have you ever had a spooky experience at work?

by Alison Green on October 31, 2023

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

It’s Halloween, so let’s hear all your stories about spooky experiences at work. Share in the comment section!

And to start us off, here are some particularly creepy stories from past years:

“I work in a 110-yo brick warehouse. On multiple occasions, the last person left in the building at night – not always the same person – has reported hearing a baby cry somewhere in the building. No source, natural or supernatural, has been discovered.”

•      •       •       •       •  

“For a few years after college, I worked at a coffee shop located inside a grocery store. One morning a week, a nearby assisted living facility would bring about a half dozen residents to do their grocery shopping. Most of them would come in and head right for the coffee shop for a drink to sip as they did their shopping.

And most had a regular order, same exact thing every time; you could start making it as soon as you spotted them and have it ready by the time they reached the counter. But one guy, Neil, had a more adventurous streak and always placed a different order, sometimes decaf, sometimes regular, sometimes dairy, sometimes soy, etc., so you’d never know until he placed the order.

One morning, Neil came in and ordered a drink, paid, and went to browse the aisles while he waited. I made the drink (in a cup with his name on it), placed it on the pickup counter, and promptly forgot about it while serving other customers. Maybe 45 minutes later, I notice that Neil’s drink is still sitting there unclaimed. I looked toward the front of the store and could see the rest of the assisted living group checking out at the registers. Figuring that Neil had just forgotten to come back for his coffee, I grabbed the cup and walked to the front of the store to give it to him, but couldn’t spot him. I asked the caregiver accompanying them if Neil was already back on the bus, and she looked at me like I’d sprouted a second head.

And then informed me that Neil had died several days earlier.

If it were anyone else, I would have assumed I’d simply gone on autopilot upon seeing the other residents, and just made the regular order for someone I hadn’t actually seen come in. But he didn’t have a regular order. I’m absolutely certain I talked to him and marked up that cup with his name and order and took his money and gave him his change. To this day, I have absolutely no explanation and it still freaks me out to think about it.”

•      •       •       •       •  

“I worked for a food delivery service in a large city, in an area that had been renovated/improved for tourism in the decade or two prior, and is still a very fashionable area. One night I had to make a delivery to an apartment on the third floor of a particular building, which was actually a really nice-looking place with a pretty ritzy address. The unease started when I was halfway across the lobby; it got worse in the elevator. By the time I started walking down the hall on the third floor I felt like the walls were closing in on me; my heart was pounding, and I had such an overwhelming sense of dread that I could hardly breathe. I was terrified.

I had to visit the place twice more before I asked my boss if I could please never deliver there again. Every time I had the same unease leading into terror, the same sense that something horrible was happening or going to happen. Every time I ended up practically running out of the building with tears in my eyes.

About ten years ago, I finally decided to Google the address, and search for things like “[city] murders.” I don’t remember which search led me there, but I finally found an article that mentioned the address…because there had been a pretty gory drug-related triple murder on the third floor there, back in the mid-80s or thereabouts.”

•      •       •       •       •  

“There was a period of my career I was working opposite hours of the rest of the office, so it wasn’t unusual for me to be entirely alone in our building overnight. One night, well past midnight, I was dealing with a difficult technical issue and getting frustrated as I was tired and wanted to go home. After slamming my hands on my computer keyboard in frustration, I went to get a glass of water and take a break.

As I left my office, I heard someone whispering directly behind my back.

Our office at the time was a big open concept loft – I had the only fully closed off office – the rest of the floor was just a big bullpen with some half height glass walls. It took seconds to survey the entire floor end-to-end and confirm that there was no possible space anyone could be hiding.

Shortly after I sat back down at my desk I heard the whispering again. It was coming from right outside my door. The words were so indistinct I couldn’t quite make them out, but this time I got a clear impression it was English and a young, female voice. The instant I turned trying to see who was there, the voice immediately stopped.

Spooked, I turned on every light I could find. I looked over everyone’s desk to see if any computers were still on or any phones were off the hook. I even went down to the only other floor of the building to see if the downstairs tenant had decided to show up at 2 am. Of course there was no one there – and I could see from the security panel at the door that their heavy-duty alarm system was on, including the motion detectors. The front doors were locked tight, the fire escape, stairwell and bathrooms secured and empty. I was, demonstrably, the only person in the entire building.

Convinced, I went back to my office and opened my notes to refresh myself on the problem I was supposed to be solving. After a few moments of typing I suddenly heard the voice again but this time saying clear as day, ‘He’s using Microsoft Office’ – the program I had just switched to!

I turned the office upside down trying to find out what was going on. I searched filing cabinets and desks for hidden speakers, looked for concealed cameras, checked the street in front of the building (and the roof of the building opposite). All to no avail. I was starting to think I was losing my mind.

Finally after I combed every inch of the main office for a third time I conceded that, given my fully enclosed (no-window) office, and every check I had just done, there was no possible way anyone could be seeing what I was doing on my computer screen. This was clearly just a figment of my tired brain running wild.

I walked back to my desk and sat down and the voice immediately whispered, ‘Now he’s using Firefox browser’ (which, again, was true).

A light bulb suddenly went off in my brain as to what was going on – and it turned out I was correct. When I had slammed my hands on my computer in frustration earlier, three things had happened that I didn’t realize or intend:

1. My earbuds, which were still plugged into the headphone jack of my computer, slipped behind my desk.
2. I turned the volume up to its maximum level.
3. I accidentally hit the key combination to turn on the ‘voice assist’ built into my computer to dictate to the visually impaired.

So whenever I was actively typing or clicking on things, the computer was helpfully dictating everything I was doing in its computerized voice. Because the earbuds are such small speakers (and were dangling behind my desk, slowly rotating around), most of it was inaudible except for the odd word or phrase that, after reflecting off the bottom of my desk and the floor, sounded exactly like it was coming from just outside my office door. Aside from the actual names of the programs, my brain was just filling in the rest of the indistinct narration. And of course, the moment I stopped using the computer (as I would do the instant I thought I heard something) the dictation would stop … until the next time I sat down and started typing again.

I don’t think I actually ever did solve the problem I was supposed to be dealing with that night — but I figure solving one huge, impossible, mystery a night is probably good enough.

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{ 430 comments }

{ 430 comments… read them below }

  1. Momma Bear*

    Great stories. I think Neil just wanted to say good-bye.

    I liked that they ended with one with a good technical explanation.

    Happy Halloween!

    2. Dust Bunny*

      We had a patron for many years (academic library) who was, not rude but a little bit intense, and he worked until the day he died, at a pretty advanced age. I always joked that if I ever got a phone call from beyond the grave, it would be from Dr. [Intense Guy].

      I never did. I’m honestly a little disappointed–I think I would be so little surprised that it wouldn’t even be that creepy.

    3. goddessoftransitory*

      I think Neil wanted to spend just one more day on the earthly plane, and the LW could see him because they didn’t know he was dead. The rest of his friends and the driver and such knew, of course, so he couldn’t come back in their presence.

    4. Kimmy Schmidt*

      Agreed, and I think this story is sweet! Neil probably enjoyed those coffee shop visits and wanted a proper caffeine-fueled send off.

    5. immunorecovering*

      I agree! Seems like Neil looked forward to trying different drinks and wanted to try one more if he could!

    7. sulky-anne*

      I’m not normally a ghost skeptic, but I strongly suspect that the warehouse has a feral cat population hiding away somewhere.

  3. Expelliarmus*

    The last one is a little confusing to me; I didn’t realize that “voice assist” uses the user’s pronouns! I thought it would be more like “opening Microsoft Office” or “you are now using Firefox Browser”.

    1. LimeRoos*

      It may not have been – he said that other than the program names, his brain may have filled in the narrative. So he hears ‘mumble mumble using Microsoft office’ and the brain says ‘he’s using microsoft office’.

      1. OMG, Bees!*

        Willing to bet on the brain filling in a few parts like the pronouns. Brains do that in a lot of ways.

        I actually witnessed someone getting hit by a car yesterday, and while I know much of what happened, I later reflected that my brain filling in other parts.

    2. Harry*

      I think it was saying things like, “Opening Microsoft Office!” but the writer was so creeped out and the sound was so soft that his brain “heard” a creepy ghost narrating his actions, instead of what was actually being said.

    3. Victoria*

      It wasn’t actually describing the actions in the third person, their brain was doing a bit of filling in: “Aside from the actual names of the programs, my brain was just filling in the rest of the indistinct narration”.

      1. Code Monkey, the SQL*

        I’ve had the same scare! My laptop, for whatever reason, will not go into Sleep mode. Since I wfh, I just lock it and leave it sit on my dining room table when I’m not “at” work.

        One night in summer, I woke up hearing a man’s voice talking indistinctly downstairs. As everyone else who was supposed to be in the house was asleep in bed, I got freaked out. I crept to the top of the stairs and heard, from the other side of the house: “Magnify text. Calculator app. Calculator app. Digital input. Calculator app, nine plus 9,” or somesuch.

        Our 21lb cat had laid down on the keyboard, turned on voice assist, and then gotten comfortable as it talked him to sleep.

        1. Corporate Lawyer*

          LOL!

          When I was a kid, our cat used to like to sleep on the cable box, I assume because it was warm. My family would occasionally come home to find the TV on and the volume ALL THE WAY UP because the on/off and volume buttons were located on the top of the cable box.

          1. Writer Claire*

            My cat did that once–but at 3am. We all woke with a mighty start and couldn’t figure out why the TV was blaring out the news channel. The cats, of course, were back to napping and denied all culpability.

        2. BigGlasses*

          Wow, I would be forever having nightmares about this less because of the spooky and more because of the worry of what my cat could have done/could do because he either unlocked it or it was left unlocked!

          1. Siege*

            My cat has unhelpfully contributed to more than one Zoom meeting’s chat since we went to WFH in 2020. Fortunately, he is extremely cute, so I opt to forgive him.

        3. Happy Camper*

          Once when my sister was young she came screaming and crying upstairs saying that a voice had said “We have all the power”.
          Scary but we chalked it up to childish imagination.
          Until one day my dad was downstairs and the computer announced, “It’s is 18:00 hours” in its creepy computer voice.
          Mystery solved!

        4. Anax*

          I’ve had that happen too – my cat turned on high-contrast mode, magnify, and voice assist while I was getting lunch.

          Very funny, though fyi, if your corporate GPOs are a little iffy, you can turn high-contrast mode on from the lock screen – but you can’t turn it fully OFF in any way whatsoever. I was stuck with random neon-yellow text and visual glitches until I left that job. A bit crazy-making!

        5. Miette*

          LOL. A similar thing happened to me recently, but it was my two small dogs rolling around on top of the tv remote, playing.

    4. Stipes*

      Yeah, that’s directly addressed by this line: “Aside from the actual names of the programs, my brain was just filling in the rest of the indistinct narration.”

      You hear some muffled words including “Firefox” and your brain uses the wrong context while trying to turn it into a sentence.

    5. OMG, Bees!*

      My ex’s story, but a similar, albeit funnier version of that happened to her. Ridding the bus to work with headphones on, she would take off her headphones and stop the music when she got to her desk, placing her phone on the desk. At some random point in the morning, she her a “EEEE!” sound from the direction of her coworker; he said he heard the same sound from her.

      After a few more times hearing that sound, finally found the music did not get paused as previously thought. The sound they both heard was a dolphin from the song “There’s a Zombie on your lawn” coming from her phone

  4. Liza*

    At a previous job, the building my department worked in was reconstructed from old WWII barracks. One of the areas had what we affectionately referred to as a ghost. Lights would randomly turn on or off, some lights that hadn’t worked in years would suddenly turn on and start working properly, perfectly good lights would begin to flicker, and people would hear odd noises when no one else was supposed to be in the building. Sure, it was probably just bad wiring, but we always blamed the ghost!

    1. RVA Cat*

      Just as long as the lights don’t explode and then a naked dead guy appears (Bodies on Netflix).

      1. TyphoidMary*

        I did have a light randomly explode in the supposedly haunted old house I worked in! No naked dead guys that I could see though.

    2. Dust Bunny*

      An ex-boyfriend of mine worked at a small rehab hospital. The building wasn’t that old (1980s, maybe?) but there was one wing that they didn’t use. Empty hospital wings are inherently a little unnerving since they’re all hard surfaces, so everything echoes, and it seems odd to not use so much of a utilitarian building. But in this place, when the temperature changed suddenly, the call bell in one specific room would go off. Everyone was pretty sure it was just bad wiring (which was probably why they didn’t use the wing) but it was still spooky. Part of Boyfriend’s job was to go check to make sure a patient hadn’t wandered off and he hated it.

      1. Lydia*

        What a terrible job duty! “Oh, and one of your duties will be to make sure things are okay when a random alarm goes off in the unused wing.”

        1. Dragon_Tea_Smithy*

          Oh. Well, then I think I will decline being cast as the nameless worker who gets slain in the first act of a horror film, thank you for your time.

          3. Mister_L*

            That’s the reason I avoided horror movies when I had my last job (still don’t like them).
            I’d have to check empty industrial buildings during the night and I have a very active imagination.

      2. Zephy*

        My husband works PRN for a hospital that’s been around for a while and has only been partially remodeled. It’s not uncommon to turn a corner or pass through some doors and suddenly be in a part of the building that’s 40 or 50 years older. His department (radiology) occupies a lot of the older parts of the building – there are disused exam rooms and a darkroom from the days when x-rays were taken on film that needed to be developed that the hospital hasn’t bothered converting for any other use. I’ve never been in there but he’s sent me pics of the hallways and an ancient bathroom back in there. It’s giving backrooms, and it’s almost assuredly haunted AF, being part of a hospital.

  5. Alex*

    I worked overnights alone at a hotel for six years. We had security cameras on each floor and the feed on a screen behind the front desk. A small red box would show up in the corner of the individual feed when a camera registered movement and then disappear 30 seconds after movement in its field of view stopped. It only registered movement for large things, like children and larger, never bugs or dust. On at least one night, I was watching the feed and saw multiple cameras indicate movement in sequence as if following someone walking down the hallway. There was no visible person on the screen. I’ve had paranormal experiences for decades, so it was more interesting than scary. I only know of one death in the hotel, but it was after the camera incidents.

    1. SheLooksFamiliar*

      ‘On at least one night, I was watching the feed and saw multiple cameras indicate movement in sequence as if following someone walking down the hallway. There was no visible person on the screen.’

      Yikes. Not seeing something on a device that is detecting a presence would freak me out big-time.

    2. linger*

      Was there a window at either end of the hall? A bird flying down the hall would be taking a fairly direct line, passing close to the motion sensors, so would trigger each sensor in sequence (it’s not absolute size of object, but the angle of view blocked that counts), but would be out of visual range by the time the camera was triggered.

    3. Mister_L*

      In my last job one of the work sites had us monitor the entrance to another site.
      The sensitivity for the alert was set so high, that a spiderweb over the camera would trigger the alarm when it waved in the wind.

  6. ananym*

    I don’t think the voice assist was using pronouns. I think that what it was saying is similar to you described (opening Microsoft Office” or “you are now using Firefox Browser”) but they could only hear part of the audio (because of the volume/location of the earbuds) and their brain was filling in the rest.

  7. Haunted library*

    I once worked in the basement of a historic building for several weeks cataloguing collections. Once in a while I’d look up and see a brunette woman standing behind a stack of books, always in the same spot. When I looked away and back, she was gone.

    This went on for weeks. As a scientist, I knew that some configuration of books or paneling after hours of closeup detail work was tricking my brain into seeing a figure. But even knowing that, I kept seeing her anyway, until I stopped working down there.

    1. ELF Cage*

      I too worked in a historic library building . This had belonged to a fraternal order. Same place?

      I worked in the basement receiving books/materials on rolling three shelf carts. I was by myself late at my desk with the cart next to it. I had my headphones on and my head bent working on the middle shelf. I saw a woman’s lower body with a long skirt walk by in the open gap.

      Twenty years later I can see the material pattern, yellowish white background with rows of small purple pansies in a downward stripe, very flour sack material looking.

  8. Jen (she/they)*

    Nice ones you’ve got there Alison!
    I guess the spookiest one I had was having to switch off the printer at work thrice because it’d always restart itself to print something (a document with random characters)… Though it probably was some kind of bug, I was in a hurry and switching it off too early after printing certainly could cause some (more or less) fun issues.

    1. Corvus Corvidae*

      I had a printer like that too! Whenever the mood struck, it would spit out pages and pages of gibberish until it was satisfied (or ran out of paper). We used to joke that it was possessed.

      1. Anne Shirley*

        The printer we have at home once started spitting out copies upon copies of the same set of pages I had tried to print out MONTHS ago. Nobody was even on the computer at the time.

        1. Mister_L*

          I had a printer at home in my room that insisted on starting a noisy and lenghty self-cleaning routine at about 2 in the morning.
          Impossible to sleep in the same room.

      2. Red Reader the Adulting Fairy*

        I had one that did that – when it was not connected to a computer or network – and literally any time it happened, someone subsequently got a paper cut on the pages of gibberish.

      3. Corporate Lawyer*

        All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy
        All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy
        All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy
        All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy
        All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy
        …

    2. Phryne*

      Printers are inherently evil anyway, so I suppose they are easy to inhibit for a malign spirit.

      I had a stereo as a teenager in the 90-ies that I would also use as an alarm clock and occasionally it would turn itself on in the middle of the night on max volume for a jumpscare. It was static electricity, the manual even mentioned that and the solution was to unplug it for a bit so it could un-charge (? unload). But in the middle of the night it was pretty scary.

      1. Michelle*

        I used to have a TV with an alarm clock function. You could set it to turn on at a certain time, but it wouldn’t change the channel so you’d get whatever channel you were watching last. In the summer, the USA Network ran Quantum Leap reruns at 10am, so I’d set it to turn on at 9:30 to wake me up. Well, I guess my mom had been watching something, because one morning I woke up to the OJ Simpson trial instead. For some reason, waking up to “boring grownup stuff” had enough of an impact on me that I still remember it almost 30 years later!

