have you ever had a spooky experience at work?

by Alison Green on October 29, 2015

Did you ever work somewhere haunted? Feel the ghost of your predecessor marooned in your office? Encounter an evil spirit lurking in the copier?

We’re celebrating Halloween two days early. If you’ve had spooky moments at work — or perhaps just odd unexplained occurrences — share them in the comment section. (Simply being haunted by a previous terrible job does not count here!)

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  1. Snarkus Aurelius*

    At my first internship, which was a disaster, a regular employee joked about the black hole he had underneath his desk.  I didn’t know what he was talking about so he took a piece of paper, and he lowered and held it in front of his desk.  Then he let go.  The paper was immediately sucked underneath.

    Turns out the cold air return was under his desk.

    We did have a lot of papers, presentations, etc. go missing at that job.  I found out many years later that the CEO would go through people’s desks and randomly toss stuff in the trash.  She would do this late at night when everyone was gone and the cleaning crew wheeled in a large trash can.  This was in 1999 so not a lot was on computers yet.

      1. Snarkus Aurelius*

        Looking back, I realize that putting the cold air return in the wrong spot was the best “problem” that organization had.

        And I’m no home improvement expert.

      1. Dr. Johnny Fever*

        I picture that desolate alternate universe from Beetlejuice with the blowing sands and giant worms with teeth.

        1. AnonyMoose*

          I picture a universe filled with gale winds and paper flying everywhere, with Walternet trying to get over to our side to kill the man whose desk it belonged to. Because he thought he stole his son, obviously.

          — I watched Fringe episodes over coffee this morning.

      2. Snarkus Aurelius*

        It got stuck to the vent. This guy was also a fan of Nutri Grain bars so there were a lot of those wrappers down there.

      3. MashaKasha*

        I was wondering if the vent ever got clogged.

        Kind of like when I told my friend, “our new house is great, except for some reason hardly any of the hot or cold air goes from the 1st floor to the 2nd” and his immediate response was, “Did the previous owners have any teenage boys living in the house? Check the vents.” (Previous owner was a single guy. We never checked the vents. I no longer live in that house.)

        1. Alli525*

          Are… are we talking about “soiled” socks? Or cigarettes/joints? Because, having had a teenage brother, I know that just about anything is possible here.

          1. Isabel*

            One family (yes, with teenage boys) I knew growing up had their vents cleaned when they put their house on the market. Found items included… a sandwich.

        2. Laufey*

          I may be really oblivious. Why would the vents need to be check specifically if there were teenage boys?

            1. Father Ribs*

              (Sorry for icky) Not really the magazines per se, but the paraphernalia used in concert.

              Once my son hit a certain age, a sock goblin moved in and they went missing at an alarming rate.

    3. Three Thousand*

      What was the reasoning behind randomly throwing things away? Was this intended to deter people from leaving their desks messy, or was she actually going through drawers and throwing things out? What did she think would happen if she threw out something important?

      1. Snarkus Aurelius*

        I really hate to say this about a woman, but it’s true here: she was totally crazy.

        She wasn’t mean or malicious or anything.  She liked us working crazy hours.  I was working seven days a week, and I thought that was normal in the work world because she told me that.  Whenever someone got close to finishing something, she’d change her mind on her expectations or require some outrageous thing that needed a week’s worth of work.  Nothing ever got to the final stage with her.

        When she trashed papers, she wasn’t targeting anyone.  She’d do it about once or twice a month.  She’d never trash a lot of papers at once so it wasn’t noticeable if you looked at or in your desk.  She’d look at what was there and toss what she knew or thought to be important.

        She liked being babied and having people dedicated to working for her.

        1. The Cosmic Avenger*

          She’d look at what was there and toss what she knew or thought to be important.

          I thought that that was a typo at first…but the more I think about it, the less certain I am.

          1. Snarkus Aurelius*

            Fair point. She’s so hard to describe because she was never overtly mean. She used to give interns her spare suite for free if they didn’t have housing.

            It took awhile for me to see how awful she is. You’d never know it by meeting her though.

            She was really needy. I think she enjoyed people falling all over themselves for her. Hence the ever-changing expectations.

            1. Panda Bandit*

              Abusive people are just like that. In between instances of awful behavior you’ll find them doing nice things. It’s part of the pattern of abuse. If they always behaved badly they wouldn’t be able to keep anyone in their clutches.

    4. Meeeeeeeee*

      ” I found out many years later that the CEO would go through people’s desks and randomly toss stuff in the trash.”
      What? What? I feel like I don’t understand English anymore because there is no way that sentence means what I think it means…

        1. Snarkus Aurelius*

          I explained more above.

          Once I was working on a conference program. Because I was an intern, I didn’t have access to the office computer. Whole thing was done by hand, and I kept it taped to my desk so staff could review and edit but not take it. The thing was huge.

          After a week of edits, it was gone. The thing had sticky notes, edits, etc all over it. Gone.

          I had to start all over again from what I could remember. Now I assume she tossed it.

          1. Folklorist*

            This is the scariest comment I’ve seen here! I actually just caught my breath and teared up a little for you in sympathetic editorial horror.

          2. lowercase holly*

            wow. i think i might throw a bit of a fit even not knowing about the trash ritual. i’d assume someone had removed it (innocently or maliciously) and ask around EVERYWHERE. because that stuff shouldn’t just go missing.

            1. Snarkus Aurelius*

              Stuff disappearing was an open frustration on the office, but like the frog in boiling water, we got used to it. It was only a few years later that I ran into an ex coworker who stayed on after I left. He said he came back to the office I’ve night because he forgot his keys and saw her doing it.

              “We should have wondered why, out of all the people in the office, the CEO was the only person who never had papers go missing.”

              How did I not see that?!

    5. Menacia*

      One of my favorite episodes of the Twilight Zone was “Little Girl Lost”. In it, a young girl has accidentally passed through into another dimension, the parents have to get her out before the portal closes…it was a nail biter (for the time period). Of course this was redone many times, one of the funniest was a Family Guy episode, where Stewie goes into the third dimension, and he gets back via Peter’s ass….

      2. Xanthippe Lannister Voorhees*

        And (like many Twilight Zone episodes) based on an amazing short story by sci-fi/horror great Richard Matheson!

      3. TychaBrahe*

        The Family Guy episode was actually a parody of the movie Poltergeist. But the Simpsons did a Little Girl Lost parody that involved Homer going into the third dimension and ended with him walking down Sunset Boulevard in Los Angeles and entering a novelty cakes shop.

      4. Dust Bunny*

        I think my favorite Twilight Zones are King 9 Will Not Return, Ring-A-Ding Girl, and You Drive, but they’re the most like classic ghost stories.

  2. Adminny*

    I once had a printer start smoking for no apparent reason…. It was an old, pin printer and we hadn’t used it that day at all.

    3. dancer*

      There’s an old Linux printer error message “lp0 on fire”. It was hi-jacked for other printer errors, but in this case, I think it would be accurate.

      1. Ultraviolet*

        I would just *love* a printer that would show “ERROR: PRINTER ON FIRE” on its LCD display when it was on fire. So much.

        1. Cath in Canada*

          Reminds me of an excellent story about a driver pulling over in a panic and abandoning his car because he thought it was on fire. Turns out the big “FIRE” scrolling across his dashboard was part of a song title.

  3. 42*

    I used to work in a clinical capacity, treating patients. We also had to respond to all CPR calls.

    I did CPR easily over 1000 times in the course of that career. I only had this happen once: I was doing the chest compressions, and unfortunately the patient wasn’t responding. I felt what can be described as a wall of cold pass me from front to back. Immediately after that cold pass, the physician who was in charge called it (asked us to stop CPR). that never happened to me before or since. No one else felt it. It was creepy, but also interesting.

    5. Clever Name*

      Wow. My great grandfather had an out of body experience during a routine surgery. He was not “spiritual” or into the occult or anything, and I doubt he had heard of an OBE, but when he woke up he talked about a weird dream he had where he was floating over his body in the surgical unit and he could see a silver cord attached to his body. To my knowledge, being under general anaesthesia does not produce dreams (no REM sleep and all that).

    6. Cathy*

      I am an RN and was working in ICU one night when one of our patients coded. (He was a priest, this is important.) The team arrived and we succeeded in reviving him whereupon he had the following conversation with me:
      Pt: You made a mistake
      Me: ??
      Pt: You made a terrible mistake. I heard music, beautiful music.
      Me: What kind of music?
      Pt: Harps!

      Suffice to say, I was pretty freaked out!

  4. Dawn*

    I used to work for an e-waste recycler that was in an old building (1950s ish). The front part of the building was an L-shaped hallway with offices around the outside wall of the building and a front foyer at the bend in the L, and the back of the building was the warehouse/loading dock and an adjacent sorting room that I worked in. The sorting room had a door that opened up onto the end of the short arm of the L hallway and I sat where I could see down that hallway to the front foyer out of the corner of my eye when I was sitting at my desk.

    So at the beginning of my working there they hadn’t opened up the front of the building yet- they were renovating it into a storefront and offices, so the lights were off and there was some plastic up on the windows in anticipation of painting. It was just myself and the warehouse manager at the time in the office. He pops his head in and says he’s going to lunch. So I’m sitting at my desk doing my thing when I hear the plastic in the front foyer rustle. I look up and see a shadow go down the long arm of the L and think to myself “Oh I guess Wakeen hasn’t left yet.” All of a sudden there’s a huge gust of wind that comes blowing down the hallway and SLAMS all of the office doors down both the long and short arm of the hallway! I give out a yelp and jump up, thinking “oh man someone’s left the warehouse doors open and there’s been a huge gust of wind” and go into the warehouse… but the warehouse doors are closed. I walk through to the long arm of the L and the back door is closed… all the outside doors are closed… and Wakeen’s not in the building.

    Sufficiently creeped out I go out to the loading dock and hang out until Wakeen gets back from lunch- and I ask him about if he’d left a door open or stuck around a bit before leaving for lunch. Nope, he’d left right after he’d told me he was going to lunch and he left out the door of the warehouse- which automatically closed behind him.

    Ghosts? Who knows. But it absolutely freaked me the hell out and I HATED being left alone in the building after that!

    2. Dynamic Beige*

      At OldJob, there were rumours it used to be a slaughterhouse… it was an old building, over 100 years, which is old for around here.

      Anyway, I worked there late and by myself (or mostly by myself) a lot. I couldn’t tell you how many times I was there until midnight or later. One night, I was getting ready to leave and I saw someone standing in the door of my office out of the corner of my eye, so I jumped because I startle easily. When I looked, there was no one there. So I called out, thinking it was a colleague who like to prank that it wasn’t funny. But no one responded. The door out was just around the corner, but I had not heard it open or close. And then the hair started standing up on the back of my neck. There was some problem with my computer, it wasn’t shutting down or I had hit Restart instead. All that time, which seemed to be forever, while it rebooted whatever that was was watching me, I could feel it. I just kept saying over and over “this is not happening.” After it shut down, I had to check the whole floor to make sure no one was there before I could set the alarm, and I just wanted to get out. It wasn’t until I was halfway home that the feeling left me.

      So one day at lunch people were talking about whether or not the building was haunted and I told that story. Turns out my office mate had been hearing strange stomping footsteps, having the papers on her desk riffled while she sat there watching and some other stuff. There were people who worked in the basement and refused to work there alone at night.

      1. Rana*

        I had that feeling once when I was out alone hiking. I decided that however much I wanted to go up that particular trail, I wasn’t going to do it that day. I still wonder what it was that prompted that feeling, of being watched, and of not being particularly welcome in that space.

  5. Ruby Tuesday*

    In my current job I sit in a spot where the overhead light flickers on and off – on its own…it’s not plugged in. I’ve decided to name my cubicle ghost as Larry Fine.

    1. Jen RO*

      The lights in my apartment used to do that. I am probably not using the right terms here, but I had economic light bulbs and the light switches had LEDs – an electrician told us that this combination caused the flickering. After I changed the switches to regular ones, the lights did not flicker anymore.

      1. IT Kat*

        But it sounds like your lights were the standard ones built-in and wired into the electrical system? I’m imagining Ruby Tuesday’s being one of the ones that is standalone and needs to be plugged in, thus the mention of “it’s not plugged in” which is… weird that it flickers on and off, because no power going to it like yours would have had…

        (I could be misunderstanding though, so feel free to correct me!)

        1. Ruby Tuesday*

          Yep…it’s standalone! It needs to be plugged in for it to work…but its not…it just flickers on and off. We had our facilities guy take a look and he asked if I wanted to take the light bulb out – I thought about it for about 30 seconds and wondered what would happen if we did – would we have a full on “carrie” – so I just left it as is. Larry Fine lives….

    2. Lydia*

      This happened in our old apartment and turned out to be caused by a major electrical problem (I.e. fire hazard), unbeknownst to us the breaker was also sparking inside our breaker box, the electrician had to replace our entire breaker panel. I’d suggest having maintenance check it out just to be safe.

      1. Tim-Tim's Teapots, Inc.*

        In my first-grade classroom, we had an electrical short in one of our lights. It made a loud noise, and smoke started billowing out of it..

        I was right underneath.

        That scared me. I still remember it 22 years later.

      2. Isabel*

        Same here, Lydia! I didn’t think much of my occasionally flickering lights. An electrician came, as a friend’s date, to my dinner party and explained the urgency of my electric situation. Luckily my landlord was great about it and immediately called someone to check it out. Turned out the whole building had to be rewired. Dust, tarps, workers everywhere – it was a wreck, but now I have many more outlets, no flickering, and my own in-apartment breaker box.

    3. Biff*

      I believe this can happen when you have static electricity or a hydrofield. Might not be a ghost. Try putting the lamp on a non-conductive cutting board.

  6. Harper*

    I know this is because the HVAC in my building is hopeless messed up, but I have an office that opens into a larger room which then opens through double doors to the hallway. When I am in my office alone, I VERY often hear the outer double doors open (well ok, it sounds like they open) when no one has come in or is around.

    This is not me, but a friend of mine was supervising the third shift cleaning crew at a college and one of the people he supervised would beg him to come with her into one of the older buildings when she had to get the trash. Thinking it was a safety issue, he would go with her sometimes and started to notice that there was an old umbrella that would randomly show up in different offices. He didn’t pay too much attention to it, until he had to cover for that woman when she went on vacation. Supposedly, he was alone in the building and he found that umbrella in three different rooms in the same night … Scary! :D

    1. Nikki T*

      I’m so glad the sun is out and it’s bright and shiny so I can take a walk and that I will forget all about these before I go home…alone…after dark.

    2. Winter is Coming*

      I’m working on a horribly tedious task this afternoon, and this thread is preserving my sanity. Every once in a while I take a short break to check in, and it’s keeping me going!

  7. NotAllCanadians*

    Although nothing spooky happened to me, I used to work in an office that was in a the basement a historic building that had previously been a hospital. The space where our office was located was where the hospitals morgue had been. Because of that, around Halloween we always had groups of people stop by claiming to be ‘ghost hunters’ wanting to investigate the space.

    1. Dawn*

      I went to boarding school my jr and sr year of high school and the girl’s dorm that I was in was in an old wing of a hospital. I was on the 2nd floor, fortunately, but the ground floor of that wing used to be the morgue of the hospital and the girls that lived down there were always talking about spooky stuff going on!

      1. AVP*

        The room in which The Exorcist was shot was in a freshman dorm at my university. Luckily it housed a priest because I don’t think any students wanted to live in it!

    2. WorkingMom*

      I used to work in an office that had previously been a funeral home. The copy room had a drain in the floor – it had been the embalming room. The guy who worked in there said it was ALWAYS cold, no matter what the thermostat said, it was always freezing.

      2. Panettone*

        I sometimes work in a building that also used to be a funeral home. The room that was the embalming room is climate controlled, but the hallway outside is always freezing. The stairs in the building start in this hallway and go up two stories through the offices.

        When I’m in the building I often work till very late at night. One night, after midnight, my boss and I were working at her desk, alone in the building, when I suddenly became aware of what sounded like someone walking up and down the stairs and down the hallway, up and down the stairs and down the hallway. I tried to ignore it for about ten minutes, until the sounds changed and added what sounded like the rattling of the hall door. I looked at my boss, she looked at me and said, “I’ve been hearing it too,” and we decided that we’d be skeptics in the morning and closed up the building without ever getting more than a foot away from each other.

    3. Applesauced*

      My apartment building used to be a hospital (Barbra Streisand was born there!). I’m guessing the basement used to be the morgue or the ER because there’s a loading (or unloaded) driveway and door.

    4. JGray*

      The city where I work is also the county seat so we have a lot of government buildings downtown. Well right across the street from City Hall is an old funeral home that the county bought in order to renovate into office space. I told my mom that I would never have an office in that building. She thought that I was being dramatic & told me that the bodies had been removed. I told her it wasn’t the bodies that I was concerned about but the spirits that hadn’t let that I would be worried about.

  8. Luna*

    I worked on an old airfield years ago and once when I was locking up the office I looked up and saw an airman dressed in a WW2 flightsuit headed towards where the old hangars were. There was a restoration yard and vintage planes used for displays parked there so I thought nothing of it, thinking he was just one of the restoration staff or a pilot. Then I remembered that the guy who ran the restoration yard had told me he was going home, the pilots were gone and I would be the last person on the complex that evening so could I lock the main gate. The airman had gone by the time I looked back! And was nowhere to be seen. Creepy. But I’m a skeptic so I just think I was tired and seeing things.

      1. Luna*

        Oh I enjoy them and I freely admit to being a huge fan of shows like Ghost Adventures (the hot presenter makes that one great haha!) but I’m a logical type and can’t believe something unless I have proof. That said, one of the planes in the restoration hangar scared me for no reason. I could not walk past it unless someone was with me, which was an issue because I often had lunch with one of the pilots and to get to the lunch room, you had to walk past that dratted plane! I still don’t know why I didn’t like it. I suspect because I was like twenty at the time I was easier to freak out back then.

      2. fposte*

        I know–this is where I land. I love the comment on Adam Selzer’s Mysterious Chicago blog that there’s no such thing as good ghost evidence, just *cool* ghost evidence. I thought that was a great way of phrasing it.

        1. Dust Bunny*

          I watch ghosthunting shows to see inside the historic buildings. That they don’t do better research into the locations drives me nuts, though.

    2. Elizabeth West*

      I grew up in a haunted house, so I am NOT a skeptic. :)

      Some hauntings are thought to be impressions that people can tune into when they are in the right state of mind. Being really tired, really bored, etc., when the rational filter in your brain that dismisses anomalies is not working at full tilt. Those are usually the ones where different people see the ghost doing the same thing over and over or appearing the same way every time–it’s like a tape recording.

      2. Dr. Johnny Fever*

        My best friend growing up lived in a haunted house (farmhouse from pre-Civil War). Her ghost (yes, she had her own) once crawled into bed with me on a sleepover. Bed dipped, blankets settled, mattress bouncing as I thought my friend was getting settled (she was baking cookies with her mom while I was crashing after studying).

        I rolled over, and no one was there. Bed side empty. I ran downstairs – there’s my friend and her mom, chatting away decorating cookies. I tried to help but my hands shook too much.

        2. Blue Anne*

          I recently had a colleague tell me that she now believes in ghosts because of a similar experience. Her boyfriend is adopted, and they found his biological mother. She had three other children after him, and kept all of them, but the youngest one died in a house fire as a toddler. Really tragic. The mom said “I’m okay, she’s not gone really, she’s always with me. She’s still my little girl.” Nod and smile.

          But then they went to bed, and as she was falling asleep she felt a little hand cuddling her around her tummy. At first she thought oh, boyfriend is being really sweet, but then she realized he had a hand on her hip and that seemed like an awkward way to sleep, on his side with both hands on top of her? By that point she was totally awake again and thinking about it, and realized that of course his other hand was actually in front of her, they had fallen asleep spooning. So one hand in front of her, one on her hip… and one on her tummy. She said she was totally awake at that point and definitely still felt it, and it felt small and was cuddling her.

          Totally friendly and benign, but she completely believes now.

        3. Dust Bunny*

          This almost exact thing happened to me when I was in college, but it was sleep paralysis. It was terrifying, but I at least knew what was going on.

      3. Sammie*

        Me too! It was pretty benign for the most part. Rattling closet doors, steps creaking, flashes out of the corner of your eye, spotting “something” in the mirror for a microsecond, dog and cats freaking for no reason.

        Interestingly my mother told me most of it stopped when I moved out. ..

        1. Kelly L.*

          I’d always kind of wanted the house to be haunted, having read way too many books and watched too much The Real Ghostbusters, and my siblings and I would set up “ghost traps” and then squeal with terror/delight if a piece of lint got caught in them. But I never had any real evidence until much later, when I was in high school.

          I was spectacularly sick. I had terrible asthma as a teen (I think we had a bad mold problem in the house) and was lying in bed wheezing and not really able to sleep. Around 3 or 4 in the morning, I heard breathing from the floor beside the bed. It was a normal, peaceful, rhythmic breathing, totally unlike my wheezing, so I was pretty sure it wasn’t me, but I held my breath for a moment to be sure. The breathing beside the bed continued. I looked. Saw nothing.

          It was weirdly comforting, and it also kind of made me go “Self, go the F to sleep,” and I was suddenly able to get a little sleep even though I didn’t feel much better. I always felt like this was a haunting, a friendly one, like someone just hanging out to tell me it would be OK, but I could never figure out why the ghost was on the floor until many years later. When I got a dog. My dog would sleep beside the bed and I’d hear her breathing from the floor and it sounded just like my ghost.

          In high school, I did not have a dog. I think I may have had a ghost dog.

            1. Kelly L.*

              I also occasionally wondered if my actual dog, who was born years after this incident, somehow time-traveled back to comfort younger-me (don’t laugh too hard!), but it was probably just a different dog.

                1. Batshua*

                  If there’s dog reincarnation, that totally makes a sort of sense, although I’d say it was hanging around to soothe you and then later chose to become your dog.

              2. catsAreCool*

                I also was thinking of time-travel. Your dog would have probably been happy to do about anything to comfort you.+

            2. Lady Bug*

              My recently deceased cat is definitely haunting my house. My dog frequently starts playing with and barking at nothing, she never did that before the cat passed. It was quiet for a few months, but then one day the dog started up again and my husband had something cold pass him. Found out later on that day my daughter had moved the cat’s ashes that morning.

            3. Cath in Canada*

              My friend’s cat just died, and she and her boyfriend both swear that he’s still with them. They’ve heard the cupboard door banging (the cat used to bang the doors), and the boyfriend felt a cat jump onto the bed, and heard purring.

              I’m a skeptic about most things, but not ghosts. I wouldn’t say I outright definitely believe in them, not having ever seen anything myself, but I don’t disbelieve, either. Way too many people who I trust have way too many stories, and sometimes more than one person independently sees the same thing in the same place. I like the “tape loop” explanation, that you’re somehow seeing a glimpse back to something that happened in that place in the past. It would explain the best ghost story from my home town, in which a contractor saw a column of Roman soldiers “wading” through a basement floor (i.e. he only saw them from the thighs up). Years later, they excavated and found a Roman road a couple of feet under the floor.

              2. The Artist Formally Known As UKAnon*

                I think I’m with you. Despite seeing a ghost I don’t actively and definitely believe in them… But I do believe the stories about them.

                (We just moved house, I hope haven’t brought down a haunting on it with my blasé attitude!)

            4. Taylor*

              +1 for Ghost Cat. A few months ago my late (has been maybe ~2 years past) and favorite pet kitty came for a visit while I was home alone. I heard a meow in my hallway but figured it was in the YouTube video I was watching–rewinded it, nope. Then I smelled her (she had a distinct and pleasant smell). I burst into tears immediately. I miss that cat!

              1. catsAreCool*

                This isn’t quite a ghost story, but… when my kitty died, I had a dream about her, and when I woke up, the kitty’s sister was walking on me and purring (which was odd because unlike my kitty, that kitty was not friendly). (Also, both cats were supposed to be outdoor-only.)

            5. James M*

              Ghost cat: leaves hairballs, claw marks, and copious amounts of hair throughout its demesne but is never directly observed by humans.

            6. msbadbar*

              Yes, I think maybe I did, too. The day my cat died, I was so disraught and depressed. At the time, I had lived alone for many years, and my family lives far away. My little kitty was my family. That night, I was in bed without her for the first time, and I heard the stairs creak like they always did when she walked up to my bedroom. They never creaked on their own before or after that. I fell asleep and dreamed that I was dreaming about petting her, a dream within a dream, and it seemed incredibly real. I could feel and hear her purring as I was petting her. I never had the dream again. I think she was saying goodbye and that she was ok.

              1. Lindsay J*

                Similar. My grandmother passed in the summer of 2007. It was odd circumstances because I can’t say she passed suddenly because she was in the hospital for months. But we lost her suddenly; she was 77 years old, lived alone in the house in front of us, and was super involved in activities and the community. She went to choir practice Tuesday night. Wednesday she said she was feeling ill (stomach bug) and was staying home. My mom went over to check on her Wednesday night and she was in the bathroom. Thursday morning my dad and I went over to check on her and she was passed out on the toilet. My dad was able to rouse her somewhat and get her dressed while I called 911. She went to the hospital and never really recovered. She regained consciousness and was lucid for short periods of time, but then other times didn’t know who we were (or mistook us for someone else). She seemed to be stuck like 15 or years in the past – she was convinced my grandfather (who passed away in 1992 or 93) wasn’t there because he was cheating on her with some other woman. She called me my mom’s name and though I was pregnant with my younger brother. She saw mice on the walls and complained about flashing lights.

                Anyway, she and I were very close. She had watched me often when I was a child and my parents were at work. I visited her every morning before I got on the bus for all 12 years of school. When I went to college she would take me out back to school shopping where we would spend the day together, have lunch and catch up, etc.

                I took her passing harder than anyone besides my own dad.

                On Christmas we had a ritual. My family would have dinner with my mom’s parents and siblings on Christmas Eve. Christmas morning my little brother and I would open presents from “Santa”. Then we would go over to my grandma’s house and have snacks, open the presents from her, and have lunch.

                The first Christmas after she had passed, my little brother and I had finished opening our presents and I was sitting there thinking about how right now we would have been heading over to my grandma’s house, and thinking about how much I missed her.

                Right at that moment, a little piano shaped music box on the shelf behind me on the couch began playing on its own.

                My grandma had played the piano and organ at church for decades.

                I knew that that was her telling me she was still there, and that she missed me too.

                It was really comforting for me.

                It’s never played on its own like that before or since.

