If you’re looking at the Peyton Randolph House, to the right is what would be considered a mother-in-law cottage nowadays. It’s attached to the house. It’s a separate house where two sisters lived there for many a year. When they left no one ever really had reason to go in the house. Nowadays it’s a break room, but at the time it sat vacant, no one ever went in.
We had a fire alarm there one night. Well, they get there and they realize they do not have the key to enter this particular portion of the building. They called work control; they called numerous other people who were working that night on the midnight shift. Nobody had a key for it.
Fire department gets there and realizes we gotta get in because of protocol they have to check the building. They didn’t want to break glass; they didn’t want to have to force entry in because there’s no reason that day warranted extenuating circumstances to break in. There was no smoke, no fire, but they said we gotta get in to check.
They’re able to find a side window that had the peg in the window. They were able to realize if they could get something between there, in between the pane, they could pop the peg out, which they did. When they crawled through the window, and it’s about three feet off the ground and they had to use, they found a stool. They had to use that stool, climb on that one, climb through the window.
When they got through the window they looked and realized a fire extinguisher had been fully discharged. No explanation as to why a fire extinguisher would just go off by itself. The room that the fire extinguisher was located in was sitting in the middle of the room. They contacted everybody outside and said we need to double check because they were afraid somebody had came in, maybe exit out either a window or one of the doors and they said double check everything.
Well, they double checked and actually probably triple and quadruple checked. Everything was still secure. There was no powder residue outside of the building anywhere that could be found. Nothing. Everything was contained inside into one room. When they realized there was no forced entry they went over to the fire extinguisher, picked it up and the only bare spots was underneath where the fire extinguisher was sitting on the floor.
They could not find the pin anywhere. The thing had been fully discharged. The handle was not in a squeezed position if you will. It was in the normal position that it would be in. The hose itself was down to the side and they have no explanation as to why the fire extinguisher went off.
It was contained in one room. The other room and the kitchen they checked too, which realistically the residue should have been in. It was like it stopped like there was a barrier keeping it all contained in one room. They said it was time to get the hell out of here.
About a year after that I was doing a follow up with a couple of the fire fighters with Williamsburgh who were there and when I asked them about it the one guy said he does not like to use the word paranormal, does not like to use the word ghost. He tries to debunk things and I understand because I tried to also when I worked there and make sure it was not something that could be explained. The guy told me, said say it, say it. He goes I hate using the word paranormal but that night he goes the only thing I can deem it to be is a paranormal ghost experience.
I said was it true the comments you made about getting out of the building? He goes yes and no. He says yes, part of what we said was time to get the hell out of the building, but the other couple colorful terms, I’ll just leave it at that, that they added on to it. He just said it was something that freaked them out to the point that they did feel uneasy, they did feel uncomfortable. So did the guys in the security when we did the follow up on it. It was just something that cannot be explained and they tried their best to disprove that somebody or to prove, excuse me, or somebody may have done a joke, may have got in there. The only problem with that was that part of the building has a separate alarm where had somebody tried to gain access to the building, the alarm would have been sent back to security. It’s a silent alarm in the building, but would have come in as audible alarm within the dispatch. Nothing was ever received except for a fire alarm.
So to this day there is no explanation; cannot figure out why a fire extinguisher would be set in the middle of the room, fully discharged and to this day no one has ever found the pin. That’s the odd thing about it.