  9. SparklePlenty*

    Several decades ago I worked as a nurse in a former convent turned nursing home. The units were built in squares. I’d always stop at the corner of my hall to chat with the nice lady who lived in the corner room. Quite often as we were chatting I’d feel a playful but forceful shove in the small of my back, enough force to take an involuntary step forward. The height of the push could have been from somebody sitting in a wheelchair propelling themselves around. There was never anybody behind me. I think I may have been in a spirits way!

  10. HonorBox*

    I’d heard for a couple of years that our office had a ghost. No one had the exact same story about his origins, but it was always fun office fodder. Things got moved… it was him. Lights were on when no one was in the building… it was the ghost.

    Well one morning I was the first one in the building and ran up to our kitchen. As I was standing at the sink, with my back to the door, I felt a presence walk down the hall behind me. I turned, I looked down the hall both ways. I was still the only one in the building. But it was definitely a presence and I know it was him. Not particularly spooky, but that was my only experience with a ghost.

    1. Optimus*

      I had an experience almost exactly like this in a restroom in my old workplace. Someone came in while I was in one of the stalls. I heard the outer and inner door open, sensed the person go into another stall, etc. I came out of my stall. All other stalls empty, doors open. No one there. It was wild.

  11. els*

    As a teenager, I worked evenings in the parish center attached to my church. It was a three-story house that used to be a convent, but was at the time uninhabited except for our pastor. I spent most of my work time in the kitchen, watching TV, reading, or doing homework; my only duties were answering the phone or door and helping people with Mass cards or whatnot.

    One night, I was alone in the building, and as I was doing homework, I heard voices coming from the hallway. I figured that one of the parish priests had come back to the office after hours, or maybe our pastor had returned, so I went out to say hello. Nobody there. Weird. And then I heard unmistakable laughter coming from upstairs. The dark, uninhabited upstairs. I looked out the front and back windows to see if there were kids in the parking lot or on the sidewalk, and there were not. I heard the laughter again, and, at a loss, I went back into the kitchen and turned on the TV so that if it happened a third time I at least wouldn’t hear it.

    The following week, I told my friend Nick about this incident, and he told me about an experience he’d had a year or so previously:

    The kitchen in this parish center had a huge walk-in pantry with two doors; one from the kitchen and, for some reason, one to the street outside. As Nick tells it, he walked past the pantry one night and saw a face in the glass portion of the door. He stopped and looked at it and, in his words, “I know what you’re thinking, but it wasn’t my face.” He ran out of the kitchen, and when he came back, the face was gone. The door leading to the sidewalk was locked from the inside.

    My mom, who worked there during the day, didn’t believe a word of this, but all the after-hours teens seemed to agree that the place was haunted.

    1. Jackalope*

      When I was in high school youth group I accidentally (briefly) started a rumor of a ghost in the church.

      We were playing Sardines or some other such Run Around in the Dark and Hide game (for those who aren’t familiar, Sardines is like the opposite of Hide and Seek – one person hides and then everyone else finds them and hides with them). Some of the other girls in my youth group were using it as an excuse to run around screaming a lot, which I in my “I’m not like the other girls” teenage coolness found the height of annoying. (To be fair, this likely would have annoyed me even without the annoying gender shaming.) I was much more of a “walk noiselessly through the church and find the person who is hiding” type player.

      So at one point in time I had gone downstairs and was walking as quietly as possible through a hallway. One of the guys from the group was at the other end of the hallway, and saw me but didn’t know who I was, so he called out to me. I didn’t want anyone to know where I was so I slipped into a nearby classroom and waited, heart pounding, until he had left. (Note that he was a friend of mine but I had spent the last who knows how long trying to be as quiet as possible and not be found, and I panicked a bit.) He moved on and eventually I left the classroom and went on my way.

      Later on (possibly that evening, maybe our next get-together), I heard him telling the story of the ghost he had seen in the basement, how he’d called out to the shadowy silent figure who had melted into the darkness and disappeared. I did eventually tell him that it had been me, once I put two and two together and realized what he was talking about. But it was kind of fun having briefly inspired a ghost story and creeped people out a little bit.

        1. Jackalope*

          It’s been a long time so I don’t remember for sure, but I think he was mostly relieved? He had kind of worked himself up to being super spooked about it, and wasn’t the sort of person who liked being spooked like that.

      2. Marley's Ghost*

        Ooh, there’s a 19th-century literary ghost story with a game along the lines of Sardines, though I don’t think it’s called that. Dang it… this is going to bother me. Anyone know what I’m talking about?

  12. happy halloween*

    Many decades ago I delivered newspapers at 5am and my mother helped me out. There was one house that I would honestly feel very uneasy about walking past and would rush past it, sometimes muttering a prayer. I figured I was just being weird – after I gave up the route, I mentioned it to my mother and she had the same feeling and did the same thing. And all the houses are dark at 5am in December – just something about that house.

    1. Dragon_Tea_Smithy*

      I do think that sometimes we can feel eyes watching us, or smell something just below the range of our conscious notice that indicates rot or anger or blood, or experience those ultra low sonic frequencies that make you feel like there’s a malevolent presence or feel queasy for no discernable reason. There IS a reason that people at the better end of the spectrum in that sense (sight, smell, hearing) will feel terrible and not be able to explain why.

        1. Snarl Trolley*

          I find it reassuring! Like – it’s not actually a zombie or supernatural monster that science can’t quite explain. It’s just our own physiology knowing something’s off before it catches up to our conscious mind. I used to be a strict cynic about anything like “vibes” or “energies” but honestly, a ton of that stuff can be legit physiological responses to our surroundings that we just haven’t consciously identified yet. Which is super neat to me! (…But I can see how the not-knowing-it-yet bit is super creepy, I get you.)

          1. Michelle*

            I’m the kind of person who gets those “vibes” very easily. I also find it reassuring to remember that our brains are very, very good at picking up patterns and subtle clues to danger that we don’t notice consciously. It’s good to trust your instincts! But also, our brains can be TOO good at this, find things that aren’t really there. Especially faces – humans see faces everywhere because our brains are trying to find predators hiding in the bushes. That’s why people are always finding Jesus or the Virgin Mary in their toast or whatever.

            When I get a bad feeling, I move somewhere safe. Might as well. But I also reassure myself that it’s probably nothing more than survival instinct gone wild.

      2. allathian*

        Not work, but maybe school counts?

        When I was a kid, we lived for a few years in a very rural area, about two miles from the nearest village school. Kids up to 3rd grade commuted by taxi, but older kids only got a ride if there was room in the cab. One afternoon when I was walking home from school in 4th grade, in November when it was getting dark but there was no snow on the ground, I had that uncanny feeling of being watched. I didn’t see anyone, but after a while I looked up and saw an enormous northern eagle owl sitting on a telephone pole, staring at me with what looked like enormous glowing orange eyes (the eagle owl is the largest owl in Europe, it can be more than 2 ft tall, with a wingspan of about 6 ft, females are generally larger than males). I got spooked and ran the last half mile home as fast as I could.

        I had no doubt seen it fleetingly in my peripheral vision before I looked straight at it and saw it.

        1. Snarl Trolley*

          Holy cow, that would have terrified me even as a full-grown adult. I still have a deep unease about large birds from a similar incident as a child involving a pair of turkey vultures venturing a little too low and close while I was napping in the yard. Nope! Too big! Just too big. I can’t imagine the terror an actual bird of prey the size of an eagle owl would evoke in a kid. Good lord.

          (Despite my lingering unease, I do adore vultures in particular now, and am fascinated by large birds of prey. Just, yk. Both from a textbook’s distance, please. :P)

      3. raktajino*

        My husband lived in a house near the confluence of several highways: when the traffic and wind were just right, there’d be this subsonic vibration that made the first floor very creepy. As soon as you’d open a window you’d hear the traffic and weather better, and the creepiness would subside.

      4. SnappinTerrapin*

        More than once in my career as a peace officer, I have sensed someone watching me from particular locations, and subsequently learned that a suspect had been in that place.

    2. On Fire*

      I had forgotten until reading your comment. My dad was working on a house one evening, and for whatever reason my mom, brother and I went to the place. Maybe we were taking dinner to him, because he was working late. (He was an independent construction contractor; this was an empty house, so it wasn’t like we were barging into someone’s home.) Anyway, a house just down the street from where he was working felt absolutely creepy. I was… 7 or 8 years old? Anyway, I mentioned it to Mom later and she had felt the same way. She asked Dad about it, and he said there had been a violent death there long before. I’ve never believed in ghosts, but there was something.

    3. UndercoverLibrarian*

      I genuinely believe that some houses have a bad energy to them. In the neighbourhood I grew up in, there was a family living a few doors down who were dreadfully unhappy, angry people. Constant yelling and screaming at one another, and while I never saw anything, my gut instinct tells me that there was probably physical violence happening too. I was only in the house once since some of the kids were my age, and everything about the place felt WRONG. They eventually moved and the house was sold. Then it sold again. And again. And again. No family would stay there longer than 18 months, and it always took months to sell, even though it was a beautiful, well built home a stone’s throw from everything you could need. This went on for at least fifteen years before it was eventually turned into a rooming house. There’s no evidence to back up my belief that our energy remains after we’ve left a place – can’t find a citation for that! – but I stand by it.

      1. Expelliarmus*

        I wonder if it wasn’t so much that the people you know left the energy in that house, but that the energy already existed by the time they moved in and that’s what was causing them to be so terrible? I’m writing fanfiction now, I know, but it’s possible that the bad vibes predated them, and because they were there for a long time, it (at least partially) manifested in them doing what you remember them doing.

      2. JelloStapler*

        Ther is a house like that near us- I think it has finally stayed with the same owners for a few years now. but for a while it felt like every 4-6 months it had a For Sale sign.

  13. my cat is prettier than me*

    I was leaving work at night and was walking through the dark, mostly empty parking garage. I turn a corner and see a single red balloon. I fast walked to my car saying, “Not today Pennywise.”

      2. AMH*

        Pennywise is the antagonist in the horror novel and movie IT by Stephen King. Pennywise was disguised as a clown and would use balloons to tempt — or taunt into danger and death.

      4. Jen (she/they)*

        Oh, I see, thanks everyone! Haven’t encountered that character before (or the story, to be honest).

          1. Jen (she/they)*

            Thanks for the recommendation! I’m probably a bit too easily scared for it, but I’ll keep it in the back of my mind in case anyone ever asks for halloween movie recommendations :-)

            1. SeluciaMD*

              The book is pretty good too – it scared the living daylights out of me (in the best way) when I was like 12. It was the first Stephen King book I ever read and I was hooked. The ending is…..problematic, to say the VERY least. But the way it tackles childhood fear and the ways in which we often find as adults we are not as removed from our childhood selves as we sometimes wish we were is brilliant.

              But yeah, actually, the recent movies are pretty fab – the first is better than the second – but there’s something kind of awkwardly great about the original miniseries? If nothing else, Tim Curry as the original incarnation of Pennywise is absolutely brilliant (and terrifying).

              1. Burger Bob*

                I first read it at age 20 and found it to be….well, yeah, that ending is, um….odd. The ending kind of killed the book for me, to be honest. Even aside from the problematic part, it felt very anticlimactic and weird. Up until then, the book had a pretty great series of scary scenes. Maybe there was no real way to wrap it all up that wouldn’t have felt anticlimactic. I don’t know.

      5. Lady Sally*

        So this must be why two of my neighbors had a red balloon tied to the gutter grate this evening. You won’t find me watching that movie!

      6. Mister_L*

        Funny story: About 2 years ago, at the height of COVID, somehow a rumor spread that city employees would hide in the sewer during anti lockdown protest and vaccinate people with long needles.
        As a city employee I know put it: “What kind of people do these morons think we employ? F-ing Pennywise?”

    4. Dragon_Tea_Smithy*

      My dog has a terrible fear of storm drains due to him breaking a toe in one as a puppers. He avoids the drains like Pennywise is whispering “We all float down here.” It’s funny seeing people giving the drain a bit of an odd look after he does this frantic scrabbling to stay as far away as possible as we walk by.

      2. Michelle*

        My dog does this too! I have always assumed it’s because she’s a terrier and has some instinct telling her that holes in the ground may contain unfriendly animals. She won’t willingly get within 100 feet of a storm drain, which is a problem since they are on every corner here.

    5. SeluciaMD*

      Oh heck no. NO. NOPE. I would have had the exact same thought and run, nay FLOWN, to my car. You played it far cooler than I would have! LOL.

  14. EttaPlaceInBolivia*

    I taught in the oldest high school in our county for a number of years before moving to a newer building. I coached some performing arts-adjacent activities that meant sometimes I’d be in the old building after dark with a handful of students while they waited for their rides. I could turn on lights in the classrooms, but not the hallways–you had to have a special key for that. So I was in an old, dark school, late at night, with a bunch of dramatic goth-y teenagers. The Grudge and The Ring were big at the time, too, so of course the child on the team with long black hair and pale skin LOVED to hide around corners and jump out at me. I did my fair share of jumping and screaming (but was truly ok with it, so let the kids keep having some fun).

    The day it became less fun was when I was in our old theater by myself. I was about to leave the space, so I went around turning lights off. As soon as I turned off the last light, I realized my mistake. The exit door was across the theater and I only had the lighted exit signs to see by. I felt more and more uneasy and started to think about creepy things. Just before I got to the exit door, I walked through a very cold spot. I *knew* it was a ghost, so I bolted for the door. As soon as I opened the door, I heard a loud shriek! I ran out into the sunshine, panting and terrified. The next time I worked alone in the theater, I left the light next to the exit door on.

    Then I discovered that: a) There was an air conditioning vent just above the exit door that was the source of the cold spot, and b) The hinges on the door were ridiculously rusty and old and they shrieked every time you opened that particular door. The school was still totally creepy late at night, though!

    1. goddessoftransitory*

      Still, though!

      This reminded me of the tradition of keeping a single light burning onstage in a theater–the “ghost light.”

        1. thelettermegan*

          it’s two reasons – one is for the ghosts, obv, but the other is a safety feature. At the offchance that someone is still in the theater after everyone has left, a light is left on the stage so that no one fumbles in the dark and falls into the orchestra pit.

          I find the second reason to be just as creepy as the first!

          1. goddessoftransitory*

            Having fallen into an orchestra pit, I can testify that it is a situation to be avoided.

            1. Burger Bob*

              I believe my brother’s drama teacher fell into the orchestra pit once. My hazy memory of the secondhand information was that it was a Very Not Good Experience.

  15. ExhaustedED*

    Recently, my work place has started to feel like a haunted house – you never know which administrative horror will pop out of the woodwork to chase you with a metaphorical chainsaw! Does that count?

    1. Elle*

      If that counts, the expense report I’ve been arguing about all morning surely does.

      Spine chilling.

    2. Ama*

      I’ve worked at my employer for 10 years and if you told me my senior management was recently possessed I would think it a more likely explanation for their sudden mania for inane policies and refusing to listen to people who point out how they are destroying staff morale than any other explanation I’ve come up with. (Seriously our CEO is basically not the same person she was even two years ago and none of us long-tenured employees know why.)

      1. Hannah Lee*

        One place I worked that had a manager who was very intense, very serious about random things but amused by things that were actual problems. He was very tall and intimidating, and when angered would flip back and forth between icy fury / calculating and explosive.

        One day I was going by his office to drop off some papers and he happened to sneeze as I walked in. Reflexively I said God Bless You
        He looked up at me, tented his hands under his chin, stared at me and said “Oh, I don’t think he will Hannah, I don’t think he will”. He did not say ‘Bwa ha ha ha, because I’m EEEvil” with his words, but his tone, expression and demeanor all screamed it to me in the moment. I just wordlessly handed him the documents with a blank smile and backed out of the room.

        It didn’t help that he was kind of like PigPen except that instead of a cloud of dust following him around it was chaos and discord. Things that had been ‘normal’ level dysfunctional went entirely off the rails, meetings or committees he was part of devolved into chaos, the company went out of business within a few months of his arrival.

        Coincidence? Maybe.
        But after the day of the sneeze I’ve always wondered. Was he just messing with me? Teasing my ‘80s etiquette diss of his belief system?

        Or was he EEEvil bwa ha ha ha…

      2. starkradio*

        My current supervisor is in her late 60’s…. I ‘m now convinced she is developing dementia. She is getting increasingly erratic, prone to strange rants and fixations. The other day at the start of the work day, she had to move something, and a chair got in the way. She LOST it, swearing, kicking at the chair, really freaking out – and I yelled at her to “Stop this right now, I can’t deal with this, please STOP!” since she was shrieking and swearing, and she did stop, and then she got really embarrassed and quiet.

        I have an old friend and colleague who developed dementia a few years back, and it fell to me and another of his friends to figure all this out and get in touch with his family, and get him the help he needed. He’s in a care home now, safe and sound, so to speak (it’s very sad)… but once you know the signs… I wonder about my older coworkers. I really do.

    3. goddessoftransitory*

      I’m going to be pursued by a pack of last minute order panic goblins today, for sure!

  17. Isarine*

    My main job is real estate but sometimes I work costumes at a theater a few hours from my home. Given my day job and the travel, I’m usually called in for an emergency-show is too big, costumes not cooperating, something that makes it worth it for the normal staff to have to go OT on the weekends. On these jobs, I work my 9-5, then drive down after work on Friday. If it’s really busy, I go right to the shop and work a few hours.

    Cut to a massive show for a medium sized theater. It’s the second week of several that I’m going down to help. I’m on a strong second wind, so I offer to work as late as I can on Friday. I’m assigned my job, and everyone else leaves for some overdue rest.

    Now, imagine a theater. At night. Only you are there. Big, drafty HVAC system. Something called a ghost light kept on to appease the ghosts. The costume shop has no windows, and I turned off the main overheads because they hurt my eyes so I’m sewing by tabletop lights, throwing weird shadows everywhere. And don’t forget the mannequins.