                (Though our sporadic clock did decide to chime the last time my aunt was over and she and my mom mentioned my grandma’s name. I wasn’t there for that though.)

          3. Elsajeni*

            I semi-jokingly think my house has a ghost dog. When we moved in, we found an odd concrete… thing on the back patio, a solid piece of concrete about 2’x2’x1′, but we dismissed it as probably just a piece of junk left over from some construction project — a previous owner had put in an outdoor medical elevator, maybe they’d taken out a chunk of patio to do that? Who knows, who cares, we put some potted plants on it and forgot about it. But after we’d been living there for a few months, a neighbor stopped by to say hello, spotted it, and said “Oh! That thing’s still there! Do you know what that is?” and then explained to us that the original owner of the house had bred show huskies. And when his beloved champion husky died, he had it interred… in the Mysterious Concrete Thing. It is a DOG MAUSOLEUM. ON OUR PATIO. And we treated it disrespectfully! We put plants on it and ignored it! We are definitely going to get haunted by a vengeful husky ghost!

            (Actually, I think the husky ghost, if he exists, probably doesn’t mind. Maybe he even likes the plants — they’re the closest thing to “flowers on his grave” he’s likely to get, and they do mean that we’re out there paying attention to the area more often than we would be otherwise.)

          4. Barefoot Librarian*

            I have a story similar to that. When I first moved to the US, I was about 10 years old and we were staying in Jacksonville, FL. My little sister was really sick with the flu (turned out to be pneumonia) and sleeping in the same room as I was. She woke me up with a coughing fit in the middle of the night, but when I looked over at her bed there was already someone standing there bent over her. He looked very much like an elderly doctor. He was as solid as you or I, but kind of washed out looking. As you can imagine, I froze and couldn’t say anything. It felt like he bent over her for a long time but it was probably just a few seconds, then I blinked and he was gone, but she had stopped coughing.

            The whole thing was probably a figment of a my imagination but it did not stop my sisters and I from trying to make contact with the ghost the whole year we rented that house. We even left him invitations to birthday parties lol.

        2. Rat in the Sugar*

          The ghost was probably you! They say that houses haunted by poltergeists tend to have teenagers living in them, and when the teen moves out, so does the “ghost”! Some people think it’s all the extra energy from the kid swirling around the house causing a ruckus.

          1. Ezri*

            I came to say the same thing! I remember reading a book when I was much younger that described cases where a family would experience “poltergeist” activities after their kid hit puberty that stopped when the kid moved out or grew out of it. From a bit of googling, it looks like some paranormal theorists say it is energy generated by puberty, and others say it’s because certain spirits are drawn to people in puberty.

            I don’t know how legit any of it is (probably not really), but paranormal theories combined with stories like that fascinate me.

          2. Mirilla*

            Ok, so I’m a big paranormal geek, and the theory is that a poltergeist needs a living “agent”, whose energy causes manifestations. It’s called PK, or psychokinesis, and it means the ability to have your energy directly affect the objects in your environment. Teenage girls especially in puberty, and also women going through menopause, go through a lot of emotional turmoil. This can release energy into the environment, leading up to the poltergeist activity. I’m pretty sure boys can also be agents. Actually, anyone can be an agent. Even for myself, if I’m upset about something, my computer starts freezing up. It’s like clockwork.

            Last year, I had a huge, and I mean huge, argument with a coworker. I was beyond upset. I was actually furious at this person and really let her get to me. I went to bed that night angrier than I had been in years, and in the middle of the night, directly under my headboard in the basement, a pile of large tupperware containers fell over and crashed to the floor. They had been there for years in the same spot and there was no logical reason for them toppling over. According to the above theory, my energy spilled over into the environment.

        1. Stranger than fiction*

          Oh you Do Not want to see a UFO. One of my best friends who’s like 65 now has had PTSD since he was eight years old because he was abducted. Sleeps with the light on to this day.

          1. moss*

            I’ve heard the theory that if you SEE a UFO you have just been returned from being abducted by that UFO. Creep-o-rama. I am sorry for your friend, though. I’ve heard horrible stories & believe them ALL… I also love the MothMan story. I don’t know. My job is pretty fact-based and I just want a little fun. :)

            1. Ezri*

              I’m a computer person, but over the years I’ve learned that it’s not strange to be a superstitious computer person. :P I really enjoy paranormal and mysterious stuff as well. I think it’s good for my psyche to believe there are things beyond explanation out there.

              1. moss*

                Yes indeed! I mean, we need to magick computers into working sometimes, right? I used to be a sysadmin and I could make computer problems disappear just by showing up. It would amaze the users! I’m sure many computer people have had the same or similar experiences.

                1. Ex-IT Ace*

                  I used to work IT. I was the fix & repair geek, the hardware person, in a huge hospital complex. The ONLY hardware person on an IT staff of 17. The only hardware person for a userbase of 6000.
                  I had a weird thing. I could go up to the patient care floor currently having problems with a PC and just *touch* it, and the problem would stop. My boss called it ‘The Laying On Of Hands’, which was even more funny to both of us because I was and am a rather militant atheist. In some cases, all I had to do was *look* at the offending machine and it’d start behaving. Crazy, huh? There were a few nurses (coincidentally, always those who were evangelical christians) who were really uncomfortable with my strange rapport with the computers, who would actually leave the area I was called up to until I had finished doing my thing. They thought it was somehow eeeeeevvvviiiil. This was funny to me, in an ‘adults actually believe that nonsense?!?’ sort of way, but it also made fixing their PCs a lot harder than it needed to be since they were not around to question about their problems.

        2. Mallory Janis Ian*

          I want to see something, too. I’m jealous of my one friend, who is an artist so I think that’s why she’s particularly open to the stuff she sees. Anyway, in her old house before she moved, she used to occasionally see a woman dressed like the 1960’s in a housecoat and curlers, carrying a Tupperware cake container from the kitchen to the dining room table; she’d set the cake on the table and then sit down and light up a cigarette. In her new house out in the country, she saw a line of Confederate soldiers in the treeline at a hill crest on their property.

          1. moss*

            My friend’s mom saw a woman in the field behind the house with her head on fire… turns out that was how the person who used to live behind her house died… !

            I’d love a ghost cake but real cake is better!

          2. Elizabeth West*

            I’m pretty sure the former owner of my house is pissed off at me for not fixing it up. Hey, Mildred, I don’t have the money to update a house YOU didn’t bother to update for 50 years either. Instead of knocking the broom off the damn broom holder, make yourself useful and sweep the kitchen! Or materialize a mysterious coffee can full of money under the sink!

            1. Mirilla*

              Lol, this would be my situation too. The older woman who lived here didn’t keep it up and I don’t have the cash to renovate it fully either.

      5. Stranger than fiction*

        My aunt lives across the street from a couple hundred years old cemetery and when I was look like 4-6, she told my cousins and I to go play there a couple times while she cleaned house. Afterwards, my parents and my aunts would give me puzzled looks when I talked about several other children playing there with me because my (older) cousins were like ” what are you talking about we were the only ones there”.

        1. Adonday Veeah*

          I think kids are tuned differently than adults. I had a neighbor when I was a child who used to talk about things that happened “when I was older”.

          1. Winter is Coming*

            When my niece was 4, she informed me that her mom (my sister) was going to die when she was six. I got the most horrible pit in my stomach when she said that. She’s now 6, and will be 7 on January 20th. I’ve decided not to tell my sister what she said until she is safely 7 years old. I’m telling you, this is has really got me freaked out.

            1. moss*

              Oh no, that’s really creepy. Maybe she meant your sister was reincarnated and had previously died at age six……….?

              1. Winter is Coming*

                I wish…my pronouns were unclear — her exact words were, “My mom is going to die when I’m six.”

          2. Winter is Coming*

            I kind of wonder if childrens’ imaginary friends aren’t actually spirits/ghosts? My daughter used to have one that she spoke too frequently when she was 2/3 years old whose name was “John Beetle.” Maybe it was John (Beatle) Lennon! Her room is plastered with John Lennon/Beatles poster now! She’s 19.

            1. Isabel*

              A few years ago, there was a reddit thread that asked, “what is the creepiest thing your child ever said to you?”

              I spent days reading responses. There were something like 7,000 responses. There were common themes. Many little children spoke of visits from deceased relatives they had never met, with details about outfits or phrases. Others had imaginary friends or monsters in the closet, and in a bunch of those cases, it eventually came out that children from previous generations who slept in the same room, also had “imaginary” “friends,” with the same names and descriptions.

              Most chilling to me were the dozens of stories about toddlers telling parents about past lives. I have been fascinated with this type of story since I was a child. Up until that reddit thread, I thought it was something that happened every few years, mainly in India. But there were just so many stories, each one idiosyncratic enough to be believable (not canned or copied). Just little children, casually mentioning to their parents the way they died in their last life, or giving details on their previous family, profession or houses. In some cases, details checked out.

              I know, I know. It’s reddit, for god’s sake. But somehow, reading sooooo many stories , over the course of a week, changed something. I went from being entertained and happily frightened while wanting to believe such stories, to full-on acceptance and belief that children regularly communicate with the dead, remember past lives, and befriend, or live tormented by, various, um, entities.

              I haven’t even been around AAM very long and now you’ve gone and prompted me to admit my crazy, darn you and your halloween question.

              1. Sarkywoman*

                I find that all very fascinating too. I can’t remember whether it was my little brother or little sister but I remember how freaked out my mother was when they said something about their mum only to confirm they didn’t mean her, they meant their “other mother. Before.”

              2. moss*

                Reddit spooky threads are so awesome. They had one on alien encounters that was amazing. Recently there was a story about a sailor seeing an ocean man swimming near his boat and his captain saw the same thing. Small story but I can’t shake it off. I think there’s so much about this world we don’t know.

                1. april ludgate*

                  Have any of you read the threads from searchandrescuewoods on reddit? I didn’t sleep for days after reading those…

              3. Elizabeth West*

                Just little children, casually mentioning to their parents the way they died in their last life, or giving details on their previous family, profession or houses. In some cases, details checked out.

                Heh, I put a mention of one of these in Tunerville.

        2. BananaPants*

          I’ve heard that kids are more receptive/sensitive to things. Our kids’ godmother’s house is 150+ years old and has a colorful past. They became convinced fairly quickly that the house is haunted because of things they’ve seen and heard, but I’m a skeptic and managed to find logical explanations for everything.
          They don’t feel like whatever it is is malevolent – more mischievous. I don’t get a feeling of fear in the house but I have occasionally felt like I’m being watched.

          What really freaked me out was when we were recently there for a party and I set the kids up with some books in the living room. I went in to check on them and saw our 2 year old looking intently at absolutely nothing across the room, and she turned to me and said, “Mommy, it’s walking right there. It’s creepy.” She didn’t seem particularly upset but it freaked the adults right out!

      6. Effective Immediately*

        Me too. Several, actually. You show my stepmother 10 houses, and every time that woman will pick the haunted one. The one that was probably the worst had a downstairs bathroom that used to be a closet. When my sister was little (~3) she REFUSED to use that bathroom; she would go all the way upstairs to avoid it. It was right off the dining room, and one night we were eating dinner, when her eyes went wide as saucers and she started panting and shaking her head, looking right at the bathroom. She kept saying, “Leave me alone! Leave me alone!” She was so upset that we had to take her to another room to calm her down.

        Fast forward two years; she had gotten over it and forgotten all about it. My youngest brother–who wasn’t even born when all this happened, and was never told–turned 2 and started doing the same thing. He said he wouldn’t go in the bathroom because of the ‘monster man’.

        Other highlights from other houses include: footsteps going across the floor above our heads when no one was home, pictures turning themselves upside down, things flying off the wall and shadows of people coming down the stairs.

        I had an interesting childhood.

        1. Elizabeth West*

          You sure did!! 0_0

          Ours wasn’t quite so dramatic. My grandfather bought the land and built a house there in the early 1970s and after he died, we moved in. Apparently something hung out in the barn we had on our property. My mum and brother both saw a white figure (my brother saw it come up into the yard). My mum saw it peeping out of the loft window–the one with the windowsill above a person’s head and no flooring underneath it. I had a swing in the barn and would go swing and listen to the radio, and my cat would come out with me and play. Sometimes she’d come in and then go right back out again. So would I, because at those moments, it felt weird. There was a small storeroom in the barn I couldn’t stay in long. It felt chokingly oppressive inside. Every time the cat freaked, I would feel very strongly like someone was in the storeroom. (I wonder now if maybe someone hung themselves in there, or on that spot.)

          We’d hear funny noises, mostly at night, that my parents said were squirrels in the attic. Uh huh, sure. And the cat would come inside sometimes and be sitting on your lap and then start and stare intensely at the door to the hallway. Parts of the house would feel randomly weird–I could go into one room at night and be fine, and then I couldn’t. Mostly by the front door, the very back of the hallway (right outside my room, oh joy), and in the family room that used to be a garage. The family room is where the next thing happened.

          Once, I was alone in the house and felt a presence come up behind me. It stood there for a moment–I spoke to it (terrified), but it didn’t answer me. Then it sort of turned and left the room. I couldn’t see it, but there was NO doubt something was there. I guess it was lonesome. :(

          I’m pretty sure the ghost wasn’t my grandfather and predated his building the house.

      7. Mel in HR*

        I also grew in a haunted house. There was one spirit/ghost/whatever that would walk in my attic. I always thought I was imagining it until my friend was sleeping over and heard it too. It sounded like a man walking in boots. And it was always going in the same direction (from the left side to the right) not like someone walked to one side and walked back.
        There was also something that liked to move things in my room. I was never afraid of that one, but I woke up once and my toy box was moving (yes moving! As in it looked like someone was pushing it) out of my closet and that startled me. I asked it to stop and it did.
        BUT- there was one entity that was malicious. I would get scratched in my sleep, but that’s easy to write off. One time I was eating dinner by myself and I felt like something was digging into my shoulder. I moved my shirt and my shoulder was bleeding.. there were cuts in the shape of finger nails like someone had dug their nails into my shoulder. But nobody else was there!! That’s why I’m not a skeptic..

      8. Chinook*

        “Some hauntings are thought to be impressions that people can tune into when they are in the right state of mind. Being really tired, really bored, etc., when the rational filter in your brain that dismisses anomalies is not working at full tilt. Those are usually the ones where different people see the ghost doing the same thing over and over or appearing the same way every time–it’s like a tape recording.”

        I am a firm believer that some people have a finer tuned antenna for this and that this residue exists. My firmest proof was when I visited Hiroshima – the city felt new and clean like a Canadian city and not at all like any of the other Japanese cities I had visited. It was like the bomb had scrubbed clean the residue of human life. Yet, when I went over the hill to the next town (which had been shielded by the hills), it felt like Japan again. It was just weird.

  9. Kerry (Like the County In Ireland)*

    People have supposedly seen a nurse in an old-fashioned uniform in the basement of one of our hospitals. THe hospital in question was built in 1982.

    1. AMT*

      Love it! “And then she came toward me…perm rustling, tattered leg warmers flapping in the wind…”

    2. Effective Immediately*

      I don’t know if it varies by region, but they still wore old fashioned nursing uniforms in some hospitals when my mom graduated from nursing school in 1983. I have a picture of my mom in hers.

    3. Lena*

      A town near me has a series of underground tunnels that were used as air raid shelters during the Second World War and are now partly open to tourists.

      Some people have reported seeing figures in Victorian dress, including a lady who smelled of lavender and a coal miner.

      This is particularly odd because the tunnels are in sandstone, ie, no coal, and weren’t dug until 1939!

      1. Barefoot Librarian*

        This makes me want to intentionally die in Victorian clothing so that if I haunt the place, I’ll confuse the hell out of the people who see me lol.

  10. TheExchquer*

    Ooh! At last job, I went into work on Friday, just like any other Friday. I was all alone in the office and took an early morning phone call from a gentleman trying to place an order. I was wrapping up the sale, getting ready to take his credit card information, when the office went dark and the phone went out. I was in a space with no windows, so it was pitch black all of a sudden and no one to talk to. I managed to make it to the hall way and waited there where there was some natural light until one of my coworkers showed up.

    (Turned out my boss had forgotten to tell us PG&E was doing some work and power might be out).

      1. Noah*

        I keep one of those heavy maglite flashlights in my desk drawer. I always figured I could throw it at someone and gain a few seconds to run at least.

        I’m often one of the last ones in the office. Our office is on an airport and while difficult to enter from the public side, it is ridiculous easy to enter from the ramp/taxiway/runway/secure side. Meaning anyone with access past the fence line, has easy access to our hangars and could probably get into the offices.

        1. Nashira*

          When my partner and I were house shopping, there were a lot of times that we or our realtor used our phones as expensive flashlights.

      1. TheExchequer*

        There’s a whole laundry list of reasons I no longer work at that particular job, the inability of the manager to communicate relevant things not the least of them.

  11. Bekx*

    So I worked as an assistant resident director in the college dorms. My building was separated by two wings, and I was on one wing and my director was on the other wing. During the summer we lived there, even though there were no students in the building.

    It’s a college — so obviously there are rumors about haunted rooms just like every other college. But this one came from one of the rooms 2 floors above me. A student committed suicide in that room 20 years ago, and ever since then there have been rumors of things flying off desks, doors slamming, and papers shuffled around.

    Sometimes I would hear noises when I was alone in my apartment. Usually just things that you can reassure yourself is the wind. I had a window air conditioner unit in my apartment, so a lot of noises DID come from outside or I reasonably believed they were outside.

    After the students left for summer, we had to go through all the rooms and make sure cable boxes and remotes were still in the rooms. We did most of the rooms at the beginning of summer but then they moved furniture around mid summer and we had to do them AGAIN after that happened. (They moved furniture from building to building…ugh). It was my last week before graduation (august) and we were told pretty late that we had to do these NOW.

    So one night my RD and I decided to just go ahead and do them all in one night and then order pizza. We were making a game out of it by saying things like “Just finished the 2nd floor!” to try to beat each other. I get halfway through floor 3 and he texts me. I think “Oh crap, he’s fast!” and run into one of the rooms. I check the room and get another text. I stop, pull out my phone to read the text and the door slams behind me. Usually I left the doors slightly ajar, but it wasn’t THAT weird that it would shut on it’s own but this was a SLAM. I go to read the text and my boss had said “Have fun in room 312.” and then “Don’t let the ghost get you.” Yup. I was in that room. The haunted room.

    I bolted out of there so fast and told him I was going to check the rest of the rooms in the morning.

    We had to do midnight rounds at all the buildings and every time I was on duty after that I always got a creepy feeling of being watched whenever I walked past that specific residence hall to go to another. I absolutely refused to look up. This was somewhat dangerous, but even when backing out with a car in that view I would refuse to look in my rear view mirror because I was terrified I’d see a face in the window. I still get goosebumps thinking about it.

    1. Jen*

      Can you imagine, being stuck in the place you died, eternally doomed to being an undergrad?

      Remind me that if I’m on my death bed, to fly to Tahiti or something to at least be stuck haunting somewhere nice.

    2. Dorth Vader*

      I was in ResLife too and had one of the “haunted” dorms! My 2nd year as an RA in the oldest building on campus, the rumor was that someone hanged themselves in the attic. I went up with two of the furniture crew guys and there was a mattress on the floor and a punching bag hanging dead center. They’ve been there forever and no one really knows why. I had a really hard time sleeping in that building, especially since I sometimes heard noises from up there (the doors were locked so residents couldn’t get in). They recently renovated and I wonder if the attic was touched.
      My husband lived in a dorm that used to be part of the hospital and I had a really hard time working there, especially over the summers. Not sure if it was haunted, but I always got bad vibes.

    3. BananaPants*

      Not about work, but the summer before my freshman year of college I was in an on-campus summer program for women and minorities majoring in engineering and we lived in what was usually an all-female dorm. We lived in the 2nd floor and a bunch of pre-pharmacy students there for a similar summer program lived on the first floor, and the third floor was inaccessible for the summer – the only way onto that floor was via stairwells at either end of the hall, and the doors from the stairwells to the third floor were locked. The three dorms in this complex were built in the 1920s and are really beautiful.

      We were hanging out in our rooms on the 2nd floor one evening and started hearing what sounded like running feet upstairs and then a door started slamming. The RD had us check and both stairwell doors were still firmly locked. She unlocked one of them and went up with an RA to see if someone was up there and there was no one. They sort of laughed it off but we found out later from the pre-pharm students whose older sibling was an alum that there were rumors that the 3rd floor is haunted by a student who died in the attic in the 1930s. The same thing happened at least three more times that summer. I’m a skeptic but it was creepy!

      I ended up living in the dorm next door to that one for all 4 years, and had friends who lived on the 3rd floor of the “haunted” dorm who said weird things happened (and started happening before they heard about the supposed ghost) . Others never heard or experienced anything.

    4. Dr. Johnny Fever*

      I think every college/university has a haunted dorm. That seems to be the case given how often I’ve heard them – my school had three!

      1. Bekx*

        Without giving too much away about my school…we were part of the underground railroad and apparently there was some interesting things going on surrounding that! So we had a couple. One in the residence hall, one in the building that was a part of the underground railroad and one in another one of the educational buildings.

        1. Dr. Johnny Fever*

          Mine was too! There were false walls in the basements and attics of two of the old dorms, plus one of the administration buildings. My hometown also had a convent with secret tunnels and rooms for the underground railroad – they found all them 130 years later during renovation.

      2. Barefoot Librarian*

        A university that I used to work at had a medical school that was supposedly haunted by the ghost of a janitor that used to be paid a little extra on the side back in the late 1800s to dig up fresh corpses for the medical students to use. The guy did actually exist and was arrested for that very crime (I worked in the library so I did some research) but I never did learn how he died. I’m not sure if any of you have ever walked the halls of a hospital wing late at night, but it’s creepy enough without the suggestion that a ghost might be around a dimly lit corridor late at night.

        Though I’ve just reminded myself of something that happened to an ex-boyfriend one night at a different hospital where he worked maintenance. He was walking through the forth or fifth floor (which was the location of several labs and therefore dark and empty at 3 in the morning). He was passing the banks of elevators when he heard a “ding” and glanced over. The doorway opened and inside was a clown in complete kit….with black and red makeup streaked down her face. Later he told me that she looked up at him with empty, red eyes…. and he screamed like a baby. Turns out her husband had been in a car accident while she was doing a gig and she’d come straight over. It’s pretty awful, but also the mental picture of this big, bearded dude screaming like a little girl delights me. Yes, I’m that kind of evil hehe.

    5. Incog Neato*

      I wanted to go anon for this, but maybe it’s unnecessary as pretty much any RA/RD will have these stories!

      I lived and worked in a 2 building pair all 4 years. I lived two years in the normal dorm and two in the haunted, but I worked in the haunted for 3 total.

      A friend and coworker of mine died the day before training started for one of my years. The building was already haunted or creepy, but it got even creepier. During summer training, we’d be the only person sleeping on each of our floors. That training week the room above me was empty, because my friend had just died. It was unsettling.

      The last room of his wouldn’t hold a poster. Posters would fall off the walls the next two years whenever rooms tried to decorate. He was pretty sparse. That part actually made me smile.

      But we’d do rounds in that building before this, and you’d always feel watched when you were walking across the basement and one of the floors had a fun house mirror feeling. There had been a fire and a death there previously. So eery.

      1. Amber T*

        Oh my god haha yes, all RAs/RDs have this type of story! I was on Res Life for 7 of my 8 semesters (and how I learned 97% of my working skills, but I digress) and the equivalent of a student RD (HRs (head residents) or BMs (building managers)) for my last three. I never lived in the haunted hall, nor did I have any friends that did, so I didn’t really spend too much time there, but as an HR we had to do rounds in all residence halls and all student villages when we were on call, and I always felt a little chillier in that hall.

        One RA friend who lived their his freshman year said he woke up multiple times to a weight on his chest, like someone was sitting on him (he was in perfect health, mind you). He saw her face in the corner a few times too. Another professional BM, when she was the director in that hall, had the covers yanked off of her a few nights.

        Actually, Incog Neato, I’m wondering if by some crazy random happenstance we’re talking about the same (small, liberal arts) college? I had heard about posters not staying on the wall of certain rooms, and the cause of this ghost had been a fire in the hall in the 70’s.

    6. Cath in Canada*

      I used to have the same feeling leaving my friends’ old house! I never felt weird in the house itself, but I would never, ever look up at the upstairs window as we were leaving. I always felt watched.

    7. Bethy*

      Speaking of rearview mirrors…

      I once had a creepy encounter at my grandmother’s apartment: someone left a message on her machine saying “Nancyyyy. Nancy, I’m coming for you!” and then this weird robot voice said her address. Being the, frankly, terrible granddaughter I was, I hightailed it out of there. On the short drive home, I peered in the rearview mirror to make sure no one was in the backseat, and got the scare of my life when I saw a face looking back at me…I forgot I’d see myself in the mirror…

      Thankfully I have never had any other “supernatural” experiences

    8. OhNo*

      Somewhat related… My college didn’t have a haunted dorm, but we did have a haunted library, where I happened to work for several years during my undergrad. There was never a specific story or anything to go along with it,. but everyone Jut Knew that the basement floor of the library was haunted. It was pretty creepy down there – it was where we kept a lot of things that no one ever used, so we had the old compact shelving with the hand cranks on the end to make space to walk between the shelves, and there were no windows or anything, just old fluorescent lights that buzzed constantly.

      One night I was down there re-shelving a bunch of old microfiche that someone had used. When I finally finished, I was walking back towards the elevator, and I passed a place where the shelves were open and saw someone standing between the shelves. I was moving fast and didn’t think anything of it, until I got to the elevator and switched the lights off.

      Suddenly I thought, oh crap, I just turned the lights out on some poor student, so I immediately switched them back on and called out, “Sorry!” I went back to the spot where the shelves were open, thinking I ought to apologize in person and make sure I hadn’t terrified them (it being the haunted library basement and all), but there wasn’t anyone there.

      I booked it upstairs so fast I probably left rubber on the floor. I refused to go back down and turn off the lights, too. I ended up asking the campus security guy who was clearing out the library to hit the lights at the end of the night instead.

  12. GlamNonprofitSquirrel*

    My very glamorous nonprofit gig is in a renovated building on the grounds of a long-shuttered school. (Closed and vacant since 1989 kind of a thing.) Our building, though, is awesome. Shiny new renovation, tons of meeting space, modern but not obnoxiously so … and we have a ghost named George. I’m the “works really late to finish grant applications” person and early days at the day job, I’d find myself alone in a 14,000 sq ft building (doors locked, tyvm) and would notice one particular painting was always unlevel so I’d fix it, go get coffee and it would be unlevel again. Bad hanging job? Maybe so we redid the hanger on the painting. Didn’t work. Then, one and only one of these hanging metal sculptures that we have in the lobby would start spinning wildly even when the HVAC system was turned off. A little creepy, no?

