Our theme for the month of March is “light.”

Most days, I work in darkness.

Which is a hyperdramatic way of saying my area of the office doesn’t have any windows. My section was built as an addition, then they built another addition—a full warehouse, in fact—and as a result, we have no windows, only one translucent skylight and fluorescents that no one likes to turn on.

Normally, I’m also a proponent of not using “the big light.” I’m definitely used to it since my apartment doesn’t have any overhead lighting, but the way my cubicle is set up, there’s no way to get a lamp behind my monitors. So without the fluorescents, I have to spend my day staring into a dimly lit corner of gray, fabric-covered, bulletin-board walls.

But alas, there’s more skylighters than fluorescent-ers in my area, so I’m out voted. Woe is me, and into darkness I shall descend.

However, recently, I have an unexpected ally in the form of an unsolved mystery. Someone—or something—keeps turning on the lights.

There’s two light switches, and two possible culprits. Switch One is by the IT director’s office, and Switch Two is by my boss’s office. My boss is the biggest skylighter of the bunch, so she definitely isn’t the one messing with the lights. The IT director has a good sense of humor, so for a while, my coworkers and I theorized that he was messing with us by slapping the light switches when he walked into his office. He was the reason for the mysterious flute sounds last summer, so it would’ve been in character for him. However, it’s happened when he’s not physically in the building, so he’s been saved by his airtight alibi.

There is only one explanation left: a ghost. My coworker Katie named him Craig. I characterized him as more of a prankster, like Peeves in the Harry Potter series, but Katie thought he was more like an old man leaving out caramels for the kids. Craig the Caramel Ghost is objectively a better moniker than Craig the Mediocre Prankster, so we went with that. Leave it to trade marketers to put a fun spin on a ghost.

After a couple months, we’d come up with a backstory. Ghost lore dictates that they haunt the area in which they died, and we figured that the only way that could happen in our building was if there was an unfortunate instance with a high-low. However, Craig loved this company so much that he turned away from the poltergeist lifestyle (or deathstyle?) and chose to just turn on some lights.

Craig has been with us for about six months, and he’s still up to his antics. He’s less active these days, but he still switches on the lights about every other week. Whenever we see the overheads flip on, my coworkers and I all call out, “Craig!” He might take it as encouragement, now that I think about it.

Not that I’d mind it if he did. Every time he switches on the lights, I feel like someone is in my corner, even if someone always jumps up to switch them back off. Craig will always have a friend as long as I’m around, and he can stay as long as he likes.

Tiffany Kajiwara

Tiffany Kajiwara graduated from Calvin in 2022 with majors in literature and writing. Now, she continues to live in Grand Rapids and works at Baker Academic Publishing as a marketing assistant. In her free time, she enjoys crocheting, thrifting, and psychoanalyzing cartoon characters.