    About 1am I think I hear voices. I duck into the hallway and walk through the entire floor, don’t see anyone. The voices have stopped. I decide not to go into the hall again. 2am, I think I see movement. I look up, listen. I’m alone. 3am, the mannequins, I swear, are leering over me as I sew, and they’ve sprouted heads (they aren’t supposed to have heads).

    I left after that, and never stayed past 12 again. Theater at night is a spooky place to be alone.

    1. goddessoftransitory*

      Theaters have been, as Shirley Jackson describes Hill House, “leperous or unclean–perhaps sacred” since ancient Greece at least. It makes sense–their purpose is to collect and then unleash strong emotions!

    3. Nea*

      All theaters are haunted. I know someone who watched a rack of full costumes glide by and turn a corner when she and the person standing next to her were the only ones there.

  18. anon for this*

    About 20 years ago my nonprofit organization was based in an old town house. One day there was a weird wind inside our space, and a window rattled. My boss, who was somewhat old fashioned, said “So that’s bad. Something bad has happened.”

    Half an hour later I got a phone call looking for a consultant to our org who often worked out of our space (this was before mobile phones). The call was from another country, where the consultant from from. I said they we’re there and offered to take a message. There was some hesitation and then the person said “Yes. Tell them that [name] is dead. Call home immediately.”

    I later learned that person was the consultants fiancé and that he had killed himself.

      2. anon for this*

        Sorry. I meant the consultant in question did not (nor did I nor most people in the org). And it was in the mid or late 90s. A bit more than 20.

        @WantonSeedStitch – yes. Very disturbing and sad.

        1. Momma Bear*

          Agreed.

          I was starting my sophomore year of college in the 90s and did not have a cell phone yet. I went to my friend’s house and her parents told me to call home immediately…a relative had died. I really feel for OP’s coworker.

      5. Polaris*

        They did exist, but I’d say that twenty years ago you did still run into people who didn’t have one. What did exist were also not quite as “smart” as our modern phones.

        1. anon for this*

          The comment from @it’s me makes me realize it was longer ago than I originally thought. Mid or late 90s was not about 20 years ago – it’s more.

            1. anon for this*

              Yeah.

              The voice saying “[name] is dead” is seared into my mind. I don’t remember the wind and window rattling much, because I did not it all very seriously at that point, despite my boss saying it was bad. But the message. Uggh.

        2. No Longer Gig-less Data Analyst*

          When my husband and I moved to WI from NY in August 2001, we had one flip cell phone between the 2 of us. We had to take 2 cars and bought 2 way radios so we could communicate with each other on the 16 hour drive. It was not unusual at all 20 years ago to not have a personal cell phone.

          1. Bast*

            The whole “everyone has a cell phone” thing really didn’t become… well A THING where I live until I was high school age, so around mid to late 2000s. By 2010 I think most people had them, but most definitely not everyone had a smartphone. In the early 2000s, the only people I can think of who had cell phones were particularly wealthy individuals that were up on technology. Even a good deal of individuals with means who needed to be contacted while out and about (doctors, lawyers) still had beepers.

            1. Chirpy*

              Granted, I was one of the last of my friends who didn’t have a cell phone, but I got mine in 2010. My parents got two around 1998/99, but they only used them for traveling/ emergencies and basically never turned them on.

              They were pretty uncommon before around 2005 where I lived.

          2. londonedit*

            I got my first mobile phone when I passed my driving test in 1999, because we lived in a rural area and my parents wanted me to be able to call for help if I broke down or whatever. I remember only two or three of us had mobiles at that point, and text messaging was this huge novelty – I remember having a conversation where we marvelled at the idea that anyone would bother texting someone when you could just ring them. Texts were also limited to a small number of characters, and on my tariff they cost 25p to send and 25p to receive, so no one really used them!

            Over my time at uni (2000-2003) more people got mobiles, but it still wasn’t guaranteed that your friends would have one, and of course smartphones weren’t a thing and there was no internet in your pocket. You might be able to phone someone if you were running late, but you’d have to make sure you knew where you were going – I had a London A-Z which I carried everywhere with me so I could look up directions to wherever I was going.

          3. SimonTheGreyWarden*

            In the 1990s, we would sometimes caravan to my grandparents’ house if I was going to need my car and my parents would need theirs (it was roughly a 6 hour drive). We had my mom’s old brick of a phone for emergencies. To talk to each other we used CB radios. I got my first phone in 2002 and it was so clunky – and I was one of the first in my friend group to go ahead and get a phone.

            1. Michelle*

              IIRC, I got my first phone for Mother’s Day in 2007. My husband bought me one of those pink Motorola flip phones, which I remember insisting I didn’t need, but it was so pretty I was pleased anyway. He’d just gotten his first phone for work the year before.

      6. BoratVoiceMyWife*

        imagine logging on to Al Gore’s internet and thinking that was a useful thing to reply with

        2. Broadway Duchess*

          I don’t think it was meant as a judge comment or a gotcha or nitpick. I think it was more a, “Wait. What?” I had the same thought because I got my first cell phone in ’97. By 2003, “everyone” in my area had one (Chicago ‘burbs), so I was confused on what the OP’s detail in the story was meant to add or suggest — not enough to comment on it or derail, but enough to momentarily start remembering what was going on in 2003.

    3. ZugTheMegasaurus*

      How awful. My family had an experience with a similar old-fashioned “omen.” Some of my aunts and cousins were packed into a minivan and driving down the road when they saw these awe-inspiring sunbeams coming out of the clouds toward the ground below (Google tells me these are called “crepuscular rays” if anyone wants to see an example). My cousins started commenting on how beautiful it was when my great-aunt harshly shushed them, saying those sunbeams meant that “the Lord was calling someone home,” and that you should never comment on such things lest you draw the attention to yourself and your loved ones.

      They argued a little bit about whether God would create such a beautiful thing for such a terrible purpose, but ultimately stopped out of respect for my great-aunt. When they all arrived home, the phone was ringing off the hook. Another elderly relative had suddenly passed away – at the exact time they were talking about those sunbeams.

      1. saf*

        Driving down the road one day, 40+ years ago. My little brother, then under 6, say those and said “look, God is speaking!”

        After we all laughed, we thought about it. That IS how painters always depict God speaking!

          1. Death doulas are a thing now*

            I’m sorry for your loss.

            I do agree that the sun rays coming from behind a cloud are a typical way to show Divine presence or even communication – in my picture bibles as a child, which only showed the easily illustrated stories, that’s how the prescence of the Divine was shown.

            When I told my mom that when I was a bit older, that every time I saw those clouds I’d think of “god talking” she commented that yes – that cloud and sun rays was god talking over, say, the industrial plant or the Walmart shopping center or whatever silly very earthly place seemed to be below the cloud.

            I’ve heard it said that the prescence of the Divine is felt most when the dividing line between this world and the next is very thin – think of childbirth, when 2 lives are at stake or yes, death, even in old age.

            Both observations and superstitions can be right.

        2. Airy*

          My mum reckons if you step into one of those sunbeams you get a mission from God like the Blues Brothers.
          She is not religious. She just likes the Blues Brothers.

      2. Crepuscular Sunshine*

        My family always calls them Hallelujah Rays or Jesus Rays (I was delighted once I took a meteorology class and learned their proper name; I hadn’t known there was one) and we *always* comment on how pretty they are. It would have never occurred to me that anyone considered them a bad omen.

  19. OyHiOh*

    I worked in a theatre for a couple years. A theatre housed in a building that, in its previous life, had been a restaurant where the dirty back room deals that fueled the city happened around a poker table in the basement. A basement you accessed through the back of the kitchen in which I frequently work alone, and sometimes late at night.

    That building was just generally creepy. I never experienced anything more specific than cold draft in places there generally weren’t cold drafts, but plenty of other people did. Footsteps when no one else should be there, door open that you knew you closed (or the reverse), creaks and thuds that were absolutely out of place.

    1. RVA Cat*

      I’m picturing the restaurant from The Godfather where Michael gets the gun hidden in the bathroom.

      1. OyHiOh*

        The building is closer to a diner in design, than that, but otherwise checks out!

        Unrelated but humorous, the theatre company inherited the restaurant’s remaining bar stock when they took the lease (there are ways to document and inventory this for the purposes of reporting to the alcohol board). I have many an imaginative story as to why our liquor inventory included no less than 16 unopened untouched bottles of creme de menthe!

  20. Lainey L. L-C*

    When I worked nights and would occasionally have to stay over after everyone else left, sometimes I would hear what sounded like someone else typing and there was no one around. Other people also reported the same thing.

    Also something that would happen at night quite frequently – our desk phones had a speaker button and you’d be sitting there working and suddenly you’d hear the dial tone and the speaker button would be on. It was one specific area that the desks faced the wall so no way someone could walk by and push it, they’d have to lean over your shoulder. I remember one person’s phone did it more than others, but all in that area would do it occasionally. Very strange.

    1. Cowgirlinhiding*

      We have the same phone thing in one of our conference rooms. Randomly it will turn on and have a busy signal. I have to get up and go turn it off. Weird.

      1. Lainey L. L-C*

        Yeah we got used to it and it was just an annoying thing. Especially, like you, when its a phone where no one was sitting and you’d have to get up and turn it off.

  21. The Prettiest Curse*

    This is not strictly speaking a spooky experience, but I think it fits with the Halloween theme.

    A few months ago, I had to help out at an event that was being held at another new building in our office park. There were boxes all over the floor around the registration desk, and eventually they got moved, which revealed a glass panel in the floor – and a real skeleton (many centuries old) underneath the glass panel. My colleague didn’t see the panel or the skeleton, so was a bit startled when the boxes were moved!

    Turns out that the skeleton was found during excavations for the building (this is in the UK, if you dig deep enough in this country, you will find human remains just about anywhere) and there’s apparently now a trend to incorporate remains and other buried items found during excavations into newly constructed buildings. I’m not sure exactly how old the skeleton is, but remains dating back to the Bronze Age have been found elsewhere in the area.

    1. BellyButton*

      It is cool and spooky AF when you see it. I guess it is better than removing the remains?? I have seen enough horror movies to know that is just asking for trouble ;)

    2. Zephy*

      I remember seeing an article, maybe on Atlas Obscura or similar, about a Bronze Age home/other human settlement area being similarly found during construction and preserved under glass, but the thing being constructed was a grocery store or something. So, you know, you get halfway down the bread aisle and then suddenly there’s a window in the floor into an ancient living room.

      1. Cristina in England*

        Thanks so much for this, I think I found it! (I love Atlas Obscura) If you search on Atlas Obscura for Aungier Street Lidl Archaeology, is that it?

      2. lpuk*

        I grew up in Chester and one of the stores had a dressing room that had a glassed panel above an exposed bit of roman hypocaust. No skeleton though

    3. Charlotte Lucas*

      Not exactly the same thing, but an archaeology professor at one of my alma maters donated his bones (and those of his Irish wolfhounds, because why not?) to the Smithsonian. His specialty was human osteology.

      The bones were on display for a time, but not sure if they still are.

      1. coffee*

        Jeremy Bentham, a philosopher who died in 1832, had his skeleton and head preserved, and then dressed up in his clothes and posed sitting in his favourite chair. After a bit of moving around he has wound up at UCL (University College London) and can still be seen there.

        1. coffee*

          Here’s some more information, including on how to visit him: https://www.ucl.ac.uk/bentham-project/about-jeremy-bentham/auto-icon

          Note that the article does include a picture of his body as it is now after being prepared for display – in the picture you can only see his clothes and a wax version of his head, but FYI in case that might be disturbing to anyone. Personally, knowing that it’s what he wanted, I find it less spooky and more interesting, but other people’s milage will probably vary.

          1. The Prettiest Curse*

            I graduated from another college of the University of London and remember hearing about students from other colleges stealing Jeremy Bentham’s body as a joke. Usually, they’d do it before an important rugby match or something. Then students from UCL would steal something from the other college and an exchange would take place. The high jinks stopped after they put the body in its current, more secure location.

            1. coffee*

              This kind of prank seems like one with logistical challenges. I wonder if anyone did a Weekend at Bernie’s style heist.

              1. The Prettiest Curse*

                I always wondered how they got him to stay in one piece! I think he used to be on a display in a publicly accessible lobby without much in the way of security, so that probably made it easier.

            2. londonedit*

              Same. They used to steal our lion on a fairly regular basis, which must have been quite difficult to do as I think it’s made of copper and is presumably quite heavy.

  23. AMH*

    Working alone, stressed and miserable at 6am on a dark November morning. Our (small) office was on the basement floor of a house with apartments above. I live and work in a very seasonal area, so by November it was completely empty around me. The few businesses on my road were either closed for the season or wouldn’t open till 10 or later. As I’m working, the door from the common area that separated our office from the other 2 on the floor opened. I had believed I had it locked but sometimes we got lazy after using the restroom. Thinking it was one of the other office mates or maybe a resident from the apartments upstairs, I pushed back in my chair to look. A very tall man (whom I’m sure my imagination is making significantly taller) in a long black coat and a scarf muffling his face made eye contact with me and STALKED through the office past me to the reception area and front door. He ignored my attempts to talk to him. Shaken up, I looked outside and saw no sign of him. Still no cars in the driveway, no lights on in any other office or in the apartments upstairs.

    A few days later, I told this story to one of the other renters on the floor. He told me that about a year prior, he had seen the same man go into our offices at about 7pm at night. Thought it was a bit odd but really didn’t think too much of it, since it wasn’t unusual for me or my boss to work crazy hours. We definitely lock the common room door every night. I don’t know who that man is and I’ve left that office and job but sometimes I think about his silent stalk across the office and I double check my doors.

        1. TC inKC*

          Think before you ask these questions, Mitch. Twenty points higher than me? Thinks a big guy like that can wear his clothes?

      2. Dido*

        Well, he was the opposite of discreet. He could’ve pretended to be an employee of the other office and the commenter would’ve thought nothing of it

  24. caryatid*

    As a graduate student, I had a long term temp job working in an office building doing filing and record storing – a lot of paperwork. I worked with one other young woman in the basement of an office building, and we were the only ones on that floor. There was a corridor that stretched the length of the building, and all the offices doors were on the left of the corridor. My coworker and I shared the first room; all the rest of the offices were full of stored files, boxes, junk – no people.

    Once, we were coming back to our office after a break. I was following my coworker into our little office room when I sideways glanced down the corridor and did a double take because I thought I saw someone at the far end. There was NEVER anyone else on that floor so it caught me by surprise. My coworker noticed my double take and asked “Did you see someone, too?” So we had both seen a person at the end of the hall.

    For whatever reason, I immediately tore down the hall to investigate, looking in every empty office as I went, my coworker on my heels. We never found any trace of anyone but it sure creeped us out for the rest of our time there!

  25. Green Goose*

    I was teaching in Seoul and part of my employee benefits was school-provided housing. All the other American teachers were housed in an apartment that was one block from the school but I was housed in a building in an adjacent neighborhood about a 15 minute walk away. It had to do with availability and was random that I was assigned there. Even though Seoul is the safest city I’ve ever lived in, there was something off-putting about my apartment. I always had a creepy feeling there and felt like I was being watched.

    There were a few occasions when I came home and things seemed to have been moved around and my landlord had denied ever entering my apartment. It put me on edge because I was a woman living alone but tried to bury it in my mind.

    In Seoul a lot of the bathrooms are wet bathrooms, meaning that there is a drain in the middle of the room and no separated space for a shower. The shower head was just above my toilet and water would go everywhere leaving the room permanently damp. Because of this there were shower shoes in the bathroom and I’d never go in with socks on.

    One day I came home and there was a balled up sock on top of my toilet and I felt my blood run cold. It was so creepily out of place and it was the last straw. I called the school owner and she agreed to let me move into the building where the other teachers lived.

    I had to move on my own, and on my moving day I had to walk 15-20 minutes with 1-2 boxes at a time to move so it ended up taking me the entire day. Some friends were able to help me earlier in the day but by the afternoon I was on my own. I had wanted to be fully moved out before it got dark, but on my penultimate trip the sun was setting and I just had this feeling of dread. I sped walked back to my apartment but by the time I got back it was dark out.

    There were two big glass doors that opened into the “lobby” of the building which immediately led to a staircase that took me to my apartment. Since it was dark outside the lobby and stairwell were also dark. I had an empty box in my hand to get the rest of my belongings and just as I was about to enter I noticed a slightly darker mass on the almost pitch black staircase. Instead of opening the glass doors slowly I kicked them open so I could stay a foot or so away and the weight of the swinging doors set on the motion lights and revealed a man on the staircase. He was so startled by the doors that he jumped up and then just ran out of the building.

    So he had been sitting in the dark, on the stairs, for whatever reason and my heart felt like it was going to explode out of my chest. I had only been gone about 40 minutes at that point. I was so frightened that I ran up into the apartment threw everything into the box that could fit and just left everything else. I jogged with the box, looking over my shoulder the whole way to my new apartment and I never went back again. There was something so bad about that place and I’m glad I got out of there.

    2. AMH*

      There’s a series of really good indie horror games by a dev team named Chillas art, which mostly focus on creepy people versus supernatural creepiness. This feels like a moment from one of their games — which is to say, terrifying and yet oh so easily imagined. I’m glad you were safe and ok!

      1. Starscourge Savvy*

        I was going to mention their games!! I discovered them through a livestream of The Convenience Store and have been obsessed since. This story especially has their energy!

          1. AMH*

            The Closing Shift and Parasocial by them might hit a bit too close to home as far as your experience, just as a warning!

        2. AMH*

          yes, exactly! oh man, I love their games so much. I consider them cozy horror somehow, to the bemusement of my friends who just consider them horror.

    3. Raisin Walking to the Moon*

      Ugh, I’m so sorry that happened to you. I know someone who had a similar situation, where the landlord was renovating his own apartment and would bring his elderly mother into the rental to nap in the middle of the day. When my friend came home unexpectedly, the landlord quickly tried to make it seem like he was fixing some problem, but I guess it was obvious that his mother was just groggily waking up.