    A few months after I started, I hosted a meeting of the former employees and students of the long-closed school. They told me our ghost was George, a former maintenance man who died half a century ago but had spent his entire life on campus, first as a student and later as an employee.

    So now, I always greet my empty lobby with a “Morning George” as I get into the building and he always spins a sculpture at me. Oh, and we changed out the art show and he’s found a new picture to mess with. It’s in my office and every Thursday when my dog joins me in the office, she barks at the picture. :)

      1. Dr. Johnny Fever*

        Don’t forget about Casper. He’s friendly, too. I hear he’s the friendliest one around.

  13. Sydney Bristow*

    I used to work at a fast food restaurant and sometimes would be the only person opening in the morning. One morning I was alone in the locked lobby setting up chairs and heard a man’s voice behind me say “no thank you” clear as day. I jumped and there was definitely nobody in the building. I told my boss about it later and she said she went back watched the security video and saw me jump. The toilet used to flush on its own sometimes too, which I always disregarded until this experience.

  14. saby*

    I used to work as a tour guide in a historical house that was believed to be haunted… well, one specific room was, anyway. That room did always kind of give us the creeps, but probably only because we knew it was supposed to be haunted. Anyway, just from the fact that it WAS a historical house, all restored to the early Victorian period, kind of got people thinking about ghosts. We regularly had people be like “I think I felt a presence!” or “I felt a cold hand on my leg! Did any children die here?” and even one lady who very seriously told us that she had a special lens on her camera that would let her capture ectoplasm on film.

    Anyway, other than the occasional creeped out feeling, the scariest thing that happened to us was the time that all the pens and papers started randomly flying off the desks in our office. One of my coworkers started screaming about the ghost and ran out of the house. It turned out to have been a minor earthquake that the solidly built stone house didn’t feel much but apparently our modern desks did…

    1. Nanc*

      Oooo! I toured that home (or one similar) many times! They always do night time flashlight tours on Friday the 13th and one year when my birthday fell on Friday the 13th, that’s what we did. I still have my souvenir flashlight–it’s 30+ years old and still works.

      2. saby*

        Sounds like a different house (we never did Friday the 13th, indeed our manager was ADAMANT that the house was NOT HAUNTED). But something about old houses that are literally set up to look like an 1800s family is about to walk in and sit down to dinner makes you think ghost.

  15. Amber Rose*

    At my last job I would often work several hours past the others, and past dark.

    There were multiple times where I’d hear filing cabinets opening downstairs, hear the printer randomly turn on and start whirring, and voices whispering. Sometimes the door would be unlocked when I was sure i’d locked it. Every time I thought someone else had come back for something and every time, it was dark and silent when I got downstairs to look. The voices were the worst. When you work in an industrial park you don’t expect to hear talking from outside after hours. Place was in the middle of nowhere.

    Of course you could make an argument for stress. I sat at the top of the stairs in a creaky old building with my back to the stairwell, and I was overworked and tired.

    That said, my boss/the owner DID die in a tragic and unexplained plane crash a couple months before.

    Just sayin’.

  16. Mena*

    (kind of work related … ) After a business trip to Loveland, CO I stayed on a couple days, driving over to the Stanley Hotel in Estes Park, CO (best known as Stephen King’s inspiration for the setting of his book The Shining). The hotel is known to be haunted (Google it!).

    I opted to stay on the 4th floor where supposedly the most paranormal activity takes place. (I’m thinking, ‘oh sure’)

    On my first night, lights are out and I’m about to fall asleep … the bed starts moving, back and forth, slightly and gently. I’d been in the room for a couple hours at this point and nothing strange had happened – I couldn’t attribute it to a heating system kicking in or anything like that. I get up, turn on the lights, look under the bed, all around the bed. Nothing.

    I get back in and it starts again. Now I laugh and tell the ‘ghost’ it is time to go to bed. After 2-3 minutes it stops. Later that night I hear children laughing in the hallway and I’m surprised – it is very late now. But I don’t hear running, just laughter in the distrance.

    The next day I find out that my room, #407, is rather famous for strange movements of items. And that the laughing children is something other guests have heard and dates back to the early 20th century when the affluent guests’ children and nannies were all quartered on the 4th floor.

    The rest of the visit was uneventful. It didn’t scare me off of the place though … I’ve been back to stay two more times!!

      1. Mena*

        Do it! Besides the haunted aspect, the place is stunning, the mountains are amazing, wildlife if everywhere (a herd of caribou right throught the hotel’s parking lot one evening at dinner time), the ride over from either Lyons or Loveland is beautiful and the gateway to the Rocky Mountain National Park is right down the road. OH SO worth the trip. An hour and a half’s drive from Denver.

    2. AMG*

      So jealous! We didn’t hear or see anything when we stayed there. It was elk epseason so the elk would roam through town and that was cool.

    4. ZuKeeper*

      I lived in Estes Park for 10 years. During the last few years I lived there I commuted to J school in Fort Collins One of my assignments was to find something interesting about The Stanley and write an article about it. This was before they started promoting the hotel as a haunted hotel, but the rumors were around. So that’s what I did my article on.

      I didn’t actually see anything, but the place has an interesting vibe to it. I’m not sure I would stay the night, haha. The staff all swore they still heard Flora Stanley playing her beloved piano, F.O. Stanley regularly played billiards after his death, and long past maids would occasionally still unpack for visitors. Lord Dunraven particularly likes to play tricks on women in room 407, while children play in the hallways in the middle of the night.

    5. Chameleon*

      I was married at that hotel. They have “ghost tours” and always show the room where the book was written–which was our suite. I had just gotten dressed in my gown and was headed down to the ceremony, and enthusiastically threw open the door…just as the guide had apparently finished describing the room.

      I never saw anything spooky there, but I will always remember making a group of 20 tourists gasp at the appearance of a “ghost bride.”

    6. Beth*

      I really want to go there! I’m actually (distantly) related to the Stanleys that built that place and my family would love to go out there to visit. It would be so cool to meet the ghost of a relative

  17. Dr. Johnny Fever*

    I worked briefly on the top floor of a building during graveyard shift. It was pretty dead, very quiet, but occasionally I would hear strange squeaks, rustling sounds, and a rush of air moving quickly past me, but I hard time catching what was bothering me.

    The whole floor was dim – the main lights were off so all I had was a cube light. I heard squeaking again one night, then shadows in the distance, morphing and moving and I ran downstairs and outside.

    I asked to move to another floor. My manager asked why. I told her the floor was haunted, the creeps came out at night, and described what had been happening. She starts laughing.

    Turns out the floor wasn’t haunted; the space above the acoustic tiles housed a family of bats. They came out after the lights went off. Since it was so quiet, I never saw them, but I was hearing them flocking above the tile, taking flight, and coming close to my area (probably drawn by curiosity).

      1. Dr. Johnny Fever*

        Only for the bats if one got bitten by a manager :)

        Your handle – is that the amazing pinball machine from The Electric Company?

          1. Dr. Johnny Fever*

            Nice! Even if that wasn’t the source, I’ve been singing the song in my head since seeing it.

      2. KRFP*

        99% of human rabies cases come from contact with dogs. It all started with a rumor that now leads folks to erroneously kill bats, which are important pollinators and insect controllers.

    3. Rabies risk*

      You really need to get vaccinated for rabies- if this was less than 5 years ago and you haven’t been vaccinated, you could have been bitten, and it could be a real threat.

      Rabies is really serious and by the time someone starts showing symptoms, it’s too late, so if you’re in contact with bats you need the vaccinations. They’re not too bad, also.

      1. Dr. Johnny Fever*

        Thanks for the concern! This happened ~20 years, the building was since remodeled and the bats were rehomed (I didn’t know one could rehome bats). Extra precautions were taken to ensure that disturbed guano didn’t make out of the isolated area or through the ventilation system.

        1. Elizabeth West*

          Yes, you can move the colony kind of like you move a bee colony. The guano can cause respiratory problems, so it’s advisable to have a bat expert come and deal with it if you have an infestation.

          No killing them. They are beneficial little guys.

  18. CV*

    I used to work at a living history museum. All the buildings on site were historical, and had been transported to the site for the “pioneer village” type of main street.
    The general store had never actually been used as a general store in its long history – it was actually a funeral home. Employees working alone in the evening swore that they heard unusual sounds and footsteps coming from upstairs, felt like they weren’t alone (even though they really were), and generally felt uneasy going to the out-of-bounds to the public second floor alone. One employee actually saw a small child sitting on a chest in period dress (and there was no way the child could have gotten upstairs – it was blocked off to the public, the site was virtually deserted). The employee was so spooked he got out of there lickety-split, and when he returned with a co-worker not 2 minutes later there was no sign of the child in the building, or on the site.
    The reports of footsteps and general creepiness stopped when one of the employees, who was a devout Anglican, did an exorcism/blessed the building.

  19. rooose*

    I used to work in the Natural History Museum stores (as in the storage warehouse where the main collection is kept). I had keys and used to work late on some nights.
    The building dates back to the late 1800’s, it’s quite old and creaky.

    All lights except those immediately in use had to be switched off at all times for environmental control reasons (and money saving reasons) so you would be sitting there, all alone, in a pool of light. Surrounded by the dead things. And the smell of the dead things, all musty and 150 years old.

    One winter evening, before Christmas I was there. I was working quite late – it was dark outside, dark inside apart from my one light. Just me and about 200,000 dead birds.

    Suddenly, I heard a live bird cooing. Very softly, somewhere in the room.

    I nearly died.

    (Turned out it was a pigeon in a hollow of the window sill sheltering from the wind. Stupid pigeon.)

    2. cardiganed librarian*

      That’s fantastic. I simultaneously love and am terrified by the idea of working in a place like that.

  20. danr*

    There was a section of a building at my old company that used to house large printing presses. When the presses were removed it became part of the shipping area. There was a certain area of the floor where ghostly footsteps could be heard following you as you walked along. Most folks avoided that floor.

  21. khoots*

    At my current job, I’m in charge of opening the front door each day. Only about three months into my position as I was stepping onto the elevator, I heard someone start to say, “Hello? Hello?” I thought there was someone at the front door so I yelled, “One minute!” but when I went to check there was no one there. Thoroughly freaked out I would not take the elevator for weeks.

    Turns out, we have a separate phone line for our elevator and every once in a while a client somehow manages to call that line and not our front desk. Needless to say I was very relieved that our elevator wasn’t haunted and I wasn’t going crazy either.

    2. Kelly L.*

      This is not a work story but a high school story.

      When I was in high school, I was somewhat religious, and was in a religious group that met after school in one of the classrooms. This one afternoon, one of the guys in the group was speaking/preaching and got all wound up and was saying things like “And God speaks to us, and God says…” and then dramatically pointed upward…

      ..toward the PA speaker, which suddenly crackled to life and said something. (I don’t even remember what the voice said. Something mundane. The PA had been out of order that day, and they’d finally fixed it right at that moment.)

      1. Dr. Johnny Fever*

        **kkssh** tomorrow’s lunch will be pizza with salad, corn, juice pop, and your choice of milk. **kkssh**

    3. Snork Maiden*

      It’s a good thing I don’t work somewhere with a separate phone line for the elevator because I would not be able to resist the temptation to call it with someone in there.

      1. Elizabeth West*

        It’d be even funnier if you knew who it was. “BAAABARA (or whoever)….ARE YOU THERE, BARBARA?? THEY’RE COMING TO GET YOU, BARBARA! DON’T STEP OFF THE ELEVATOR, BARBARA!”

      2. Rebecca in Dallas*

        Hahaha, this reminded me of something. In middle school, we were having a moment of silence during an assembly, I think it was the anniversary of the OKC federal building bombing. So we’re all completely quiet and the PA crackles to life, someone was trying to fix it so we heard this tentative, “Hello? Hello?”

      3. EditBarb*

        My college campus had emergency call boxes dotted around campus. I worked at the campus information desk, and if someone called, I saw the extension they called from–including the call boxes. So my friends and I knew the number for the call box right across from the dining hall, and discovered that you could call the call box and have it just start talking. This was pre-cell phone, but there was a private dining room in the dining hall we regularly sat in that ALSO had windows where we could see the box.

        We freaked out a LOT of people. “Hey, you. In the red shirt!”

        1. heatherskib*

          My University had those, too. I never quite understood the purpose of them. If someone’s chasing you are you supposed to treat them like tag points?

  22. Terra*

    I worked in a kids retail store in college that sold a lot of furniture and bedding and such. Because of this we had a back store room area that was filled with shelving piled with extra merchandise and flat pack furniture. We used to joke about that room being haunted because regularly things would fall off their shelves or, even weirder, switch shelves for no apparent reason. No one would admit to it and gossip claimed it had been happening since that location opened. Mostly we just joked about their being a ghost and would occasionally say stuff like “Mr. Ghost, stop that!” if we had to pick things up too often.

    In January the last year I was there we had to do inventory. The company had just been sold so we had a new district manager in the store with us while we did inventory so he could make notes on everyone’s performance, what we had, how our store was set-up, etc. For the most part we just ignored him but then someone made a joke about getting the ghost to help with inventory. The district manager wanted to know what we were talking about so we told him about the haunted storeroom, mostly in fun. He got really annoyed with us. I think he thought that since we were mostly high school and college kids the ghost thing was a sign that we weren’t taking our jobs seriously.

    He gave us this long lecture about how there was no such things as ghost that we were ridiculous to think there was and that talking about it could be grounds for firing. As soon as he finished we heard this crazy loud crash come from the storeroom. A bunch of us ran back there to see what the heck had happened, including the district manager. Two big shelving units, at opposite sides of the room, that were fastened to the floor had fallen over backwards. One of them was seasonal with all of the decorations we used to decorate the store for the various holidays so there was a “sheet ghost” decoration that had fallen and was just standing on the floor in front of the shelf it had been on. After that we were all careful not to insult the storeroom ghost.

    2. Liz*

      I feel like threatening someone’s job for talking about ghosts is worth a whole AAM letter in itself!

  23. Mo*

    Not my own experience, but my mom has worked in an office building built on the old state mental hospital grounds for the past 25 years. That fact alone is enough to make it slightly creepy, but it’s also rumored that the ghost of a little girl haunts the building. Things move or go missing from desks, people working late hear giggling, footsteps or doors closing, and some workers feel things brush up against them when there’s nothing there! In the time she’s been there, they’ve had five night cleaning crews abruptly quit and refuse to return, and a few employees have even quit over it. A few years back, an actual ghost hunting crew came to check it out. Really weird, especially since so many people have had similar unexplained experiences.

    1. Mike C.*

      “Dear Ask A Manager – How do I explain to future employers that I left my previous job due to repeated hauntings?”

      2. Dr. Johnny Fever*

        “Dear Ask a Manager – My current workplace is haunted and my CEO refuses to bring in a priest to cast it away. Is this legal?”

        4. coyote_fan*

          Dear AAM – Can I sue a company for the ghost repeatedly taking my red stapler after they moved me into the haunted basement office?

          1. Dr. Johnny Fever*

            Dear coyote_fan, It is legal, if not ethical for the ghost to take your stapler. However, if your manager refuses to let you leave the haunted basement, your stapler continues to go missing, and they forget to pay you, you may burn the place down.

  24. Diluted_TortoiseShell*

    My residential high school use to be an old hospital.

    Once while hanging out with some friends on the porch I saw an opaque, smoky white, but strangely high detail image of a girl wearing 40s style clothing. I turned quickly to look but nothing was there. Even weirder as I opened my mouth to speak one of my friends on the porch started chanting “Don’t say it! Don’t say it! Don’t say it!”

    Of course I did. I asked, “did anyone else see that little girl?” and the chanting friend responded “Yes! I didn’t want it to be real! Why did you have to say you saw it too!?” Only he and I saw it though. But it was spooky!

  25. University admin*

    The university building I work in is actually on my town’s haunted Halloween tour. It’s known to be haunted, and strange things have happened in the year and a half we’ve been here. It’s an old ice factory, and the old maintenance staff often complained of spooky things at night. The lights are now all on motion sensors, and my office light is always on in the morning when I come in. No one else is around, and there’s nothing else that would set off the motion detectors.

    1. Ama*

      I’m kind of bummed now that none of the university buildings I worked at when I was in academia seemed to be haunted. There were some good candidates, too — especially a couple that had been converted from turn of the century residences.

      One of the universities I worked at did have a building that they acquired many years after a high profile tragedy happened there (can’t say what at the risk of doxing myself, but if you grew up in the U.S. you probably learned about it in history class). Paranormal blogs claim there’s been ghost activity reported there but I never heard any stories directly.

    2. Mallory Janis Ian*

      The university building I used to work in was the campus’s original library. The old library stacks made up the central core of the building, all the way from the basement to the top floor. That space couldn’t be used for anything besides storage because of fire code laws (the metal support rods that the shelves used to span were spaced two feet apart throughout the space and couldn’t be removed because they were load-bearing). The stacks were kept locked and it was rare for anyone to go in there. Occasionally we would see evidence that students had been in there after hours (I guess they somehow managed to crawl through an upper window or something — who knows).

      A few years ago, students complained that they kept seeing the same strange man in the building after dark (our students were able to access the building after hours to do studio work). It turned out that a homeless guy had taken up residence in the stacks and had been there for (weeks? months?) before being caught. The stacks don’t exist anymore; the building was renovated and the stacks were eliminated when the central core was blasted out.

      1. OhNo*

        Wow, that’s even creepier than a ghost taking up residence in the building! Having someone else live in my house (or work, or whatever) without me knowing it is really high on my “things that creep me out” list. It doesn’t sound like he ever did anything that bad, but still! Creepy!

        1. Mallory Janis Ian*

          Yeah, he never did anything except use it as a place to set up camp. Nothing was stolen, no-one was harmed. But it was creepy that someone was able to exist under our radar for so long. And the potential risk to the students!

      2. JanetM*

        I am more than a year late to this discussion, but — the university building I used to work in was the campus’s original library. We were told that it was haunted, but that the ghost/s, called Evening Primrose or the Evening Primrose People, was/were benevolent (albeit mischievous). I myself never perceived the Evening Primrose People, although I would have liked to. http://tntoday.utk.edu/2016/10/31/haunted-spots-ut/

    3. One of the Sarahs*

      I used to work in a big open plan office with motion sensor lights, and sometimes I’d stay late, or come into the office after a meeting somewhere else or whatever, in winter when it was dark, & every now and then a light would turn on further down the office but no one was there. Got to admit, the idea of ghosts was better than imagining rats!

  26. Kelly L.*

    I worked at a college with a locally-famous ghost story, though I never saw the ghost personally. There was an old building with the tower, and legend had it that a student had killed herself there when her sweetheart was killed in the Civil War. The building was not in fact built yet when the Civil War happened, but the legend persisted anyway. And certainly it was an old and pretty enough building to spawn plenty of stories!

  27. JBurr*

    I know it’s not strictly “work”, but in undergrad I did a ton of theater, which only differed from my semi-professional theater work in that I didn’t get paid. Can I tell those stories? Because there are a lot of them.

      2. JBurr*

        Haha, okay. Well, we often had run-ins with ghosts and… other things in the old performing arts center. This place had an auditorium and offices on the main level, classrooms and some storage space upstairs, and a smaller theater, more storage, an old set shop, and sound-proof practice rooms in the basement. This place was laid out like a labyrinth–you had to go down to the basement to access the stairs to the upstairs storage areas–and there was no cell service, so students new to the program were strongly encouraged to use the buddy system in case they got lost or locked in somewhere. It was also built on top of a spring, which many paranormal enthusiasts believe attracts and sustains spirits. I’m an atheist and skeptic, but… some of the stuff that I saw down there makes me wonder.

        For one, there was Suzanne Little, for whom the basement theater was named. She was a big proponent of the arts at the college when she was alive and sat in on as many student performances as possible, even after she passed, apparently. Many older students and alumni told of times they’d been rehearsing and heard clapping come from the audience only to look up and see a woman in period dress applauding them from the audience. I didn’t put much stock in this one until the day my friend, Danielle, and I were heading out after rehearsing. The exit was at the back of the house, and Danielle was headed up the house left aisle. I had just picked up my stuff and was starting to walk up the center aisle when I saw Suzanne in the house left aisle, approaching Danielle from behind. I knew Danielle would flip out if I said anything, so I kept my mouth shut. Danielle and Suzanne both reached the exit before me, and when I reached the back of the house, Suzanne was gone, but Danielle was pulling on her sweater because she “got really cold all of a sudden.” When we were outside on the sidewalk, I told her what I’d seen, and she got really pale and thanked me for not telling her downstairs.

        Suzanne was at least kind, and a lot of folks didn’t mind spotting her. It became a badge of honor to get her applause. The other thing in that basement, though, was decidedly not friendly. Suzanne was pretty obviously herself, a person who’d spent a lot of time there in life and continued to do so in death, and she looked just like her portrait, but this thing was… I don’t know. I don’t know if it was a person or demon or something else. It didn’t look human like Suzanne. Everyone who saw it described a black mass, human-ish in shape but like a solid shadow and not quite proportioned correctly. I’ve heard it locked students in practice rooms, set music stands in blockades across hallways, stuff that could be attributed to prankster peers if you didn’t also see this thing walking away and through a wall. Two girls reported it slamming open their practice room doors and running through a dead end.

        I’m a wimp. I’ll admit that right now. I can’t even do obviously fake haunted houses. So, it took me a very long time to have the guts to go into this place by myself even though I knew this stuff wasn’t real. I knew it. So I finally got used to it, and one day over spring break, when there was no one to accompany me, I headed for the Fine Arts Center to raid the prop closet. Besides, I’d be mostly in the upstairs storage spaces, and the creepy stuff was mostly confined to the basement. I just had to go through the basement to get to the stairs (remember I said this place was a maze?). So, I descended the stairs and turned the corner. There was just a door, a hallway, another door, another hallway, and one last door between me and the other stairs. But I didn’t make it to any of them. I got that first door open maybe a foot when it suddenly slammed in my face. A-air pressure, right? my poor, skeptical mind pleaded as I put my face to the small window. The shadowy mass I saw on the other side of the door was not air pressure. And it obviously didn’t want me there, so I took those stairs two steps at a time and didn’t stop running till I reached my dorm. I never, ever went into that building by myself again.

      1. coyote_fan*

        My high school theater had it’s construction manager hang himself off of the roof just before the building was finished. There were always things that would move around, cold chills (I experienced a few on that side of the building), weird noises when people weren’t in that part of the building.

  28. Anna G*

    Foolishly I listen to the black tapes podcast while at work, at my isolated workstation, in an archives with motion-sensitive lighting. Nothing really creepy has happened yet, but it’s almost uncanny how whenever an episode reaches an especially creepy part, the lights just happen to go out. Curse you, environmentally friendly lights!

      1. Cath in Canada*

        So good! My new favourite.

        Tanis, Limetown, The Message, We’re Alive, The Night Blogger, and The Shadowvane Podcast are also excellent and are similar fake documentary style. the Nosleep Podcast is (I think) people’s real-life spooky stories, like the ones on this thread, from Reddit readers.

        1. Nashira*

          K, while I write thousands of words about systems design tonight, I’m going to download enough scary podcasts to keep myself thoroughly creeped out at work tomorrow. Thanks for the recs!

        2. Gem*

          I am obsessed with The Message at the moment. Sunday’s ep cannot come soon enough! Not heard of the Night Blogger/The Shadowvane podcast so will be checking those out!

      2. Anna G*

        It’s fun! Kind of This American Life meets Paranormal Activity (with a drive-by by James Randi), except w/o all the terrible sequels.

      1. Anna G*

        Ooh, thanks, will check it out. Next on my rotation of scary stuff is Last Podcast On The Left, though I don’t know how it compares, format-wise.

  29. Episkey*

    Not super creepy, but more interesting I suppose…I work for a real estate agent and I routinely have to visit our clients in their homes we get as listings because I work on the marketing materials and other tasks that it’s helpful to see the house.

    I have been in many, many houses in the 2+ years I’ve been working with my boss. We had a listing awhile ago that my boss sent me to do a walk-through on. The client was out of town, so no one was in the house and I went by myself. Upon first entering the house, I can only describe it as just a very bad vibe/sense. I have never felt that way in a house previously or since. I continued feeling this bad feeling and I just did not like the house.

    When I got back to the office, I was telling my boss about it because it was so odd for me to have such a visceral reaction to a house and she told me that it was a truly unhappy place — the clients were going through a bitter divorce and the wife was an alcoholic. I hadn’t known anything about the clients beforehand, and I always wonder if I really did pick up on some of the inherent strife in that house.

    1. CV-Q*

      I totally understand this. Same thing happened when I was house hunting. As I walked thru the house with my realtor — nice house, nicely decorated, etc. — I just felt an odd uncomfortable feeling. I kept walking around trying to figure it out when my realtor said, “Did you notice anything different here?” I told her I was sensing something “off” but couldn’t quite figure out what it was. She said, “Look at the walls.” It was then I noticed several barely noticeable repairs/patches to the walls right at the height where someone would slam their fist thru the wall. That house definitely had a dark presence. We left immediately.

      1. Liza*

        This being the thread that it is, I misread your “when I was house hunting” as “when I was house haunting”.

    2. Windchime*

      I went into a Open House that was that way once. The instant I walked in the door, I could feel that this was an unhappy home. The people weren’t there and the place was tidy and neat, but it just had a very unhappy vibe to it. I couldn’t wait to get out of there.

    3. Minister of Snark*

      When we were looking for our first home, the realtor took us to a place that, the moment I stepped out of the car in the driveway, I wanted to nope the hell away from it. Even though it was just a plain old circa 1980s ranch house, it felt WRONG. Angry and dark and sad, like that feel you get when you walk into a room where two people have just had a fight, and they’re still standing there, glaring at each other?

      We toured the house, which was perfectly nice, if a little dated, and I kept saying, “Nope.” To the point where my husband was getting super-frustrated with me. Especially since it had an inground pool in the backyard and the price was super cheap. I said, “I’m sorry, I just can’t live here.”

      Finally, the realtor opened the last guest room and there’s a giant pile of hunting trophies (deer heads, stuffed squirrels, stuffed bobcats, that sort of thing) in the middle of the room, surrounded by hunting rifles. I let out a little shriek. The realtor groaned and said, “I begged him to clear that out.”

