Our Spooky Tales: Knock on the Bathroom Door
October is one of our favorite months of the year. These are our favorite scary stories to share with each other when sitting around a campfire or when traveling together for work.
This week’s story comes from our colleague Colleen Fannin about a situation we all fear being in… hearing a knock on the bathroom door when you least expect it.
When I was in college, I became friends with a seamstress named Angela and did modeling work for her designs in photoshoots and on runways. One of the locations where we often took pictures was called Miramont Castle. It’s a small castle in Manitou Springs, Colorado that was built in 1895 and is now a museum.
Angela’s mom is really into history and is friends with the people who run Miramont Castle, so Angela knows the team there very well. For this reason, we were allowed to do photoshoots in the museum and the gardens.
On this particular shoot, we were allowed to store our outfits and equipment in an area that was off-limits to the public. It’s important to note that we did not have an assistant with us — it was just me and Angela at this shoot.
Specifically, we were allowed to store our things in an old servant’s bathroom near the tea room. You see, this castle was built with servant hallways — narrow, cramped spaces in the walls for the servants to traverse through that allowed them to get their work done “out of sight and out of mind”. This was a small bathroom that was connected to the servant’s hallway on one side, and connected to the main floor plan on the other.
Nowadays the servant’s hallways are strictly off-limits, even to the staff of the castle, because they are not safe. They’ve fallen into disrepair, and they’re quite maze-like, so it would be easy for someone to fall and hurt themselves. To make things worse, anyone trying to help would have trouble reaching them in these passages, if they could even find them in the first place. No one uses the servant’s hallways anymore.
We had multiple outfits to shoot that day, and I was in the bathroom changing. Angela waited outside since the bathroom was very small and there wasn’t a lot of room for the two of us. As I was struggling with one of the outfits — probably a corset busk or some buttons on a jacket — I heard faint knocking. I was distracted, so said, “I’m trying, Angela, hold on!”
In response, I heard the knocking again, and that’s when I realized it wasn’t coming from the door to the castle floor. It was coming from the door to the servant’s hallway.
Now, keep in mind, I was half dressed and incapable of fleeing. So my brain did some logic loop-de-loops and came to the conclusion that obviously I had to summon my friend to get this thing to leave me alone.
So I started pounding on the bathroom door that led into the castle, yelling for Angela, and sure enough, when she joined me in the room, the knocking from the servant’s hallway went away. (In addition to warding off the spirit, she also helped me into my outfit.)
When I explained to Angela why I was out of sorts, she just laughed. She already knew the castle was haunted! She then told me a dozen ghost stories about the place that convinced me that the knocks I had just heard were most definitely real. The stories about this castle and the people who lived and worked there are ghastly, but I won’t get into them here. Just know that if you ever visit the castle’s doll room and it feels like someone’s watching you — well, there probably is.
Colleen is a game designer with experience in production, art, and programming. She started her career at WayForward Technologies and worked on projects such as River City Girls 2 and Miraculous Crush: A Ladybug & Cat Noir Match 3. Colleen is passionate about fostering an environment of positivity and growth in any team she’s a part of. She believes people come before projects, because projects cannot exist without people. To really get to know Colleen, ask her about the Resident Evil movies and book series.
