A Spanish mayor has been urged to hire an exorcist after town councilors said they were being haunted by the ghost of a girl. An image of the alleged phantom was caught on camera by one of the councilors.
The spooky incident took place earlier in February in the town of Vegas del Genil, Granada province, in southern Spain, according to reports in local media.
A councilor in the town hall was working late when he said he suddenly felt the air “turn cold.”
“It was abnormally cold in the office so I put on my coat and then got up to go to the bathroom,” he told the local Ideal newspaper. “That’s when I heard a strange rustling sound in the hallway, like someone was dragging files across the floor.”
The man feared that thieves had entered the building and picked up his cell phone, intending to call the police, but according to his account, he was too afraid to turn on the light.
So he instead grabbed his phone and took a photo of the hallway to check if anyone was there. Initially he saw no one in the picture, but on more careful inspection he noticed something which made his “body freeze” – the image of a child, probably a girl.
The image has been circulating in the media ever since.
The man said the photo turned him “into a state of panic” and that he locked himself in the office and sent the picture to a WhatsApp group made up of the governing council.
One of his colleagues came to pick him up from the office. “He found me white as a sheet,” the witness to the ‘paranormal’ said.
Leandro Martín, the mayor of the town, was informed of the incident. He took it as a joke, but then another colleague started complaining of “inexplicable cold in that particular corridor.”
“Other [town hall workers] have felt strange phenomena and there was also concern about the inexplicable cold,” the initial witness said.
The town hall even called a technician to check the heating in that “dark” part of the building. And it turned out that the system was working normally.
“I’m a skeptic. It’s not true that it is inexplicably cold. It is a collective psychosis,” the mayor told El Mundo newspaper.
"I have never seen anything, nor have I photographed any empty corridors,” he added.
However, the town hall workers won’t ‘give up the ghost’ quite so easily – one councilor even called a local ‘Reiki’ practitioner to perform a ‘cleansing session’ in that particular spot.
Reiki, a form of alternative medicine, is based on ‘universal life forces’ and its followers use a technique called ‘palm healing.’
The healer claimed to the Ideal paper that she was born with the “gift of contacting energies.”
Indeed, the Reiki expert reportedly said that she felt some “presences that are trapped and do not know how to return.”
The mayor has been urged to hire ghost hunters or a priest to conduct an exorcism session. “How can I justify hiring a medium when I have residents without electricity?” he said in response.
Yet local papers won’t give up – they even released a story that on the place of the town hall there was a school and a local girl died there back in 1979. Local residents dismissed the rumors, however.