    5. Phryne*

      Ugh, that is horrible. I’d have nightmares.
      In a slightly less creepy but equally horrible story: a good friend of mine was living in a sort of bedsit with a landlord. The unit was self-contained, one big room wit tiny kitchen and bath and her own front door. The landlady had made a big point of explaining that she only had a key for emergency reasons and that this key was in a sealed envelope in a safe. But com next winter she had started making remarks about my friend leaving the heating on when she was out, and my friend was low-key wondering how LL would know that.
      But then she started to notice that stuff seemed to move when she was out. Once she was sure she was not imagining it, she set up a webcam to record and what she saw was not LL checking the radiators, which in itself would be bad enough, but LL’s husband rifling trough the papers on her desk…
      She was all in a panic, as she was in a different country from all her friends and family and even a bit unsure on local laws on this, but fortunately the director at her workplace (a woman who had until then been very formal and a bit distant) sprung into action and helped her with all the legalities and support and finding a new place to stay. (She filed a report and with the help of the police came to an agreement with LL not to pursue if they payed for all costs for moving etc.)

  26. PricklyPearOverThere*

    When I worked in retail at a store inside a mall, we would often have to come in very early or stay late at night to do things like shipment processing, inventory, or updating displays. One early morning (around 4 AM), we (my manager, coworker, and I) were coming in to do shipment and were also supposed to relieve a night security guard who had been monitoring some after hours maintenance work going on in the store. When we arrived, the guard was visibly relieved to see us, explaining that our store was “really creepy” and that he had been hearing strange noises all night. He even pointed out that a mirror had “flown” off of a display and shattered, showing us the broken shards on the floor in one of the aisles. We thanked him and told him we’d take it from there.

    Out of curiosity, my manager wanted review the video tapes to see if the mirror had been jostled at all during the maintenance work. We all headed into the back room to put our things away and see what was on the security footage. As we entered the back, three things happened in rapid succession:
    1. The overhead light just around the corner turned off,
    2. We heard a huge crash, and
    3. Something big and heavy slammed further back in the stock room.

    Turning the corner, we saw that both of the fluorescent light tubes from the overhead fixture had somehow fallen loose and smashed on the ground. We all moved carefully around it and looked for a sign of anything else being out of place. Nothing caught our eye, so my manager went into the office to review tapes. Not only did we catch the mirror flying off of the display (the workers were nowhere near it when it did), but we also saw what made the slamming noise as we entered the back room: one of our rolling storage shelves started rolling on its own at an alarming speed, sending it crashing into the others.

    We never really figured what was going on; was it was a series of weird coincidences that felt bigger because the guard had mentioned feeling creeped out, or was there some supernatural being unhappy that we had let these strangers run amok in their store all night? Who knows!

  27. Honeygrim*

    At my first academic library job (in the big main library building at my alma mater), I was frequently the first employee to arrive at work on my floor. The large upstairs wing where I worked usually wasn’t very busy until later in the day, and on days I didn’t have a student worker to help me open the wing, I was often alone for an hour or two. My desk was in a little room right next to the reference desk in the wing, and if I was sitting in my office I could see most–but not all of–the reference desk.

    One morning, shortly after I arrived and was settling at my desk, I distinctly heard someone say my name: “Honeygrim.” I looked up and didn’t see anyone through the doorway, so I got up and walked out of my office to help the person who I assumed was standing just out of sight of my desk. But there was no one there. There was no one anywhere in the wing. And after walking around, I determined there was no one anywhere else on that floor. But I know I heard someone call my name.

    That Civil-War-era building is famously haunted by its namesake, and I heard many creepy stories of ghostly sightings from coworkers and students. But that was the first time I got thoroughly spooked.

    2. LadyVet*

      I did work-study in my undergrad school’s main library, and it was also allegedly haunted.

      It did make me feel better to realize that due to the open space around where the stacks connected between floors, sounds from other floors would carry.

      Though I still believe it was haunted.

  28. BlanketFort*

    I worked in an old building in a southern city that has ghost tours. The building had been a records office and later became a library and archive. There were rumors of a ghost that would pull your hair if you were careless about handling items or if you put things back in the wrong place. My boss swore she’d seen/felt a ghost, and the one time she talked about she was a lot more serious than I would have assumed. Sadly I never saw a spirit, but the thought of it added a bit of fun to shelving maps and old letters.

  29. justpeachy86*

    Just hear to say I regularly think about the gal who worked in a leasing office for an apartment complex that was on the hell mouth and provided lots of stories and updates several years ago. Hope she is living her best life, somewhere not on a hell mouth.

      1. Hlao-roo*

        The post titles are:

        “my new job is a nightmare built on a hellmouth” from October 24, 2018

        “updates: the hellmouth, am I too generous, and more” from December 19, 2018

        “update: my new job is a nightmare built on a hellmouth” from June 21, 2021

        Links in a reply to this comment.

        2. Sharpie*

          She posted a bunch in the Friday open threads. I only found out about the Hellmouth later on (doesn’t help that I don’t generally read the Friday threads!)

          Seeing her username change to ‘I WORKED on a Hellmouth’ after reading all the shenanigans is still one of the most incredible things!

          She’s got stories for years from that one job!

        3. Diatryma*

          Hlao-roo, I’ve wanted to thank you in an open thread for weeks now for being so quick to provide links to context, posts, updates, and anything else that comes up in the comments. Thanks!

  30. H.Regalis*

    A friend of mine works from home. She took a nap after her shift on the couch where she sits to work, and had a horrible nightmare about a former coworker from years ago. She had fallen asleep with the TV on, and when she woke up, it was a true crime show and the episode was about her former coworker! Years after she worked with him, he had murdered his child. Creeped her out.

    1. Phryne*

      I know I’m being a buzzkill, but 100% she dreamed of him *because* his name was on TV and entered her dreaming subconsciousness. More causation than coincidence…

      1. Charlotte Lucas*

        Agreed! But still creepy to find out that a former coworker was a murderer while lying on the couch where you work.

  31. Green Goose*

    I thought of another one:

    I worked at a company that was spread over multiple floors of a building (floor one and floor three) but there were no tenants on floor two or floor four. I was on the third floor, in an interior wing that housed my team in four offices. There was a door with a chime on it that led to our wing, so if anyone left or entered our area the door would chime loudly.

    I would work late, sometimes until 8pm but I never wanted to be the last person there. I had my own office, but one of the offices in our area had four of my coworkers “the bull pen” and some of them worked late too. One night as I heard people leaving but had to stay late I was comforted to hear someone walking around the bull pen. One of my coworkers liked to walk around while he spoke with clients on the phone so I assumed it was him and I worked until about 8pm. The walking sounds continued and no chime went off to indicate that someone had left.

    When I was ready to go home, so I went into the bull pen to see if my coworker wanted to head out too and the room was empty. No one from the entire team was in our wing and I felt the hairs on the back of my neck stick up and I left as quickly as I could. I was never alone in that space again.

  32. umami*

    I mean, on that last story, I can’t believe you didn’t just up and leave when you heard the first whisper. SThere’s no way I would have stayed looking for the ‘source’! Funny story though.

    1. Phryne*

      I totally would look for a source. Scary stories are nice, but in realty I don’t believe in ghosts but I do believe in malfunctioning electronic devices, weird acoustics and, if it is a one off, auditory hallucinations, so I would be walking around trying to find where it came from. I am not brave at all, but you don’t fear things you don’t believe in. In fact, whenever I hear things go bump in the night (or when my cat suddenly gets up and starts to stare at the door) my first thought is burglar, not ghost.

      1. Charlotte Lucas*

        Same! But I am fascinated by people who jump to the “ghost” explanation before any other one. It’s like we both live on planet Earth, but experience two completely separate worlds.

        I do love a good ghost story, though.

  33. Ellen*

    This is kind of cheating… but I used to give ghost tours in a supposedly haunted building. While I never experienced anything unexplainable myself, the people on my tours OFTEN did. A woman who was at the back of the group told me she felt someone put a hand on her shoulder, but when she turned around, no one was there. Several people (who didn’t know each other previously) on one tour reported a large area of one room that was colder than the rest of the room. (I checked it later and didn’t notice any discernible difference, so it wasn’t a malfunctioning a/c or anything.) I can’t tell you how many people on tours heard mysterious footsteps or whispered voices.

    1. ferrina*

      Best story I heard from a ghost tour-

      The tour was on its way through an alley to the next spot. One of the tourists glances behind her a couple times, like she’s looking at someone, then suddenly presses herself against the wall. Her face turns like she’s watching someone run past, and she remarks to the guide “Well, he was certainly in a hurry.”

      The guide had seen no one, but the next spot that he was taking them to was where someone had tried to run away- through that very alley- before being killed. He hadn’t told the group that story yet.

      1. (Health, Safety) Environmental Compliance*

        On a high school band trip we went on a ghost tour in Virginia. There was a group of girls absolutely insistent something was grabbing at their feet when we walked through a historic part of the city that used to be a graveyard (iirc). They got *freaked*.

        In reality the trombone player had a stick and kept managing to snag their shoelaces at just the right time.

        I did, however, see weird moving lights at the corner where they used to hang people, so it wasn’t all just tomfoolery.

        1. Expelliarmus*

          Wait, so was the trombone player purposefully doing it, or were they just fiddling with it and snagged their shoelaces by chance?

    2. Clewgarnet*

      There’s a system of tunnels in a town near me that has regular tours. Several people have reported seeing a woman in Victorian clothing.

      Which is odd, because the tunnels were dug in the 1940s as bomb shelters.

  34. Magnus Archivist*

    I once worked in a historic library/archives that coworkers said was haunted by Albert, the ghost of a former librarian, who I believe was also the building caretaker in the early 20th century and died in his apartment in the building. (I may be conflating two stories here though.) I never experienced this, but there was one room in the building where colleagues would experience weird noises, lights flickering, boxes moving, etc. But because the ghost was a caretaker of the collections and the building and was really just looking out for them, if you told him “Just pulling some boxes, Albert!” or “just reshelving, Albert!” the spookiness would stop and he’s let you continue with your work in peace.

  35. HailRobonia*

    At one of my first office jobs I would occasionally hear a quiet and creep voice coming from UNDER MY DESK! I couldn’t make out what it was saying… it was a weird crackly whispery voice.

    I eventually realized my computer was set to read aloud system errors, and the system volume was set to a level that was just at the cusp of my hearing. It’s like a horror story someone would tell around the campfire at computer camp…. “and then the ghost said ‘ERROR CODE 0X00805TG UNEXPECTED SYSTEM ERROR…'”

  36. Analytical Tree Hugger*

    Here I am, reading these in full daylight with the windows open…and I’m still getting chills! Ahaha, I’m such a silly…

  37. Gray Cat Mom*

    I worked in an old Catholic hospital that had been converted into a basic science lab. When I started, the other staff warned me that there was a ghost nun who still did rounds in the early morning or late afternoon- she never did anything frightening, but it could be startling. My spouse was with me once when I was working early on a Saturday, and he asked me if anyone else was in the building because he’d just seen something walk by the door (nobody else was there). The nun also slammed the bathroom stall door next to the one occupied by a friend of mine (she said maybe she’d been in there too long?), and finally, one of the techs who was running an overnight experiment came face-to-face with her by a sink.

    The city tore down the building several years ago and converted it into a Federal Reserve building. Those of us from the lab who are still in touch with each other joke that the nun is now haunting unfortunate federal workers in the basement.

    1. nm*

      We used to have a toilet that would flush itself. Not an automatic/motion sensing/tech toilet, just a weird old toilet that would flush itself. We used to call that the ghost’s bathroom. Nobody ever saw the ghost though.

  38. Waltz*

    *cracks knuckles*

    So, about 20 years ago, I worked at a small movie theater. This was not some opulent place with a long history. It was a small hole attached to a bowling alley and skating rink. I got the job through a friend who worked there and she’d told me that there was a ghost. I didn’t really take her seriously, not because I wasn’t a believer but she was kind of the sort of person who thought everything was ghosts.

    First incident I remember: we were so slow during the day during the school year that it was literally just me and one other person in the theater working. I heard my name called repeatedly all day from one particular screen. I even checked if someone with my name was in the movie playing in there – there was not. This happened when it was literally only me and my coworker in the building, no customers, and no movie running, and, at least once, I was looking right at my coworker when I heard my name.

    Mostly, there were the footsteps that would follow you around the projection booth, or that would stomp around overhead when I was in the office. I’d go looking for mundane explanations, but often there just wasn’t any. Also, the small area in the back where screens 7 & 8 were was the creepiest place in the building. I LOATHED going in there to clean up. The room with protectors 7 & 8 always seemed dark no matter how many lights were on.

    One night, I was alone in the building closing up. I was re-threading the projectors for the morning and walking between projectors 5 & 4 I heard whistling right behind me. Like someone was behind me whistling a little tune. I just kinda shoved a bunch of denial into place, finished closing down and got T.F. out of there.

    The theater’s been LONG shut down. I’m not even sure the building is still there and I’ve no idea who was there or why.

  39. Samwise*

    I heard an interesting podcast on panic attacks, which maybe is what happened with the food delivery OP. OP has symptoms similar to those in a panic attack due to something like stress, overwork, heart problem, medication reaction, too much caffeine, etc (or has a panic attack but doesn’t recognize it as such since it’s a new experience). It’s a very distressing experience! The next time the person is in that same location, or performing that same activity, they experience a panic attack; now they really really associate that place or activity with panic/terror/distressing symptoms, and so it happens again and again.

    The therapist on the podcast gave the example of a patient who’d experienced shortness of breath and a racing heart while driving over a bridge –every time after, they’d experience those same symptoms, as a panic attack, and became unable to drive over that bridge, and eventually unable to drive over any bridge.

    Or who knows, maybe it WAS freaky emanations from the grisly past…

    1. not nice, don't care*

      The bridge over Deception Pass in NW WA state has brass plaques on the handrail memorializing all the folks who have jumped from the bridge. It’s pretty freaky to walk across it.

    2. Phryne*

      I thought that one was a likely candidate for infrasound on the ghost frequency, maybe from a fan or AC unit.
      ‘Reported effects include those on the inner ear, vertigo, imbalance, etc.; intolerable sensations, incapacitation, disorientation, nausea, vomiting, and bowel spasm; and resonances in inner organs, such as the heart.’

  40. 2023 Got Better*

    In 2019 I was working at a S Baptist Church. I’m absolutely convinced the new senior pastor had some kind of attachment. He wasn’t a kind man. A number of odd things happened in his office and inner study. We had it rekeyed; only three of us had the new key.

    The worst thing was the unfortunate demise and deterioration of three squirrels in his inner study walls. The smell was horrible.

    But the oddest and most unexplainable event was the Friday that I had turned off his lights and locked his door, as it was time to go home. I stepped away for a few minutes and came back to see his door standing wide open and the lights back on. You will have to take my word for it that there simply was no way any one else came along and did that. I just stood there and stared at that wide open door. After several incidents of the light being on after I was sure I’d turned it off I got to being extra careful about that.

    He had an unusually long resume, bouncing from church to corporate to back again. I think that attachment followed him and made trouble deliberately. As badly as he hurt me, I’m certain he hurt someone else much more.

  41. Anita Brake*

    Yes, I have! I worked in a very small office for 7 years. Repeatedly when I was in one end of the office, I would see something traveling across the hallway from right to left. There was never anyone on the left (or the right, for that matter) when I went back to check. Oddly I never felt spooked or scared, and I eventually just started telling whatever it was “hello!)

  42. BecauseHigherEd*

    I used to work as an admissions officer at a beauty school in a major metropolitan area. The school had once been a bank, and my office was a converted vault. When I first started, my boss swore that the office was haunted. She claimed that she had heard tapping on the walls when she was working late at night. Once, she insisted she saw human fingers reaching under the office door. I shrugged it off and assumed she was just overworked.

    Beauty school students need to clean their stations each day–it’s part of their training, as that’s what cosmetologists need to do in salons and spas. The trash room was in the basement by my office next to this ancient elevator–at one point, it had been used to transport money from the street into the vault. Now it was just full of rows and rows of big trash cans, and because it smelled, no one spent much time in there. One day, we’re clearing up and getting ready to go home when we hear a blood curdling scream coming from the trash room. We staff members all run over to the trash room, and one of our barbering students is pointing at the door saying, “He’s there! He’s in there!”

    The school director (she was five feet fall and extremely fierce) pushes the door open to reveal a bearded man in a lime green hoodie and…nothing else. It was clear that he was an unhoused person who was likely mentally ill, suffering from substance abuse disorder, or both. My coworker escorted him out, but when we looked behind the rows of trash cans, we found a sleeping bag and some assorted trash. In other words, this person had used the old ancient elevator to get into the building and had been living in our basement…from the looks of it, probably for a few months at least. We really did feel for him, but at the same time…not great to know that someone has been LIVING in your office without you knowing.

    2. Turtlewings*

      “Once, she insisted she saw human fingers reaching under the office door.”

      Oh heeeeck no. If I saw that, I would never enter the building again. Never. Even if I wanted to, my body would simply not do it.

      I’m not sure if it turning out to be a real person is better or worse. :/

  43. CP*

    I worked in a house built in 1908 on a farm. Have heard laughter and music on the steps at different times of the day when no one else was in the house. When people stay upstairs, they have heard heavy breathing and one time the sheets were ripped off a bed when someone was sleeping.

    We think its a nice ghost. Or we hope.

    1. The OG Sleepless*

      I grew up in a farmhouse that was built in 1918. People have occasionally asked me if we ever had any ghost encounters. I’m sad to report that we never did, just the unending annoyances of living in an old house.

      1. SimonTheGreyWarden*

        We live in a house built in 1913. The closest I’ve had to a scary experience is in the converted garage (which was turned into a daycare at one time, and is now a bedroom/living space). There was a strange sound coming from the ceiling.

