t have any time to tell him how bad of an idea that was before things got downright frightening. A torrent of wind hit the window. That was then followed by scratching on the walls all around us. I knew from the one or two past experiences that being firm and unafraid would help. Even so I could see a dark figure in the shadows not far from us and a cold breath washed over my neck. I dont know what all was in the room with us, but I felt an immense pressure threatening to crush me into the ground.

The two other guys were screaming their eyes closed, holding onto each other. This shook me from my own paralyzed fear, as I noticed that they were slowly peeking through and screaming at something behind me.

“What!?” I yelled, hoping that any sense of false bravado would at least get them to tell me what they were screaming about.

They just pointed behind me, screaming more. Dave said “It’s going to grab you!” I froze at those words, all the false bravado leaving me. At that same moment, I felt fingers drift from the back of my neck halfway down my back. That was it before I screamed, terrified, and jumped from my chair, diving for the lights.

Suddenly everything was gone, there wasn’t anything in the room but us. We took deep breaths, the other two still freaking out. They explained that a gray pillar of wispy smoke appeared. It had no form, just a column that came through the wall and glided smoothly towards us. It had stopped and one of the tendrils of smoke formed into a hand and it reached towards me. That is what they saw before I leaped up and turned the lights on.

As we settled we told each other what we saw, with me apparently seeing and feeling the most. We were beginning to laugh again, feeling safe, until one of them mentioned also seeing the figure in the shadows, and the other made fun of it. I was about to tell them that was a bad idea when one of the bunk beds behind me shook loudly. They screamed again and I told them it was a bad idea to make fun of spirits, especially ones you invited into their room. That just because you couldn’t see them anymore didn’t mean they weren’t still there.

We ended up going to the room next door where one of the guys was a born again Christian and his goal in life was to be a preacher and have his own church. They told him what had happened and he told them that they had done a very bad thing and that he would do what he could. We spent the next two hours in that room praying and going through what he called cleansing rituals, and we generally felt better. He told us we should be baptized just to be sure and would ask the management if we could go somewhere to be baptized. The two guys did, but I didn’t.

I was curious now if I had been marked or something I wanted to know more. My curiosity was piqued. I had mentioned my experience to one of the management people I, as a newcomer still, had to meet with in the mornings. Her father had worked here all his life, and now she had as well. The gray figure she knew of immediately. She called him the chief and from what she discerned he was the good spirit of the chief of the tribe who were killed here many years ago. She also talked about how there are many stories of many dark figures that live in the hills around us, and the dark figure I saw may have been one of them.

It was a few weeks later, I woke from my sleep at about three in the morning and found myself facing a pillar of gray smoky wisps. It had no features, just a column of smoky wisps from the ground to the ceiling. Panic set in, but then I remembered that this was supposedly the chief and that it was a good spirit. I didn’t say anything, I just observed it for a minute, terrified. As if bored of me, the column slowly drifted into the wall beside me and disappeared.

It’s been almost ten years since then, and I have heard our old dorms were torn down and rebuilt. I also have heard that the rebuilding process brought out a lot of dark energy in the area, and have found tales of people being attacked at night by scratches and bruises. It seems to have calmed down now though, and with my last chat in the facebook group about ghost stories everyone seems to have the same old stories, though a lot more people seem to have been meeting the chief.