London Brothers Hotel.
Its now getting on thirty years since I worked at this hotel. (Its still there, run by another company, on the corner of North Gower Street, right above Euston Square tube, for anyone that might like to 'ghosthunt')

Anyway, I was 'living in', receiving what seemed like a pittance but was probably a fair wage. One of the unofficial 'perks' was that we could get into the kitchen in the evening and grab milk and cornflakes.

So, one evening, I went to go into the kitchen and found the door locked. The 'chef' (he cooked egg and bacon for breakfast) was out, so I decided to go through the dining area as that had a passage to the kitchen.
I unlocked the doors, stepped in and turned the lights on.

Stood at one of the tables, leaning forward as if putting something down, was a woman in a green dress.
As I started to say something she straightened up and vanished.
Now people don't just vanish.
I logically thought she'd moved away, so went and checked the toilets (she couldn't have gone past me), then went through into the kitchen.
No sign of anybody.
I went back up to the reception desk and asked Brian to go and check. His immediate reaction was to say "Oh, you've met the ghost then."
He did go to check though.

His story was that during the war the building had been a nurses home, the main hospital in London being a 2 minute walk away along Gower Street.
One nurse found herself in the family way, but unmarried. (Youngsters nowadays think its not a bad thing, in fact for some they see it as a way of being an adult, but in those days it was a bad thing. Your parents could throw you out and be seen as being in the right, and society as a whole thought you were a slag.)
So she went out onto the roof and jumped.

Where the dining area was when I was there was 'below ground', and the two stories of the nurse were that either she ended up going into the steps to the cellar head first or she went into the metal railings on the edge of the steps.

Whichever, she died.

I've never been scared of ghosts, I've had no reason to be. So I tried asking in a quiet moment on my own what her name was and I got the name Elizabeth in my mind.

I told my room-mate (Eddie) about it, and he suggested we went up to what was our top floor (which had been built onto the original roof) and ask her to appear.
For some reason I thought this was a good idea.

We caught the lift to the top floor, no customers up there as it was winter and we kept them to the lower floors so we could turn the heating off on the top floors.
When you came out of the lift you turned left to go down the corridor, and there was a further left turn about half way down.

We stepped out of the lift, and stood there as the door closed. The only light was from the moon through the windows, and was quite pale.
"Are you there Elizabeth?" one of us asked?

Okay, its winter, the heatings off, but suddenly it got colder.
The far end of the corridor, the bit we couldn't see because of the left turn, started to get brighter...

Sorry, this isn't going to turn into a "we met the ghost" story.
More of a "we ran down the stairs because we didn't want to wait for the lift door to open."

For the sceptics, the decision to go meet her was spur of the moment which no-one else knew about, so there wasn't anybody at the other end with a torch. And there was no access to the other end other than the stairs or lift, where we were.

I don't know why, but I don't remember ever trying to make further contact.
Maybe I left there soon after, like I said its the best part of 30 yrs.
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