        Eventually we found out what it was when my cat brought me a live bat.

  44. Not Your Sweetheart*

    I worked the front desk of several hotels – most of which were 100+ year old buildings. I’ve had elevators move for no reason, doors open and close on their own, heard voices, and other small experiences. The worst was during Shut Down in 2020. We had maybe 15 guest in a 500 room hotel, and I was 1 of 3 people working (the only one on the lobby floor). I saw people walking from the entrance, cross the hall and to the elevators. I heard the elevators arrive and the doors open. But there was not anyone there, and checking the security videos, the elevators never activated. And I heard my name being called a few times. These are all things that probably happened all the time, but I only noticed because the hotel was otherwise quiet. I should also mention that my hotel is on the haunted city walking tour, and is listed in a number of haunted places lists. We had at least 2 security staff quit because of possible paranormal experiences in the time I worked there.

  45. AdequatelyAnon*

    Three stories all the same haunted project in the middle of nowhere Nevada.

    1. I went to pee off to the left of our excavation site. As I did my business, I heard voices and laughter directly below me, coming up the hill. I assumed it was the other crew coming to meet us as planned, so I hurried up. When I got back to our site, my boss, who had also heard the voices, asked if I’d run into the other crew. We waited, but when they finally arrived several hours later they were in their truck (not on foot) and coming from the opposite direction.

    2. We were camping for this project near the mouth of a canyon. One night as we were sitting around the campfire the most god-awful screaming started and went for a solid two minutes, just echoing down to our site. Apparently the canyon was home to some mountain lions. Who like to hang out in trees. And we were in a forested camp site. Night time bathroom trips were extra terrifying after that.

    3. I debated even mentioning this one, but I feel like it was the most terrifying part. Our crew consisted of hiking and camping enthusiasts who had traveled across the country. But everyone heard weird footsteps outside their tent every single night. There were no deer, there weren’t other people, and there was no explanation. As a group we were creeped out and just generally uncomfortable for a reason none of us could put a finger on. Then, the last day of that project, someone finally brought up the word “skinwalker”. And I’m pretty sure they were right.

  46. Kella*

    I read recently that variations in electromagnetic fields or infrasounds, which are just barely below the range of human hearing, can cause really intense feelings of dread, fear, and even visual hallucinations. It’s not uncommon for very old buildings to have technical issues that results in one of those being present. I wonder if the story of the OP being unable to stand being inside that building could have been caused by that. I wonder further if a similar issue could’ve impacted the behavior of whoever was involved in the murders decades before.

    1. All Het Up About It*

      The science of things like this is so interesting. A few months ago on this site there was a discussion of different types of colored noise and two were especially recommended for people with ADHD, so I’d thought I’d try them out. One seemed okay, but the second made me wince and tense up, so that was a no. The rest of the week I was playing the first color noise playlist in the background, and I thought I saw a small uptick in my concentration. One afternoon, I was dealing with a low-key annoying situation (common) and as I was typing up my email response, I was just getting more and more annoyed, sliding over to angry. It got to a point where I pushed back and was like “I need to take a walk.” As I was stalking from my office, I happened to glance down at my phone and it was showing me the playlist that had been playing in my office and I was surprised to find it was the second noise playlist. The first had finished and Spotify just jumped to the previous playlist. It wasn’t noticeable for me to consciously hear the difference, but unconsciously it was absolutely messing with my mood for the previous 15/20 minutes! After a few laps around the building and switching back to the other noise, I was able to send a much more pleasant email response!

      Like you say maybe some of these sounds and fields are natural, but cause bad things to happen repeatedly. Or maybe something bad in the past creates these pockets of negative energy! I’m neither a believer or a non-believer, but I think it’s fascinating. (And often creepy!)

      1. Cyndi*

        I listen to white noise a lot while working or commuting to blot out outside noise, sometimes pretty loudly, and I usually find it neutral or even comforting! But once I was staying in an AirBNB where the walls were thin and the bedroom next door had been booked by a family with toddlers, and the only way I could get comfortable was to wear earplugs and then wear headphones OVER my earplugs, with the white noise at maximum volume. I don’t know what about that hit my brain differently than usual, but I lay in bed for a long time that night, facing the wall, absolutely convinced there was someone or something standing directly behind me and I just didn’t dare roll over and look.

        I left the headphones on, though, because I still hated the peripheral noise more.

      2. Chirpy*

        One day at work, I was feeling pretty good, just really in the zone for what I was working on, and then the manager came over the radio to apologize that the muzak wasn’t working. It was absolutely a mental load off to not have it playing, and I hadn’t even noticed it wasn’t on until then. Background noise really can change things.

        (It’s typical store music, a classic-ish rock/country mix, mildly annoying to me in that it’s just constant noise and also not great music, but generally inoffensive overall. But I’m also the type of person who prefers just regular ambient sounds to concentrate.)

    2. 1LFTW*

      It can be caused by vehicle engines too. I read something years ago about someone who’d figured out that reports of paranormal activity tend to be near roads where there’s a lot of large vehicle traffic. Infrasound has cause sympathetic resonance within the structure of the human eye, which causes the eye to see dark shapes or shadows that aren’t there when the person looks directly at them.

      I’ve experienced this myself. I used to live in a place where I would see a “ghost cat” out of the corner of my eye – I’d see a shape out of the corner of my eye, think it was one of my own cats, then find out that they’d been in the other room the whole time. I lived a few blocks from a fire station, and the fire engines would drive up and down my street all the time.

    3. Sleve*

      Skyscrapers often make me feel ill. I feel sudden waves of dizziness, I stumble on air, I bump into things, and I feel the occasional surge of dread that’s entirely unrelated to context. Science says it’s probably something to do with my inner ear picking up the swaying of the building – but taller buildings also have more people in them, and hence a higher chance of acquiring a ghost or two over the years…

    4. SimonTheGreyWarden*

      Also, the idea of liminal spaces. There’s some neat writing about that out there, and how they influence our feelings.

  47. UKDancer*

    I used to work in a stately home in the north of England. It had allegedly several ghosts but I never saw or heard any of them, being somewhat prosaic by nature.

    There was one spot I didn’t like, out by the gatehouse. Cromwell shot a number of the prisoners he’d taken at Marston Moor there and you could see the holes in the stone of the gatehouse wall. It always felt slightly cold and sad there. Although I don’t know how much of that was me being reminded of the executions and how much was real.

    The other really creepy place I’ve never liked visiting is Clifford’s Tower in York. In the 12th century it was the location of the last major pogrom in the UK against the Jewish community. In 1190 around 150 Jewish people took refuge from a violent mob. They couldn’t find another way out so they took their own lives and the castle was set on fire. Years later Robert Aske (who rebelled against Henry VIII) was hanged in chains on the castle wall. I used to have to walk past it through the car park and it always felt really eerie and sad beyond words.

    I’m not sure I ever believe in ghosts but I think when a lot of blood has been spilled somewhere, the echoes linger on and I don’t like the way Clifford’s Tower feels even though I’ve no evidence it’s haunted.

    1. Phryne*

      I love how US ghost stories are all ‘this building is nearly 100 years old, so obviously haunted’, and the UK is all ‘something bad happened here in the 12th century, we still feel it’…

      The Netherlands are an invariably prosaic country. Not a lot of ghosts happening here, even though we have old buildings and bad things happened. The Dutch are too sober to haunt people after death I guess. ;)

    2. Haiku*

      As a Jewish person, thank you for your sensitivity. Since then we have a custom not to sleep overnight in the city of York.

      1. UKDancer*

        That’s interesting. I understand from York university research the Jewish community returned to York in the 13th century to some level. York does have a small Jewish community now and quite recently a rabbi arrived to serve them which is nice. I know at least one Jewish person who does live in York within the walls but couldn’t say how many others are there.

    3. STAT!*

      I went on a ghost tour in York, part of which told the story of that Tower. The tour guide also said that Jewish populations were (officially) expelled from England around the time of this massacre. He added that Jewish communities were officially invited back by Cromwell during the Protectorate. (No point to make really, just that your two spooky experiences involve the Tower and Cromwell, which are linked in my mind due to the ghost tour.)

  48. BeautifulVoid*

    I grew up in a town with a very large institution for the physically and mentally disabled. It shut down for good when I was a kid (I remember riding the kindergarten bus through the complex and waving at the residents) and the town renovated and repurposed some of the buildings while others fell into disrepair. It’s been featured on ghost hunting shows and even now, kids in the area dare each other to sneak in to the abandoned buildings overnight.

    I worked for the town summer camp in high school and college, and for a few years, one of the renovated buildings, now one of the community centers, was our rain location. I HATED rainy days because the kids would always be screaming that the building was haunted and riling each other up and generally being more obnoxious than usual. I wasn’t sure whether or not I believed in that stuff, but we always made sure never to go anywhere alone.

    Fast forward many years – I’m now an adult with a professional job, living in a different nearby town, and around once a month or so, I have a work meeting in that same community center. I don’t know what it is, but I CANNOT make myself use the restrooms in that building. Every time I walk in there, every single hair on my body stands on end and my brain urges me to get out get out get out. Thankfully, the meetings rarely last longer than 90 minutes, so it’s not a big deal for me.

    About six months ago, it was announced that a new community center was opening up and all these meetings would be moved there once the room was ready. At the meeting where I first heard the news, EVERYONE — lawyers, engineers, government officials, other professionals — was talking about how relieved they were because the building we were in was haunted. Nothing panicky, all said very matter-of-factly, just yep, the building is haunted.

    The new community center is lovely and I haven’t heard any reports of paranormal activity yet.

    1. FrogEngineer*

      My friend used to work in a building like that, I believe it used to be a mental hospital, but had been converted to a work-release facility for prisoners, so they had staff there overnight. My friend said there was an unwritten rule that you didn’t go up on the third floor after dark because of something like a haunting. Nobody lived up there so it was easy to avoid, but still…

  49. Delta Delta*

    I worked in an office that was converted from a funeral home and everyone said the place was haunted. I worked there close to 15 years and was endlessly bummed out that I never had a haunted experience there. Everyone else did and apparently all the haunting left me alone. Harumph.

  50. Goosey*

    A theatre building where I worked (like all good theatre buildings) was haunted. I had a couple of very low-key interactions with the ghost – students making reports, he turned the lights on for me once when I was walking down dark stairs with my arms full (in a very old building with no motion-detecting lights), but you could ABSOLUTELY tell he was an undergrad dude when he died and would be one forevermore. The only time I went to take a nap in my office between classes, there were three clear knock from an inner door to my office (with no external access), and when I rolled over to try to sleep anyway I heard the wooden chair in there start dragging around the concrete floor. Not dangerous or scary, just annoying.
    (Another colleague reported that when she was up in the electric grid alone and felt him close by she’d say ‘I respect you but I’m scared of you, please give me space while I’m up here by myself,” and she’d hear him periodically knocking on things to tell her where he was as he went further away.)

    1. Goosey*

      My current school’s theatre is allegedly also haunted. I haven’t met this ghost yet, but our students are incredibly fond of him – they wish him good night when they leave the building, make sure he has a good seat in the booth for shows, and stage managers write him a note formally inviting him to each production. It’s very charming!

    2. Pipe Organ Guy*

      Hmmm. I wonder if concert halls are haunted. I would think that halls that serve as both concert halls and theatres might be haunted; and I would think that opera houses might be haunted.

      2. Goosey*

        I would be interested to see the correlation between claimed hauntings, the types of rigging and grid systems used, and the social standing of the typical person who works/worked at the location. I suspect that part of why so many theatres are haunted (assuming the stories are true) is that there’s a lot about the buildings that are dangerous if you aren’t careful and it hasn’t historically been a business for the most stable or well-to-do folks (hence a higher likelihood of workplace mortality). I’d guess opera houses more than concert halls given the similar need for changing light and scenery for each show, but I’m not a paranormal performance specialist XD

        1. Charlotte Lucas*

          I remember learning that at one time, it was common for former sailors to work behind the scenes in theaters, because they were comfortable with the type of rigging and work that would need to be done. They whistled to indicate what needed to be done (same as on an old-time sailing ship), which is why it’s unlucky to whistle backstage (you could mess something up).

          Then it clicked for me that theater people and sailors are both traditionally very superstitious (a lot can go wrong in a short time for both groups). And I think they must have come to a meeting of the minds to make theaters the most haunted, superstition -laden places you can find.

  52. Kat Maps*

    I was a cemetery groundskeeper for 3 summers while I was in school. You’d think I’d have a plethora of stories, but there’s just one that stands out.
    It was a stiflingly hot August day. My coworker and I were instructed by our foreman to “take it easy,” so I sat myself under a shady tree and spent my morning removing grass and moss from some old headstones.
    From the corner of my eye I saw someone walking towards me. I thought, “*coworker* must be coming to get me for break time.” When I stood up, there was no one there. I was so sure I’d seen someone. I sat back down and resumed what I was doing, and it happened again – I thought I saw someone out of the corner of my eye, but when I turned, there was no one. I couldn’t shake the feeling that I wasn’t alone for the rest of the day. I never experienced anything like that again.

    1. Dodo Egg*

      Speaking of cemeteries, I listened in on an Australian radio station where a caller called into the breakfast hour segment.
      She said that she and her young daughter would often visit the cemetery to clean up a family grave.
      Her daughter would sometimes wander off, hang out at another grave and start prattling on as if there was another person there.
      When the caller asked her daughter who she was speaking to her daughter replied “im playing with a little boy. He isn’t sick anymore and he’s waiting for his mum”.

      Years went on and they’d routinely visit and clean up, but her daughter gradually grew up and stopped playing at the other grave site, and probably forgot about her ‘friend’.

      But one day she brought along her small nephew, who was playing then turned and asked her daughter “the little boy wants to know why you don’t play with him anymore?”

  53. Janie*

    Cats can sound a lot like crying babies. We had an empty lot behind my house when I was growing up and I would hear like a little infant crying in the grass, which creeped me out until one day I saw a cat sitting on the wall between the houses and it was making the crying noise.

    1. saf*

      We have the opposite problem here. We have a few feral torties who live on the front porch. Sometimes, another cat stops by. So I hear cat crying and go out to see if someone needs help. No cat. Only someone with a baby walking down the street. Happens every few weeks.

      (Once it was a kitten. He lives inside now.)

    2. Michelle*

      Growing up I used to attend a summer camp next to a peacock farm. They sound like a child calling for help. Of course the campground was also built on around a former home where the family had supposedly locked their disabled child in the attic, until one day she attacked her mother (or sister) with a fork and jumped out the window to her death.

  54. Sciencer*

    I work at a university in a house originally built in the late 1800’s. It’s a cute and very quirky place and our students love to insist that it’s haunted. They often work there late at night so get to hear all the house-settling noises in a creepy, dark, empty-campus environment. Plus the copy machine frequently does bizarre little musical performances for no apparent reason.

    Last spring I was one of just two people in the house one morning on a very cold day. I sat down to my laptop and gave myself a massive static shock (winter clothes + dry climate). My internet instantly went out and a horrible, demonic singing noise started filtering up from the main floor. I panicked that I had destroyed my laptop and somehow also the entire house’s electrical system (had I sent an electrical surge through the whole house?? was something about to catch fire?!). My colleague was closed up in her office on a call so I was running through the empty house trying to find the source of this noise and just couldn’t figure it out. It would come and go at random intervals and it was a truly creepy sound. Meanwhile the copier was doing its show on steroids, making noises I’d never heard from it before, and before long I was pretty sure the students were right about the house being haunted.

    Turned out to be a campus-wide power outage due to the extreme cold, which just happened to coincide perfectly with my sitting down and touching my laptop. The demonic house noise was our doorbell, which is already quirky (like, doesn’t work if someone is plugged into the nearby electrical outlet), and was apparently receiving little surges of electricity that would send it into a weird quasi-functioning mode like an old battery-powered tape player running out of juice. Ditto for the copier. I was genuinely a bit concerned that our house seemed to be getting electricity in non-standard amounts while the rest of campus was blacked out, so I informed my colleague and the facilities team of the situation and worked the rest of the day from home.

  55. Falling Diphthong*

    When I started reading AAM I had no idea haunted office parks were going to loom as large as they do.

    1. an infinite number of monkeys*

      …and on a moonless night, you can still catch a faint whiff of microwaved tilapia coming from the deserted breakroom…

  56. sofar*

    I’m one of the only people in my giant office that works in person, and I’m usually there after 7 p.m. Several times, I’ve been walking toward the bathroom. As soon as I round the corner to the hallway with the bathroom, I’ll see a shadow of a foot and swish of a skirt going into the bathroom as the door shuts. Nobody is ever in the bathroom (it’s only 3 stalls). This happens only in the evenings.

    The first time, I thought, “Oh man … who else is even HERE right now?” And now I’m like, “Ope, there she is again.”

  57. The Editor-in-Chief*

    The man who built the house I grew up in was diagnosed with stomach cancer and chose to end it all at home. We used to joke that it was him when doors would slam (there were many halls and doors, and wind moving through the house would cause them to shut abruptly) or lights flickered. I was about 12 and brushing my teeth in the basement bathroom when I felt a presence behind me and heard – as clear as any other human speaking – “Would you *please* quit blaming everything on me?”
    My aunt also saw him on a couple of occasions. He was nice, but if I played anything by the Beatles, it would shut off (unless I specifically asked to let the song finish – then it would shut off immediately after).
    This was good training for my job working overnight at a radio station. Someone would stand behind me just as I was ready to open the mic and start speaking, and would occasionally shut off one of the studios.
    I started just saying aloud, “Look, there are a LOT of buttons and switches in here, and you need to FIX THIS before you get me fired and have no one to talk to!” or “You CANNOT breathe on my neck while I’m going into a break. Or ever. Please.”
    I’d also just talk at him – pretty sure it was a him – and I got the distinct feeling he just enjoyed being noticed.

