Pizza Shop

About four years ago I was working in a pizza shop in Northcote, Victoria. The shop had shifted into a new building. This had taken some time as the grafiti artists painting the inside had refused to work there at night due to " creepy feelings". From the very first week people would start to hear children playing out the back and would go to investigate, finding no one there. The sounds would stop when one walked out the back, the room ( a store room) would be empty of anyone and the door would be locked. Eventually everyone in the shop had made the journey out the back to catch the kids, but no one ever did. It sounded so convincingly like real children too. The shop backed onto a locked alleyway and it was always late at night when we were there. Nightly customers would come into the shop and make acusing comments like " late for kids to be up isnt it?" Well, yes, it was, but what could we say?

I remember giving a new guy the introductory info one his first night when he interupted to go "see to" the kids he was convinced had got into the back room. Of course he came back having found nothing. At least he knew what he was in for. One night I brought in a box of about 20 toilet rolls, put them in the storeroom and locked the door on the way out. Ten minutes later we needed bacon or something from the back room so I unlocked the door to go in. The toilet rolls had been unravelled everywhere around the room and of course there was no one there. One night I came back from a delivery to find the cook sitting on the bench out the front. He was refusing to go back inside unless someone was with him. He had heard the children playing again and this time he was going to catch whoever it was. As he made his way to the back storeroom where the sounds where coming from he had to pass the pool table. As he approached the pooltable a pool cue unclipped itself from its holder and fell in frount of his feet. He picked the cue up and replaced it in the rack. The cue unclipped and fell again. Followed by the next and the next along the rack- unclip-fall, unclip- fall, unclip-fall, unclip-fall. Eight cues in all. He ran outside to where I later found him. If I remember correctly he never came to work there again. I dont know if the children are still in the building, the people I worked with have moved on but at the time everyone in the shop but the owner ( who was very rarly there) heard the kids. I dont know the history of the shop except its single story so unlikly to have been a buisiness/dwelling like many in the area and judging by the age of the buildings around it, it was built between 1900 and 1930.

Submitted from: Gippsland, Victoria, Australia