“It can get pretty spooky around here,” says John Nelson, referring to The Eaton Center in Norwich.
Nelson manages the former pharmacal company-turned-office building, and claims he’s heard all the tales surrounding its paranormal past and present; from less-than-pleasant encounters with barking ghost dogs – tested on in pharmacy labs in the 1940s and 50s – to the roaming spirits of long-dead construction workers who parished laying the building brick-by-brick.
He’s even had a few encounters of his own.
“It seems like everyone here has had some sort of experience,” he said. “Sometimes, it just feels like you’re not alone.”
More than a few members of night cleaning and security crews have walked off the job after seeing something they say is “unexplainable.”
“One of my maintenance guys was working in the basement and saw something behind him out of the corner of his eye. He figured it was one of us checking on him, but when he turned around a rush of cold air went right through him. There was nothing there,” Nelson explained. “He ran upstairs and he looked white as a sheet. He wouldn’t make something like that up.”
Several first floor tenants even claim to have developed a friendship with one of the spirits, whom they’ve dubbed “Alfred.”
“He’ll turn the lights on and off, or he’ll turn the radio on and put the volume all the way up. In one instance, I went to step back and felt a hand press on my back,” claims Linda Jones, who says Alfred seems friendly, and that she’s not afraid of him. “I just try to be nice to him.”
In light of these claims, The Evening Sun staff set out with two local spirit mediums to investigate buildings two and three of The Eaton Center, where the most ghost activity has been documented. We started with the numerous rooms and halls within the pitch-dark basement and worked our way up through the floors of old laboratories.


I am the type of person who relies on what can be seen or physically touched. Once I have seen it, I believe it. I know the air I breathe exists because I can feel it in my body; I do not know of any higher being because I have not personally met one.
I do not like scary things, scary things being anything with people getting chased, creatures escaping from my television set or anything else that will make my stomach turn into a knot. Being skittish around most everything gruesome and gory, I do not like the element of surprise all that well either.
As the crew of us started our unguided tour through the Eaton Center, I was half expecting to be stopped in my tracks, have someone or something come out of the hollows of hell and start madly chasing us through the halls. I imagined myself climbing through the heat vents with blood gushing from an open wound on my head, me in my high heels (because of course being a girl in a horror movie, that’s what I would be wearing) running from the forces of evil and screaming to my co-workers that unbeknownst to myself are already either running in the other direction, dead or hiding scared in the basement.
As it turned out I was strong and I did not succumb to the evil forces my co-workers stumbled upon. I simply thought the excursion turned out to be dull as I did not feel the gushes of cold air or see the left behind spirits roaming.
– Jill Osterhout

Oh Jill, you’re no fun.
I approached our little Eaton Center outing wanting to see something otherworldly, wanting to believe. Our spirit medium sidekicks were quick to feel “presences” in the bowels of the Eaton Center’s cavernous basement, and I was quick to latch on to them, hoping desperately to touch the other side.
Did I? Ehh, I don’t know. I definitely got that creepy-crawly, spine-tingling feeling a few times. In one dank corner of the basement, a decades-old tool cabinet was an apparent “hot spot” for our psychic friends. I stood in that corner, hands outstretched, for a good five minutes, hoping to feel what they felt. Not exactly. Until, that is, I opened the tool cabinet and felt a definite rush of cold air. Sure, it could have been some atmospheric phenomenon, but I’d prefer to buy into the theory that it was the presence of a long-forgotten Norwich-Eaton maintenance worker, perhaps one who met an untimely death. Or at least one who couldn’t give up the ghost ... err, job.
The basement of any building in the city I would imagine is fairly creepy, so I chalked up a lot of what I “felt” in the Eaton Center’s bottom quarters to be circumstantial. But the Eaton Center actually gets creepier as you move up. The building twists and turns so many times that I really couldn’t tell you exactly where in the complex we ended up, except that the unrenovated floors looked to be old pharmacy labs that haven’t been touched in decades – some even looking as though the scientists left their experiments going one day and never returned. Long metal tables, Bunsen burners, animal cages and the wreckage of bizarre-looking equipment -- these old laboratories have that definite “chamber of horrors” feel.
That said, I can’t attest to feeling the presence of any psychic phenomena there, as much as I would have liked to. It’s pretty much just a creepy, abandoned space. But the possibility that there is something there, some remnant of experiments gone wrong, of employees whose lives were so inextricably tied to their work that they never left, that current occupants have seen and heard the unexplainable in those halls -- that’s what’s truly scary. And that’s what I chose to believe.
– Jeff Genung