  58. B*

    I worked in a nonprofit health clinic back in the 90s that was built on the site of a torn down hospital . Our lobby had glass walls that divided it from three different wings of the buiding. After dark, one of the wings was just spooky. If you stood in the lobby and looked into it, it was pitch black, and you could feel something staring back at you. It felt dark and evil and creepy. No one, and I mean no one, wanted to go into that part of the building after dark.

    Halfway through my tenure there we launched a new foor pantry program – think lots of hauling of food and shlepping big, heavy boxes during off hours. We hired a crew of young men from the local university who were football player types – huge, muscular dudes that you would think would never be intimidated. After their first night at the office, all three of them told their supervisor they would never go into that side of the building when it was empty at night.

    I never did find out what it was that made that part of the building feel so creepy to everyone, but I have always wondered.

  59. Blanked on my AAM posting name*

    One of my favourites (my late sister’s story):

    The building where she worked at the time was old (1840s, so not ancient by British standards but old enough to have a history), Gothic, and surrounded by pine woodland – so stereotypically spooky. Passersby reported a mysterious light that would appear in the two-storey grand hall in the middle of the night: it would first appear high up at one end of the hall, float slowly down to ground level, then travel the length of the hall before disappearing. Sometimes it would make the same journey but in reverse – very spooky!

    Eventually, after hearing this story several times, staff worked out that the ghostly light was… the building manager, who had a room which could only be accessed from the balcony at one end of the hall. This room didn’t have a bathroom so, if the manager needed to pee during the night, they had to use the guest bathroom on the ground (first) floor at the other end of the hall: rather than turning all the lights on, they used the flashlight app on the phone to light their way. No spooks here, sadly!

  60. Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain*

    Like the earbuds story, mine isn’t really a ghost. When my department moved into the 5th floor of a 1960s era office building, the 7-story building had been 90% unoccupied for many years — only the first floor had been continuously used. They didn’t really have the money to do an extensive renovation of the building when we bought it, so it was being completed, and then occupied, one floor at a time; we were the lucky first department to move in. The inside rehab was mainly cosmetic — clean, paint, new flooring. So of course the 2 elevators in the building were old and hadn’t really been used or serviced, which meant fun elevator shenanigans that several people attributed to spirits. For about 4 years, the elevators would take turns — one week the left one is having trouble, then the next week it’s fine and the right one is misbehaving. They would activate all by themselves with no human pushing a button; sometimes go to the wrong floor (spooky when that floor hadn’t been rehabbed yet); the doors wouldn’t open or only open about 4 inches and need to be pushed; the cab would sometimes stutter to a stop (that one always got me taking the stairs the rest of the week); they sometimes got stuck on a floor and wouldn’t budge. Piece by piece they have now replaced every mechanical and electrical part of these elevators, including the doors, and all the “spirits” have left the building.

    1. goddessoftransitory*

      It’s crazy how hard it can be to replace elevator parts! I live in an apartment that was a hotel in the 60s (built during the Seattle World’s Fair) and its elevator is–eccentric, charitably speaking. The doors would stick, start to open, open and then slide shut on you as you were getting out, you name it. My personal favorite was when the door would sing an eerie, high pitched note that sounded uncannily like Puppycat from the cartoon of that name.

      We told our very good building super, but there was a huge delay because elevators have to be serviced by specialists, plus, getting the parts for this particular one took FOREVER because it basically couldn’t function with modern stuff, so they had to track down one of the maybe three companies that still had the right era parts for sale!

    2. allathian*

      I once worked in an office building that was built in the 1930s. There was a cage elevator that could well have been original. It had been refurbished several times and certified to function reliably every 5 years (legal requirement here), but it was a bit creepy. The elevator light worked with a primitive motion sensor, the elevator floor tilted and closed the switch as you walked in. It made horrible creaking noises as well, and the mechanical double doors were sometimes a bit fiddly to open or close. I don’t like elevators much at the best of times, but this one was so horrible that I preferred to take the stairs to the 6th floor twice a day (there was no fridge or microwave so you had to go out to lunch) rather than use it. My calves have never been in such good shape before or since…

  61. Irish Teacher.*

    I was teaching in what used to be an old boarding school, but boarding had been discontinued. The school was started by nuns and during the time I was there, the exam years were doing their pres (practice exams before the real thing) and they were held out in the old convent, probably so that they wouldn’t be disturbed by the other years who were having classes as normal.

    One day, I was going out to supervise the exams and I heard footsteps on the stairs ahead of me, even though there was nobody else on the stairs. The kids were convinced the building was haunted by the ghost of some old nun and were telling me they heard footsteps overhead when they went to the school library, also in the old convent building.

    Not really that mysterious in an old building, but…it was creepy going up those stairs with nobody else in sight.

  62. Jade*

    I was working overtime and the building was empty. Almost midnight. I could hear very soft rustling and you always think it’s a serial killer at that hour. I isolated the sound to the storage closet and being dumb like the people in the slasher movies I slowly opened the door and peered in. A large fat white rat ran out!

  63. thatoneoverthere*

    I have a home haunting that I am pretty sure followed me to work.

    In our first apartment together my husband and I rented from this odd apartment complex. It was popular in our area at the time. The set up was quite strange. There was living room, dining room and kitchen. Upstairs bedroom and the master bedroom was down in the basement. It had a garage, master bath, and laundry room all downstairs. I swear the place was haunted. I would wake up every night screaming. Something I never did previously. Something would rush at me from the bathroom. One night I was so scared I bolted up the steps half asleep.

    Almost everyday at work I would feel like I was being watched. I would turn around and see a dark outline of man. Then it would disappear. It followed me to 2 different work places. I changed jobs halfway through living there. The strangest part… we got a dog and it stopped. She would sleep in bed with me all snuggled up. No more strange occurrences.

  64. merida*

    The HVAC system at my last job was very noisy. It was one of those things you got used to after a while (“What noises?”), but every new employee was thoroughly freaked out at first. Since the noise came from the ceiling, we joked that we had a friendly ghost named Jim who lived on the roof and watched over the building. There were constant clattering noises, giant crashing/thumping noises that sounded like a door slamming every few minutes, and then the occasional series of gentler thumps that sounded like footsteps and grew louder and then quieter as the sound moved across the building. That last one could probably be explained by the HVAC system being turned off/on for the day, and the air would cause a responding series of creaks and groans as it moved throughout the ducts… But saying that ‘ole Jim was walking around was more fun.

    On my first day I remember saying “WHAT WAS THAT??” After what sounded like a giant door (in the ceiling?) being slammed right above our heads, and my boss looked at me like I had two heads and said she heard nothing. Fastforward a few years and I no longer notice the noises either… but it was the height of COVID and I often worked alone in the building as an essential staff employee. I’d join Zoom meetings from the office and my boss started commenting on why she always heard footsteps and doors slamming in the background when I said I was the only one there. “Oh, that’s just the ceiling.” Blank stare. “You know, remember before the pandemic when you were in the office, the ceiling would make those big clunky noises all the time?” Boss did not remember ever hearing those noises, and neither did any of my colleagues that I asked about it. I think this has much more to do with how it’s easy to forget what the office is like when you work from home long term, but my boss did look genuinely alarmed that I was working ‘alone’ in the building with a ghost… I laughed and assured her that it was ok, Jim was a friendly ghost. :)

    Sidenote: In the beginning, the ghost was randomly named Jim by an employee who had forgotten in that moment that our company president was also named Jim. President Jim was well-loved and an incredibly kind and gentle person, and we felt bad that the ghost had the same name – so collectively staff had decided to brand Ghost Jim as a very non-creepy, overtly-friendly ghost who watched over the building. That folklore did give me some comfort when I was alone there in 2020.

  65. Squidhead*

    An un-ghost story: I used to work as a stage technician. As mentioned here, every good theater is haunted. You even put out a ghost light on the stage to keep the ghosts happy when the building’s empty (okay, it also keeps you from becoming a ghost by falling into the orchestra pit…). But right out of college I worked for a small theater that didn’t have a ghost. And it was awful. Awful because of human factors like rampant safety issues, condescending and somewhat creepy management, not enough money, and not enough creativity to do anything interesting with the shoestring budget. It was depressing and I took it much too seriously as my first creal” job (now it would be much easier to just say ‘F– these idiots’ and leave). But I did come to the conclusion that the reason *why* they sucked so much was they didn’t have a ghost. (Or maybe they didn’t have a ghost *because* they sucked.)

    1. linger*

      But at least they were *trying* for a ghost (if those “safety issues” might do it :-) … not that that should reassure any worker…

  66. Kammy6707*

    Pretty minor, but I used to work at the second oldest Catholic college in the US. So old there was a ghost tour held each October – I had heard one of the dorm rooms had a lot of ghost activity.

    The building I worked in was older and made of stone, but had been renovated on the inside. I worked on the second floor. As an administrative assistant, I often ended up working alone in the summer or right before holidays – no students/faculty around and other staff would take off or leave early.

    The office seemed fine when filled with people, but it was pretty creepy when you were alone – you just never really felt alone and it just felt “heavy”. Not to mention, the office was constructed as a big circular hallway so its possible someone could always be slightly ahead of/behind you!

    Anyway, before one break I was alone and it was almost time to leave. The restrooms were right by the reception area and we had those toilets with a sensor flush. As I sat there, I heard a toilet flush. Clearly, I would have seen anyone enter/leave and no one had. I told myself it was just a faulty sensor but was happy to run out at the end of the day!

    I wasn’t the only one creeped out by being alone in the building – I eventually got a promotion that came with an office and would often come in on the weekends to focus on homework for my master’s degree. A few times a faculty member had the same idea and we would give each other a scare!

    1. Bibliothecarial*

      Ghost toilets are a thing! Scared the dickens out of me alone at work one year. What happens is the toilet leaks just enough that the water level triggers a flush. Google it; you’ll feel better!

  67. Sharpie*

    Back in my army days, the camp lived on was an old Victorian barracks. Some of the buildings were still used for accommodation while others had been converted for different purposes. Our workshop was in one of these converted barrack accommodation blocks.

    I was alone in the workshop one afternoon, with my colleagues out doing various things. I was quietly minding my own business, testing some piece of equipment when one of my colleagues came in and walked through to our equipment store. I just caught a glimpse out of the corner of my eye, it was the motion that caught my attention.

    I went to ask a question… And there was nobody there. The only other exit from the store was closed and locked, the only way in or out was past me.

    And when I thought back, I could have sworn the person in question was wearing Victorian military uniform, not our camouflage combat uniform.

  68. KT*

    I worked the desk in a dorm building in college and took a lot of overnight shifts. It was a great gig where I could do homework, binge netflix, or play video games if no one needed the desk. My job was to help students who were locked out or needed to check their mail or wanted to borrow a DVD, or to call the RA on duty for more serious things like noise complaints, underage drinking, fire alarms, etc. It often meant being the only one in the lobby after about 2 am but I generally loved it. One of my first overnight shifts a freshman shuffled down sometime after 3 am. He asked if I had ever heard if the building was haunted. I said no, but it was an older dorm so maybe it was possible. He then said his roommate was gone that night but he had woken up in the middle of the night to something on top of him, choking him. He claimed he’d finally fought the thing off only to realize he was alone in the room and the door was locked from the inside. I was very baffled and concerned. I asked if it was a dream and he said maybe but his throat hurt. I told him I wasn’t sure how I could help but I could call the RA on duty or campus police to come if he believed someone could have assaulted him and wanted to file a report. He said no, apologized for bugging me, said it was probably a dream, and shuffled back off to bed. Never saw him again. I sometimes wonder if I was the one talking to the ghost.

  69. Kara*

    For what it’s worth LW#1, cats can sound almost identical to babies, particularly if heard from a slight distance or from behind a closed door. And cats can also be very good at hiding, thus the ‘we never found anything’.

  71. nerdchild87*

    In 2011 I worked evenings and overnights at an inpatient drug rehab. Groups during the day were in one building, and in the evening we walked the patients to the dorm which was across the street. I worked 3rd shift for a bit, which meant that I had to go back to the group building by myself at night and clean it. I heard big heavy fire doors open and close themselves, voices, footsteps, all the things. No one was in the building but me. Other people had weird stories about that building and it freaked me out so bad that I eventually refused to work that shift. At the dorm we would have door alarms randomly go off even though the doors weren’t open. I always had a weird feeling in that building at night, like I was being watched. We also kept getting reports from patients at night that they spotting a man on the smoke deck (this was a women’s only dorm at that time). We would check but wouldn’t find anyone out there. Initially I wrote it off as them pulling my leg or maybe hallucinating (some patients had mental health diagnosis that could account for that and some withdrawal can make people see things too) But it happened months apart, with women who were in the program at different times with no connections to each other. We also got a lot of very scared women coming to us at night stating a dark shadow entered their room. Suffice to say it was all highly creepy and i was oh so happy to get out of there. I left that job in 2012 and ended up working at an outpatient mental health clinic. I told one of my co-workers about all the weird stuff I experienced there and he informed me that a male patient died in his sleep there in the 1990’s. Years later the dorm building was bought out and guted and turned into an assisted living center. I actually ended up with quit a few clients that lived there as part of my outpatient work. A decade later these clients from time to time would tell me about weird things that happened there, and a man no one could identify being spotted on the smoke deck late at night.

  72. Roguestella*

    I’ve worked in historic houses for years and so spooky old spaces are not unfamiliar to me. Once I was working late, alone, in an 18th century house with modern office & collections storage space attached. I heard a strange noise and walked over to the collections storage area to see three wooden baby cradles stored next to each other all. slowly. rocking. No breeze, no reason for it. I took a deep breath, moved them apart so they wouldn’t rub against each other, asked whoever was there to quit it so I could get my work done, and walked away. No more rocking after that.

  73. ConstantlyComic*

    I used to work at a gold mine-turned state historic site. Part of the job was taking people on tour through restored mine tunnels and locking them up at the end of the day. Some of my coworkers swore up and down that the mine was haunted, but I’m not sure if I ever believed them. I locked up a lot, and while I never felt truly haunted, it did sometimes feel like there was some sort of presence in the tunnels with me. It was nice and quiet down there, though, so sometimes I’d put on a podcast and just hang out for a bit.

    1. lin*

      It took me a minute there to parse out that you locked up the tunnels at the end of the day, not the tourists…

      1. ConstantlyComic*

        hahaha! Locking up the tourists would probably have made me the spooky encounter (not to mention gotten me in a world of trouble). No, I just locked the doors to the tunnels.

  74. LCH*

    ahahah, i love the “ghost” that just narrates the most boring part of someone’s life. “he’s using microsoft word.” :D :D :D

  75. Human Embodiment of the 100 Emoji*

    I worked for a historic house museum in an extremely remote area. About 3 months into my position, I was completely alone in the house’s already-creepy stables, doing a supplies inventory. Everything I was inventorying was supposed to be boring run-of-the-mill supplies like batteries and trash bags, so when I opened up the last box of supplies and instead found myself face-to-face with a doll with glowing red eyes, I was pretty sure I had entered horror movie. Only the next day did I find out my supervisor had been hiding this terrifying doll around the house for years to scare new employees.

    For illustration, Little Miss No-Name herself: https://toytales.ca/little-miss-no-name-hasbro-1965/

  76. Random Bystander*

    This isn’t my story, but related to me by my middle son who was at that time working as an assistant manager at a sporting goods store. These events were not just observed by him but also by others there, and not exclusively in October.

    Now, one of the things the store sells are kayaks, which were displayed hung on hooks way up high (far beyond what anyone can reach without a ladder). On multiple occasions, he and co-workers would hear sounds like someone was slapping the life jackets (displayed below the kayaks) and then the kayaks. There would be sounds of someone rummaging in the back room, but no one was there. At times, the motion detection for the cameras would trigger, but no one appeared on the camera. Footsteps would be heard running from the front to the back of the store even when it was prior to opening/after closing (so no one but staff present and both were visible to each other and not located where the footsteps were coming from).

    On another occasion, he was working in the back room to get shoes for the floor, and had the sensation of being watched. He looked toward the area, which was near the sink they fill the mop bucket with and which could only have been reached by passing him–he saw a “black shadowy figure” which as soon as he looked at it moved into/through the wall.

  77. Black Sow*

    My father is Welsh and I was a sensitive child. I was deeply afraid of Mari Lawyd, the horse skull that dances at Christmastime, and I became obsessed with the idea that the horse would come find me at Halloween (I was confusing it with the story of Hwch Ddu, the animal that rises out of the fire during the harvest slaughter to chase children. Such cheery traditions – can’t imagine why I was bothered!). I had almost forgotten all about this until I was in my 20s, working at a primary school that had a Guy Fawkes day bonfire. Picture it, the little children eating treacle, carrying their carved turnip lanterns and cheering as the effigy burned, me trying to keep them all back out of the way. I was among the last ones cleaning up and, the whole time I walked home I kept hearing clanking, like metal – or stirrups, but I couldn’t see anything behind me except the line of flickering turnip faces from people walking home by other roads. As soon as I got home I told my all about it and he laughed and reminded me of my childhood fear that Mari Lawyd was after me! “It’ll come back for you next year, for sure,” he said. I moved to Houston after that.

    1. WantonSeedStitch*

      To be fair, Mari Lwyd is creepy as hell! I had never heard of Hwch Ddu before, but I’m fascinated.

  78. Camellia*

    Bought a house. I had two cats. Previous owners had also had pets, and had owned the house for about 20 years, so you know they had had a pet or two go over the rainbow bridge.

    If you’ve ever owned a cat that you’ve allowed to sleep with you, you know exactly how it feels when they jump up onto the end of the bed and then slowly walk, on their little cat feet, up the mattress along side your body, towards your head. You can feel each individual step by the way it presses down the mattress next to you.

    So I’m laying there on my bed, in the dark, and feel a cat jump up on the bed and slowly walk up the mattress. I look up. Neither of my cats are on the bed. This continued for the entire time I owned the house. Every once in a while, before I would go to sleep, I feel those little cat steps walking up the mattress toward my head, only to look and see…no cat.

