Item Detail
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The Winking Picture
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2/4/2016
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Provo, UT
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Male
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Columbus, OH
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Provo, UT
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22
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Husband
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American/Caucasian
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LDS
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Cody is a sophomore at Utah Valley University, majoring in Computer Science. He enjoys working out and watching sports. He is an active member of the LDS church and served a mission in Colorado, where he met my family, who later introduced us. Cody would describe himself as mildly superstitious
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Cody and I work together for Pro Building Services, a janitor company. Cody has worked for them since just before Christmas 2015, but he was in a different building. At the start of 2016 he was moved over to the Ancestry.com building, where he still works. There are 7 total people who clean the building and we are each assigned to a different job. Cody's job is vacuuming the carpet. Ancestry.com is an office building, with two halves connected by a covered walkway, which has been converted into a game room. Each half has a lobby in the middle, which roughly divides each of the three\rfloors into two halves again. Each floor is further divided into cubicles. The janitors work in teams, with each one cleaning a side of a level. Because of this division, much of the time spent cleaning is solitary. The building is mostly empty of people when the janitors arrive, and the rooms are dimly lit to save power. On the walls are hung old black and white photographs of people doing various activities, with an overlay of green on some part of the photo, like on a tree or a dress, because the company color is green.
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Ancestry.com is a company that works on creating family trees and gathering information about people's ancestors. They also do DNA mapping to show what part of the world a person's ancestors were from. Since the first day Cody and I started working there, we were told by our supervisor and coworkers that the building was haunted, and that creepy happenings were commonplace. All the janitors assume that the\rhauntings were due to the fact that the company researches the dead. The ghosts are not believed to be harmful, just mischievous. I asked Cody if he had any creepy experiences while working for Ancestry.com
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Ghost stories, personal experience narratives, janitors, paranormal activity
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How Collected: This story was recorded and later transcribed. Ums and uhs were edited out\r[Cody] So this one night, I was vacuuming on the third floor of, I think it's the west building. And, just a normal night, vacuuming, and the vacuum's super loud so you can't really hear anything, so I usually just have my headphones in listening to an audiobook or whatever and I'm just in my own little world. And so I'm vacuuming and, you know, there's pictures on the walls everywhere, and there was this one particular picture of a young man. I seen it a dozen times, tons of times. And I walked past it this one night, and I like, my vision just briefly glanced past it, but as I like briefly glanced past it I could've swore I saw it wink at me, and it made me do like a triple take.\r[Interviewer] And how'd that make you feel?\r[Cody] Well I vacuumed that floor a little faster. It was a little creepy.
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Shana
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Pickett
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Female
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22
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English 392
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Eric Eliason