      Apparently, the couple selling the house was in the middle of a very ugly divorce. The husband was sleeping in the guest room and the wife told him to put the trophies to prevent creeping out the prospective buyers. Piling it in the middle of the room was not as effective as he thought.

  30. Jessie*

    I work part-time in an Irish pub & restaurant. The décor is filled with pieces shipped over from Ireland from old buildings that were being torn down (like church pews, stained glass, an old confessional, etc.) We joke that a ghost named Elizabeth must have come over with everything on the ship, because there are always creepy noises and things falling. The scariest I’ve ever been was a couple weeks ago. The bar had just closed, there were only four of us inside doing our cash out reports downstairs, when we hear a loud thump & gasp from the second level, sounding like someone was jumping down from a ledge. I was so convinced someone was still in the building I did a lap through the entire place & searched under all the tables! My co-workers were too scared to come upstairs so I had to go by myself, making it even worse!

  31. Eugenie*

    I used to work at a pretty famous historical site (the home of one of our most-famous founding fathers). Every year during our candlelit Christmas tours we’d get one woman who came through claiming that she was communing with the soul of either one of the daughters who lived in the house, or one of the slaves — right down to describing what they were wearing. We generally just chalked that one up to a nutty visitor though, definitely not the weirdest thing a person had done on a tour.

  32. Turanga Leela*

    I used to work in a building that was supposedly haunted. According to rumor, there were ghosts of an old man and a little girl.

    One night, I was working late and was alone in the building. I heard a noise in the hallway and went to the door. I saw a man and a little girl, with their backs to me, holding hands. They walked out the door at the end of the hallway. I hadn’t seen them pass my office, and I never saw them again.

  33. Courtney*

    I worked night shift in a historic hotel all through college. It was widely believed to be haunted, and teams of people would come stay with all sorts of equipment and cameras trying to capture proof. The lights flickered all the time, especially in the lobby and a handful of rooms, but one evening the entire hotel went pitch black (the power on the rest of the block was fine). Half the guests loved it, and the other half were waiting with me out in the courtyard until the lights flickered back on.

  34. Anna*

    I’ve never had anything especially creepy happen to me, but my friend used to do housekeeping at a hotel near caves in the southern part of the state and she talked a lot about weird things that would happen. The story was that one of the floors was haunted by a woman from the 1890s. A couple of times when my friend finished cleaning rooms, she’d walk in to the hall and hear the faucet turn on. She’d go back in and turn it off and it would happen again. Another time she saw the woman in the hall. She said after the faucets kept turning on she had to tell the ghost she needed to finish her work so please stop turning on the faucets. According to her, it stopped after that.

  35. AMG*

    I had a job as a nanny for a famous psychic. One of the first things she told me when I started the job in spring of 2000 was that I shouldn’t go to New York under any circumstances because she saw buildings on fire.

    Regular occurances included hearing my name when nobody was there, phones would have dead static and then be fine 30 seconds later, ‘parties’ inside the closed refrigerator, toys moving around in the kids’ rooms when I had been in the living room with both kids the entire time, napping with the 2 kids only to wake up and see a 3rd child who died at childbirth napping next to his twin brother, and so on.

    One particularly rude spirit was banging on things right next to my head, locked the kitten in the bathroom, would follow me into the bathroom and knock things over when I was on the toilet, and then started following me home. He would switch on the dome light in my car and drain the battery. My boss said he wanted help with something and was throwing tantrums because she wouldn’t help him. I got mad and told him that if he made me miss my college midterms, I’d find him and send him back to the light myself. I told him that if he left me alone, I’d put a good word in with my boss for him. He was quiet and I kept my word. Never heard from him again because my boss kicked him out and did a cleansing shortly thereafter.

    We are still close friends and her kids, psychic in their own right, are awesome. One is a famous model now.

    3. AMG*

      I never went. She told the FBI what she knew but she didn’t have snout detail.

      Just like I won’t ever go to a sold-out football game with palm trees and a church nearby. Especially if a police officer dies there the day before.

  36. Friday's cupcake*

    My former workplace was actually haunted, according to the old-timers I worked with. Before they moved into their current building, they worked out of a very old home that had been built sometime in the 1800s. It was (is) an ad agency, so people were constantly working late. Several people claim to have seen ghosts walking around the home, things mysteriously disappearing or being moved, etc. After hearing some of the stories, I started to wonder if they were just exhausted or drinking too much. (We had several liquor clients, so there was always booze around.)

  37. Kirsten*

    My internship was at a large forensic psychiatric hospital with many buildings that dated back to the Seminole Wars. The intern house had to have been from the Civil War era as well. I heard rumors of ghosts, but never experienced anything weird personally; the scariest part was just living alone in this big old house on the grounds of a facility where residents occasionally escaped.

  38. kdizzle*

    I used to work in an old 1850’s firehouse that was converted to local gov’t offices (it even had a pole! Sweet!). It was an old building, obviously, and it hadn’t even been renovated since the 1970’s, so some of the systems were wacky.

    My colleague and I would occasionally work late into the evenings around budget crunch time. We’d hear the normal creepy noises in the darkness, and without fail, the elevator would always ding at our floor and open without anyone inside. It’s unnerving enough to be two young women in a creepy old building at 10PM and think someone is getting off at your floor…but then to know that the elevator is actually transporting ghosts too lazy to take the stairs! We worked as fast as we could so we could leave them in peace.

  39. special snowflake*

    I swear there is a poltergeist in my office. From the time I started something didn’t work correctly. First it was the printer, a month in that was finally working. Then it was my phone, several weeks later it was my computer. Then the lights then a different recurring problem with the computer.
    It’s bizarre and I’m the only one it happens to – we are convinced there is something causing all of these things!

    2. SnowWhite*

      We have this in my office.
      Anything electronic in the office is tempramental, the printer can be fixed in the morning – new parts added and as soon as the engineer leaves we have the same error – the engineer returns, need to order the same new parts as were fitted the day before or sometimes even that morning.
      We joke with the engineer that he should just move into our office.

      We have the same issues with light bulbs, can be fitted and work fine for a few days and then bust.

      Our coffee machine does weird things, and then returns to normal when the engineer arrives, starts again a few hours after he leaves.

      Our computers are the same too!

  40. april ludgate*

    I worked in a library during college and a couple of the other students were convinced that the ground floor was haunted. People would put things down and they’d disappear when there was no one else down there (not like electronics or things people would steal either, it was usually the notes we were supposed to take while we worked, or pencils). The lights didn’t always work the right way and sometimes they’d be on or off when they shouldn’t have been, even when no one else was in the building. So of course I was always a little on edge when I was alone there after hearing that. One morning I was opening the building by myself because my coworker was running late, so I was completely alone in this huge five-story building and it was still dark outside and I’d just turned on all the lights on the ground floor at a half-run, thinking there’s no such thing as ghosts, there’s no such thing as ghosts. It was fine, and I headed back up the stairs, out to the main floor when I see something human-shaped out of the corner of my eye. It was a life-size Barbie replica that was there for a health-awareness week, staring at me with it’s lifeless face. I almost peed myself. I’m more afraid of dolls than ghosts.

    1. JBurr*

      Hah! My cousin’s life-size Barbie almost got one between the eyes one night when my uncle was investigating a crash he’d heard in another room.

    2. MaryMary*

      One of the girls in my dorm kept a life size cardboard cutout of Han Solo in our common room (her room was too tiny for Han to really fit). Han scared the crap out of more than one college student who walked through the common room at night and saw the figure of a man lurking in the corner.

      1. Elizabeth West*

        I’ve posted about this before, but my lab job, we had a life-sized Frankenstein’s monster cutout. We’d leave that thing all over in corners to scare people. They got me in the bathroom once. Then we put it in the darkroom and scared the living sheet out of the metallurgy guy. Heh heh.

    3. ThursdaysGeek*

      I have a life sized pop-up poster of a person’s muscular, skeletal, and vascular system, called Dimensional Man, and I’ve taken him from job to job. Years ago, I had him on my office door, which was down a dim hallway. I knew he was there, but one time I needed to run to my office after the lights were turned mostly off and forgot about him. Until he was standing there in front of me! I keep him in better lit places now, for all of our sakes.

      1. Sarah*

        This isn’t ghostly, but my office has a stuffed possum that we hide to scare each other. Best one was when I put it in the microwave, and the big boss was the person who found it. He yelped spectacularly, but was a good sport. No one knows where it is right now….or at least won’t admit it.

        1. Elizabeth West*

          Hahhaha, at the same lab, we had a big black plastic squeaky rat and we used to put it in the refrigerator. I kidnapped it when the lab shut down and I still have it. :)

    4. Dust Bunny*

      I work in a medical school archive. We had a display of old nurse’s caps on Styrofoam heads in our lobby. I came in one winter day (still dark outside), before everyone else, went to turn on the reading room lights, and when I returned, the mannequin head was reflecting in the door in such a way that it looked like a petite, translucent woman with no face was standing on our front steps. I nearly jumped out of my skin.

      The heads got moved to a display area away from reflective surfaces.

      I also was there alone one morning and started the coffee maker. I didn’t realize, though, that it was kind of on its last legs, and it started making a sputtering noise that sounded oddly like somebody rolling an empty metal library cart around in the [uninsulated and very echo-y] garage/loading dock on the other side of the door. I think that was about as close as I’ve ever come to having a panic attack.

  41. Leah the designer*

    I used to work in nursing homes and assisted livings as a nurses aid. When residents would start talking about seeing small children and cats (which none of us could see), we knew they were close to their very last days. This was a common enough occurrence where the residents would see the same thing as well. Working nights were always bit creepy.

    1. Katieinthemountains*

      An elderly relative had just moved into a nursing home. A nurse came in to give him a bath, and he said, “My wife came to see me last night.” She said, “Oh, really?” because both his first and second wives had been dead for decades. He said, “Yes…I think I’ll go back with her.” He died less than a week later, and that exchange gave his daughter such comfort. (My mother wanted to know which wife, but they had the same first name so even if he’d said, we still wouldn’t know.)

    2. Catseye*

      I also did nursing home work. We didn’t have people seeing children and cats (mostly…) but when patients started saying they could see friends and relatives we couldn’t see, it was usually a sign that they would die quite soon. It sounds creepy when you explain it to people but it was actually quite sweet in reality.

      The last place I worked in was a building dating from the 18th century, which had been a house and all sorts of other things before becoming a nursing home. Big rambling building, lots of weird creaky noises and strange cold currents of air. It was always a bit spooky on the night shift.

      Some weird things that happened there:

      1) One of our residents swore blind she saw a little girl in her room sometimes, offering her sweets from a bag. This patient had mild dementia, but she was very consistent and sure about seeing this little girl, and staff were split 50/50 on whether she was seeing a ghost or not. The patient was sure it was a ghost but was fortunately very relaxed about it. (I did ask her once if she wanted to move rooms but she said no, the girl wasn’t really bothering her. Fair enough!)

      2) On a night shift when I wasn’t working, at about 3am, the staff were all upstairs doing checks when the doors in the dining room started banging loudly, enough to hear them at the other end of the building. Staff rushed downstairs to find out what was going on. Doors locked, nothing moving, nobody there. The staff on shift that night were still freaked out about this years later.

      3) I was taking breakfast to a patient one morning and she greeted me with “I’m so GLAD you’re here, now you can see her too!” I couldn’t see anyone, so just said “oh, who?” while getting her breakfast ready. So far this wasn’t spooky in itself (the patient didn’t have dementia, but sudden symptoms of confusion, seeing things etc. can happen in elderly patients and be down to things like UTIs, so I was making a mental note to tell the shift nurse). The rest of the conversation creeped me out, though:

      Patient: You aren’t looking! She’s standing right by the chair. There, now she’s coming to stand next to us, that’s better. I’m so glad you can meet her!
      Me: Oh, me too! So breakfast today is eggs, toast…
      Patient: You can’t see her?
      Me: I, um…
      Patient: She says you can’t see her.
      Me: Right.
      Patient: She says you won’t be able to see her.
      Me: Ah, that would explain it. So, your breakfast here is –
      Patient: It’s so wonderful, dear! She’s coming to take me to heaven!

      Patient died a few days later.

  42. Manders*

    I have a skeleton behind me… right… now! :O

    (I work in an orthopedic surgeon’s office, we keep the skeleton behind my desk)

      2. Cath in Canada*

        My sister used to be terrified of skeletons when she was a kid. Once, in a genuine attempt to make her less scared*, I told her that she had a skeleton inside her, so it was nothing to be afraid of.

        Didn’t work.

        *not for entirely altruistic reasons – she had skeleton nightmares every once in a while and would scream until everyone woke up and put the lights on

        1. Jess*

          Aw! A few weeks ago we took our three year old daughter to a Halloween event. There was another little girl there who was afraid to walk past this tableau of skeletons and my kid cheerfully told her, “Don’t be scared, inside we’re ALL skeletons!” It didn’t help.

          1. vpc*

            I had a friend in high school who used to say, “underneath our clothes… we’re ALL naked.”

            Yep.

  43. Amber Rose*

    Just for fun, a not really ‘work’ story but school: a school I went to as a teen was built in 1913 and is actually a historical protected location now. It has a massive clock tower with no clock in it, just a creepy black wood face. Supposedly it used to have 5:00 painted on it.

    I was often early and late there for band practice and/or detention, and once all night for a Wake-a-thon for charity. Lights would flicker. Voices could be heard from the (very much off limits) clock tower. We once had a plague of roaches. Black ones with red Vs on them. People would report strange writing on walls that would disappear, or misty shapes in the basement. Library books would move around, lockers would pop open.

    I thought it was all great fun, but the skeptics pointed out that old buildings are weird, and the scared ones didn’t want to hear about it.

  44. caryatid*

    ooh i have one!

    i was living in ireland for grad school and had a part time admin job in the city centre. it was in a multi-story office building.

    the lady i worked with and i were close in age and situation and quickly became friends, taking our breaks together.

    one big part of our job was filing paper applications and related documents for a grant program. all the files were on the lowest level of the building, sub-street level but above the car park. there were about 10 empty rooms off a long hallway, each of the rooms were on the left side of the hall, and there were stairwells on either end of the hallway. we did most of our work in the room closest to the main stairwell, so at one end of the hall. we worked on this floor alone as all of the other staff was upstairs.

    the place wasn’t really old but it did feel a little odd at times, nothing oppressively creepy though.

    so one day we were returning from one of many tea breaks and we walked down the stairs into our workroom. my friend went in first, then i did – but i thought i saw someone/thing at the far end of the hall out of the corner of my eye so i popped my head out of the room door to do a double take. as soon as i did this, my friend said, “did you think you saw someone? because so did i!”

    for whatever reason, i decided to jam down the corridor to see what was actually there, looking in all of the empty rooms as i went. of course, there was no one there. we also went down the far stairs to see if we could find anyone. no one there, either, and no one in the car park.

    we definitely worked upstairs for the rest of the day!

  45. Drea*

    I once got an email from a coworker two days after he passed away. Yes, it turned out to be a mass email that mistakenly didn’t have his signature removed, but it still gave me a hell of a shock to open it.

    1. JBurr*

      It took an absurdly long time to get our deceased HR Manager’s name off the mailers our 401(k) folks sent out. It really upset some folks to continue getting mail from “him” two months after he’d passed.

      1. Drea*

        Ugh, that’s terrible. I wasn’t particularly close to him, so it really just startled me more than anything. But there were a couple others who were close to him that were upset by it. Not that I can blame them.

        1. Sarah*

          We had an administrative assistant who passed away from lunch cancer on her 30th birthday, it was tragic and sad. My boss had her name in her cell phone, with our main office line as her work phone. Six months after the woman passed away, my boss got a call from our main line (which isn’t unusual), but of course it came up as the woman’s name who had passed. It took us both a little while to calm down from that one and figure it out.

      2. Stranger than fiction*

        The creepiest thing is when you call someone deceased and hear their voice still on their voicemail. My niece took over my brother in laws cell phone after he passed away and kept her dads voice on the voicemail. It freaked me out but I understand why she couldn’t delete it for a while.

        1. Hlyssande*

          I used to call my grandma’s house just to listen to her voicemail message – it took like two years for my mom and aunt to get everything in order, so it was still there. I used to leave her messages, too.

          But on a cell phone is a little more creepy, I think.

        2. Anna*

          My cousin’s wife hasn’t shut down his FB page. He’s been gone a year and a half and every once in awhile something will pop up and it sucks.

          1. Clever Name*

            Facebook has an option to set a person’s page to make it a memorial page. It still keeps the page active, and folks can post on it, but I don’t think it will alert you to “friendship anniversaries” (which I think are super dumb anyway).

            1. KR*

              This isn’t related to death…. but when my boyfriend went to boot camp he gave his facebook credentials to his best friend. Only I and his friend really knew that. Well one day he wrote to his friend and asked him to update his facebook status with how he was doing and all that, and the comments were PRICELESS. Because all of his friends knew there was no way in hell he had access to facebook and they were so confused!

  46. Tilly W*

    This is more a personal fear than spooky, but I mistakenly admitted that I had a fear of geese when I was a new grad at my first corporate job. A coworker placed a decorative garden goose under my desk one morning. We sat in an open floor plan so when I pulled out my chair that morning to be confronted with a 3 ft. goose lurking under my desk, I screamed (and maybe cried a bit). Being that we were in an open layout, everyone from the COO to head of security came running over to what was wrong with the new girl. Beyond embarrassing.

      1. JMegan*

        +++ to this. I’d have been terrified, in the same way the boss who had the spider thrown on her shoulder last week was terrified. Not cool.

      1. Tilly W*

        Even better, she had bought the goose from a garden store for the purpose of the prank, hoping to return it after work. The garden store refused since they had a no return policy so she actually thought I should pay her for it or split the cost. Just one of many smh moments with this colleague.

    4. Elizabeth West*

      That’s mean. :(

      You woudn’t like it here–our largest company campuses look like golf courses, so of course we have a pond. And it’s full of Canada geese. And there is goose plop everywhere.

  47. UsedToDoSupport*

    In high school, I got a summer job as a warehouseman in a seaport city, we were opening boxes from containers and repacking the items to be shipped out to retailers. I worked nights. One night I was in the back of the warehouse doing my thing. I had the feeling I was being watched. Our shift supervisor was a bit creepy/stalkerish so I blew it off thinking he was watching me again. Then, in the darkest corner, I saw several sets of eyes glowing in the reflected light. Big, fullgrown Norway rats, lots of them. They decided to attack me and all ran right at me! (yes, this type of rat will do that) I decided it was break time.

  48. LBK*

    I’m pretty sure the store I used to work at was haunted. The alarm would go off randomly in the middle of the night and we could never find any other evidence of a break-in – especially since the alarm would never be triggered by the sensors at the single entrance to the building, but in remote areas like the warehouse (which didn’t have outdoor access) or the office where we kept the safe. That office also had a motion tracking camera that would occasionally move and zoom as if it were following motion while the store was closed. Always a little unnerving working in there alone the morning after the camera would pick up “movement”.

  49. Court*

    The ski resort I worked at in high school and college was haunted by a previous owner who had killed himself in the lodge. Weird noises, lights on and off, and glimpses out of the corner of your eye were common place late at night. Sometimes it was really scary but, after I had a heart to heart with him about how much I loved the place and I wouldn’t let anyone do anything bad to it he was less of a jerk. When it got too playful, I’d just yell at him to cut the crap and a particular light would flicker a bit and it would be the end of it for that night.

  50. Lyric*

    I work for a government agency that bought a Victorian school in our town that had been derelict for over a decade. My employer refurbished it (beautifully), and we run our main office out of the building. The feeling around the office is that the place is definitely haunted. I’ve never experienced anything unexplainable myself, but my boss has a pretty spooky story:

    One evening she was staying late, finishing up some paperwork, and she and the executive director were the only two left in the building. Our offices are in the old classrooms, which are large enough for four cubicles each. She had her classroom door partially cracked open, but her cube was one of the back two, so she had no actual view of the door unless she walked around the corner. The executive director stopped by in the doorway, said that he would be in his office (at the other end of the long main hall) if she needed anything, and shut the classroom door. My boss clearly heard his footsteps going away down the hall. She kept working, but a few minutes later, heard the door creak slowly open.

    Of course, she figured it was the E.D. again. But there was just silence. So she called out his name, and no one answered.

    Then the door swung slowly shut and latched again.

    This building has all hardwood floors, and not only do they creak like crazy, you can’t take a step without making a clomping sound. But my boss heard absolutely nothing–no steps. So she stood up and walked around the corner. The door was closed, and no one was visible through the window in the middle. She opened the door and looked around. No one in the hall. Down at the end of the hall, she could see the E.D. in his office, at his computer, and there was no possible way he could have walked back to his office from her door between the time she stood up and the time she opened the door.

    She grabbed her things and was out of there like a flash, and I’ve only seen her stay late maybe twice in the entire five years I’ve worked here, lol.

    We also have a security camera video that I have actually seen, where a dark shadow drifts through the main hall area, around the reception desk, then disappears when it reaches one of the classroom doors. That video is admittedly eerie. But really the scariest thing about this building is that before it was restored, the attic was absolutely full of bats. Sometimes they still get back in, wander down through the air ducts, and end up careening wildly around the main lobby. :P

    1. KR*

      Fun fact, but bats are endangered on the East Coast! They actually eat most night insects, particularly the ones that have a life stage in water (mosquitos!) and are a major step in the ecosystem!

  51. June*

    I worked at a haunted hotel for a while! I worked nights so I ran into a number of cold spots, piano music coming from nowhere… but one time I was refilling coffee and a ghost threw a box of filters across the room and hit me in the head! Not sure what I did to piss it off, but the other ghosts were friendly enough.

    1. Elizabeth West*

      There is one here, downtown, and it’s well known to be haunted by a ghost that typically appears between midnight and 4 a.m. Though reportedly staff are not allowed to acknowledge it. I’d love to stay there one night and hang out late.

      We have another very old and historic building that used to be a children’s home (by all accounts, including that of a former resident I was privileged enough to meet, it was a well-run and kindly one). The woman who runs it now is a performer and she also rents it out for weddings, etc. I’ve been on a ghost tour thing there. On the second floor landing, I was walking down the middle of this ramp and suddenly felt a stirring next to me, and then a strong sensation that a small hand was about to slip into mine. I stopped and waited, and after about ten seconds it went away. Little ghost kid, I suppose. <3 Of course, I saw nothing. Curse these non-clairvoyant eyes of mine! :P

      They had some cells in the basement where the Army kept prisoners when they had the building, and one of them was very eerie. I went in and had to go out again. Then I went back in and was okay. It was freaky.

  52. PB*

    I worked at a historic hotel that had guest cottages in the back. There were a number of stories that floated around the staff about ghosts but one was related to one of the cottages in the back. The cottage itself was huge and divided into 3-4 separate guest suites, it was popular for wedding night couples as this hotel had a ton of weddings. The rumor was that some bride who spent her wedding night there and lost her husband shortly after the wedding, committed suicide in the room they spent their wedding night in, because she couldn’t bear to live without him. This supposedly happened in the 30’s or 40’s and the rumor was her ghost was stuck in the house and would do goofy things like move room service dishes around, or knock on doors in the middle of the night, or the most common, hold doors shut from inside.

    There was a general closet in the common area of the cottage where we kept a supply of towels and linens and only a select few had a key to it. It was a very small closet, small door that opened to a shelf, you couldn’t even go into it if you wanted. The door was an odd shape and you could practically see through where it connects to the frame. I went to open it one time and it felt like someone was pulling it closed as I was pulling it open, there wasn’t even a handle on the other side of the door! At the time I didn’t know about the ghost bride, so I pulled harder and it gave in and opened, but it felt like I won a tug of war match. I looked for towels or something blocking the hinges or wedged in the path of the door and there was nothing.

    Not knowing what to think of it, and not knowing about the ghost bride, I asked one of the housekeeper supervisors when I saw her if that door sticks and found out about the ghost, really freaked me out after that. There were also calls to the night auditor about people knocking on the room door in the middle of the night and no one being there when they opened up, weird because you needed a key card to get into the cottage so only employees or guest of that particular cottage would have entry access. There would be times when things were just thrown around, like room service trays or linens from the closet. I was always nervous entering after finding out about it, but I never encountered anything again after that one instance.

  53. Elizabeth West*

    Way back when I was sixteen, I worked in the hospital cafeteria in my hometown for a while. It had a storeroom for the canned goods with shelves on three of the walls, kind of like a large square closet. For some reason, the room was very poorly lit, so badly that when you went in to get something, you could barely read the labels. The building was completed in 1949 (it’s no longer used).

    I grew up in a rural area on property that apparently had a ghostly resident, so I had some familiarity with feeling something was with me in certain rooms, the barn, etc. (I can’t see ghosts, darn it, only feel them). I would get that feeling when I went in the storeroom–not all the time, just sometimes. I hated going in there. HATED it. It got so bad it factored into my decision to quit the job. It was a very different feeling from the one I experienced at home, and it wasn’t pleasant.

  54. MashaKasha*

    Mine is like one of those Scooby-Doo cartoons – scared me at the time, but ended up having an explanation. Two of my coworkers at OldJob, a guy in his 40s and a girl in her early 20s, had worked together at a previous job and were friends. One day I overheard the girl complaining that she’d seen mice in the office. Next morning, I come in and there are mouse droppings on my desk and keyboard. I walked over to her desk to tell her she’d been right about the mice, and her guy friend was there talking to her. I told them that there were indeed mice in the office, and the guy offered to walk back with me and check. We go back to my desk. He takes a look… “yes, looks like mouse droppings.” Picks one up, looks at it closer… “yup, definitely mouse droppings” pops it into his mouth and eats it.

    Turned out, those two were very much into pranks. They spread the rumor about mice the night before, then came into the office an hour earlier than they knew I would, and scattered chocolate sprinkles on my desk. Nothing major, but I damn near fainted when he did that. The reaction I had was “who do I work with? what other weird things does he do? will he bite? am I safe?”

  55. Gwen*

    I’ve never experienced anything (but I’m a skeptic, so), but I work in a former locally famous department store & it’s widely believed amongst my coworkers that the store’s founder still haunts the building. Numerous people have heard footsteps/had doors slam when they’re working late after everyone else has gone home. Spoooky!

  56. heatherskib*

    I used to work for a funeral home, and have worked in nursing. Too easy.
    However, my career jobs aren’t spooky.

