©1 February 2026, Levite
http://themediadesk
1.
It wasn't long after the dedication in the courthouse parking lot that I found myself sitting in another parking lot. But instead of watching for a mist to move across it, I was watching a car. It was late in the morning, just before the sun would peek over the side of the building.
I was waiting on Wayne to appear, looking for somebody to either drive him home, or to the hospital.
This case was odd because the staff that had reported it knew exactly who would sometimes appear in one of the cars parked in one of three different spaces close to the building. Wayne had worked at the agency for most of his adult life, working his way up, not from the mail room, but from the janitorial staff, all the way to facility and grounds manager.
And then one day back in the late eighties, Wayne had had a rough spot of it and said he "didn't feel well", and asked if somebody could drive him home.
He never made it home.
Wayne had walked out toward the parking lot to wait on his ride.
He's still waiting on his ride.
When a coworker went out to drive him home a few minutes later she found Wayne lying on the pavement. She yelled for help, and they tried CPR until the ambulance got there, but Wayne was gone.
That was in nineteen eighty eight. Over thirty years ago. Almost everyone that had worked with him have all retired. But there was a photo of Wayne, from much happier times, on the wall of the break room. He was holding a coffee mug and laughing at something.
Except that now, at least for the last few months, he hasn't been laughing at anything. For some reason, about three months ago, he began to appear out by the parking area. They asked me to come over and figure out why.
The senior secretary, Miss Joann, was one of the few that had worked with him. She had started, still in school, working part time, in the file room when he was there. Now, she ran the place.
"Oh, yes, the poor man, he kept talking about not wanting to retire. He didn't."
"What happened to the coworker that found him?"
Miss Joann shook her head. "She was really shaken up. She came back in and got help, but she just kept saying that she expected to see him sitting in the car waiting on her, and he wasn't there." Miss Joan smiled, "She had to transfer to another job, she couldn't stand being in here after that. The last I heard she was working for housing over at social services. But she may have retired by now."
"Do you remember her name, just in case I need to speak to her?"
"Why, yes. Everybody called her Cathy, but her name was Catherine. Give me a second, Catherine... Garrison. That was it."
"Thank you. Which office did Wayne use?"
"I'll show you."
Wayne's office had been remodeled a couple of times, but it was still the same room. And served the same purpose. There were blueprints of several of the buildings on one wall with 'as built' hand written on an old notecard taped to some of them.
The blueprint was the same one Wayne would have consulted if they needed to change a water fountain or figure out which way a heating vent ran. The desk was new, but it was in the same place, so he would recognize his office.
Except he had never been seen there.
Bobby was one of the supply managers and said he'd almost gotten used to seeing Wayne out in the back parking lot, "Sometimes he'll be standing by one of the cars, and sometimes he's sitting in it, even if the car is locked, he'll be sitting there, waiting."
"Are they always county cars?"
"That's all that is supposed to be parked there, you know, agency pool use, that kind of thing. And if one of us parks there, you might see him in your car. So nobody takes those spots now even if one is open. And they're supposed to back the cars in now, so if it needs charged they can plug it in."
"And it's always the same time of day for the last couple of months?"
"Yes, ma'am. You'd think a ghost would come out at night, but if he's going to be there it'll be between ten and eleven in the morning. Just before lunch. And, yeah, it hasn't been going on all that long."
"Does he ever say anything or react to you?"
"No," he shook his head, "I've even spoken to him, but he doesn't act like he hears me." Then he remembered something, "here, I've got a picture of him on my phone."
Bobby's cell phone photo showed what appeared to be a man sitting in a car.
And the man looked enough like the smiling man with the coffee mug to convince me that something was going on.
"What happens if somebody gets in the car with him?" I asked.
Bobby laughed, "A guy names Eric tried that, he said maybe Wayne just needed a ride and that'd make him happy. He got in the car, and as soon as he closed his door Wayne vanished."
There were a couple of others that had seen him now and then, and one other cell phone camera photo, this time, from the side, and Wayne didn't seem to see her taking the photo. He was just sitting there.
"And then he just sort of faded out. He never did see me, but he just slowly vanished," the lady said.
"Which parking place was the car in?"
"The second one, somebody had taken the first fleet car, so it was in the second spot."
2.
Some other duties arose and I couldn't spend my mornings sitting in a parking lot for a couple of days. But then my schedule cleared and I drove up to the county complex and around to their building at about nine AM. I wanted to be early so if Wayne decided to look for a ride, that I wouldn't disturb him when he showed up.
On Wednesday morning there was nothing there, and nobody appeared, the two county fleet pool cars sat empty until one of the staff came out with a box and a bag on a dolly. They put the items in the back seat on the driver's side, took the dolly back inside, then left in the car by themselves.
At about noon, which was the latest anybody reported seeing Wayne out there, I left to go take care of a mundane investigation the involved some picnic tables in a county park.
