Paranormal Passions

I had a weird thing happen to me at the store I work for a while back. At 8 o’clock we close down one of the two front registers. Beneath every register is what we call the “black box,” which is where all bills $20 and up are placed for safety. They are black metal and have a door in the front that is hinged on the bottom and a slit across the top to stick the bills in when the door is closed.

So, I opened the black box for register 3, and glancing in before I pulled the cash out, I could have sworn I saw a $50. However, sorting through the money a second later, there was no fifty. I chalked it up to seeing things, grabbed the rest of the drawer, and went up into the office to count the drawer down.

Each of our register drawers gets counted down to $100 base change every night, the rest of the money going into the deposit. Our computer system helps keep track of how much profit is made on each register. Register 3 came up $50 short. At this point, I figured there must have actually been a fifty in the drawer and that I dropped it, so I went back down onto the floor to search. There was nothing around the register, under the counter, on the floor, or under the floor mat. I opened the black box again to double-check, running my hand around the inside walls to make sure it wasn’t stuck anywhere.

Nothing.

“Okay, don’t panic,” I said to myself. I went back up to the office, re-counted the drawer, re-counted the deposit, and re-counted the change drawers.

Still short. Now I started to panic.

I went back down to the sales floor, got down on my hands and knees, and proceeded to crawl all around the floor of the register 3 area, looking under the photo processor, the floor mat, etc. I even pulled the black box out of it’s housing to look behind it.

No dice.

Sighing in resignation, I sat back on my knees and decided I had no choice but to go back to the storeroom and look through the garbage. But first, I wanted one more look inside the black box. I turned the key and cracked the door open.

There the bill laid, face-down in the bottom, crisp and new like it was just shoved in there.

So was it a ghost? I don’t know. I know it wasn’t the other sales girl because she was nowhere near me while all this was going on. (And she was freaked out by the whole thing.)

There is a theory circulating around that, when someone says they have a haunted house and things disappear, only to show up again in plain sight but in the oddest places, that ghosts are able “take” things into another dimension that we can’t see. When they “put it back” they are just releasing it from that dimension back into ours.

I dunno if I believe it or not, but it sure was freaky when that bill just showed up out of nowhere!