Staring Apparition

"It's another Saturday morning", I told myself. I had to be at work early. Well I held myself to that expectation. I got out of bed and I got ready as fast as I could. Shortly after I headed to work in my Mustang. Not a lot of traffic that day but my drive was only seven minutes long so traffic never really mattered.

I got to work at 7:05, a whole 25 minutes early. I got out of my car and went inside the store. Great timing I thought to myself as I entered the store and disarmed the alarm. Autopilot quickly kicked on and I finished all the ads and handled all the money matters in 15 minutes. Finally, i conducted my daily opening store walk.

I walked all the aisles and made mental notes to give feedback later. The store looked ready for business, they had done a good job recovering the night before. After walking all the aisles, I started walking down the second to the last aisle, which was the pet aisle, to go unlock the bathrooms. As I walked, I heard loud footsteps walking the opposite direction coming from the next aisle. "Good morning", I said excitedly. My co-worker, who was scheduled to come in at 7:30, sometimes wore heels to work and I was hearing the clinking heels walking down the aisle.

No answer came from the person in the next aisle. She is probably half asleep still, I assumed. I unlocked the bathrooms and walked to the office. I started to speak as I walked in but stopped. No one was in there! I hurriedly walked the aisles expecting to find her, but she wasn't anywhere in the store. As I made my way towards the office, I felt as if someone was staring at me. I turned back and saw a woman staring directly at me. She was standing at the edge of a gondola! Impossible, I thought to myself as I stared back at her. I could see the sunscreen bottles on the shelves and her body was almost as if it was embedded in the shelves. The woman was in her 40's maybe, with a fair complexion. She had on a black shirt, blue jeans and brown high heels. Her big brown eyes pierced through mine and I felt chills down my spine. I couldn’t bear her stare for long so I looked away.

This was not my first paranormal encounter so I didn't scream my head off and storm out of the building. I turned away and then gathered the courage to look back again. This time she was gone! She had vanished. I could now see the entire end of the shelves with neatly stocked sunscreen but no woman.

Okay, it was not my first rodeo but I could feel all the hairs in my body standing up. My breathing became heavy and my mouth was very dry, I couldn't have screamed even if I wanted to. I sped walked to the office and stayed there until my co-worker arrived.

My co-worker and I had a laugh about the occurrence and we continued our day. After a couple of days I got myself to check the cameras. The aisle and the corner gondola were strangely blind spots! An eerie feeling came across me when I saw myself staring at the gondola on video. It was as if I relived the whole incident once again. I still went in early to work after that, but I couldn’t help being more alert to sounds and more observant to my surroundings. I have never seen that woman again, though!