An Iowa judge ruled this week that a former security guard could not be denied unemployment benefits after being fired on the grounds that he saw ghosts.
Wade Gallegos was working for a security company in September when he called his supervisor to warn him that ghosts were haunting a neighborhood he was guarding. The supervisor went to the scene and, surprisingly, did not see the ghosts. To Wade’s credit, he did not do the usual they-were-just-here-a-minute-ago copout, but rather insisted the ghosts were still there and showed the supervisor right where they were standing. Despite his integrity, and his conscientious ghost-protection service, he was fired the same day.
When he applied for unemployment benefits, the company challenged the application saying that he was guilty of "misconduct." This week, however, a judge ruled that while seeing "ghosts and apparitions" did render a claimant unfit to act as a security guard, apparently because it had and would result in false alarms, it was not "misconduct" in the sense that would justify a denial of benefits.