    1. heatherskib*

      Except for the elevators in my building, which were horrendously bad. I was in an accident a few years ago that dropped us 5 floors and seriously injured a woman.

      1. Nashira*

        Oh my gosh. The worst our elevators have done is sprained my bad shoulder by closing on me, and twisted a bunch of ankles due to opening the doors when they were a few inches higher than the floor. I hope your elevators are no longer viscious beasties.

        1. Sarah*

          The power went out on our entire downtown city block about two weeks after we moved into our current office building, and of course that trapped three people in the elevator for hours. SO glad it wasn’t me.

    2. Anna*

      Yeah, I worked at a cemetery/mortuary for several months and it was the least creepy place to ever work. I never even saw a body on its way to a viewing.

  57. CollegeTales*

    I went to a very small and very old college that shares the name of the first president. I had several friends who worked late nights in the library and told many stories about cold spots, and noises when they were alone in the building. This same library had a creepy history too: a rich man donated a lot of money to the school to fund the building of the library; right after donating, he lost all his money and couldn’t get the donated funds back, so he hung himself in the construction area of the library. And that is actually a true story; there are newspaper clippings to back it up.

  58. Ella*

    I used to work as an apprentice at a funeral home. I was usually the first in in the morning, and would start my day by tidying up the parlor and making sure everything was ready for calling hours. One morning I was dusting and I turned around to see an old woman sitting on one of the sofas. Not so weird, funeral homes gets walk-ins more than you’d think. I said hello and asked her how I could help her. As I was talking, I turned away from her to set down the cleaning supplies. When I turned back toward, she was gone. I checked the bathroom, doors, and sidewalks – nothing, and the front door was locked. ***Disclaimer – funeral workers often get erratic/insufficient sleep. It’s very possible that I was sleep-deprived and seeing things that were not there, but I remember looking this woman in the eye for a good 4-5 seconds, it wasn’t a “corner of the eye” type of thing.

      1. Ella*

        I actually did go into the embalming room to see if there was any resemblance to anyone we had in there, but nope, only male bodies! Maybe a deceased spouse/former lover/relative?

      1. heatherskib*

        Someone (teams of 2 or more depending on the size of the funeral home) has to be on call for pickups 24/7, and at least one person has to man the phones. It’s not unusual for a relatively small funeral home to have 2 plus pickups a night on average. The record on the funeral home I worked at was 10, and it was all hands on deck. Of course the more pickups there are, the more preparation and services there are. So there’s not really time to catch up on sleep until a few slow nights.

        2. Anna*

          Have you read The Good Death? It is such a great book about a young woman who worked at a funeral home and all the everything that went on. Her name is Caitlin Doughty. Love that book.

      2. Ella*

        Because people die at all hours, so unfortunately if you get a call at 1 am, it’s out of bed, put on a suit and get rid of bedhead, and go get the body. The bigger funeral homes are pretty good about having an on-call schedule so that employees only have to do this 1-2 times a week, but the smaller mom and pop homes don’t have enough employees to do it that way, so you’re pretty much always on call. Also, if you have calling hours in the evening for Family A, and Family B’s loved one dies sometime during the day, you’re probably going to be embalming after calling hours. It’s one of those feast or famine jobs.

  59. Solidus Pilcrow*

    I used to work in an 1890’s industrial building that was renovated into office space. It’s a truly beautiful building: genuine solid brick walls (like 2 ft thick brick, not veneered cinder block), huge 20″ x 20″ solid cedar support columns, solid iron joist hangers holding up solid cedar beams with solid cedar ceilings (the building’s name was “Timbers”). The company occupied the 5th floor of the 7-story building.

    The workspace was a long and narrow U-shape. Two rows of cubicles were clustered back to back in the center with walk-way aisles on either side — the cubicles opened out to the walk-ways. I was often the first person into the office in the mornings. As I’m taking off my coat one day, I hear fast-paced (almost running) footsteps on the opposite side of the cubes. I look over the cube walls but didn’t see anyone. I figure I just missed seeing whomever it was. Then I hear the footsteps again. I look up but don’t see anyone. While I’m looking I hear the footsteps yet again. It sound’s like someone going back and forth up the walk-way. Unless the person is unusually short, I should be able to see them. Thinking maybe someone brought their kid with them to work, I walk around the U to corral the ankle-biter, but no one is there.

    So now I’m confused about where these phantom footsteps are coming from. It’s an old industrial building, so I’m sure at least a few people have died there and maybe left a ghost behind. Then it occurs to me. Remember those solid cedar ceilings? There is no gap between stories for HV/AC and electrical like in modern office buildings; the wood ceiling of one story is the thinly carpeted floor of the next story. What I was hearing was someone from the floor above walking around with the sound transmitted directly through the wood ceiling.

    I never had any other experiences in that building, but that one was spooky for all of 10 minutes!

  60. Wowzers*

    I went to Flagler College. The main building is an old hotel and the 4th floor is rumored to be haunted by the mistress of Henry Flagler. The college is even on the local ghost tour… Personally, I think the 4th floor is just in utter disrepair and don’t want people up there.

  61. Stranger than fiction*

    Yes, twice.
    1. I was working in a restaurant in an old house by the beach rumored to be haunted. I had the dreaded task one night of having to restock certain items that required going into the basement storage room. I was grabbing to go containers and suddenly got the chills and felt someone breathing down my back, I turned around super fast thinking a coworker was messing with me but nope, nobody there.

    1. Another time at the same place I left something upstairs one night while closing up and when I got to the top of the stairs something made me look to the left at a bench at end of the hall even though I was going straight, I saw the dark apparition of the man who used to own the place that they say haunts it.

    Also, kind of humorous, a friend of mine once saw what he thought was a fake bat in the aisle next to his cube. He went to walk over to it and it moved. It was real. They had to call animal services to come trap and release it.

  62. Noah*

    I worked for a regional airline as a flight attendant as one of my first jobs, since these were small jets or turboprops there was generally only one flight attendant and the two pilots. One morning I was the first one to arrive at the aircraft. I told the gate agent I would go down and start my preflight checks and she could send the pilots down when they arrived.

    I made my way through the cabin completing the checks and when I got to the back opened the lavatory door. In the mirror I clearly saw an older gentlemen sitting in one of the seats a few rows ahead of where I was. At first I was pissed because I thought the gate agent started boarding without telling me, but when I turned around no one was there.

    I ran back up the jet bridge to the gate and when I told the gate agent she turned white. Apparently a passenger had a heart attack onboard the night before as the flight began its intial descent into the city. Despite CPR and an AED used by the flight attendant and paramedics meeting the flight, the passenger died. He was an older man, seated in one of the last rows of the aircraft.

    I’m still not 100% sure I believe in ghosts, but there was certainly an echo or something there.

  63. AnonEMoose*

    Back in my undergraduate days, I worked for a security program on my college campus. We had shifts in various buildings after hours, stuff like that. There was one complex of buildings (since torn down) that most of us didn’t like working in. They were older buildings, parts of the complex were used by the medical school, part by the dental school, and part by…drumroll…the mortuary program. But that wasn’t why people didn’t like working in there.

    The complex was basically a rectangle, so we patrolled by walking each floor in turn, usually starting at the top and working our way down. And one particular corridor, on one floor, was very creepy, especially when the building was otherwise empty. It always felt to me like someone was following me down that corridor, right on my heels, and that if they could have done something nasty, they would have. I never actually saw or heard anything, but it was there. I talked to several co-workers who switched from working in that building. Most of them said they felt creeped out in there, and when I asked them if it was any particular part of the building…they invariably cited the same floor and corridor.

    Now, one thing in this building was the cadaver labs for the medical students, so you’d think it would be that part, right? Wrong. Or the part used by the mortuary program? Also wrong. Completely opposite side of the complex. I have no idea what it was, but it was definitely nasty. It was still there, even when I had trainees with me, just not as bad.

    There was one night with the cadaver labs that’s funny in retrospect, though. It was summer, so not as many students around as usual anyway, and Saturday. Earlier in the evening some students had been working in the labs. It was now midnight, so deserted except for yours truly. And dark – lights off except for the emergency ones, and no windows in that hallway. As I start down the hall where the labs are, I can hear one of the doors rattling.

    I don’t care how much of a skeptic you may be, I defy you, under those circumstances, to not have flashes of every slasher flick or zombie apocalypse movie you’ve ever seen or heard of in your head at that moment. I took a very deep breath, and walked down the hallway anyway. Only to discover that there was a very definite breeze coming from around the door, meaning that the students must have left one or more windows open. Since it wasn’t on the ground floor, I decided I was NOT going in there to close the window.

    1. Elizabeth West*

      Gah!!! That’s really creepy.

      In music school, I had to walk through a graveyard at night coming back from the mall after seeing a movie. I cut through there all the time, as did many people, and they put up a really tall chain link fence across one end. (That didn’t stop us; we just climbed it.) One night, I was halfway in and as I passed the mausoleums, I heard a distinct creeeeeeeeak. It sounded just like one of the iron doors. Ghost, vampire, rapist–I didn’t care. I was off like a rabbit and over that fence in three seconds flat.

  64. manybellsdown*

    I’m currently volunteering at a museum that has an exhibit on horror movies.

    Nothing’s *happened* in there, but it is creepy as all heck when the exhibit is empty. I do not like being down there first thing in the morning. We’ve got this sort of maze that looks like a dark, creepy forest. You walk through and there’s little nooks where you can watch clips of movies. So there’s often a muffled scream or someone moaning “Feed meeee!” coming from various corners of the room.

    1. Owl*

      Oh yes, I’ve had that happen. The pirate exhibit just felt creepy (even beyond the sound effects) and nobody wanted to be in there.

      At one of the museums I interned in, I was walking through an empty exhibit when someone called my name. I turned around, nobody was there and I jumped a foot in the air. Then I realized it was one of the voice tracks running behind a mannequin. Her “companion” shared my name and they conversed.

  65. JHS*

    When I was working in a hotel a guest kept complaining about footsteps in the room above her – a room not only reputed to be haunted, but also essentially shut down and used as storage. No one ever went in there. One of the other staff and I went up one day to see what it was like, and found the floor was literally covered in mattresses, and so dusty we could tell none of them had been moved. So not only was the room locked, but there was no way anyone’s footsteps on the wooden floor could have been heard. Needless to say, we never went back in there.

  66. Drea*

    I don’t know that this is spooky in the traditional sense, but it’s something that always struck me. My grandma worked in a nursing home for many years so, of course, saw many people pass away. She said that pretty frequently after someone had died, the nursing home would get calls from family members saying they had a feeling something had happened and they just wanted to check in before the staff had a chance to notify them that their relative had died. Again, not really spooky, but one of those odd little mysteries of how the universe works.

    2. F.*

      When I was twelve years old, I suddenly “knew” that my great grandmother had died. As I went to tell my mother, the phone rang, and it was my grandmother calling to tell us that her mother had died.

      1. JMegan*

        My father was out of town at a conference when my mother got the middle-of-the-night call that his grandmother had died. My mother was able to reach him early the next morning, and it was decided that he would have breakfast at the conference and then come home.

        For some reason, there was a palm reader at the breakfast, and my father decided to have a reading done. The reader was really uncomfortable, and told him she didn’t want to say what she had seen. My father told her it was fine, and she responded “There’s been a death in your family, but it’s so recent that I’m not sure anyone has had time to contact you yet.”

        Part of me wants to be a skeptic, but I’m quite sure there’s more to this world than meets the eye, especially around issues of death and dying.

        1. Lindsay L*

          I had a similar experience when I was about 20. I woke up in the middle of the night from a horrific dream where my mom had did. I was panicking and my chest felt tight. I was *this close* to calling my parents, but talked myself down, since it was 2am and I figured I had just freaked myself out.

          The next morning I overslept and woke up to several missed calls. My mom had a not-quite-heart attack around 2am the night before. She was fine now, but when I’d had the dream, she was heading to the ER.

          Needless to say, I’ll be following my instincts from now on instead of being a skeptic, even if it means I’m being ridiculous 9/10 times.

      2. KR*

        My mom died a few years ago. My aunt’s children were very small, the oldest probably between 3-5. Her daughter is upstairs doing some mid-morning napping stuff in her bedroom when she comes downstairs and tells her that Lisa (my mom) is upstairs. So my aunt shows her a picture of her friend Lisa, thinking that her daughter just saw a picture of her friend. That’s not the Lisa she saw, apparently. So my aunt minimizes the picture and behind that she had a picture of my mom up, because my mom had just died the day before. My cousin was insistent that my mother was upstairs, swore up and down. What’s more, my aunt lived down the street from a cemetery that my mom’s grandmother was buried in and across the street from one of my mom’s grandparents (and a couple blocks away from her parents). I guess she was visiting the family before she left?

    3. Headachey*

      When my grandfather died, my grandmother was in a nursing home with advanced Alzheimer’s disease – she was mostly bedbound at that point, and had stopped speaking to anyone. A few days after my grandfather’s death, but before the funeral, my mother and I went to visit my grandmother. One of the nurses stopped my mother in the hallway to offer her condolences, and asked, “What time did your father die?” My mother told her, and asked why. The nurse responded, “Oh, I thought so. I was in the room with her right before that time, and was so surprised when she sat up and said, “I love you, I love you, I love you.”” We looked at each other and continued on to my grandmother’s room, where she was minimally interactive and did not speak.

      I don’t believe in ghosts and am not spiritual AT ALL, but I do treasure this memory.

    4. LeighTX*

      One day during the summer after my freshman year of college, I came home from work and my mother told me my beloved grandmother had died earlier that afternoon. I was distraught and wanted to call my boyfriend (now husband), but Mom asked me to wait until they’d finished making phone calls to relatives/friends about the arrangements. A few minutes later the phone rang and she poked her head in my room and said, “Did you call Boyfriend? He’s on the phone.” He had had the feeling something was wrong, and was calling to check on me.

      That’s one of the reasons I decided he was a keeper. :)

  67. Minister of Snark*

    I worked for a student publication on my college campus and it was supposed to be haunted. It was built in the 1940s and had a lot of “quirks,” like no air conditioning and peeling paint. We would prop the windows open when it got hot and they would suddenly crash down no matter what incredibly sturdy thing we used to hold it up. People got stuck in the bathroom or the photo darkroom, and people would say, “Oh, the heat/humidity made the door swell shut.” But the doors worked just fine before the person went into the room and suddenly worked again when someone heard that person banging on the door and tried to open it? Electronics acted funny, turning on suddenly on their own and making weird “feedback” noises.

    The office was a huge cavernous “bull pen” type newsroom. And when you were one of the few people who worked late at night, you would hear noises and assume that someone else was working in the room with you (I’m talking keyboards typing, muttering, the sound of papers shuffling, drawers being opened and shut) and you would turn around to speak to whoever you thought was in the room with you, only to find that you were “alone.” That other person had left the room to make copies or get a soda.

    The worst was the second floor. At night, it always felt DARK. Like even if you turned on multiple lights, it felt dark. And when you walked down hallways, the lights would go off suddenly, so you had to stumble down to the nearest switch to flip them back on. You would hear footsteps behind you when you walked, but it was just close enough to the sound of your own footsteps that you couldn’t tell for sure if it was someone else. You just felt creeped out and watched the whole time you were there.

    There was no typical ghost story explanation of involving someone who’d died during the construction of the building. We don’t know why this happened. It was just understood that if you worked in that building at night, you didn’t want to do it alone.

    Also, I recently found this video of a haunted office, which if it is real, is freaking terrifying in its intensity.
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ru-7Oplww5I

  68. Buggy Crispino*

    I used to work in a building that I thought one of the upstairs men’s rooms were haunted. It was a very small restroom with two doors, the outer door swung freely into a 3×3 vestibule and then another door was a typical locking door, but because of that outer door almost everyone left the inner door standing open. The sink was immediately when you walked in, a urinal to the left of that with a divider between it and the sink, and then there was a stall to the left of the urinal. Think sink/toilet/tub layout in an average older house.

    I was at the urinal one day (sorry for painting THAT picture in your head) knowing full well I was alone in there. The stall door was always open unless someone was in there and it was locked, and I’d had to turn on the light when I went in. However, as I was standing there, I felt the sensation of someone passing behind me – out of the stall and over to the sink. Then I heard the distinctive sound of someone using the sink. It was an older fixture, and the escutcheon on the hot water valve rattled any time you turned it on. I clearly heard that, heard water running, and then heard the outer swinging door open and close. When I finished and went to wash my hands, the sink was completely dry, there was no way that water had been running. When I got out, there was no one in sight. The door let out into a break room type area that had one of those compression auto door closers that was really old and couldn’t be forced closed, it had to just take its time and close on its own. And the door WAS closed. If anyone else had gone out that door, it would have still be closing by the time I got there.

    Nothing like that ever happened to me again, and it wasn’t until a few months later when my coworker Bryan started telling me HIS story that I realized it was exactly the same. If it truly was a haunting, I feel sorry for the poor lost soul that’s stuck haunting a public men’s room!

    1. Dr. Johnny Fever*

      I don’t know why, but after reading your last sentence, I thought how much it would suck to have an aneurysm in a portapotty and then be doomed to haunt that portapotty for eternity.

      1. Anna*

        If they ever make a Beetlejuice sequel (they should never make a Beetlejuice sequel), they should include a portapotty ghost.

  69. LV Ladybug*

    I work at a hotel and we actually have a ghost on property. Everything was build about 15+ years ago and there have been no deaths, or anything that we are aware of. Several members of the staff have reported seeing things, hearing things, etc., myself included. There are some units where our housekeepers don’t like to go into. It’s very interesting and I love hearing the new “sightings” that people have.

  70. KYLawyer*

    My law office is in an old funeral home. The mortuary was in the basement, and it still looks like (and is outfitted like) a mortuary. Also, the old wooden, rope-and-pulley casket elevator is still intact.

    No way that place is not haunted.

  71. Sara*

    I worked as an overnight news producer at a television station that was supposedly haunted (someone had died in an accident at the station years ago). I have never believed in that sort of thing, but I would upon occasion hear footsteps in the building — despite being the only person there. And sometimes the corner of the newsroom I sat in would get strangely cold for a few moments, then return to normal.

    We actually had “ghost hunters” come in and try to find the ghost. They supposedly “contacted” him, and decided he was friendly and we didn’t need to worry. We never aired the story though because our station had so many fire code violations that we would have likely been in a lot of trouble if the fire department saw it….

  72. Career Counselorette*

    Before my current career track, I worked in TV production on a pretty well-known reality show. When participants were being screened before the episode was greenlit, they would have to prepare a pitch tape, in which a producer would visit them at home and collect some footage to present to the showrunners. One family lived in a building that had had a few different incarnations, notably as a school and then as a mental hospital, and they said it was definitely haunted. I was doing some coverage in post-production when we were logging the footage of their pitch tape, and we found that EVPs (electronic voice phenomena, where recording devices allegedly pick up paranormal activity that’s undetected in the moment) had been captured unbeknownst to the producer and participants. In the middle of one interview, while a woman was talking, a gravelly, raspy disembodied male voice broke in and distinctly bellowed “WAKE UP.” There were other incidents of this on different tapes, where the family would be going about a normal activity and all of a sudden there would be disembodied screams. When we played it for the producer who had captured the footage, he got so scared he actually THREW the headphones and exclaimed, “I did NOT hear that while I was recording!” Paranormal activity is real, you guys.

  73. KT*

    I’d like to start by saying I am a RATIONAL person with a Master’s degree. I’m supposed to be somewhat smart and normal.

    I started my nonprofit career working at a small all-girl’s school. It was based in a old Victorian-era mansion. It was magnificent–the walls were ornate carved wood, there were beautiful archways, and there were odd little staircases that had been the servants’ stairs (rather than the grand staircases for the family). One such staircase was right outside my office and led to the attic–which had been the nursery but now was completely unused and roped off.

    Everyone left work sharply at 5, not a minute later. If I was working at it it was 4:48, my boss, the head of school, and whoever else was still there would order me to leave, no matter what I was working on. When I protested and said I was fine, the head of school told me “You don’t want to be here after dark”. I thought they were oddly superstitious (and they were normal in other interactions!) but I decided to oblige them.

    One day I was way behind, so I pretended to leave, then went back in when everyone else had left (I had a key to the main entryway for early morning events). I went back to work–chuckling at this superstitious crew–and was diligently typing when I heard laughing from the corner of my little office–like a little’s girl’s giggle. At first I thought one of the classes had an evening event, then I remembered it was a school holiday week and no one should have been in the building. I went out to the hall and looked around, and nothing. I went back to work…and heard it again. I came back out to look around, and this time I SWEAR I saw a little girl in a white dress with red hair at the top of the attic stairs. By the time I moved closer, she was gone.

    I was thoroughly spooked and dashed the heck out of there. The next day I confessed I had been here late working and had seen a little girl–the head of school just said “Did she have red hair”? And I looked at her terrified–I had been hoping they would laugh at me and I was just hallucinating from working too much.

    She said “We’ve all seen her. That’s why we don’t stay past 5, and none of us wanted the office by the stairs”.

    I had a few other encounters there. One day a maintenance guy had to go up to the attic check the air ducts, so I followed along with my camera (I was also the school photographer). The second I got up there, my camera died, even though the batteries were at full charge. When I went back downstairs to change them out, the camera worked fine. That was repeated by several people.

    Random laughter was common after hours, horrible rooms that never got warm, even when the fireplace was lit…an incredibly creepy (but beautiful) place.

  74. Anon for this*

    I work for a university that also owns a huge old building that looks like a castle and used to be the local armory (it was also a skating rink at one point). It’s been used for theater prop storage for a long time, but only a main area in the cavernous center of the building. The periphery has smaller rooms and staircases to a mezzanine level, but these are really decrepit. There is also a defunct basement boiler room drilled right down into the native sandstone. It usually had a lot of standing water in it, thick thick moss & slime on the stone steps leading down and on the walls. It is called Freddie’s Lair.
    It’s usually kept locked up and dark, with one small outdoor light over a side door/parking area. Campus police patrol it and provide access when needed.
    My family had made the 100 trip up to visit, and having previously heard about the armory, wanted to drive by on our way from their hotel. Imagine our surprise when we pulled up to the access door and found it slightly ajar! So naturally we all filed in, turned on the one working light switch, which illuminated only a small area near the door, and started poking around. It was as creepy as we had heard (lots of anecdotes from the cops about thumps & bumps and furniture moving around) and peeking into the blackness that was Freddie’s Lair was as close as we got to that.
    There was a lot of debris and papers littering the giant main room, and it was too dim to walk properly, so we were sort of shuffling to avoid tripping or stepping on things. Everyone stayed in a bunch since it was so creepy, and when we turned to head back to the door, I was at the back of the group with my mom. You can bet we jumped and hustled everyone along when we heard the stirring of papers and clink of empty bottles being kicked along…behind us!!
    When we got outside and were pulling away, the one tiny outside light turned itself off.
    The building has since been cleaned up a little, and Freddie’s Lair drained (the water has since returned) but the cops say there are still odd sounds and shadows and they try to patrol it in pairs.

  75. ohhello*

    I used to be a event coordinator at a beautiful old mansion. The original owner committed suicide, then it became and orphanage, then an insane asylum, then it was purchased by nuns. Every ingredient needed for a haunted house, amiright? We had some pretty spooky instances there.

    One time, we were goofing off after an event, because we had to wait for a security team to come and check the whole mansion before it was locked up. The team was running about an hour late, so we decided to go up to the attic and ouija (yes, I know this is how all horror movies start). We were on the very top floor, and there was no way anyone could have gotten on the roof, as the mansion was six stories high. We started asking the “spirit” to make very specific noises (stomp the ceiling above my head, tap the wall by the door, creek the floor in the corner, bang the window twice. For whatever reason, all of the sounds we were requesting came out clear as day! This continued for about 20 minutes, and finally, after we asked it to make a noise on the creepy out of tune piano (because yes, of course there was a creepy out of tune piano), we ran out and waited by the front door for security to come. I’m a skeptic, but darn that was a scary night. No ouija again for me!

  76. Career Counselorette*

    Oh! Also, once I was on a shoot in St. Augustine, Florida, which is one of the oldest cities in the country and is seriously haunted, and I actually experienced a terrifying sleep paralysis while I was alone in my hotel room, in which I saw and felt a giant dark form about nine feet high and five feet wide advancing towards my bed. I tried to scream, but I literally could not move, and I actually thought that I was going to die, and I think I fainted. The next morning I had them change my room.

    1. Turanga Leela*

      Apparently that is really common during sleep paralysis! There’s a ton of art inspired by that kind of nighttime visitation—check out the Wikipedia page on sleep paralysis. Super scary.

      1. Career Counselorette*

        I actually recently watched that documentary The Nightmare referenced on the Wikipedia page. I was totally convinced after watching it that I was going to start having more episodes, particularly since people in the documentary said they only started experiencing it after learning more about it. I don’t know why I did that to myself, I guess I wasn’t anxious enough.

      2. LawPancake*

        I am convinced that so many of the ghosts or paranormal experiences people have are actually just sleep paralysis. It’s surprisingly common, something like 30% of people will experience at some point, but it’s so awful (and feels absolutely real) that I think people don’t really talk about it. I’ve felt someone walk across the room and get in bed with me, jump on my chest and start shaking my shoulders, choke me or punch me, scream, make terrible thumping noises coming closer and closer, stand over me breathing menacingly, and on and on… I can absolutely see how someone would be convinced that they’re being targeted by evil spirits. But nope, just messed up sleep! Anecdotally, sleeping on your back makes it worse.

        1. Elizabeth West*

          I have it all the time. In mine, I get the sensation that someone is lying very close to and pressing on me. Of course I can’t move to look and see if there is anyone there. I used to be scared of it, but once I discovered what it was, I found it kind of interesting. Now I just lie there and try to move and see how long it takes before my body catches up with my brain.

          What would be REALLY scary is if it never did…..

          1. Turanga Leela*

            Is it like lucid dreaming at that point? I’ve never had sleep paralysis, but using lucid dreaming techniques helped me with my nightmares, and it sounds similar.

            1. Elizabeth West*

              Not really, because I’m not dreaming. Your body paralyses itself while you’re dreaming so you don’t get up and act it out. What happens is I wake up before that wears off. I can’t move, and I have a very weird sensation of someone in the bed with me, lying right next to me (usually pressing up against my back, as a partner would). It wears off after a few seconds and then I can move again. Then I either get up when the alarm goes off or go back to sleep.