    2. DawnShadow*

      Yes! Oh my gosh. I felt this for years, after my childhood cat died. Just slowly walking step by step and curling up by me. Now that I think about it, it’s only stopped since I got my own cats in my forties, and they were the ones curling up with me. I think it’s my present cats, anyway…

    3. RC*

      The reason I kind of wished ghosts exist, is because I really would love my old little kitties to come back and haunt me <3

    4. Phryne*

      I have also had moments where I was certain I felt my cat jump on the bed, only to find she is not there. As an added bonus, in my apartment the woorden flooring directly above my bedroom door is very creaky, so when she walks around at night I get creepy floor sounds.

      Also a favorite: my cat, fast asleep, suddenly waking up, sticking her head upright, eyes wide open, pupils dilated, getting up and walking to the edge of the bed and staring very intently at the half-open bedroom door. For minutes. Without blinking.

    5. Protoa*

      I had the ghost of a kitty I had lived with for all my life when she passed (she was 18) follow me and my family to a new house, and just check on us then peace out, and she curled up on my feet at one point, and to top it off, her name was Wraith

  79. Baby Yoda*

    I used to work in a 100+ year old bank, and the cleaning people always reported hearing footsteps overhead at night. Even when they were alone and locked in the bank.

  80. RowdyDow*

    As a Scenic Artist at a theatre, sometimes sets would be built during the day and I would have to paint at night, or after the cast had had rehearsal. A lot of times, it was a “the-show-is-opening-tomorrow-and-we-just-got-this-built-today” scenario. Fun.

    So I’m at the theatre painting, alone, and it’s going on 1am and I start hearing voices. Not words, just mumbling. I’m pretty sure it’s not the paint fumes.

    I’m tired and achy and highly put out that the carpenters haven’t given me enough time to paint (sure, I can paint it, but you want it to “look good”, too, right?) and I’m getting creeped out by these disembodied voices in a dark theatre.

    I throw my paint brush down, stand up and yell,” Look, bub, I’m here alone, painting this *#$% set and I don’t have time for this! Either come and pick up a brush and help me or stop yer yappin’!”

    The voices continued their soliloquy.

    I went home without finishing the job.

  81. Dek*

    I haven’t (which, like. I’ve worked at at least one VERY haunted place with literal graves in the floor. You would think), but when my cousin was closing up the bar on his own, he felt someone grab him on the shoulder. Turned around, there was no one there. Kept turning, put down his towel, and headed for the door. It’s on the security footage, and it’s funny af.

  83. Blinded By the Gaslight*

    I worked at a university library that was said to be haunted. I was the night supervisor and closed the library at midnight, but would often be there until 12:30 or 1 am. I and my student employees would walk the building’s seven floors, clearing everyone out level-by-level before we locked the doors, then campus police would come in and do ANOTHER sweep–we were very good about being sure everyone was out. Occasionally it would just be me by myself, and maybe a couple of janitorial crew. The janitors all had stories of weird things happening, but they were just fun, spooky stories to me. I was always cautious when in the building by myself, but I was never *scared.* Until . . .

    One night, I was there by myself – I hadn’t had any students, and I hadn’t seen the janitors yet. I did the closing rounds, security had come and gone, and I was finishing up some returns. I went to put something back in the “old section” of the building (the building had an old original half, and a newer remodeled half), which meant I would walk past a set of stairs that only went to the 2nd floor in that part of the building. With the building lights off, the stairs were pitch black from about the 6th step up and beyond into the 2nd floor; I never liked to look up directly into that darkness at night. It was almost totally dark on 1st (just some remnant light from Exit signs and from pathway lights outside), and totally quiet – just the soft sound of my own shoes on the linoleum. As I walked past the stairs, an empty 20 oz soda bottle came bouncing loudly down the dark stairs from the 2nd floor and clattered to the ground in front of me. I stopped short, heart racing, listening desperately for the sound of anyone up on 2nd floor who could have dropped that bottle . . . absolute silence. I called out, “Hello . . . ?!” fully expecting to hear straggler students giggling or footsteps or the janitors’ music, *some*thing . . . but there was NOTHING. I’m sure there’s an explanation, but those stairs always gave me the creeps after that; the only thing that made me feel better was the idea of ghosts drinking Mtn. Dew and tossing their empties around!

    Another frequent after-hours occurrence was that the elevators would depart and arrive with no one in them, and no one who should have been calling them since I was the only one in the building. I’d be at my desk and hear the *ding* from the elevator down the hall well after closing, get up to look, and no one would be there. The janitors said it happened all the time, and some crew would refuse to work our building because it scared them. There was another large, newer library on campus, but that one didn’t have these occurrences.

    2. Mister_L*

      If I recall correctly, some elevators are built to return to a “default position” if they aren’t used for some time. Might explain the last part.

  84. RedRock11*

    I was never around late enough to experience this but the building my mum worked in for over 10 years was haunted. Several people reported hearing footsteps if they were working late at night and one guy actually saw the ghost standing in the doorway to his office. The building was originally base housing for Navy recruits and the story goes that one of the hazing activities was taking sleeping first years to the roof and rolling them off onto a pile of mattresses. ‘Eric’, as the ghost was called, unfortunately missed the pile of mattresses and passed away.

    On another note, my husband believes I have a protective spirit attached to me – when we were dating, if he was at my place alone and even thought about doing something he knew I wouldn’t like something would happen (apparently one time an empty drink can threw itself across the room).

    1. Expelliarmus*

      If that’s true, that’s terrible! I’m pretty against hazing in general, but rolling people off a roof who can’t consent is a new level of jerkface.

  85. MaybeMayQueen*

    I think our basement at work is haunted, and I have since I started here almost 5 years ago. Its a dirt floor basement and the light have never worked. The lady that used to work here for many years died only a few years ago, and I got promoted into her spot in the office after our other person retired. Now, I used to come into this office a lot as a kid with my parents and I always remembered Nancy’s perfume because it was strong. I was sitting here alone one day (1 person office other than my boss who is not in often), and I kept getting a whiff of Nancy’s perfume. It would go away, and then was there again, all of a sudden. I couldn’t figure it out for DAYS.

    My boss bought scented trash bags. I was smelling the trash bag.

  86. Need More Sunshine*

    Just yesterday, I was the only person in the office. Most of the lights were out except for my own to save energy costs. I was using my standing desk and suddenly felt something like cat brush against my calf… in our regular office building without any animals. Right after I jumped and looked behind, I realized it was my skirt tickling my leg.

  87. NAL-NYL*

    I don’t know if this is exactly what you’re after, but in college I worked for one of those pop up Halloween stores. Our manager was a total mess, bags of marijuana would fall out of her pockets, she reeked of alcohol and she just couldn’t keep it together. Anyway, early November we’re all sweeping up getting ready to leave the premises for the season and somehow my colleague’s broom knocks loose part of the drop ceiling and a bunch of vodka bottles and inexplicably rubber masks fall to the floor. It was quite the jump scare, but we all knew whose stash that was and gently requested she pick it up. She complied and every one lived happily ever after.

  88. ARROWED!*

    Can’t remember if I’ve posted this before.

    I often worked late and by 9 pm was probably literally the only person in a medium sized office building, in which my office was part of a smaller, separately locked suite. It was not the safest part of town; I
    felt reasonably safe locked in my suite inside the locked building, but it still feels pretty creepy when you’re the only one in the dim, silent building. One night I was finishing up when I heard this sudden mechanical noise from right around the suite’s front door. I almost jumped out of my skin. Was someone trying to break into the suite? Surely it was just the cleaner (except I knew he’d already gone home) or security (except they didn’t walk our building – at night they monitored us remotely)… right?

    Ten seconds later, I remembered I had just printed my document – to the printer on the secretary’s desk immediately next to the door.

  89. Pipe Organ Guy*

    I recently retired from work as a church organist and before that the weekly service booklet guru at our church. Supposedly there was (is) a church ghost; there were those who claimed to have had encounters. I never did, not even if I was there late at night practicing.

    At another church where I had been the organist, I did have an experience I can’t explain. One night I had gone in and gone upstairs to put my choir music away after rehearsal (choir rehearsal was in a different room on the church campus). As soon as I unlocked the door and entered the dark church, I felt something, not physical, but something that just made me want to get out of there. I unlocked the choir loft gate, turned the stair lights on, went upstairs to the choir loft, put my stuff away, and got out of there as quickly as I could. I’ll never know what I felt, but no one in the choir laughed it off when I told them about it.

  90. Lbd*

    I worked at a place that is a long ways from anything, and staff usually lived on site. I was staying by myself in a large old log house with capacity for more than ten people. At about 3 in the morning I was awoken by what I could swear was the sound and impact of the front door slamming shut. I lay awake for a while (very quietly and not moving), but didn’t hear anything else. It took me almost an hour to convince myself that it was safe to go back to sleep because if someone was in the building with me, they couldn’t get upstairs to the bedrooms without the old stairs creaking loudly and warning me.

  91. Trippedamean*

    I’ve got lots of haunting stories.

    I worked in the basement collections of a museum for a while. There was a long hallway separating the bathrooms from the collections area and human remains were stored in a closet off of that hallway. Every time I walked down the hallway, I thought I heard footsteps or felt like someone was behind me, even though there never was anyone.

    The building I currently work in is old and haunted. When I first started, I couldn’t go into one of the stalls in the bathroom because all of the hairs on my arms would stand on end. It eventually went away, but I was telling a new coworker about it one day when the fire alarm started going off. We all evacuated and then learned that someone on the top floor had tried to “smudge” the ghost away, which triggered the alarm.

    Another time, I was on a work trip and staying at a hotel. I woke up in the middle of the night with a feeling that I was being watched and I swear I saw someone sitting next to me on the bed in the dark.

    Another place that I worked had been an old hospital before it was converted into an office building. Each office had been an individual patient room. The electronics in my first office would periodically turn on when no one was touching them. For instance, my printer would start trying to print. I moved several times to different offices in that building but never had the same thing happen in any of the other offices.

  92. SB*

    When I worked in aged care most of the nurses who worked second or third shift had encountered something unsettling on shift. Most of the time it was nothing (combination of working in a darkened environment & hearing the spooky stories from other nurses) but there was definitely something going on in one of the rooms that no one could explain. Every resident in that room would mention seeing a teenage girl standing in the corner of the room staring at them at some point soon after moving into the room. I am a skeptic, but I can’t explain why they all saw the same thing.

    The facility had been a convent from the 1800s until the 1950s when it was repurposed into a boarding school for girls who were considered “difficult”, then it became an aged care facility in about 1980 when locking your daughters up for being strong willed fell out of fashion.

  93. Epilogue*

    My husband and I rent an office for remote work in an old house that has been converted to office spaces. When we first started working there, I often had a feeling of someone being in the room with me and once I saw the shadow of someone walking past the door at night when the other offices were empty. I finally checked with my husband who admitted that he had seen a man appear and disappear in the hallway. Things calmed down after we had been there for a few weeks but I have yet to work up the nerve to ask our landlord if he knows that he has an office ghost.

  94. Jellyfish Catcher*

    Decades ago, I bought a one story house, built in the 40’s. The seller left a detailed list for me: garbage day, neighbor’s names, etc.
    At the end was: “don’t worry about the footsteps in the hall at night, coming towards the master bedroom. There’s never anyone there.”
    Yeah….not only I heard them, but house guests had to be warned and heard the foot steps. Maybe it was night settling, but…. the ghost felt like a positive guardian, so ee went with it.
    Years later, I added a partial second story. Right at the top of the new roof, in the middle of the night, would come a series of what sounded like rapid hammer taps, loud not like creaking.
    One day I sat down, under that part of the roof and talked to him:
    I told him that I was sorry that the addition upset him, that he was welcome to stay, it’s his house too, but please stop the hammering.
    We never heard it again.

  95. lin*

    I used to work for a state agency that was housed in an old mental hospital. The stonework “ASYLUM” chiseled into the stonework above the sweeping staircase was the clue. It was a short building, only three stories, and had been remodeled inside to be cube farms instead of wards. Fine place to work, and I’m as psychic as a lead brick, it never bothered me.

    Except. It had a cupola, which you could only reach up a wrought iron staircase from the middle of the third floor; we called it the eagle nest and a favorite grad school professor perched up there surrounded by decades – possibly more than a century – of historical records. There were tales that it used to be a solitary-confinement cubicle, that patients had met their demise tumbling down the steps, etc. I knew many people that wouldn’t go up to the third floor in that part of the building after dark.

    See again, psychic as a lead brick, I never thought it was anything but a neat perch for a cool dude. But I could absolutely see how other people were creeped out by it when compounded with the building’s history!

  96. Ghosts of Bars*

    I worked in a notoriously haunted building in my city. My hours were a standard 9-5 and was never uncomfortable or saw anything during those hours. However, the building was a lot creepier at night. Tenants reported hearing music in rooms where the location could not be pinpointed. Footsteps at night. Lots of orbs in a staff photo that I took. At one point, my boss reported seeing a woman sitting at the front desk in a black dress and veil. She nodded and wished him good morning when he walked in to the office. When he realized what he saw, he screamed and ran out the front door. Good times.

  97. Rach*

    My business, the theatre, is full of hauntings! Some blame it on the residual energy of shows and performances.

    I was interning on a popular NYC show set in a old 6 floor warehouse, which was overhauled to look like a 1930’s/1940’s space where audience members roamed the floors and followed the story instead of sitting down like regular proscenium theatre. Each floor had a theme – ie hotel reception, living spaces etc.

    One room had a REAL used coffin as a prop and the space gave off some serious bad vibes. I could not go in there alone and often refused to alone. Something just felt very OFF, creepy and like someone was watching you. And I worked with and made some of the creepiest props in the show. I still get the creeps thinking about it.

    My college theatre was also haunted too. Lots of ghosts here!

      1. Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain*

        just a few guesses but …the deceased is displayed in a fancier/expensive open casket at a wake, then interred in a cheaper “pine box,” or cremated. Or the deceased is transported to another place for burial in a basic casket…died in NY but wants to be burried in California…and then the family makes arrangements for a fancier one where they will be buried. Third, least interesting idea, it was the floor model and various people have tested it out while still alive.

      2. Rach*

        Some coffins/caskets were used a viewing casket and even “transport”. You would rent a nicer coffin/casket for a wake and then get a cheaper pine box if you want to be cremated. Depending on the era, you can find some interesting practices revolving around death and how things were used. That’s my inner props master geek coming out.

        You would be surprised what you can find an estate sale, antique stores, warehouse clearance and even someone’s attic!

    2. Bluebell*

      When that show played in Boston before NYC it was in an old school building. There were definitely spaces there that had their own creepy vibe.

      1. Rach*

        I feel like it those vibes must have travelled with it, because there were other spaces where the atmosphere felt off in NYC.

  98. AlarmedAdvisor*

    Years ago, I worked at a school that was haunted. Over the summer, I’d get there an hour earlier than everyone else. Our building had a large glassed in lobby in front that gave a view of the parking lot with locked exterior doors on either side. There weren’t any other building close to campus. One morning, I was leaving the restroom and heard two female coworkers’ voices. “Oh, they’re here early!” I thought. I continued walking towards the lobby when I heard the male campus police officer say something and figured he’d also gotten there early and was letting them in. By the time I reached the lobby, I still could see no other cars in the parking lot, and I was still alone in the building. I did look out each of the doors before promptly locking myself in my office. Those three showed up about 45 minutes later. I had convinced myself it was an evil entity trying to lure me somewhere!

  99. NobodyHasTimeForThis*

    I used to work for a really old theatre. I was working alone in the light booth and heard footsteps overhead. There is no overhead, it is the top of the building. Seats will fall randomly throughout the building. Things move from where you put them. Lights turn on and off by themselves.

    But what really got me is once I dismissed the idea of the ghost being real – its an old building, all of it could be explained. That night at home, in the middle of the night I heard a weird whirring noise that would last about a minute and stop. Everytime I started to drop back off to sleep this noise would start again. I walked around my house and finally tracked it down to the office where my paper shredder was turning itself on and off.

    I went back to the theatre the next day and apologized to the ghost for doubting and my paper shredder has worked perfectly since then. It’s been at least 10 years and no electrical glitches.

    1. lurkyloo*

      Wait, seats will fall randomly through the building? Please explain! I have a mental image of seats falling from the top floor and landing on the bottom floor :D

      1. Clewgarnet*

        I think NHTFT means that, throughout the building, seats will randomly topple over. Or, if they’re the folding seats that are common in theatres, will randomly fall open.

        1. 1LFTW*

          I thought the latter – that seats that were folded up, which ordinarily stay that way until someone pushes them down, would randomly drop into the unfolded position.

  100. Sam*

    I’m late but I worked at a petrol station when I was 17. One morning I was opening (so a 3am start) alone and I noticed a black mark on the security camera pointing to the back. It had sort of smokey edges and actually seemed to be moving slightly but I just told myself the camera was dirty and cleaned it. It didn’t go away. I cleaned it again, no luck.

    I told myself I was just bad at cleaning and kept an eye on it, only to see the shape float out of the camera’s view and towards the back storeroom.

    I refused to think about it any more and continued on with my life like nothing happened. No good comes from trying to explore stuff like that.

  101. NoLightsNo*

    I used to work as a cleaner at a worker’s camp up in the mountains. Me and my coworker, Anna’s, job was to clean the camp’s common areas as well as the worker’s private rooms while they were at their own worksite a few kilometers away. This meant that most of the time, the only people actually at the worksite during my shift were me, my fellow cleaner and the kitchen workers (who never wandered off from the kitchen/dining area).
    Half of the time, I was working alone, the other half I was with Anna. On a few occasions, I or her would hear the other person calling out for us but we never had. What was a lot spookier and more uncomfortable was, one time, I was alone and I hear distinctly my name being called but search as I might, no one else was there.
    Anna has a similar story to tell but she also had a creepier occurrence when staying alone. One time, she was talking to her kid niece, when all of a sudden the child starts asking “who’s talking to you?” and thinking it was just a child being a child, Anna tells her that no one’s talking to her but the kid INSISTS that there is someone talking to Anna.