Two county picnic tables had found their way into the side yard of a church run daycare.
The reason was simple, somebody had stolen their picnic table, and one of their volunteers said he'd get them a replacement.
The director of the daycare, which took care of children as well as some special needs adults, claimed she didn't know where the replacement tables had come from, and almost didn't believe it when I showed her the painted stencil on the bottom that said "Suffolk Park Dept."
A bit later I talked to the minister of the church and one of the board members and they asked if it would be all right if they 'borrowed' the park's tables for a week or so until they got a replacement.
"And this time we're going to chain it down," the elder said, "that was the second table stolen in about a year."
Thursday morning I was back in the parking lot a bit early. I didn't think that the witnesses, and the photos, were a misidentified reflection or an intentional hoax, but I wanted to make sure all the same.
I took a bunch of pictures of cars, of the building, of the fence, and even tried to catch my own reflection in the car window, with and without a flash... and ended up with pictures of cars, the building, the fence, and a distorted picture of somebody that might be Queen Victoria reflected at an odd angle off a car window.
But I never saw anything in any of the images on my laptop while sitting across the parking lot in my car that looked like the photos the staff had sent to me.
And I waited.
And Wayne never appeared.
So I went and worked on another mundane assignment looking into somebody that was selling fraudulent toll passes that actually worked.
I managed to backtrack the passes to a website that looked very real, including having a local phone number for technical assistance, except the website was behind a redirect that took anybody that clicked on it to a home site in Russia. The kicker was that the electronic toll pass they sent you worked. The problem was that every time you went through one of the pass readers on the highway, not only was your credit card billed for the toll payment, which was made to the Toll Administration, but on top of that you were charged processing and handling fees that far exceeded the toll payment.
For instance, on one of the bank statements I saw the user had been charged the current rate of about seven dollars to cross one of the major bridges with the pass. They had been billed fifteen dollars for a processing fee for the payment, and then a two dollar 'toll payment administration fee' by the company. Over twice the cost of the toll in fees.
Unfortunately, the local phone number for assistance ended up in an endless voice response phone tree that, as I tried to navigate through it, got less understandable and, finally, after about the fifth transfer, sounded like a badly made call center comedy skit featuring some eastern European actor. In short, both the website, beyond where you bought the device, and the entire operation behind the support phone number, were nonsense. And the entire thing, overall, was a scam.
Yes, the toll pass did work, and they did pay the bill and correctly backbill your card for the charge, but then they hit it with sky high fees, which you actually did agree to.... on page seven of the fine print in the user agreement. The processing fee was in a paragraph just beneath a section about how the pass was not approved for use in several countries in Europe and Africa.
The toll agency started canceling the known passes issued by the outfit, which were being reported in almost a dozen states now, and then they got complaints from people who evidently didn't mind paying the extra fees.
One gentleman wrote in and said, "I don't go on the toll way often, but when I do, the pass has always worked and I've never gotten a ticket from their cameras for not paying the toll. So I'll pay the extra charges from them."
I had contributed what I could to the matter, and now it was in the hands of everybody from the Port Authority that controlled the bridges and tunnels to the Turnpike Administration.
I still don't know what they're going to do. And, just from what I've heard talking and emailing with various contacts on that side, the agencies don't know what they're going to do.
3.
But now I went back to the parking lot and tried to find Wayne.
I did an extended EVP session around the cars, but got no response at all. And my scan for the presence of unusual EMF readings was inconclusive at best given the proximity to the charging stations.
Finally, on my fourth morning of sitting out there... on a holiday when the office was closed, I saw something over by the cars and got my full spectrum camera ready.
At first, it was just an odd motion and almost a shimmer next to the car in the second parking spot. Then it did it again.
I tried to see if it was just glare or a reflection off the car in the first spot, but there wasn't anything around to cause it.
Then, while I was watching and taking pictures, I could see a man sitting in the second car.
He was just sitting there. He didn't move, he didn't look around like he was expecting somebody to come out of the office. He just sat there.
I got out of my car and, still taking a photo every so often, I walked over to the second car and looked in from the driver's side.
I could clearly see him, and although I'd only looked at the picture in the break room a couple of times, I could see that it was the same man.
He just sat there. And I could see most of his body, although his legs seemed to fade away from about mid thigh down. He had his left hand on his lap, and he was holding his right up just slightly, as if he was going to reach for something or maybe roll down the passenger window.
I slowly opened the driver's door and moved to get in the car, which made me grateful that I had asked them to leave the cars unlocked for now. Well, that I had asked, and they had done it!
Wayne was still there as I sat in the seat and turned on my recorder.
"Ready to go home? Did you forget anything in your office? I can run in and get it for you." I said to him.
He didn't look at me or respond, he simply sat there.
I even held the camera out and tried to 'take a selfie' with me sitting next to a ghost. The picture did come out, but not as good as I would want.
Then I noticed that Wayne was fading away.