              I enjoy my nightmares–they’re rather entertaining. :) The only times I didn’t was when I broke up with someone I thought I would end up marrying, and I couldn’t bear to dream about him. So I trained myself to wake up whenever I had dreams about him that were particularly fraught with strong emotion. It was like I noped right on out of it. That was more akin to lucid dreaming.

        2. Solidus Pilcrow*

          I’ve felt someone walk across the room and get in bed with me

          This reminds me of a time when I woke up when it felt as if someone had bumped into my bed… but I live alone with no pets! After my heart rate calmed down and I was certain no one had broke in, I fell back to sleep.

          Then I learned on the morning news there was a minor earthquake 100 or so miles south that night, and the effects were felt up in my area. My conclusion was that the “bed bump” was actually the tremor.

    2. Lizzie*

      St. Augustine is haunted as all get-out. I had my 21st birthday there and although I was very drunk, I know I exchanged greetings with someone who just up and vanished into thin air. (Sober friends confirmed this for me later and I nearly had a minor cardiac episode.)

  77. tod*

    Before I got a “real job” in the parks world , I used to do a lot of volunteering. One of my Park Management classes got the chance to volunteer in Alcatraz and get to sleep in the cells overnight between shifts, so I decided to go. We all thought this was SO cool.

    But all night long you could hear footsteps of people coming and going. I figured it was just people heading to the restroom, and I thought it was annoying, not scary. But then once I looked up to see who was walking over my way so I could tell them to stop stomping so loudly…and no one was there. But I could still hear the steps waking toward us… so I promptly hid my head in my sleeping bag. Brave.

    I heard the steps go right by my head and then stop, like someone had paused to look closely at something. I almost died of fright!

    1. fluffy*

      My husband and I toured Alcatraz. Not long after we entered the buildings, I started getting the most awful feeling–despair, anger, grief, madness, if I could put a name to it. It gave me the cauld grue. I couldn’t weait to get out of there–I may have left the tour early, and I stood as close to the water as possible waiting for the ferry. I’ve always wondered how many other visitors get a reaction like mine

      1. Dynamic Beige*

        I felt seriously uneasy while in Alcatraz… was glad to leave it. Also, will never go into the basement of Old Fort York again. I had to get out of there right quick.

    2. Elizabeth West*

      Ooh, I would love to do that. I wanted to go there when I lived in CA, but I never got to. I have been to the Winchester Mystery House in San Jose, though. We were in the seance room and a window banged shut somewhere and scared the crap out of everybody, LOL.

      1. manybellsdown*

        The only time I thought I might have seen something “ghostly” was in the Winchester. But then I thought that some of the staff loiter up staircases and flick a white sheet out once in a while or something. Still, it would have been neat to do the Halloween flashlight tour!

    3. VintageLydia USA*

      I did the evening tour a few years ago on my honeymoon and they opened up the hospital wing just for the nighttime. It was apparently still being renovated to get ready for regular tours but I guess safe enough for guests to walk around in. However, there was no electricity yet. It was lit by a few random camping lanterns (and not in every room.) Very few things are as terrifying as walking in a pitch dark room and running into a huge steel operation table you just could not see at all. I kept thinking of Silent Hill 3. It was definitely more of a mundane creepy than a spooky/eerie/haunted creepy, though. I otherwise had no ill feelings which is odd for me. I get them all the time in my not-at-all haunted home (I know the entire history of the place. No one died here nor did anything otherwise terrifying happen.) You’d think I’d get them in a place which is personified by anger, death, and fear.

  78. Kimothy*

    This is my mom’s story. She used to work in a school kitchen with 10+ other women, and at least half of them were pretty sure there was a ~someone~ who roamed a certain part of the kitchen. Like, several of them all independently pointed to the exact same spot and said it gave them the creeps. A few times, one of them would be working and be certain that someone – a woman, in long old-fashioned clothes – had come in to their part of the kitchen or the pantry… only when they looked, there was no one there.
    A while later my mom changed jobs and started working in a nursery kitchen instead. She was the only cook this time. Weirdly, the same thing happened again, a few times – she’d be 99% certain that a woman had come into the kitchen only to look around and see no one there. She just chalked it up to being used to a busy kitchen full of women.
    Some time passed, and she went out for drinks with some of her old colleagues from the school, and jokingly asked how the ghost was doing (bear in mind she hadn’t told them a thing about her odd experiences at her new job). “You know what,” they replied, “I think she must have followed you when you left – we haven’t seen anything in months!”

  79. Jiffy*

    My sister and her family live in a historic old home. My sister thinks she has heard a ghost (wife of the previous owners) talking to the children late at night. OMG — I would so have to pack up everything and move!!!

  80. Mr. Mike*

    Some time ago, I worked as a supervisor for a security force. One of our contracts was overnight watch at a mall construction site which was a huge affair. The guards duties were to sit in the parking lot all night while performing periodic patrols through the site. Were talking about a huge empty shell with scaffolding and stairwells and such. And darkness. Lots and lots of darkness.

    One night, the guard on shift called in sick, so I had to take the post. I gathered my things and my book and went to the site. I spent some time exploring the construction, as I had only seen it during the daytime when everyone on the construction crew was working. Imagine wandering a huge empty building with partially constructed storefronts in pitch blackness with only a single flash light.

    Anyway, the night was fairly warm, so I sat in my truck with the window down and read a book to the dim ambience of my dome light. Some time early in the morning, 1 am or 2 am, I had just finished a patrol and returned to my truck and starting reading when I heard the giggling of little children. It… echoed… through the site and lasted only a few seconds.

  81. Tilly W*

    At a hospital that I previously worked at, my office was in a closet within the education department. I had grown used to the CPR dummies but one night after night shift meetings I was trying to navigate my way to my office in dim lighting when I came across a maternity dummy. Picture a life-size, Chuckie in labor on a stretcher. I guess she is usually stored in the maternity ward but she had found her way to the education department that night. Again screaming and tears followed and I was granted my request to move my office to another area.

    1. JBurr*

      Dummies are scary! We used one covered in a sheet as the “lump” in a show I was doing, and one night backstage, I swear it moved on its own.

  82. Father Ribs*

    My mother used to do a lot of odd jobs for extra money. One was elder-sitting at this large house that had a large kitchen with two sturdy swinging door with deadbolts inside the kitchen. My mom explained to me that they were to keep the old lady away from the knives.

    Imagine being a young child locked in the kitchen and hearing on the other side of the door the slip-slip-slip of her slippers up to the door, tiny cat scratching sounds and a little old lady voice going “let..me..innnnnnn..”

    Not something you forget.

      1. Minister of Snark*

        OK, wait, I have to come back to this. Had she hurt someone in the past and that’s why she was locked away from the knives?

  83. Michelle*

    I work in a museum. There has always been a joke that the man the museum was named after haunted the place. Things would go missing and items in the souvenir shop would be moved. We sell miner helmets; they are on a stand. They are pretty secure and don’t fall off unless someone intentionally flips it off the stand. We would get at least 3 calls a month, in the middle of the night, because something had tripped the motion sensors in the museum. It was ALWAYS a miner helmet that had “fallen” off the display stand and landed 6 feet away. When Housekeeping did a deep clean at night, they always said strange stuff would happen. Sounds, voices, etc.

    When the museum was renovated, we added a big-screen theater. There is a control booth with a small storage area at the top of the theater steps. There is also a tiny balcony behind the control booth where we have screens that face the main hall and that we use to advertise upcoming events, memberships, etc. Many of the security staff swear they have seen and/or experienced ghostly happenings in the control booth/storage area/balcony. One really large, muscled ex-military guy had such a frightening experience that he refused to go in the theater. He was on rounds, checked the theater and heard sounds in the control booth. He knew the AV guy was off that day so he went up. He saw no one in the booth or the storage area, so he was checking the balcony area. He said someone shoved him and he almost fell off the balcony area. There was no one in the theater besides him but they checked the tape anyway. You could clearly see the moment he was pushed forward but you couldn’t see what pushed him forward.

    I stay away from the theater. If the biggest security guard in the place was almost pushed off the balcony by invisible forces, I’m not chancing it.

  84. Aly*

    I used to work in the Presidio of San Francisco, an area that was the site of a military base and hospital for about 200 years. The old hospital building is still there, but has been converted into office space for several nonprofits. Across the street from the hospital is a row of old officers’ homes, which have also been converted into office space. I worked in one of those old houses, and my office was up in what used to be the attic. The organization that inhabited the first two floors of the building would joke about the place being haunted, and there was a decidedly creepy vibe when you went down into the basement (which housed a lot of the old furniture from when the house was in use, including numerous old claw-footed bathtubs).

    So. On January 21 one year (yes, the date is etched into my memory), I came into the office one morning and noticed that the spare computer in the corner was turned on – this computer was used strictly for graphic design work and was hardly ever touched. It was open to PhotoBooth, and there were about 5 photos of a little girl that had been taken around 3am that morning. We were thoroughly creeped out, but laughed it off and tried to say it was probably the cleaning lady’s daughter.

    Exactly one year later, again on January 21, my coworker and I were alone in our office, and suddenly we started hearing music coming from that spare computer in the corner. The computer was completely off, but there was music coming out of its speakers.

    We moved offices about three months later, so alas, I never found out of the trend of creepy occurrences on January 21 continued. But the moral of the story is, if you work in the Presidio, just stay home on January 21.

    1. KR*

      Not saying that the music wasn’t a ghost, but I wanted to tell you that if there’s a small pinprick of exposed wire (not even visible to the eye) in the speaker or in the wire going to/from the speaker, a radio station can be transmitted through a sound system. I’ve come across this twice recently at work, once with a large sound system for a stage and once with a pair of computer speakers.

  85. J-nonymous*

    I was a vendor at a major financial institution and worked on the same floor as a man who was pretty quiet* and nebbish. After several months at this client’s office, the guy was escorted out of the building. Several women (myself included) were later informed that this guy had been discovered writing incredibly violent ‘fiction’ about raping and mutilating each of us. We were told that security would be on the lookout for this man in case he showed back up at the offices, and that they wanted us to be aware of the situation in case we wanted any additional personal security outside the offices (though we were assured this person could not have gleaned any personal information about us from their company systems).

    Anyway. It was spooky in a really f*cking creepy, stalker, slasher way – but not in any supernatural way.

    * Isn’t it always the case?

    1. evilintraining*

      Ugh! Had to deal with a person like that at a previous job with a Jewish agency. First he called us saying that he was the victim of police brutality and wanted us to help. Then he told us he wanted to make Aliyah (move to Israel to live permanently as a Jew). He got very belligerent and threatened one of the admins, so he was banned from the building, but we told him we would still try to work with him. When he couldn’t produce some of the required documents, we started doing a little digging. We found out he was on parole and was not allowed to leave the state for a couple years, so of course, his application was denied. Nine months later, there was an article in the local paper stating he had been arrested for trying to kidnap a woman and take her to a house across the state to make her his sex slave!

  86. Carrie in Scotland*

    The first job I had was when I was 18 and in a small local nightclub( aka a bit of a dive). On 2 separate occasions a row of glasses standing on the bar before opening spontaneously smashed.
    It was strange, even if it wasn’t a ghost. Perhaps it was a spirit though… ;-)

  87. Ruth (UK)*

    A store I used to work in had the office right at the back, down a dark corridor. There was a lot of pipe noises etc. I had a manager who was completely convinced it was haunted and was scared to be alone there at night. She had to cash tills and count the safe etc around 11pm and onwards as that was when we closed. We would be cleaning etc meanwhile. She used to come into the kitchen a lot and come up with jobs she needed us to do for her in the office so she wouldn’t be alone. After a while she stopped pretending she had legit jobs and would just come out and tell one of us to come and keep her company in the office because she was scared…

    Incidentally I also once worked and lived in a rurally based youth hostel in northern England for one season. The staff area was in the basement, it was a very old building, and there was a church and graveyard next to it. A lot of staff felt it was haunted and would not stay in the staff area alone at night..

  88. bewitched*

    I used to work on Reserve at an Elementary School. The elders would tell us that the spirits of the children who died in the house fires (of which there were a devastating amount) would be called by the school bell each day, so we were to expect and honor their attendance. The Students frequently reported seeing the spirits of dead family members, babies, children etc. I had one student whose baby sister had passed away in some what mysterious circumstances and she would randomly start “playing” with her baby sister’s spirit during class. I once had one of my 5th graders who had been sitting in class get up suddenly, and without a word, and leave the classroom. I followed him down the hall, calling his name- he sat down at the top of the staircase and when I finally was able to get his attention he pointed to a spot on the stairs and said “I have to watch her, she’s just little” but I could see nothing in the spot he had indicated. He said he could see the spirit of a small girl who wanted him to come play with her. Apparently children being spirited away was a big problem and if there had been a recent death in the family the kids would come to school with a loop of black thread around their wrists and ankles. This was supposed to tie them to the world of the living so they didn’t wander off into that good night. Several staff would report doors randomly opening and closing (we worked in locked pods- collection of 3-4 classrooms with auto closing doors), seeing faces or figures in the windows but no one was there and generally just a eerie feeling when alone in the building. The new school had been built on the site where a residential school had been so there were many rumors of bones being found during the construction and whispers of unhappy spirits disturbed. I always consulted the elders after and incident and they were happy to come in and smudge the room with sweet grass and sage to keep the spirits happy and calm. The community was hugely spiritual and I often joined in sweats and other cultural activities, but yeah- working alone at night could be a little unnerving.

  89. Jackie*

    I work for New York State on the grounds of the famous Letchworth Village, we were on an episode of Ghost Adventures a few years ago. If you don’t know Letchworth, it is a place where they used to house the mentality disabled. Willowbrook covered NYC and Letchworth covered Upstate NY.

    After all of the allegations of abuse to the individuals they were moved to Group Homes throughout the state in 94′. Most of the buildings are now shut down and deteriorated, only a handful have been restored for business purposes (we take care of the clients monies and benefits since they are disabled and cannot do it for themselves.)

    If you go into the buildings that have been abandoned, it looks like everyone grabbed everything they could and then ran out. The Morgue still has old glass jars that used to hold organs and body tissue (there are no jars with organs anymore because people stole them but they do still have jars with rotted, dried up tissue), old files, bones, teeth, surgical and dental equipment. It’s a really eerie place.

    We have a lot of spirits that still reside on the grounds. Letchworth is 2,362-acres with 130 buildings on grounds so sometimes the individuals would get out of the building because staff wasn’t paying attention and they wouldn’t know until they found the body days, weeks or months later. Unfortunately, some bodies were never found.

    If you walk the grounds you will see ‘people’ walking but when you turn around, they’re gone. There are also so so many unmarked graves of people because they had no one to care enough for them to give them a proper burial.

    There is one spirit who is a real joker. He will close your office door even though it’s held open by a doorstop, he will take files out of the drawer and place them other places, he will move things around in your office etc. You always feel like your being watched but when you quick turn around, no one is there.

    I came in the office on a Saturday one day because I had forgotten my phone here the night before. I went into the bathroom before I left and said out loud “Don’t worry, I know the weekend is your time to relax so I’ll be out quickly”. Right as the last word left my mouth, he knocked the toilet paper roll right off the handle.

    Another time I came to the office on the weekend I brought my dog. She would go into my office but refused to step foot in our master room where the secretary’s desk and copier is. She will follow me anywhere but would not walk into the room with me.

    There is another spirit that you feel only when the lights are turned off (we have a few agencies in our building so if the agency down the hall leaves early and turns off the lights in their section of the hallway, you will feel something staring you down giving you the evil eye from the darkness. He never leaves the darkness but you feel him there)…when you feel him stare at you, it’s a kind of a ‘I hate you people being here’ feeling. That one I think is very very angry for how he was treated here and probably died on grounds due to neglect.

    Letchworth was a very very good place at one point, It was its only little community just for the disabled with a farm, stores, they made there own toys, clothes, however, I do also think lot of ‘experimenting’ was done on individuals. It was one of the first institutions to try electro-shock therapy on the mentally disabled and it was also the first place the polio vaccine was tried.

    I could go on and on with stories. I don’t think most of them are evil, I just think they are having fun and don’t understand that sometimes it’s a little scary for us. There are some though, like the one in the darkness, that are really really terrifying and you worry about if you step into the darkness with him, what would he do?

    1. KR*

      +1 for the ghosts just having fun. It must be scary to be a ghost, and I don’t think they realize just how frightening their mere presence can be for he people they’re just trying to talk to.

  90. hodie-hi*

    About 20 years ago I was working in a wooden railroad depot building, originally built around the mid-1800s. It had just been modernized and upgraded to house offices and cubicles for up to 20 people. As happens in small tech startups, people sometimes work late or all night. My co-workers had experiences of their own, but I’ll stick my own story. On several occasions I worked past 10 pm, entirely alone since the last of my co-workers left hours ago. I heard footsteps. I heard voices at normal conversational levels, but from the distant end of the building. I heard doors close. Every time I investigated, my car was the only one parked outside, all the exterior doors were locked, and all the interior doors were open.

  91. evilintraining*

    When I was a teen, I worked at a movie theater. Two of my sisters and one brother had worked there during high school as well, so everyone who had been there for any length of time had a lot of stories for me. My brother, who was mentally ill, had committed suicide the year before. One of his friends, who worked in the projection room, told me that the place was haunted, and he saw and heard a lot of weird things after everyone left at night: the deceased owner walking around, slams and bangs, etc. I was very into the whole ghost thing at that age, so he invited me to stick around after closing sometime. I was excited…until he told me he would occasionally see my brother come out from behind a side curtain and lean against the stage. I was out of there like a shot every night as soon as I closed the ticket receipts!

  92. Oswin*

    When I was in high school, I worked in a nursing home and part off my duties was to take the cups and water jugs from residents’ rooms and wash them in the kitchen after everyone had already gone from the kitchen so the dishwasher was free. Well, I never turned on the light until I got to the dishroom, because sometimes the residents who would still be up became confused by the light and thought that the kitchen was serving food and would wander into the dining room.

    So one night, it’s completely dark, and I’m leaving the dining room, and when I pad by the kitchen manager’s office that had glass windows, I saw a hand press up against the window. Now, I know that no one could be in there, because the door was always locked when the manager wasn’t there, and she had left hours before that, since she had to be in super early.

    I hightailed it out of there so fast, I can’t even tell you. This was after I had already worked there for two years, so it wasn’t just me being unfamiliar with the area. Being a nursing home, we did have many people die there, so it was probably one of them, but it freaked me out so much.

    I also had several experiences at the job that I just left, but that would really make this comment long, so I’ll stop here.

  93. A is for A*

    I work in a nursing home with many folks who have dementia. They live in other realities, and I’m used to residents saying weird things. However, there seems to be a trend in one area of the building where residents typically refer to “the little boy” who always seems to be standing somewhere near. It’s very common for a resident to be talking to the little boy (look like they’re talking to thin air), and it’s also common for them to ask us questions about the boy (“is this your child?” or “is the little boy going to come to the activity too?”, etc.). It’s only in that one area of the building, but it’s with almost all of the residents who have dementia. Only one of them has a history of having visual hallucinations. It does creep me out a little bit.

  94. Sara The Event Planner*

    At my first job out of college, one of our IT guys was kind of the “office clown,” and had an especially jokey relationship with our receptionist, a good-natured older woman. One year around Halloween time, he recording himself saying things like “hello, is anyone out there?,” “Jane, can you hear me?,” and “Jane! You’ve got to help me!,” hid the recorder amongst some potted plants, and set it to go off at random times. It went on for weeks, and the WHOLE office knew. When she found out it was him, she got on the intercom and said “Excuse me, I have an announcement to make. Joe Smith, you are the absolute worst and I hate you.” You could hear the whole office burst out laughing. Even the receptionist thought it was hilarious. I still giggle just thinking about it.

    1. Florida*

      This reminds me of a place I worked where a volunteer would set up this motion detector “burglar alarm”. When you walked by it, a pack of vicious dogs would bark loudly. He would put it in random places throughout the office. It was pretty funny and quite startling.

  95. Effective Immediately*

    I have worked at a few places (including my current building, which I can’t identify because it’s very unique) that were haunted, but the bookstore I managed takes the cake. It has been around forever, and at one point housed a dive bar. A man was brutally beaten and murdered in the basement years ago, and the basement is by far one of the creepiest places I have ever been (and I say this as someone who once upon a time explored abandoned insane asylums for fun). One day, I came to open up, and all around one room there were short stacks of books. I had locked up the night prior, and the only other key holder was on her way in at the time–no one else had access to the building. As if that wasn’t creepy enough, we had a play table for kids that we cleaned up every night, and on it–again, first thing in the morning with no one else coming or going–was a ~6 inch tall figure of a man made out of Legos. We ended up having paranormal investigators come in and walked around with them; when we played the recordings back there were clearly voices. I had been with them the entire time in the otherwise empty store, and they played the recordings back immediately afterward, so there was no time to tamper with it.

    I’m a fairly cynical person, but I have no explanation for the things that went on at that place.

      1. Effective Immediately*

        The best part is that it wasn’t just any bookstore–it was a metaphysical bookstore that was around for several decades. Weird things were inscribed on the walls downstairs, and there was a tunnel that ran off the basement with a door that was locked from the opposite side.

        I never went down there if I could help it. The upstairs had a great, mellow vibe but the cellar felt like a black hole.

  96. GS*

    I worked in an office building one time where one of the single-person office’s lights would randomly flicker all day long. The entire building had been a bank before being sub-divided, but that’s all we knew about it. New bulbs, new fixtures, new wiring, didn’t matter– there was nothing we could do but keep the lights off in there. One day, someone else was using the office and had turned the lights on and was powering through the flickering.

    The rest of us were meeting with a client who had just returned from a naval deployment, and as we walked past the office he said, “That’s cool, how did you guys do that?” We were puzzled and he said, “The lights? They’re blinking SOS in Morse Code.” True enough, the lights were flickering SOS with an exactly 15 second delay before repeating.

    That office is now a storage closet without any lights, last I heard.

    1. Noah*

      I think it is funny how we just deal with it. Growing up my grandparents lived in a beautiful old home, built to be the lt. governer’s mansion when the city made a bid to be the state capital. The city lost the state capital bid, and the home made its way through many owners over the years until my grandparents purchased it in the early 1980s.

      Anyways, there is a closet under the main staircase with a door that will not stay closed. We’ve even tried putting a chair in front of the door and eventually it will be open, even if it is just a few inches. As a kid I thought it was everyone just messing with my grandmother, but no one will fess up. If there is a special event, like when my sister got married there, my grandmother will plead with the spirit (or whatever) to keep the door closed for a few hours. That generally works. Otherwise the door is just always open.

  97. GMNT*

    I worked at a place where when we renovated our office, they decided to replace all the walls with glass, to show we were a “transparent organization” (as you can probably guess, leadership there kind of sucked). While the higher ups had frosted glass offices, most of the staff had glass, fishbowl offices with no doors. As you can imagine, we all hated when we lost our walls, particularly one guy who routinely complained about it.

    Well, a few months later this guy is fired (for unrelated reasons) in the worst way possible, where they did it midmorning, and everyone saw it happen (hard to hide things in a glass office). So he had to pack up all of his stuff and was escorted from the building.

    The next day, the glass walls of the fired guy’s office shattered. No one was near that office, no one saw anything suspicious, and we worked in a secure office so people couldn’t come in without us knowing. We never found out what happened, but I like to think that fired guy got his revenge.

  98. Slowlocal*

    Over a period of three months at a particular hour of the day (6 pm) my uncle’s house used to be ‘haunted’: cups and plates would fly from kitchen and land in the bed room, rocks would be thrown at the main door, bed sheets and covers would be rolled in a bundle at the end of the bed, medicine bottles fall of the shelf (none would break through),random stuff fly around the house. This would continue for an hour and then stop only to be resumed the next day, same time. All these happened when several people stood around. Mustered enough courage to walk into his house and while sitting in the living room, there comes flying a large nail out of no where. I was scared to death.

  99. Cath in Canada*

    My friend’s dad used to be a telephone line repairman in Ireland. He was out on a call in the countryside one windy night when a woman ran out in front of his car, and he hit her. He grabbed his flashlight and looked all over for a body, but there was nothing there, and no damage to his car. He drove to the nearest farmhouse and banged on the door, yelling that he needed help. When the farmer came to the door and my friend’s dad told his story, the farmer said “oh, not again”. Apparently my friend’s dad wasn’t his first visitor with the same story on a stormy night!

    I don’t have any of my own. I did once hear what sounded like a ghostly hissing noise in the bathrooms at work when I was there by myself late one evening, but it turned out that someone had installed an automatic air freshener that sprayed every couple of hours. I was pretty freaked out for a few minutes until I figured it out, though!

  100. Librarosaurus*

    I once WAS the ghost in a place I worked! I worked at a historic site with many buildings and spent a couple of days organizing our special event supplies stored on the non-public second floor of one of the historic buildings (a bank from around 1905). I was looking out the window towards the street at one point, where customers were walking around enjoying the park, and a little boy happened to look up. I was behind a lace curtain, so the boy could make out a person looking at him, but probably not my very modern dress. I stepped back as soon as he saw me, but I could hear him telling his family about the ghost on top of the bank all the way down the street.

    1. saby*

      I have a similar story at the historical house where I worked — the “lady of the house” for the time period we were portraying had been chronically ill and eventually died of TB (although in a different house twenty minutes away), which was explained in a panel on the first floor. Our office was hidden behind a period-accurate broom closet on the second floor. One day one of my co-workers was getting over a nasty cold so hiding in the office doing paperwork all day. More than once she happened to burst into a nasty coughing fit right when a visitor was leaning in to check out the broom closet and they flipped out!

  101. Brian*

    My old office was haunted. It was in an industrial park built on the site of a torn-down hospital, and it had a general spooky vibe after dark that we all felt, but rarely talked about. I was always staying late to meet crazy deadlines, and after midnight the activity would perk up. Mostly whispers, sounds of doors down the hall opening and closing, and a general being watched feeling. I put up with it for a few years until one night in 2006.

    I was working crazy hard on a federal grant that was due tomorrow. I started hearing the typical spooky noises – whispers, bangs, doors – so i turned up the music in my office and basically said “%&$* you, I have to finish this. Leave me alone.” That was the only time I ever addressed the energy/entity/thing directly, which was probably a mistake. At about 1:30 a.m. I got the tingly being-watched feeling. As I was typing I felt something cold grab the middle of my right forearm and I heard something say “get out” in my right ear – it sounded like someone speaking normal volume, standing 6 inches away. I jerked out of my chair, grabbed my bag and booked it to the lobby where I set the alarm and then ran as fast as I could to my car.

