Every day is hallowe'en...

Unlike most fun-loving 26-year-olds, I chose to spend my Saturday night running around a haunted jail.

A friend and I decided to go ghost hunting at a jail-turned-hostel downtown for a Hallowe'en story.

My job was to be the skeptic of the story. I was the Scully to my friend's Mulder, but that's not really the case.

I believe in ghosts though I'm not sure if I've ever seen one. The closest I think I came to seeing ghosts was in a park back home near my house one night. I've never been able to explain it, but that's not really the point.

The point is what I believed I saw.

Think of ghosts like a rorchach test, it's all about perception. If you believe you see shadows and light, then that's what it is, and your brain doesn't take it any farther than that. My brain decided to see two figures in the park that disappeared the closer I got to them.

I find I'm only scared when my imagination gets going. Probably a by-product from all those horror movies as a kid. I still love horror movies but even now if I'm in a theatre watching scary movies I revert back to a kid, crouching low in my seat, plugging my ears and diverting my eyes just enough to remind myself it's a movie screen.

I don't find many of my real-life ghost encounters terribly frightening. I wasn't scared of the two ghosts I saw in the park back then, and I wasn't afraid of ghosts when I was sneaking around the gallows and a near-pitch cell block at 3am.

The 8th floor was open to anyone with enough motivation to wander around at night. Even though death row was locked up, I spent some time outside the barred gates staring through, looking to the 4 cells at the end of the hallway where prisoners would be psychologically (and most likely physically) tortured before they were eventually killed.

I expected something to happen.

The only time I got to walk through death row was during a tour I joined up with.

The guide kept talking about the events of cell 1, the cell closest to the gallows. More important was cell 4, stuck in the middle of the cell block but kept completely segregated from everyone with two steel doors that have since been removed. It would be the last cell a prisoner sentenced to death would ever see.

Of course the tourists loved walking through cell 4 and so did I.

But I wonder if anyone was watching cell 2 like I was...