I asked several more questions and pretended I was looking for the car key.
Wayne never moved. His right hand was still where it had been when it faded completely out of sight, and the rest of him wasn't far behind.
And then he was gone.
It was the most unusual apparition not only that I'd seen, that I'd even heard or read about. He wasn't interacting with a building that had been there for a hundred years, or a natural feature of the Earth. He was sitting in a car, that wasn't the same car from when he'd worked there, and it most likely wasn't even in the same position.
Which gave me a question that I wanted to ask the woman that had found him back in eighty eight. Was the car pulled in facing the fence, or were they backed in like they are now? Maybe she wouldn't remember, but it wouldn't hurt to ask.
4.
It did hurt to ask.
In fact, I still haven't asked her the question.
But it solved the case anyway.
Ms Cathy, Catherine Garrison, had retired from Social Services several years ago. But about three months ago she had had a massive heart attack while at a social gathering.
The employees of the host site had rushed to her aid with a portable defibrillator, and the paramedics got there quickly. She survived, but she was in bad shape.
A week or so later, while still recovering from the heart attack, she had a somewhat severe stroke, and was now hospitalized because of that.
I did talk to her son and his wife for some time in the waiting room at the hospital.
"Oh, yes, she'd talk about when she found that man all the time. It really stuck with her," her son said.
His wife nodded and said something that helped solve the case, "They told us that she kept saying that at the dinner when they were working on her. 'Just like Wayne', they said she kept repeating it."
"She'll even talk about that when she wakes up a little bit now," her son said staring down the hallway toward his mother's room, "you really can't get anything else out of her."
I sat there for a moment, "I'm sorry, I wish I could help put her at ease over it, but I don't know what I could do."
I walked back down the hall with them and we stood by her bed and listened to the monitors beep. Miss Cathy's body was still alive, but there was no telling whether the woman they knew was still in it, even though the various doctors had seen signs that her condition was improving.
I thanked them for their assistance, and I whispered to Miss Cathy that Wayne was OK now, and left.
I sat the break room and glanced at the picture of Wayne on the wall.
"It's not him." I said to Joann and Bobby and the others that had come to hear my report.
"But it looks like him," Bobby said.
Miss Joann pointed to the monitor I used to show them some of the images I had taken of him in the car. I didn't show them my 'selfie'. "That's what we've all seen. Wayne sitting in a car."
"I've seen him standing next to one," another witness said.
"But it isn't him."
They looked at each other for a second.
"It's a memory somebody else has of him from that day."
Then I told them about Miss Cathy and what had happened to her and what she had said.
"Oh, my. That poor woman." Miss Joan shook her head, "I didn't know that had happened."
"She carried that traumatic memory with her for all these years, and when she had her own heart attack a few months ago, that's the thought that came to her mind. That she was going to die, just like Wayne did."
Some of them had their heads down, I don't know if they were praying or just saddened by the news. Or perhaps both. I continued with a bit of an explanation.
"It's a type of crisis apparition. With an unusual twist. Cathy isn't projecting her own image to somebody, which is what happens in most of the cases of that type of appearance. You've probably heard stories of how a family member knew something bad had happened to somebody else, even if they are several miles away, because they saw them, maybe just for a second, and they looked like they were in pain or something."
One of those whom I'd just met volunteered an example. "Yes, that happened to my aunt. She even knew what had happened to my cousin Bill before anybody else. He'd had his arm crushed in a machine, and she said she saw it. She started calling his work and asking about it while he was still being taken to the ER."
"But that was... Bill... appearing to your aunt while it was happening to him. This is Catherine's memory of what she had wanted to see. Not what she actually found when she walked out there. She was expecting to see Wayne in the car, or standing by it, waiting on her. Not lying dead on the sidewalk." I took a breath and finished. "That shock never left her, and she spent the next thirty years with that memory. And now, while she's clinging to life, it keeps replaying in whatever state of consciousness she's in, and... well, we all know what is said about the power of the human mind."
Then Bobby asked the question that I didn't have a good answer for.
"If the lady dies, will Wayne keep appearing?"
"I've thought about that. I don't know. But I don't think so. The image is totally based on her, but, it is a traumatic memory generating the apparition. And given how long she'd lived with it, and how obsessed she's been with it... I don't know."
Miss Catherine came out of her near comatose state and was finally able to speak a little and seemed to recognize her family. I went to see her with Miss Joan, and we were both pleased that she was recovering.
But I never asked her the question about Wayne and the cars.
The reported sightings of Wayne out by the cars diminished to where they became rare and unusual.
And that was enough for me to consider the case solved, if not totally closed.
-end 31-
[NOTE: The above story were written as adventure fiction, and is to be taken as such. While most of the features of Long Island exist, such as toll bridges and tunnels to get on and off the Island, the rest of the setting is fictional.
Thank you, Dr. Leftover, TheMediaDesk.com]
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