It’s always entertaining when rumors of ghosts lead to official responses from company PR.
That very thing happened back in March, when an employee of the Market Basket supermarket in Wilmington, Massachusetts, Christina Bush, asked a local Facebook group if anyone else had seen the store’s resident specter. “This is going to sound really strange,” she posted, “But has anyone seen a ghost in the Wilmington market basket?”
Bush’s ghostly encounter was very brief. The alleged apparition appeared in the store’s frozen food section (near the frozen peas, to be exact) while she was working on a cake in the bakery. She looked down for just a second, and when she looked back up the apparition had vanished.
The ghost had appeared old-fashioned, a barefoot elderly woman with curly hair, wearing a white dressing gown and hair cap. It was solid and very “human-like,” Bush said, and would have perhaps been unremarkable if not for its strange attire.
In an interview with TODAY, Bush said the old ghostly woman was staring right at her, though only for a couple seconds. “She looked kind of like melancholy and a little angry,” she added, “So it was kind of a creepy kind of sense, but it was something.”
After the encounter, Bush searched the aisles for the strange old woman, but couldn’t find her. That’s when she decided to ask around about possible ghostly activity.
As it turned out, others replied to her Facebook post, sharing their own ghost sightings at the supermarket. One person claimed to have witnessed an apparition that also wore old clothing and sported a Victorian hair style, though that one appeared younger. In the days that followed, several customers even became temporary ghost hunters, searching for any evidence that the mysterious apparition still lingered in the store’s aisles.
As the story continued to go viral, however, a spokeswoman for the Market Basket chain came forward to bust all the ghost stories. “As far as we know all of our stores are ghost-free,” she told the Boston Globe, “But if there’s anything to it, she’s probably attracted to our Victorian-era prices.”
Oh ho ho.