Neither rain nor sleet nor death will stop Carl from delivering chills

This is the second in a weeklong series on local ghost stories.

SHEFFIELD - Rick Hyde was settling in as a new employee at the Sheffield Post Office several years ago.

He was getting accustomed to the daily routine, which included "pitching letters," that is, placing mail in the correct slots of a wooden carrier case in the back of the post office at 210 Columbia Ave.

But something occurred one Saturday morning that, for Hyde, was anything but routine.

"I was back here, pitching letters, and it suddenly got bone cold," Hyde said. "I love cold weather, so when I get cold, it's cold."

This was around May or June, so the sudden cold conditions seemed especially unusual to Hyde.

"Then, I looked up and saw someone walk by," he said. "I saw him from the side of his face. He walked into a mail case."

Hyde went to some other workers and asked if they knew who had just walked by.

"I described him: Sandy hair, wire-rim glasses and he was wearing blue pants with a stripe, like postal pants," he said.

"As soon as I said it, they said, 'You just saw Carl.' "

He had never heard of Carl, so the workers explained that Carl is a former postal carrier who retired years ago and now haunts the post office.

Since then, Hyde said he has encountered Carl several times. "The last three times, he was sitting on the steps leading to the break room. He just sits there until I speak to him; then, he just smiles and goes away. He always smiles first."

"I never gave a thought to ghosts before,

but I know what I saw," Hyde adds.

Two of Hyde's supervisors and a former employee also have reported seeing Carl, workers at the post office say.

Another worker, Marnie Willingham, said two custodians refuse to go in the basement because they are afraid of seeing Carl.

The ghost often makes noises and even flushes the toilet, workers say.

Willingham remembers about six years ago when, while seven months pregnant, she asked the postmaster if she could lie down on the couch in his office for a few minutes.

The postmaster's office is on the other end of a long hall from where the postmaster and others were working behind the counter. The postmaster told Willingham she could rest in his office.

"I went in the office and shut the door," she said.

She reclined on the couch, and immediately, someone banged loudly on the door. Willingham looked up to see who was there but didn't see anybody. A silhouette is easily visible when someone is at the door, but Willingham saw no one.

She quickly got up, opened the door and looked down the hall. No one was there.

"There's no way someone could have played a trick on me and run away down the hall that fast," Willingham said.

The other workers were at the postal window, and a customer vouched for them, saying they were there the whole time.

Willingham had heard about Carl but never knew what he looked like. Since that time, she said she has had two dreams about him.

When Willingham told co-workers how Carl looked in the dream, "they said I had described him to a T," she said.

Postmaster Hugh Robinson saw Carl around 1998, just a few months after starting at the Sheffield post office.

Robinson was walking and looking down at some papers and saw Carl out of the corner of his eye.

"He had on a carrier uniform, and I thought it was one of our postal carriers," he said.

"He was so close to me, I stumbled to keep from running into him. Then I looked up and he was gone."

His description of Carl coincides with others' descriptions of the ghost, except Robinson said it seems Carl's hair was more gray than sandy.

Carl has reached national fame throughout the postal service. His story is featured this month on the U.S. Postal Service's official calendar.

Robinson says he doesn't know what to think about his and others' sightings, but he can come up with no other theory than the post office is haunted.

"I'm not a disbeliever of the paranormal," Robinson said. "There are too many strange and unexplained things in the world, so you may as well just keep an open mind."

Hyde said he enjoys having Carl around. "That's a good thing, because there's not a whole lot anybody can do about it, anyway.

"Live and let die, I guess."

Bernie Delinski can be reached at 740-5739 or bernie.delinski@-timesdaily.com.