    Because I wasn’t finished and was panicking about my deadline, I woke up and got to the office very early – around 5:30 a.m. I walked in the lobby, turned off the alarm, and walked into my office and froze.

    Every drawer of my desk was open. My trash can was knocked over and trash was spread all over the floor. My chair was out in the hallway. All the cabinets of the credenza behind my desk – which i have never even used – were open. My keyboard was knocked onto the floor.

    Mine was the only office messed with. I checked the alarm detail and no one came in or out that night other than me. None of us could explain it. I never worked past 10pm in that office again.

    1. Karowen*

      I’m going to tell myself that you’re lying. I do apologize for this; you are likely a very lovely person who is telling the truth, but if I don’t tell myself you’re lying I’ll never sleep again.

      1. Brian*

        I know. Honestly it’s something I look back on and wonder “Did that actually happen? Or did I have some kind of stress-seizure blackout thing?” Because if I think about it too much I get super freaked out.

    2. Lizzy*

      You didn’t give your notice after that? Or request to work remotely?

      Man, something like that would put me in therapy for years.

      1. Brian*

        It was a really wonderful job; the freaky stuff only happened very late at night. I would gladly put myself through a lot, including spooky crap like this, to be in such an awesome work environment with such amazing people again.

  102. Kipling*

    When I was expecting my first child, I worked in a call center for a cell phone carrier. Handled calls from all over the country. One day at work (I was probably 7 months along at the time), I get a call from a customer whose account information indicated she was over 1,000 miles from our call center. After a normal, uneventful call, the customer says “Can I ask you a personal question?” I’m like, what the heck, shoot. She asks “are you pregnant?” Um, yeah… “is it a girl?” Yup, but how in the hell would you know this, crazy phone lady? We don’t give full names or locations, and we probably had 20 call centers scattered across the country. There was nothing on the call that could have led her to find this out.

    Apparently (according to creepy phone customer), she could just ‘sense it’ in my voice. Apparently that’s a thing, or something? Sufficiently creeped out, I wrapped up the call and took an unscheduled break.

  103. The Other Dawn*

    The admin offices of the bank I used to work at were in a three-floor office building. We were on the third floor, so more often than not, we would take the elevator. Many times when I approached the elevator the doors would just open. This always happened when I was leaving the office on the third floor, so the doors weren’t opening because the elevator had returned to the first floor. I rather enjoyed this little perk, actually; I didn’t think it was spooky at all.

    There were coworkers who claimed they had been “touched” or had heard things, but I never did.

  104. Lizzy*

    At my current job, our offices are housed in an old historic theater. The theater rents office space to nonprofits for a reasonable amount, so there is a bunch of small ensembles and theater companies on the 2nd and 3rd floors. This place is the oldest standing theater in my city, therefore it has a reputation for being haunted. The theater at one time was connected to the church next door, so there are stories involving nuns and priests haunting the building. There are also stories of workers dying on the job, again adding to the theater’s spooky factor.

    I have never experienced anything myself, but my predecessor warned me about the woman’s bathroom being haunted by the ghost of a young nun and claimed to have felt her presence multiple times. Another coworker claims to be able to pick up on spiritual energy and says she occasionally picks up on certain energies, depending on where she is located in the theater.

    This same coworker got uneasy when we were touring the auditorium to see if it be a suitable venue for one of our programs. She especially acted strange when we went to the lower level to see the dressing rooms. It was very obvious she was uncomfortable, which is weird for her because she is usually an upbeat, confident person. She outright refused to walk into a specific room at the end of the hall and asked me if it was okay to finish the tour a little early. I had to find a way to tell the theater coordinator who was giving us the tour that we were done without coming off strange, but he picked up on the situation anyway. He told us that several workers on the theater’s administrative staff and maintenance crew have had strange experiences over the years and that the theater really was deserving of its haunted reputation.

    I later asked my coworker if she saw anything and she told me no, but the dressing room area was making her feel sick. The closer we got to that room at the end of the hall, the stronger the energy was and the sicker it made her feel. We get along really well and I find her to be very levelheaded otherwise, so I gave her the benefit of the doubt.

    To be honest, seeing my coworker react that way was quite unsettling in itself. Since then, we both agreed to avoid the auditorium area as much as possible.

  105. Ann O'Nemity*

    I used to work in an old university building that was supposedly haunted. It wasn’t unusual for doors to suddenly slam, lights to flicker, or even to walk through random cold spots. I was inclined to blame all that stuff on finicky HVAC, drafty windows, and unreliable electricity. And then I found out that a professor had committed suicide by jumping out of a window about 25 years before. Now, I’m not particularly superstitious but you gotta admit this makes a creepy story.

  106. KelseyA*

    For the past year I’ve been temping in a 19th century cemetery. Personally, I haven’t experienced anything eerie (except bad jokes) but my coworkers swear we have a semi-friendly mainly mischevious ghost.

    Any time “Ed” wants to introduce himself to me, I’m open.

  107. Chris*

    Yay! A forum to tell this story lol. Years ago (late 90’s) when I was in college I had taken a job that that would go into retail stores overnight and replace the old damaged shelving, display cases, etc. It paid pretty well and even though it was at night it was only a few days a week and I could work it around the days I had class so it was perfect. So I am on assignment in a large chain toy store, you know which one and a severe snow storm had blown up that evening. I had a large SUV at the time so I made it up to the store, but the rest of the crew had not, just me. The store manager asked me if I wanted to split since I was alone but I figured I was already there and I might as well get some of the work done at least, so he locked me in to work. I don’t get creeped out easy so I was fine the first few hours, puttering around, doing what I could for the assignment when stuff started to get weird. The store had one of those overhead muzak systems that was just plain awful easy listening, so what we would do is dial the overhead announcement code into the phone and shut off the music, leaving the phone off the hook. But the music kept coming on, as if someone was going to that phone and pushing the receiver button, it had never done this before when the crew was there, ever, so it was kind of weird. I would reset it and it would just keep shutting off, so I gave up and left the music on. Later one of the aisles had these toy Godzillas that would growl if you walked past them by motion sensor, I kept hearing them going off, not just one or two, but like ALL of them, I was nowhere near that aisle and it was not doing that earlier in the night, ok getting weirder. The final part was I had gone in to the warehouse to dump off some trash metal and as I rounded the corner I caught what I thought was a glimpse of someone rounding one of the warehouse aisle, by this point I was jumpy as hell and I actually dropped the shelves and ran to that aisle and looked but of course there was no one down it. By this point I was thoroughly creeped out, it was about 3 hours till the morning crew showed up so I cleaned up and locked myself in the front end office until they showed up. I didn’t mention it to anyone the next shift we were all there, but one of the regular day shift guys I was chatty with was there and I mentioned it to him a bit and he did not seemed surprised, he told me he had worked night shifts in the store before with small crews and they noticed weird stuff like that too.

  108. RoseLaw*

    This happened recently, NO JOKE.

    I work at a law firm that handles family law, civil litigation, and trusts and estates.

    We recently had a day when one client’s number kept coming up on caller ID. Whenever someone answered, the line was dead, or they got a busy signal. Annoying and strange.

    We got a call from their spouse a few days later, who informed us that they had passed away… the day before the weird, repetitive, blank phone calls.

  109. Lily in NYC*

    I just found out my office has bedbugs and that it scarier to me than anything “supernatural”!!!

    1. Shan*

      Wow yeah no kidding, especially after the stories here about bed bugs! Eeeek! Hope things go smoothly for you at the office and at home.

  110. Marketing Girl*

    After undergrad I was a teacher at a Headstart and was in the 0-2 classroom working the late afternoon/evening shift waiting for parents to pick up their kiddos. I had one kiddo left. Jack, who was 2 and had a troubled home life, but was a happy child. It was late enough for a late afternoon snack, so I cleaned up the play side of the room, shut off that side of the room’s lights and was carrying him to the smaller play side that had a table and chairs to eat. As I was carrying him he said very clearly, “HI! HI!” and pointed to the dark side of the room I had just cleaned up – then I heard one of the children’s toys that needed to be touched to activate go off and start playing music. …..his parents could not get there soon enough that night…..

  111. Weasel007*

    My desk is smack dab in the middle of a 23 story building on the 11th floor. My cube shakes. ALL.THE.TIME. It doesn’t help that I have vertigo that is triggered by the shaking. Hopefully I will be moved soon, but it is unnerving.

  113. Shan*

    People probably have way weirder stories than me, but this happens so often it’s weird. Sometimes when my boss and I start talking about a colleague, the phone will ring…and it’s the person we were chatting about on the phone! It happens so often, even with people who we rarely or never talk to, that our coworkers have noticed and make jokes saying things like, “you should talk about Fergus, I need him to call me back!”

    In addition to that, I also take photos for my organization, and there are often weird shapes or reflections in them. We’ve gone through two cameras and I have my own two cameras that I use as well, and it happens every time I take photos for the organization…but not elsewhere. It’s creepy!

    1. manybellsdown*

      My one not-very-useful psychic talent is to know who is calling before I pick up the phone. Or, it was. Now that there’s caller ID on everything I think it’s gone dormant because it doesn’t get any use anymore.

      1. Lindsay J*

        My mom has this, too (or did).

        She also once predicted every pitch for 7 innings in a baseball game.

        I also wonder if she didn’t have some kind of premonition about 9/11. When I was a child she would often mention her (entirely irrational) fear that a plane would mistake our house for a runway and land on it. I haven’t heard her mention it since that day.

        1. Shan*

          So weird. I live in Texas, and the night before Space Shuttle Columbia disaster, my aunt had a dream about a fire ball in the sky. She was so freaked out when she woke up and saw the news on TV.

          1. Elizabeth West*

            When the Challenger exploded, and also the morning of 9/11, both times I woke up out of a dead sleep and went straight to the TV. Not my usual routine at all. It was like the collective shock woke me up and both times, I knew something was wrong. It was so weird.

            1. TychaBrahe*

              Back in the early 1980s, there were plans to build a launch facility at Vandenberg AFB in California for pole-to-pole orbits. (All of the launches out of Kennedy Space Center or Goddard Space Flight Research Center go west-to-east approximately around the equator. Military satellites, that go pole-to-pole to cover as much land as possible, and especially back then those that were intended to cover the Soviet Union, need to go pole-to-pole. You can’t launch pole-to-pole from Florida, because if the launch failed, the spacecraft might fall on a Caribbean island or South American country.)

              At Kennedy, the Shuttle rolled out to the launch pad on a trawler, a process that took two days. But when you are at Kennedy you can see violent storms approaching with weather satellites in time to take the shuttle back to the Vehicle Assembly Building. At Vandenberg, there wouldn’t be that kind of advanced warning, so the SLC-6 as it was called, was going to be a launch pad *inside* a Vehicle Assembly Building. The entire building would split into pieces and roll out of the way to allow the Shuttle to launch. This was considered *very* iffy design by a lot of space enthusiasts, and there were many jokes/whistles-in-the-dark about the size of the fireball when the space shuttle finally launched at the site. (I should point out here that we thought the launch facility would burn, not the Shuttle.)

              About this time, Shuttle flights were becoming more and more frequent. There were two launch pads for manned spaceflight at Kennedy: LC-39A and LC-39B. 39B hadn’t been used since Apollo 17; the previous 24 Shuttle flights had been launched from 39A. But 39B had just been reworked as a Shuttle launch pad. Challenger 51-L was going to be the first mission launched from the new pad.

              So, new pad and all, I’m standing in the space exhibit at the museum where I worked recording the launch for later replay during the day. I swear on my sacred honor I suddenly had this idea to turn to the guy standing next to me and jokingly offer to make a bet on the size of the fireball.

              Only the knowledge that it’s very different to joke about theoretical future missions and actual people on the pad made me hold my tongue. I have always been so glad of my momentary flash of common sense and decency.

  114. Emily*

    I work in museums and have jobs in several historic homes over the years. I used to give tours in a house where the former owner was injured in a duel and died in the home shortly thereafter. The house was almost always empty, except for the tour guide and guests. Many times while giving a tour, I’d hear someone in the next room and assume that a maintenance or cleaning person was coming through to do work. It would only be later, once I was through with my tour and the guests were gone, that I’d realize that there never was anyone else who came through. There were occasional rumors of ghosts, and I’m convinced that what I was hearing must have been the deceased owner making his presence known!

  115. Roberta*

    I’ve got two.

    I worked at a psychic hotline in Colorado for about a year, and there was often talk of enemies sending malevolent spirits around to sabotage the business. These malevolent spirits were often blamed for technical issues (we had an IT guy but he was a believer), and one of the first line troubleshooting techniques was to lay hands on glitching computers and attempt an energy healing. I worked until midnight, sometimes alone if all the psychics were working from home, or with one or two other people who were often shut up in their reading rooms. Even though I was skeptical, sometimes I’d start to wonder about all the malevolent energy floating around and get a little spooked.

    My second is more prosaic but much worse (and deserves a trigger warning). I worked for a government agency housed in an infamous architectural landmark building that had a large open atrium inside. One night, about ten minutes after I left the office after working late, a woman committed suicide by jumping from the 16th floor inside the building. She was the fifth person to do so since 1985 when the building was constructed. I often worked late, and most of the building’s lights were shut off on timers, making most of the building very dark and eerie after everyone went home. I never saw any ghosts, but between the deaths and the general feeling of despair that permeated that particular governmental entity, the effect was extremely unnerving.

    1. OhNo*

      Your second story is so sad! But the first one… I have so many questions. What did you do at the psychic hotline? Did you give readings, or did you work in admin, or what? That sounds like a fascinating job. (Although I’m now trying to imagine performing an energy healing on my computer and all I can think of is grabbing the monitor and shaking it until it stops being a pain.)

      1. Roberta*

        I was in customer service! So people would call in to get a reading and I would take some basic info about their problem and match them with a reader on staff who specialized in their problem.

        Unsurprisingly, things got pretty dysfunctional there. Once somebody really believes that other people can affect their lives with negative thoughts, it’s easy to start blaming everybody else for your own problems. So it was a fascinating job and I’m glad I worked there, although by the time I left, I was pretty happy to move on. I’m a generally skeptical person and was never a true believer and there was talk that my skepticism was ruining the vibes and impacting revenue. They also told a coworker and friend that her health problems were her own fault because she had so much negative energy.

        I mean, they are out of business now so maybe they were right…

    2. moss*

      one of the first line troubleshooting techniques was to lay hands on glitching computers and attempt an energy healing
      as a former sysadmin…LOLOL. I’m trying to picture getting certified for this and putting it on my resume…

  116. Nell Gwyn*

    I worked in a historic house and was cleaning in the attic. The other 2 people in the building were in the basement, 3 floors away. Out of the corner of my eye I saw a woman in an Edwardian-style dress standing on the stair landing and looking at me. When I tried to look straight at her, she was gone. Soon after that, I was up in the attic again and had to go downstairs to get something. When I came back up, the light- which I had left on and was operated by a pull chain- had been turned off.

    I worked 2 jobs at the time. My boss at the other job had worked at the same historic house museum and her office had been in the attic. I asked her if she’d seen anything odd while she was there and she said “oh, Jane (the last owner)? She used to turn off lights if I left them on. I also used to hear leather-soled heels walking up and down the staircases and hallways when I was the only one in the house. She stopped after I let her know I was taking care of her house.”

    Basically, I saw a ghost and would have dismissed it as a hallucination if someone else hadn’t said she’d had similar experiences there too.

  117. Hlyssande*

    My best friend worked in a haunted movie theater. There was a ghost who roamed the hallway where the projectionists worked.

    He would slam doors, move items, whisper at them, mess with the movie reels, etc. Generally be terrifying. I forget what she started calling him, but he stopped bothering her specifically when she would greet him ans say goodbye when she left. Everyone else was fair game.

  118. Tim-Tim's Teapots, Inc.*

    Not scary, but funny: One time at the Tim-Tim’s Teapots marketing department, we were joking about cats. All of a sudden, we heard somebody say “meow” in a high pitched voice. (It was definitely a person, not a cat.) We don’t know who it was – nobody stepped up to say that it was them. (Someone thought it was me, but it wasn’t.)

  119. EditBarb*

    I used to give ghost tours during college–located in the town of a Civil War battle. The one story that sticks with me is giving a tour on the anniversary of the battle. We were at a building that was standing during the battle, and it was 9:30 or so at night when there came a really loud bang; it sounded to me like a door slamming. It was loud enough that the tour group, who had been sitting on the stairs of the building, all jumped up.

    The next night–so, anniversary of the second day of the battle–I did the tour again. Same location, same time. As I talked, I was looking at the building and saw security sweep the building and then leave. And again, loud bang.

    I didn’t give a tour the next night, but I do wonder.

  120. Beancounter in Texas*

    The original Parkland Hospital was built in 1894 and later used as a psychiatric ward for about twenty years. The building sat vacant for a long time and when you drove by the side of the building, you could see straight down this long hallway. That was spooky by itself, but now it’s been renovated and turned into offices. I’d love to work there for the history of the building, but I’d be creeped out to be there alone after dark.

  122. gsa*

    Remodeled a house where the woman was moved out by her children. Rumor was she was not happy about their decision. Once she passed, they sold the house. The countertop guys were on schedule for a particular day. They were running late, but I was promised they would finish regardless of time. The next day, the countertops were half installed and it looked like had dropped everything and run. When they returned during daylight, they were done and gone in record time. They heard “someone” walking around upstairs. There were other reports, but only after dark… That stuff does not bother me much, but creeped those guys the #$%& out.

  123. ed*

    I used to work building scenery, which meant late nights finishing sets. The theatre had an elevator (brand new) that occasionally would come down from the upper (empty) floors. You could hear it coming down, and we’d stop and watch when it reached our floor. It was always empty when the door opened.

    1. Biff*

      Ruining the vibe here, but I think some newer elevators have an automatic self-diagnostic system that may act like this. I feel like I’ve read about that before, but I might be imagining things.

  124. Marina*

    I had an internship in a theater that used to be a church. The building was over 100 years old. It supposedly had all sorts of ghosts–a priest, children of the family who used to maintain the building, etc. We had all sorts of problems with the electric and computer systems, weird noises, doors opening and closing, etc. Most of it could pretty easily be explained by just being an old building with drafts, faulty wiring, and clanky plumbing, and most of us treated it as a big joke.

    I did find out, however, that a few years before I started working there, a long-time volunteer died. Her husband volunteered there as well, and according to her wishes had flushed her ashes down the toilet there. Possibly the most bizarre way to scatter ashes I’ve ever heard of.

    1. Ghost*

      The theater at the local college here is allegedly haunted. What is it about theaters?!
      The ghosts in this theater are:
      – a donor who the theater is named after. Used to attend productions when she was alive.
      – the theater janitor who hanged himself in the backstage area several years ago
      – I think there is one other that I can’t think of right now.
      I don’t have any experience with these ghosts. I just thought it was interesting that it was another theater.

      1. Sarah*

        Most theaters I know of have a ghost light – a single bulb on a stand, usually on center stage or the orchestra pit – for exactly this reason. They’re all haunted.

          1. Hornswoggler*

            I did a contract for the Nottingham Theatre Royal some years ago (UK), and they had a ghost of someone who used to attend every single play and lurked in the Circle. The person who told me about it said he had seen it. Theatres are always a bit weird.

  125. Bunny Purler*

    Mine actually happened on Monday! I have some friends who help look after my sheep. They were there on Monday, hanging out with the flock (they are VERY friendly sheep) when the old, deaf and rather creaky farm dog started to bark. She was staring down the farm track, next to the field the sheep are in. My friends could see nothing. The moment the dog stopped, the sheep turned as one to stare down the track, then turned tail and dashed across the field, terrified. They then all turned, all 30 of them, and stared at a particular spot on the track. It was very clear to my friends there was absolutely nothing there.

    The track is actually an old drove road, part of a network which has crisscrossed southern England for over a thousand years. I do wonder what the sheep saw on the drove road that day. They are quite a supernatural flock anyway (one of them saved my life by alerting me to the fact that I had cancer!) so it wouldn’t surprise me if they can see ghosts.

    2. Rebecca in Dallas*

      I have heard of animals detecting cancer before! I mean, granted, my source on this is an old episode of Unsolved Mysteries, so could be a lot of hooey. But it was interesting! I remember one of the stories they profiled was a woman whose dog suddenly started pawing at her (the owner’s) chest. She kept trying to get her to stop and in doing so felt a lump where the dog had been pawing, went to the doctor to get it biopsied and it came back as cancer. And more recently I have heard of support dogs being used to assist diabetics.

  126. Velvet Cupcake*

    It happened in a nursing home, so, someone’s workplace.

    After my grandmother died, her pastor relayed to me an incident that had happened in the days leading up to her death. She had seen an older man and a young woman visit her by her bed in the nursing home. The pastor figured the man had to be her husband (Gramps had preceded her by several years), but was confused as to who the girl might have been.

    My cousin, her granddaughter, had died of cancer two years prior, in her early 20s, and her father, my uncle, had insisted that we not tell Gram or anyone else in her town, for fear of it getting back to Gram and distressing her. I disagreed with him, but as long as no one asked, I didn’t tell until after Gram was gone. Spooked the pastor quite a bit (also pissed him off, because he thought he had become friends with my uncle during his earlier visits when getting Gram settled into the home).

  127. Cripes!Jinkies!*

    I was assisting a rather asinine Big Pharma drug rep with his litany of computer woes. After resolving four different issues, he then started printing out some large document and asking me a bunch of ridiculous questions re: why does Corporate make the IT department do this as opposed to that, etc. The whole time he was droning on I could hear his printer working furiously in the background, and I swear, clear as day, over and over the printer sounded like it was saying MURDERER MURDERER MURDERER…

    For two whole minutes, until the document finished and I was able to terminate the call. I memorized his name and randomly Google it from time to time, half expecting him to be in the news for something gruesome.

    1. moss*

      awesome story!! He has probably already done his nefarious deeds though and only the printer can bring them to light.

  128. Liz*

    I used to work for a now-defunct chain of large bookstores. Let’s call it … Forders.

    My store was in an old building which had once served as the local morgue. The weird chill at the very far end of the shop, deep in the shadows of the cooking section, was probably just down to idiosyncratic air conditioning. But there were other weird happenings.

    For example, I had the job of counting up the cash floats and getting the registers ready on weekends. I’d get to work around 7 in the morning on those days. Only a couple of other people joined me on the early morning shifts: a merchandiser, to get stock in place, and a shift manager.

    One morning, as we made our way into the cold, dark, cavernous store, the phone started to ring.

    “Someone’s calling in sick,” we thought, and there may or may not have been speculation as to which colleague was too hungover to get out of bed. But when we reached the nearest phone, caller ID said the call was coming from the store manager’s office.

    That was weird, we thought, and wandered out the back to find out why the store manager — who rarely appeared before 10 in the morning — was in so early.

    The back rooms were empty. Not only that, but the store manager’s office was locked from the outside, as per policy when she wasn’t around.

    We checked the security footage, but no one had been in or out of the back rooms since the closing staff had left the night before.

    I spent the next few hours sitting alone in the tiny, cold cash office out the back, losing count of money every time the air-con sent a cool breeze down my neck.

    I’d like to say that I quit after that, chased away by mysterious book shop ghosts, but I stuck around for another six months, until I realised the company had been blacklisted by Disney for not paying for stock and probably wasn’t going to be around much longer.

    1. Mutt*

      This was an awesome story, made me laugh Forders) and was very visual! You have a gift for writing, it’s in the shadowy cooking section!

  129. AnotherDirector*

    I used to work in a research lab which had been the site of a Catholic hospital in previous decades. our particular floor was haunted by a nun. If you were there early in the morning or later in the evening, you could hear her walking the halls and doing her rounds.

    One Saturday, my husband came to work with me (I didn’t want to be I the building by myself because it was a little creepy). He’s kind of a skeptic and thought that the nun rumor made for a nice work urban legend, but he didn’t really believe it. About an hour after we got there, He glanced up from his newspaper while I was working on my computer and asked who else was in the building, because he’d just seen someone walk by my office door out of the corner of his eye. I told him that it was the nun, because we were, quite like literally, the only ones in the building. He is no longer a skeptic.

  130. Lizzie*

    When I was in high school, I volunteered at a local Civil War museum. More than once, when I was down in the records room in the basement, I had filing cabinets violently slam shut. Once I actually caught it right before it closed. I had never run up a flight of stairs so fast in my life, and I have not done so since.

    I also got the distinct feeling someone was walking just behind me and to my left when I went out walking on the battlefield on breaks. I mean, all of the time.

  131. Cache Away*

    I was leaving work one day and decided to run some errands before it got dark. I also decided it was too hot to go traipsing through the city by myself (when it’s hot, the crazies come out), so I took the Skywalk. This thing is usually crawling with people around the time I get off, but was eerily empty that evening. I had my sunglasses and headphones on, in my own little world, when I felt something crack me in the face. My glasses fell off (they were broken in half), my face stung, and my ears were ringing – it really felt like I’d been punched. But when I looked around, no one was there. Needless to say, I avoided that Skywalk for months.

  132. Soupspoon McGee*

    I used to work at a college, and the president’s wife told this story:

    The president and his wife had decided to revive an old tradition and live on campus in the historical president’s house. Their predecessor had not done so for more than 20 years. The house was rumored to be haunted by a female ghost. Mr. and Mrs. P were not worried.

    Mrs. P was a lovely, elegant woman in her early 60’s with flowing silver hair and twinkling blue eyes. One night, very late, she w. She heard woke up to a strange, repetitive noise outside, sort of a whoosh whoosh clank, then bouts of laughter. She couldn’t sleep. It was quite cold out, but bright thanks to a full moon. She got up to investigate, donning her white robe.

    As she opened the back door, she noticed some kids skateboarding. She said, “Excuse me, but would you mind . . . ”

    The kids shrieked, “It’s the ghost!” and took off.

    3. Dust Bunny*

      I used to be on a folk music forum. A lot of the people on there do reenacting (various interests and time periods, depending on where they live). One guy played bagpipes and did 18th century highlander impressions.

      He arrived at [some battlefield in Scotland] early one cold, damp, morning, parked in the reenactors’ parking area, got his stuff together, and started out through the fog for the main event site. He came around a bend and saw a woman in modern clothing walking toward him. She looked up, screamed, and ran back in the direction from which she’d come. He was totally confused until he remembered that she’d just seen an 18th-century Scot emerging from the mist.

      (You’d think she’d have better sense since there was a *reenactment* going on, but apparently some people are more weirded out by reenacting than others? I’ve done Civil War and Texas Republic, and my brother lived in Williamsburg, Virginia, for a few years, so we’re pretty used to it.)

