By Christiane Williams-Vigil
With my hometown being ranked the most haunted city in Texas, it is not uncommon to hear spooky tales. El Paso is full of various spots where you can intermingle with ghosts and legends. My grandpa, however, airs on the skeptical side. He always says that there must be a reason behind the bumps in the night, and that shadow you thought you saw.
Despite his side-eyeing of such stories, he holds the strangest brush with the supernatural in my family.
My grandpa was born and raised in Juarez, Chihuahua during the 1940s. My family struggled like many to get by and make ends meet. It resulted in them having to move around often. When he was about twelve years old, his family moved into an apartment complex.
He told me that the apartment complexes in those neighborhoods were square-shaped, small, and two-storied. All apartments faced a patio decorated with a large ornate water fountain. And at the entrance of the complex, a large, wooden gate ensured the tenants would be protected from outside disturbances. The gate was to be shut during the night. He said the place was alright, and the only qualms they had about it when they moved in was whoever was living next door moved the furniture around all day.
The apartments themselves had no plumbing. If you wanted to use the restroom, you had to leave your apartment and go to the communal bathroom downstairs. There were only two toilets enclosed in a closet-like space with a sink. Each had a vacant/occupied sign on the outside and a swinging light bulb for light.
One night, my grandpa left the apartment alone and carefully descended the stairs to reach the restrooms. Around him, only the sound of soft singing crickets and the outer traffic of the neighborhood could be heard in the patio.
He reached the restrooms and raised his brow in confusion. The toilet on the left was closed with the occupied sign. That one had a broken lightbulb that the landlord hadn’t fixed, so no one in the complex used it. The free one had the light on, and the door was swinging lightly in the wind.
As soon as he shut the door and locked it, there was a loud pounding on the door.
“Ocupado!” he shouted as he settled to sit. The door thumped from the force. He crinkled his brow with annoyance.
“Ocupado!” he stressed once more, but, out of courtesy, hurried to finish. The door continued to rattle as he rushed to pull up his pajama pants. The door banged as his fingers fumbled to open the lock. As the door swung outward, he flinched seeing that no one was there. He slowly stepped out of the restroom, turning his head side to side. The patio area was empty.
He looked to the toilet on the left. The door was also open, revealing a dark void within. He walked across the patio, passing the fountain as he reached out to grab the railing of the stairs. He heard a sound that made him look back over his shoulder.
Standing beside the fountain was a dark silhouette of a man with hands on his hips. A ten-gallon hat rested on the man’s head. Beside him, a box was suspended mid-air, spinning in a strange corner to corner motion.
My grandpa sprang into action. He ran up the stairs, going two at a time, all the while keeping his eye on the shadow. The head of the man turned as if following my grandpa. The box remained spinning in the air as he rushed into his apartment. He slammed the door shut and laid down with his big brother, trying to rationalize what it was he saw.
A few days later, he told his parents what had happened. My great-grandfather, having grown tired of the constant screeching of furniture from the next-door apartment, as well as being concerned that someone might have tried to hurt my grandpa, went to the landlord. The landlord was stunned to hear about the moving furniture. There was no one currently living in that apartment. They checked to see if perhaps there was a squatter, but all that was there was an abandoned bed frame, haphazardly thrown in the middle of the room. My great-grandparents moved out soon after, and my grandpa was relieved to leave the eerie place.
A few years ago, above the skies of El Paso, Texas, appeared a large black box coming out of the clouds. Onlookers watched as it transformed into a long brown rectangular shape that absorbed back into the clouds. Someone recorded the incident, and it was blasted all over the local news and even made it on an episode of a Travel Channel special.
The first person I phoned was my grandpa. We discussed the possibilities of what he saw and what others saw that day in the sky above my hometown. Was the box a time machine that this shadow person used to move? Or was this simply magic being performed out in the open? I have heard that seeing a shadowy figure with a hat is demonic. However, I would counter that it took place in Juarez and it could be a ghost of a Mexican Revolutionary. That makes more sense to me than some demon playing with a box.
Whatever the case, it left a profound impression on my grandpa and me. It left open the possibility that this world is stranger than we give it credit for. I’m not sure if the apartment complex is still standing, for many spots around the city have since been renovated and modernized. I long to visit the grounds to help search for clues. Or perhaps a sliver of what it was my grandpa experienced.
Still, if you share a spooky story or an anecdote about a time you saw someone at the foot of your bed, my grandpa will chuckle, “And then you woke up?”
Christiane Williams-Vigil is a Xicana writer from El Paso, Texas. Her work has been published in various literary magazines such as Marias at Sampaguitas, Fatal Flaw Literary Magazine, HyDRAW Zine, Chismosa Press, and Marshall University’s Movable Project. Currently, she is a contributing staff writer for Alebrijes Review.