  133. Becky O.*

    Not really spooky, but incredible freaky and scary. It was my first week at my first job after graduating from college. I am waiting to get into the elevator to head home for the day. As the elevator doors, a bloody bike messenger stumbles out and falls on top of my. The police showed up, etc…etc…etc…Long story short, the bike messenger got into an altercation with another bike messenger and one guy got stabbed.

  134. Psychic (Once)*

    During a conversation with a very smart coworker, he was trying to think of the name of someone he had been working with. As he was thinking, I started seeing the person in my mind’s eye. Then I had to remember the person’s name myself; once I did, I blurted it out. He said, “Yeah!” then “How did you know that?” I had not seen them together or heard anything about the project, so it was pretty spooky.

  135. Ghost*

    I worked at an art museum. The building was an old mansion that became a funeral home that became an art museum. The old embalming room used for storage. It was covered in tile, floors and walls, and had a special trash chute. The room definitely had a peculiar feeling although I never saw a ghost or anything to indicate the place haunted.

    This was where I worked on September 11, 2001. We had a large screen TV in one of the galleries. About five of us were watching the news, which was mostly replays of the towers falling and the reactions of people, when the fire alarm went off!! It sacred the begeezus out of me.

    Normally we probably would’ve ignored it and assumed it was false alarm (not a recommended strategy). But we actually evacuated and had the fire department come. We never did figure out why the fire alarm went off. Maybe we should’ve stuck with our normal strategy of assuming it was a false alarm.

  136. Marie C.*

    I used to work overnights at a homeless shelter that was in a pretty old building. Most of the staff were convinced that it was haunted. I don’t generally believe in ghosts, but I have to admit that it wasn’t unusual to hear creaking floorboards and general odd noises when nobody was nearby.

    A few years before I started working there, a baby died in the building. From what I was told, the mother had the baby sleeping in bed beside her after going on a drug binge and was too out of it to notice that the baby suffocated. (I think this is why even the most passionate co-sleeping advocates say that you should not let your baby sleep with you if you’re under the influence.) The staff member who had been on duty at the time was apparently still traumatized and I was warned to never discuss the incident when she was around. Anyway, a lot of residents who stayed in that room (and didn’t know what had happened years ago) reported hearing a baby crying at night.

  137. Former Computer Professional*

    My office was at the end of a hallway, a few steps from a sharp turn after which there was a door to a stairwell. Per fire regulations, the inside of the door was always unlocked, but the stairwell-side was kept locked for security reasons.

    One Saturday I went into work to try to catch up on the Eternal Backlog. It was that time of the year when you seemed to go to work in the dark and head home after sunset. The giant, old building where I worked, part of a university, was mostly full of science labs, but our area was all computer-related stuff. You needed keys to get in to the area, whether via the front door or a stairwell.

    It was light when I got in but it had long since grown dark. I’d barely noticed, typing away at my computer with headphones on, listening to music as I worked. Suddenly, I felt that something was wrong.

    I stopped the music. Nothing.

    I took off the headphones. Nothing.

    Then a moment later, I heard it. Scratching noises, and a low muttering sound. Almost chanting, maybe. Then it stopped.

    It started again. Then stopped. Started again.

    I looked around my office for a weapon. Couldn’t find anything but a screwdriver. Grabbed it, and held it so I could hopefully use it as a weapon, and then, as quietly as I could but with my heart pounding, I crept down to the stairwell at the hall’s end. I came around the corner and then –

    “Geez, [My Name], what the hell are you doing with that thing?! Did you think we had screws loose?”

    It was the campus locksmiths, re-keying the stairwell doors, during a time that few people would be around. The new keys were to be distributed on Monday.

    I jokingly threatened them with the screwdriver. They laughed at me. We all laughed together. Damn near had a heart attack.

  138. Computer Guy Eli*

    I’m a security officer in the middle of nowhere reaches of the country. The client I service has acres of land with nothing built on them but a dirt road that stretches out for a few miles. As it’s my job to patrol this area on the night shift, I’ve got to be the one to go up and down this road for hours at a time in the dead of night.

    At the time of this story, I was a fresh hire with a new badge. I was going out on one of my first night patrols at about 2AM. I wasn’t quite used to being up so late, so I was a bit sleepy (not bad enough to avoid driving though!) and driving down a dirt road can be a bit boring. I live in the heart of the great plains, so besides the road, it’s just a bunch of tall grass. It almost felt like I was going through a corn maze. As I was driving something darted from the right side of the road to the left. It looked like a bear on two legs but it was moving too fast to be a bear. I was petrified. I went back into the guard office to tell what I had saw, and they thought I was joking. We put out a wildlife notice for that area of my site, but I haven’t seen anything like that since.

    tl;dr- I was patrolling on my shift, saw something too big to be a deer but too fast to be a bear, my report wasn’t taken seriously, haven’t seen it since.

  139. StillHealing*

    I was at work this past February and used my cellphone to call a friend/co-worker at her home. She was out ill and had recently returned home after hospitalization. Suddenly during our phone call, loud eerie screeching and strange electronic sounds drown out our conversation. I could make out what sounded like someone who was having trouble speaking but slowly trying to scream my name followed by, HELP ME! ….HELP ME!” All the strange noises were very loud so I held the phone away from my ear and kept asking, “Betty, are you ok? Betty, can you hear me, are you ok?”

    I eventually hung up and tried calling her back using my desk phone. After a couple tries she answered and immediately asked me if I was ok. She thought something horrible had happened to me and that I needed medical attention. She had gone to her computer and was looking up my office phone number. She too heard what sounded like someone in crisis begging for help.

    It was so bizarre. Scary and unsettling. Maybe someone was messing with the airwaves and knew how to pull a prank? Neither of us knew what it was and it’s never happened since.

  140. drivesmenuts*

    I saw a ghost at work a few years ago, and I felt a ghost a few weeks ago. The first one was when I was walking in the third floor hallway past some empty offices at 7am. I passed one office that had its door open and saw someone sitting in it out of the corner of my eye. After passing I realized that no one had been in that office for months and when I went back to check, there was definitely no one in there. The second one was when I was working in one of the lab rooms. I heard the door open and I assumed it was the person normally assigned to that room. I looked around but no one was there. Then I felt someone pass by me in the room. There was still no one there.

  141. AT*

    I had undiagnosed toxic psychosis for several years, so I’m hardly a reliable witness for some of the things I saw in that time, although on two occasions I inadvertantly freaked a few people out by mentioning things I’d seen that happened to fit perfectly with the ghost story of those particular places (which I hadn’t known about beforehand). Bit vague…I’m not giving details because I know now it wasn’t a proper ghost story, but I’ll tell if anyone’s curious.

    Now, though, I’m in a workplace with an associate manager who has prophetic dreams. She doesn’t usually dream (or remember her dreams, anyway), but when she does, it’s about something quite specific, and it always comes true. I’ve only been working there a year, and in that time there’ve been several natural disasters, a colleague’s cancer diagnosis, a new pet for another colleague, another colleague being mugged, a car breakdown for herself and a burst pipe in the staff bathroom. And yes, she tells someone about the dream after she’s had it but before the thing happens.

    2. Hornswoggler*

      I have those but they’re always about something really trivial – e.g. I dreamt I was on the phone to a friend talking about Japanese businessmen sponsoring a concert – and it happened for real about two years later. I really wouldn’t like to have prophetic dreams about disasters and death – mildly interesting incidents do me just fine

      1. Elizabeth West*

        I had one about a kid in our school whom I’d grown up with. I dreamed he and another kid were dead. I saw him standing by our big walnut tree, and there was a large truck trailer in the background. I couldn’t figure out why it was there. Nobody I asked in the dream could give me an answer.

        When I woke up, I busted my ass getting to school to see if everybody was okay. Everybody was fine. Several months later, the kid was driving somewhere with his dad in a truck, and they crashed, and the trailer they were pulling hit the cab and killed him.

        I felt horrible, like I should have done something. But what can you do?

    3. Amy Farrah Fowler*

      I have dreams that seem to come true as well. They’re mostly mundane things like Hornswoggler said, mostly conversations or hearing a particular person say a phrase. But whenever they come true (generally several weeks after the fact), I always feel a distinct sense of deja vu. I’m usually skeptical of such things, but it’s happened enough times that it’s really started to make me wonder. I think I should start a dream journal… It might be an interesting experiment.

  142. Bonnie*

    In our building, built in the 1950s, almost everyone who has been in the basement has reported feeling watched and then seeing a figure in the darkness when no one is there. The building is six stories tall and sometimes the elevator will show up on an upper floor with no one on it.

  143. SevenSixOne*

    I used to work in a very small store. Many of the longtime employees swore there was a “trickster ghost” there. There was a whole bunch of lore about who the ghost was, where he came from, but “the ghost” never did anything scarier than knocking over boxes and making weird noises.

    I thought it was just a silly running joke or superstitious nonsense until the time I clearly heard a regular customer’s (very distinct) voice say “SevenSixOne, come look at this!” I headed toward the sound… then remembered I WAS IN THE STORE ALONE OOOOoOOoOoOOo!

  144. Lindsay J*

    I’ve got a few.

    The airline I work for recently purchased a hangar.

    It had been owned by an oil and gas company, and they left it full of stuff. Office furniture and paintings, machinery, etc. All this gave it an eerie kind of suddenly abandoned vibe.

    One night before we officially moved into it, a coworker and I had to use it as a shipping staging area for some large but delicate parts.

    We should be the only people in this building.

    So we’re in there, talking and packaging up stuff. And I hear what sounds like talking, laughing, and whistling in the background. But she’s not paying it any mind so I figure that maybe I’m imagining things. (I mean, I work the night shift, I could be over-tired, etc).

    There’s a lull in our conversation and I kind of look up towards the direction I hear the noise coming from.

    She goes, “You hear it, too, don’t you?”

    We kind of looked at each other wide-eyed. We finished what we needed to do as quickly as possible and left.

    Everyone we work with denied being in the building then.

    The next time I went in there, a doorknob came off in my hand as I was trying to open the door to leave.

    Since then a lot more people have started working out of the hangar so it’s not nearly as creepy.

    But one night I stepped outside the door and heard radio noise coming from the guard shack (where someone would sit to let in people doing deliveries, etc). I walked closer and peeked in the door. Nothing.

    I assumed that maybe the overhead radio system was projecting out there somehow. I mentioned it a few days later and learned that it doesn’t work that way.

  145. Lindsay J*

    Another job I had was working in an old time photo studio in downtown Galveston. All of Galveston is pretty much accepted to be haunted.

    Our ghost’s name was Gilbert.

    We all kind of referred to him in this mostly joking but maybe 5% not kind of way. If props started falling or the lights started flickering we’d tell him to stop messing around, even though we knew it was gravity/having an ancient electrical system.

    However, every once in awhile we would begin to wonder. We had a coconut as a prop that would kind of start rolling across the floor on its own. People would close one night and open the next morning and the props would be in different places than they left them.

    However, if there was a presence he was friendly and just a bit mischievous so we never really minded him.

  146. Hornswoggler*

    I have a ghost in my office. I have one room in the top of a very old town-house house (about 2050-300 years old), which is one of the old maid’s rooms. When I first moved in here about 14 years ago, I had to be here a few times after dark and it did feel very spooky – but only some of the time. When I’d been there a year or so, the chap in the office next door casually mentioned the ghost. I said I knew there was one and fancied it was perhaps the housekeeper from long ago.

    I lent out a desk to a friend who needed temporary office space, and she used to come in the evenings. I didn’t realise she was doing so – I thought she was using it during the day while I was away. She ran up to me in the street and said – “you might have told me your office was haunted!” I said, oh, sorry, but she only comes out after dark. My friend explained how she had been working at her laptop one night and felt someone come up behind her and look over her shoulder to read what she was writing.

    This sounds a bit bonkers but when I have to go up to the office out of hours and after dark, I always speak out loud as I go in and say something like “do excuse me, I left my scarf behind, I don’t mean to disturb you!” She doesn’t seem to lurk elsewhere in the house – only in the two attic rooms and on the landing.

  147. Lindsay J*

    The place I had the most experienced was working at an amusement park.

    There were all kinds of runors that it was haunted. Several people had died on property.

    I worked in the middle of the night and I would often be wandering around alone or with one other person.

    I heard a little girl shrieking and laughing. Others have heard her, too.

    There was one part of the park where I just got a feeling that made me really uneasy.

    Near a part of the park where 8 people died back in the 70s, they put in bumper cars. Rumor has it that pretty often something would overturn one of the bumper cars at night. I never really saw that. However, sometimes in that part of the park you could smell smoke or hear echoes of yelling at night.

    One night the park was really empty because of an impending storm coming in. It was really dark, too, and thunder was rumbling in the background. All of a sudden, we see one of the parachutes from the parachute ride slowly rise up and then fall to the ground.

    There was nobody there to operate it.

    Sometimes I would see something moving in the corner of my eye, only to turn and have nothing be there.

  148. Lp*

    I worked in a law office that was a textile mill at the turn of the 20th century. A lady had hung herself from a rafter in what is now a hallway near the bathrooms. I’m sure anything I saw or heard was encouraged by my hearing the story, but sometimes the automatic bathroom faucets really did come on when there was no one in the bathroom.

  149. CrazyLadyLocks*

    I work for a company that’s been around for about 100 years.
    They have an original building that was abandoned when newer buildings were built in the 70s. Apparently, the offices in the original building were left almost intact – as in – if you walk through them it looks like poeple just picked up and walked out. No one seems to know why they don’t use that building anymore (we assume building codes or something) but the original building has been locked and is not used for anything anymore, and hasn’t been in the 5 years I’ve been here.
    Sometimes if it’s rainy or gloomy out if I look across from my office window over to the original building (third level) I’ll see a light be on in that building, and be turned off. Almost like someone noticed that I was looking, and didn’t want me to see the light. But they couldn’t see that I was looking directly at that building from where I’m located.

    Also, just yesterday, as I was leaving for the day I decided to take the stairs because it’s only 3 floors, and I’m trying to be healthier. As I started walking down the stairs I heard someone from the 5th floor begin to RUN down the stairs, very loud steps, and the sound of a ring on the banister like someone was holding it. I felt the need to hurry down the stairs, to beat this person, before they caught up with me, but when I reached the bottom of the stairs I decided to wait to see who it was. The second floor of our building is locked, and it sounded like they were only a floor above me the whole way down. But no one ever appeared and the sound just stopped right before the turn in the stairs where I would have expected someone to appear.

    1. Hornswoggler*

      arrrrgggghhhhh

      That is SO SPOOKY!

      And now it’s getting dark here so I have to go home and let the ghost take over…

  150. Lindsey*

    I work in a gorgeous fine wine house. The house itself was built in 1886 and the family who owned it ran the dairy farm which supplied milk to the whole county! You can almost feel the house breathe as you walk into it- it is beautiful and so full of life and history. It is also still the home of the family’s adopted daughter Flora Lee, even though she is long from this world. Her presence has never been frightening- she appears as a woman in a white dress, happily walking through the Camilias that have stood there for a hundred years. Once while I was outside watering plants I heard her on an invisible swing hanging from the two hundred year old oak tree. I am not the only one who has seen her and felt her presence. The owner of the store has seen her several times- once even in the house. I have heard other spirits on a couple occasions: clapping of hands, tapping of feet in time with the music in the wine room even though no one was there; and coins falling to the floor, again while no one was in the house.
    For years we didn’t know who Flora was. Her apparition was so clear that the first time I saw her I thought it was a customer coming in from participating in a Civil War reenactment or something like it and when she didn’t come in I went outside to meet her and she was gone.
    Several months ago a woman came in with a folder and told my boss she thought she’d like to have these: several photos of the home and its residents in the early 1900’s. Carrie said she just froze because there was our woman in the white dress! She was standing amongst the Camilias as we normally see her, wearing a black or navy dress in the photos and she looked just a little younger than the lady we were so used to. Thanks to someone writing captions on the back we now know her name, and thanks to some research by one of Carrie’s friends we know that she and the rest of her family are buried about a mile from our wine house!

  151. PolarBear*

    I have a few!

    I used to work as a flight attendant and had to stay in hotels a lot. The Holiday Inn, Frankfurt is apparently built on the site of a hospital that had a fire with lots of deaths. It was a horrible place to stay and much of the hotel was actually empty. I had to sleep with the lights on, it had such a bad vibe. There was also a hotel in Edinburgh and my room had a strange empty corner that you couldn’t see around and I had the strongest feeling of an old woman, bent over, loving in that corner.

    I worked in a specialist nursing team at a hospital and the office, along with two other teams, was based on the edge of the hospital site. It had been used years ago as an isolation ward for infectious disease. I had my own tiny office there and was often first in or alone in the building during the day. I would often hear somebody come up the stairs and walk down the corridor. But of course, nobody was there.

    When I was at uni studying nursing I had some weird experiences. The campus was an old mental old hospital which was pretty creepy. Lots of buildings, many of them were empty. I saw an old man in a brown coat in one of the courtyards one day, looked away and back and he was gone.

  152. Marie*

    I worked in a place that had a weird little closet/alcove where we shoved all our outdated tech, for lack of a better space. It was right behind the copier, and every time I was making copies, I would just get a creepy, hair-raising feeling. I’d alternatively whip around to glance behind me and/or force myself to just focus on copies while internally reassuring myself that “it’s just a stupid supply closet, what’s your deal, nothing haunted could happen in a supply closet.”

    One day I was talking to a coworker about how my boss had asked me to go through some of the old tech in that closet so we could finally get on top of recycling it, and she shuddered and said, “Oh, I wouldn’t be able to do that, that closet creeps me out — can you believe that thing used to be an elevator shaft?”

    NOPE NOPE NOPE

    I did clean out the closet and there was no creepiness at all — somehow being IN the closet was never creepy but standing outside it with your back turned gave everybody in the office the heebie-jeebies.

  153. misplacedmidwesterner*

    This is not at work, but still… It was 2am (but really light because I live in Alaska and it was July) and I was trying to comfort my 4 week old baby. Nothing was working and then she just stilled and looked at a spot just past me. I thought I saw a flash, but when I turned, I saw nothing. But the more I turned around, the more the baby’s eyes stayed locked on the same spot (more than you would expect for a one month old). For all the world she looked like she saw someone and was tracking them, that’s the same face she used for looking at people.

    Mentioned it to my mother in law and she mentioned a Native belief (my husband’s family is Alaska Native) that spirits can go visit and perhaps it was my (semi-recently passed) grandmother-in-law coming by to visit her first great-grandchild.

    Side note: my husband is a Native storyteller and was head-hunted to be a cast member on an Alaskan version of ghost hunters. However they couldn’t pay enough to justify him missing work at his real job. (Also he had concerns about how Native culture would be represented.)

  154. TLake*

    Way back when, I enlisted with the US Army and was sent to Ft. Leonard wood for training, there was a standing order that weapons were not allowed in the barracks and whenever we drilled with them, we would have to leave them outside with 2 private standing watch, at the time no one really understood why they did this since we weren’t given live ammunition yet to practice with and they were all empty.
    At night the recruits would do what was call a fire watch, 4 per floor 1 hour each shift. Part of our duties were to clean the barracks and check to make sure everyone was accounted for, after 4 weeks privates assigned to the 1-3am shifts kept reporting they would see a female private run down the hall and disappear around one of the corners with the stairs. We thought it was one of us playing a joke on the others at first, but during a head count we told a our Drill Sergeant about seeing a private out of her bunk at nights running down the hall, his reply was, “Yeah, we know about her, she shot herself a few years back, don’t worry she doesn’t open any of the doors and set off the alarms.” Apparently the biggest issue they have concerning her was making sure the security alarms wasn’t tripped when the doors and windows are opened at night. But at least we all now knew why weapons aren’t allows in the barracks.

  155. Chinook*

    I am late to this because I was on vacation (yippee!) but I did once work at a haunted historical site (which nobody admitted to until I started telling my stories). It was an old mission church and school with a bishops’ “palace” about 10 km out of town in northern Alberta that had been deconsecrated back in the 60’s and started being restored in the late 80’s. I worked there in the early 90’s and felt like I was constantly being watched. One day, while I was sorting through old textbooks in the basement, I thought I heard the groundskeeper walking down the creaky stairs. I turned around to ask why he was taking a break early and there was no one there. I don’t remember running up to the main floor, but I had to sit outside my boss’ door until I could get myself calmed down.

    Another time, an atheistic member of the Youth Volunteer Exchange Group that was the reason I was there came out for a visit. I took him across the highway to see the cemetery and get a better view of the site. While there, he started goofing off around the headstone and being generally disrespectful in a fun manner. I wasn’t confident enough to tell him to stop it (I was only 17 at the time) and, after he left, I went back to the basement to work and it felt like someone’s disapproving stare was burning in my back even though I was alone. Frustrated, I explained out loud that my friend didn’t understand that he was being rude and I didn’t know how to stop him. The feeling stopped and I was able to get back to work.

    Then, for Halloween, the group decided to have a haunted house in the basement of the Bishop’s Palace since they heard about the recorded accounts of ghosts walking through the rooms and closing doors behind them and thought it would be cool. I helped set up during the day but I felt so uncomfortable after dark that I barely could stand next to the building without feeling something was off.

    I knew I wasn’t alone in feeling this way because my roommate, who spoke only Spanish, and I walked into the sacristy in the back of the Church and we must have stepped on a loose board because a closet door swung open. We both zoomed out to the main altar area and were met by our boss who was giving a tour. Roommate and I looked at each other and burst into laughter because we wordlessly realized that a)it was just a loose board and b) we knew there were presences in the other 2 buildings that we both had experienced. Once I told my boss what happened, the stories about the various spirits protecting the site came out from everyone who worked there.

  156. Reverend(ish)*

    I worked in a hospital during my chaplain residency, and normally worked on the psych unit. Lots of stories there, and I really enjoyed that job; never bored. However, my freaky and spooky story comes from one of the ICUs. We had a patient who was declared dead and family wanted last rights. I’m baptist( disclaimer: not the stereotype as I’m female, love science, proudly drink bourbon, and am highly skeptical of all things supernatural), but in certain situations non Catholic clergy are allowed to perform last rites. I grab my gear, the holy water bottle, and get to work.

    Anywho, patient was not as dead as everyone thought. As soon as I finished anointing with the holy water, patient opened their eyes and started breathing again. I jumped back and accidentally let fly some inappropriate language. Granted, so did the nurses, family, and the Resident who confirmed death. And the patient.

    The patient died after an estranged family member reconciled with them. The staff on that unit were freaked out and requested that other chaplains handle bereavement care. More than fine by me. Patients that claim invisible squirrels are angelic messengers? That I can handle. People popping back into the land of the living? Hell no. It’s terrifying and the paperwork is a nightmare.

  157. Laura*

    My boyfriend works for a company where he audits bars at night after they close. He weighs the beer kegs, does inventory of beer, wine, and liquor, and records the waste. He mainly works alone, anywhere from 11pm to 10am. One night he was auditing at this restaurant, which was rumored to be haunted. He told me he stood in front of the ATM because he couldn’t believe his eyes… The ATM buttons were being pressed all by themselves! He is a brave soul. I would’ve been outta there!!!

  158. Sara*

    Used to work IT for a large hospital. Our department was in the basement of a fairly new area, but we still had freaky things happen. Our department had two areas that had separate alarm systems. The first part was where the lobby, training room, meeting rooms, and offices were. The second part – my part – was where the server room and build/repair room were. One night, I got a call at home saying that a major, vital part of the system had gone down, and when I got there, I found that one of our five mainframe computers had crashed spectacularly. Since the machine was still under warranty, I was not allowed to just fix it myself and had to wait for a repair person from the supplier to drive from London ON to Toronto to pick up the needed parts and then drive to my location in Stratford, so it would be anyone’s guess when he’d get there. Due to the heavy volume of user calls I was getting, I elected to stay in the server room until the supplier’s tech got there instead of going home. I’d asked the switchboard operator to kill the alarms in the server/workrooms but not the Lobby/Office area.
    About an hour after I arrived, I distinctly heard the front door to the lobby/office area open (it had a very unusual squeak, so it was easy to tell that it wasn’t a different door), and I thought “Oh, Brian (supervisor) must have decided to come in after I called to tell him what was going on” and opened the back door into the lobby/office area – to find it still unlit and empty! And, I set off the alarms! No one was there, and the door from the lobby/office area into the hall was still locked.
    I apologized to the switchboard lady over the phone and asked her to re-arm the lobby/office area’s alarms, then re-locked the back door into that area. I’d been back in the server/work room for about half an hour when I heard the lobby/office front door open *again*. This time, I called Switchboard and asked if anyone had asked her to shut the alarms in the lobby/office area off or had set off the alarms to that area by opening the lobby/office area’s front door. Nope. The alarms were still armed and had not been turned off or set off.
    I left the server room and went around the long way to the hall where the lobby/office area’s front door was located. There was no one there. I looked through the glass in the door, to find the lobby unlit and vacant. When I tried the door, it was still locked.
    I went back into the server room. During the rest of that night, I heard the lobby/office area’s front door open two more times, and when I called switchboard to check, the alarms were still armed and had not been set off. Very weird.

  159. Evan*

    I have a job as a Youth and Family Director of a church. One of the classrooms contains a wooden sculpture that one of the kids made. I was alone in the classroom one day and suddenly felt as if someone else was in the room with me so much so, that I actually looked up from what I was doing. Not even one minute later, that wooden sculpture went flying off of the shelf it was on and crashed to the floor. No explanation other than the possibility that something was trying to get my attention. The church building is very old and has been other business to include a bar at one time.

  160. NorthernSoutherner*

    OK, it’s almost Halloween again, so I’ll chime in. My first real job after college was at an ad agency located in an old hotel that was still a hotel, but also rented office space. Our hotel was OK… it was the hotel next door that was the problem. It had a very long history but had fallen into disrepair. It was empty and cut off — no electric, no water, fenced off. And it was haunted, of course. People claimed to see lights flickering in the upper rooms. Police were called; no one was ever there. Well, I was working late one night in our office on the 10th floor… and I saw the flickering.
    Just to be sure, I turned off my office light and stood in the dark, watching. I saw a light bulb, suspended in mid-air in the room across from me, kind of glimmering. It looked something concocted by Disney.
    The next day I told a co-worker and we stayed late together to see it. It wasn’t there (big surprise).
    Many years later, that hotel was renovated and finally reopened. And guests reported noises and sightings and so on. As far as I know, it’s still happening.

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