    I’ve worked a few jobs where I’m completely alone (nightshift life) and while I often hear unusual sounds, this is the only time I heard my name being called.

  102. Malarkey01*

    In college I was part of a team of three that had to go to a site for some work- it was an old remote hunting lodge/social club from the 20s that had been turned into a resort of sorts. Our work took us the entire day and into evening, and since we were about 2 hours from our office the resort offered to let us stay the night. Around 2 am I had the most overwhelming sense of dread, I cannot explain it but I was in a full panic and just had to get out. I actually made up a lie that I had an emergency call from home and told the others we had to leave. We drove out of the complex (which was in the woods and around all these old roads) and stopped at the security shack to drop off the keys to the cabin we’d stayed in. I clearly handed them to the guy and said we have to leave for an emergency. Two days later at work our client calls and asks what happened to the keys. I said I left them them at the security shack when we left around 2:30 am and they said the overnight guard never saw anyone leave. I said no that’s not right, I handed them to a guard, around 30s, African American gentleman with a buzzcut, the other person in my office who was there and listening said wait what? You gave them to a much older Asian gentleman with gray hair.
    The manager paused and said the only one here was a woman. We called our third employee over and asked if he remembered the guard and he said yeah it was a young college guy in a leather jacket.

    All three of us saw a completely different person and we stopped for at least a minute when I explained we were leaving. I still have no idea what happened but we had to pay $100 for the missing keys because our story sounded so made up.

  103. Red*

    Oh I don’t have a scary story to tell, but I may have an explanation for the first one: Birds. There’s quite a few common birds like Ravens and Starlings that can imitate human voices. Possibly they’d come home to roost for the night and it just so happened a baby mimicking bird was the rooster.

  104. Sad Desk Salad*

    In my previous career, I was a biological research assistant. My colleague, boss and I went to the northern part of France (Bretagne) to work at the Station Biologique, in the famously haunted town of Roscoff, for three weeks. Aside from some cold whiffs of air across my neck and my ponytail standing on end for a few seconds, most of our paranormal experiences happened in my hotel room. I had a really nice room but none of the staff would come in. At one point, four of the five light bulbs went out and no one would replace them. I had to take out my own trash (this was the kind of place with a full cleaning staff so we weren’t expected to remove our own trash). I woke up to my sheets sliding down my body. I learned to keep my windows shut in the heat of August because that’s when the creepy stuff would start.

    It came to a head when my alarm clock, which was set for 8 am, started going off at random times. This was in 2005 and this was a very cheap travel alarm clock, whose only setting was to go off at the times you set. Yet one night, after having turned it off a couple of times, it finally started blaring “It’s a Small World.” WHICH IT DID NOT HAVE THE CAPACITY TO DO. I turned it off and took out the batteries. It kept playing. I’m not proud of this, but I chucked it out the window and decided to start waking up with the sun instead. After that I started crashing in my coworker’s room.

  105. Keyboard Ghost*

    I’ve only had one paranormal experience in my life and it was a hospital where I worked. A lot of my coworkers said it was haunted, and that they would see this lady in white that would roam the halls. I don’t and still don’t really believe that, but one time I was was working pretty late (I worked in the HR/Admin office) and I had question for a colleague that worked in then next cubicle. She often worked late as well, and I heard her typing on her keyboard so I knew she was still working. But, when I walked over to her cubicle it was empty. I was so freaked out I literally grabbed my stuff and ran out of the office, and actually left the (very much not allowed) space heater on since I left in such a hurry. Thankfully the place did not burn down and I didn’t have any more creepy experiences, but to this day I still don’t know what that was, as there was definitely typing from her cubicle and there was no one left in the office. So strange.

  106. Dina*

    At a previous workplace, the smell of w33d smoke would occasionally fill the office I shared with another person. Definitiely wasn’t me, my officemate, or any of our coworkers! We’d also sometimes hear a skateboard roll down the halls. We used to blame this on the ghost of some skater kid who was haunting us.

    (Was it more likely that the ventilation intake was in the suite next door, which was a theatre school? Surely not…)

  107. glt on wry*

    When I was working at a wholesale bakery, the opening manager got a tad freaked when they came in one morning at 5:00 to see this trail of white footprints the length of the place, just kind of trudging to near the door and disappearing. I think for 10 seconds (perhaps more), they thought it was a lost soul wandering.

    Turns out: I closed the place up, which required mopping the floor (about the length of an elementary school gym). Once everyone else was gone, I would start mopping at the entrance door in the front and mop all the way to the utility sink at the back, dump the mopping bucket in the sink, and then take off my boots and carry them while in my stocking feet to punch out, so as to leave my shiny floor lovely and pristine. Would put on my boots at the front door before I left.

    My footprint trail from the back sink to the door would disappear as the floor dried. Except for the times that I was putting foot powder in my boots. Then, I’d be leaving little white footprints that were walking from the sink to kind of… stop at the front door.

    So, that was me, the bakery ghost. Sorry, Jesse!

  108. AMY*

    This was about 10 years back at an old job that had multiple office locations. There was one location where no one liked working alone. It was just SO quiet – you could hear a pin drop – except for an occasional “bang” sound from the single upstairs office, like a table or chair hitting the ground.

    Even the big boss said she will stay late in any location but that one.

    Just about everyone had gone up to investigate the “bang” at various times but nothing was ever found there. Conventional wisdom was that it was something to do with the air ducts?

    Eventually, we found out that many years before my company moved in, someone had committed suicide in that upstairs office by hanging themselves and kicking the chair out from beneath them, causing a big bang to be heard below.

  109. Honey*

    I once worked in a building built in the mid-to-late 1800s. It had been updated in the 70s, but most of the updates were cosmetic.

    One day blood began running down the conference room wall. Over the next few days, more and more rivulets of blood would start streaming down the walls. The blood wasn’t coming from a corner or the ceiling, it would just appear in the middle of the wall like stigmata. It definitely felt like something out of a horror movie.

    After about a week, building management finally agreed we weren’t crazy and sent someone to look at it. It turns out that it wasn’t blood – it was honey. There was a giant beehive that had been growing in the wall for years. I remember they moved the bees, but I don’t remember them ever repainting that wall.

    2. Anonymousse*

      I have always been waiting for something that requires the explanation, like “stigmata.” LOL. What a story! Best non ghost office story because it’s not a computer, speaker or some kind of electrical malfunction/explainable thing!

  110. Ex-prof*

    I love the Neil story.

    But whoever submitted the earbuds story is going to have to rock me to sleep tonight.

  111. Ex-prof*

    By the way, I do have a paranormal story from when I worked in a youth hostel as a teenager but I only tell it when I’m drunk.

  112. AMY*

    Oh I also have another one…I worked for the local police department and going down into the underground parking garage was always creepy. The door between the elevator and the parking spots always had a weird reflection in the window that looked like Michael Myers. It absolutely freaked me out every time, and against my will I would start playing the Halloween theme music in my head as I walked to my car.

    Thinking it was just a quirk of mine, I mentioned it to a cop one day who said, “Yeah, I see that reflection every night too.” For some reason, that just sent me over the edge. I decided to pay for street parking after that LOL

  113. anon24*

    I’ve shared a few of my EMT stories before, but I don’t think I shared this one. The last place I worked at as a full-time EMT had a bunch of different stations and one was normally staffed only during the day. It doubled as an ambulance station and our administrative office, so we had crew room for the ambulance staff, offices. We also and a full sized kitchen. Also, this station had a reputation as being haunted and one of the night shift captains was terrified to go inside alone at night. One of my partners had spent the night during bad weather once and woken up to someone standing over her talking to her.

    One night this same partner and I had gotten a few late calls and gotten bogged down with charting and ended up several hours past the end of our shift. It was probably 9:30 at night and we were sitting at the computers, which were right next to the open door to the kitchen. All the lights were off except the one in the crew room where we were so we had assumed we were alone in the building. I had just finished up my paperwork and was talking to her as I was getting my things together to leave. Mid sentence I heard, sensed, and saw someone walk across the kitchen in the dark, drop dishes into the sink with a clang, and then sort of just disappear(?). I remember literally stopping mid sentence and loudly saying “is someone fucking here?”

    No one answered, and we just stared at each other wild eyed. My partner confirmed that she too had heard someone in the kitchen putting dishes in the sink. We theorized that maybe someone was still there working late, but I didn’t want to leave my partner alone in the building after what happened so we got up and walked through the entire building. All the lights were still off, all the individual offices were off, and all the doors were secure. I offered to stay but she decided she was fine by herself and as far as I know had a quiet night after I left. Oh, and there were no dishes in the sink either.

    1. saskia*

      aaaaaaaaaaaaarrrrrggghhhh!!
      When the partner woke up to someone standing over her and talking, what did she do? And was the entity actually intelligible? This is so interesting!

  114. 1LFTW*

    My colleagues and I joke that my current workplace is haunted!

    The building is 150 years old or so, and everyone who’s ever been there by themselves at night has heard inexplicable noises. I can write off the sound of the stairs creaking or footsteps as the building settling, but I can’t say that about hearing voices, music, or laughter when I know I’m the only person there.

    It’s also not uncommon to look upstairs after my class and see the lights turned on, even though they were off at the beginning of my class, nobody’s been up there since the afternoon, and the doors were supposed to be locked.

    I’m sure there’s a logical explanation, so I’ve never felt particularly creeped out. But I definitely know people who refuse to be there by themselves at night (or who refuse to be in the building at all at night).

  115. NerdyLibraryClerk*

    My workplace isn’t quite what I’d call an old building, but it’s old enough and finicky enough that staff jokes about it being haunted. And perhaps it is. A coworker and I had a strange experience at one of the service desks that could’ve been our imagination but didn’t have an obvious explanation.

    The desk is U-shaped, and patrons are meant to come to the front, or sides, but occasionally one will come up to the open part of the U to ask for help. One fairly quiet evening, the person I was on desk with and I were chatting, since there was no one in need of our help. We both distinctly heard someone behind us say, quietly, “Excuse me.”

    When we turned to help them, there was no one there. After a moment of staring at where a patron wasn’t and then at each other, we confirmed that, yes, we’d both heard that. The only patrons in the area were seated and far enough away that it couldn’t have been someone pranking us.

    It must have been a random sound we thought sounded like a voice, or some weird echo from somewhere else on the floor. Or a very polite chose wanted to ask us a question.

  116. La-Z-person*

    A few years ago I worked at a two-storey Mental Health clinic that was barely a decade old and with state of the art facilities.
    Clinicians and staff offices were upstairs, and to gain access one would need a staff smart card to use the stairs or elevator.
    Patients did not have upstairs access and were always based in the downstairs clinic.

    I decided on a Saturday morning to turn up catch up on file notes. The clinic is usually empty except for the occasional one or two triage officers downstairs.

    Id completed all my work, and headed towards the stairs to go to the bottom level.
    Id turned off all the lights, but the room was still bright from the sunlight through the windows.
    As I turned to close the door behind me, I saw through the narrow glass panel a face opposite the door.
    I stopped breathing…then opened the door again to check if anyone was there, but then remembered that no one else had been upstairs beside myself.

    I raced downstairs, activated the alarm and fled.

    It may have been my imagination but Ive been mindful not to work overtime again!

  117. Legalien*

    I’ve been waiting all year for this! Although I’m late to the party, I have a few spooky/haunting experiences from a couple of places that I worked.

    1) When I was in high school, I volunteered at my vet’s office as an assistant on weekends during the school year and all week during the summer. It wasn’t unusual for me, his nurse, and a tech to be down in the basement getting stock to put up on the shelves (like most vets, he had some fancy foods like Science Diet available to buy) and hear the front door open and close, the sound of footsteps come across the floor to the basement door and stop, but nobody come down, and nobody was upstairs when I’d run up to see who was there. My vet’s nurse would always call out ‘Hi Alvie!’ when that happened. Turns out that Alvie was an old employee who’d died a decade or so before. Apparently, he would drop by to visit whenever someone was in the basement getting stock. I guess he wanted to make sure the job was being done right!

    2) I worked graveyards in a group home for teenage girls in my mid-twenties. There were three houses for the girls to sleep in, and two of those were also used for school/therapy/etc. Well, everything you hear about such group homes is true. Although we on the night staff actually cared about and wanted to help the girls (for the most part), the same couldn’t be said for the owners and a lot of the day staff. Anyway, at what we called ‘Next Door House’, where some of the girls slept and the ‘library/computer lab’ was, there was a room that would have the light flip on by itself over and over. The atmosphere in that house on the nights it would do that was really oppressive, like the feeling that someone was there and watching you, but wanted to hurt you. One night when my back was turned to that room , I got a creepy feeling up my spine and turned to look. Not only was the light on, there was a shadowy figure standing in the doorway! I swear, if the girls hadn’t been asleep I would have screamed. As it was, I still gasped, but then told the figure it wasn’t welcome and to leave. It disappeared after that. This happened a couple of times while I worked there, but interestingly it stopped after one employee/owner stopped working there (he went to work at another group home the family owned). I know he in particular liked to bully the girls, so I have to wonder if he somehow invited something into that house while he worked there.

    3) A few years after that, I was working graveyards as a front desk clerk at a hotel. It wasn’t unusual to hear or see the front doors open, the second set of front doors open, and then hear footsteps in the lobby. I could chalk up the doors opening to a critter running past the sensors, but the footsteps…I dunno.

    I don’t work graves anymore. Huh. I wonder why. ;) Anyway, those are my stories!

    1. Protoa*

      with the second story, maybe the shadow figure follows that guy around, making sure if he hurts someone he gets punished, and it was making sure you weren’t gonna hurt anyone, and when you told it it wasn’t welcome, it knew you meant no harm and left?

      1. Legalien*

        It’s possible, but I don’t think it was like that. The feeling other people I worked with that saw it and I got from it was that was pure malice and hate (I know, since we talked about it after stuff happened). We came up with the theory that the other guy brought in so much negativity with his behavior and the way he treated the girls that it attracted something dark and malevolent that wanted to scare people, if not hurt them.

        1. Legalien*

          Oh, I should have added that I and other people saw that shadow figure a few times. Each time I saw it had to tell it that it wasn’t welcome and to leave. I’m a pretty religious person, so I definitely was praying as well when that would happen. I’m pretty sure it was a combination of praying and telling it to leave that made it go each time.

  118. Humble Schoolmarm*

    I once taught at a school where the basement was divided into a creepy maze of small, windowless offices. The school was built in the 70s and nothing dramatic had ever happened there, but the office area of the basement was creepy.
    One day, the resource teacher, who had his office in there, ran into the staff room, his face pale. He told us that he had been recording a student’s reading to assess later. He was playing it back after school and the kid kept saying “they” when the text said “their”. The weird thing was, around the middle of the recording a spooky voice, not his or the kid’s, cut in and said “nooootttt theeeeyyyy” after the kid mixed up the word again. To say the teacher was freaked out was an understatement. Honestly, I tried to avoid that chunk of the school when I was alone after that too. I have to say, though, that the ghostly recording was far less scary than the idea that one could get trapped in a school listening to kids read badly for all eternity.

    1. EvilQueenRegina*

      In which case, I’d recommend avoiding the show School Spirits, since ghosts being trapped in a school for all eternity is pretty much the plot.

  119. Marinade*

    Not that creepy for me, but…

    When I was working for my university’s help desk, one person of our undergraduate team always did the last round to lock all computer labs and server rooms and activate the alarm. Sounds pretty okay, but they were located in several buildings across campus and you went alone. Between October and March, it was dark outside when you did the rounds.

    With the computer labs, you let any remaining undergraduates know it’s closing time soon and then return 10 – 15 mins later to lock the rooms and set the alarm. Only that you left the (still relatively populated) building with our office to walk 10 to 15 minutes across campus to reach the buildings with the majority of the computer labs and the servers. Those buildings were often already deserted, but at least the lights were mostly on.
    Then I would announce the closing of the labs there (if anyone was still working) and off I went to lock the two server rooms in close-by buildings. The first server room was in a dimly lit basement.
    By nature of a server room you don’t hear a lot because there is the constant hum of the servers. We were instructed to check that nobody was in there before activating the alarm (because you couldn’t trust your ears to know), so along long rows of servers I went in a half-lit room, always hoping I wouldn’t run into anybody. Not because of dangerous people – you needed a special key to access the server room –, but because both of us would probably have a heart attack on account of not hearing anybody enter or move around.

    So I would lock the server room in the basement (I liked that part the least because it had the worst light and we shut all lights off when we left), traversed to the server room two stories up, and finally I went back to the computer labs to lock them up as well. By this time the rooms were definitely empty and I rarely met a person in the halls.

    Well I did this round a lot of times in my 1.5 years there, as did all the other team members (mostly between 18 and 24 years old), always alone, if there didn’t happen to be a new person who needed to see the steps live.

    Time jump to me having left that job, having left university and meeting one of my former colleagues by chance. We start chatting about that job and I learn that one day, upon returning to the computer labs, one member of the team did not run into one, but two people who were eagerly carrying away computer equipment from the yet-to-be locked lab.
    Apparently they weren’t very smart, so the police caught them when they came back to get the rest of their loot. But you bet the rounds were completed by two people from that point on.

  120. Clewgarnet*

    I’m the horrible person who invented a ghost.

    I was a network engineer who worked with field engineers out in telephone exchanges, while I stayed in the office. One day, one of them mentioned that the exchange he was at seemed eerie and he thought it was haunted. I thought he was joking, so I carried on the bit – yes, an engineer had died of a heart attack there, back in the 1950s. He hadn’t been found for two days. Hadn’t my engineer noticed that there were always flies buzzing round the far corner of the exchange? (There are flies buzzing round the far corner of EVERY exchange. They’re revolting places.)

    Only, he hadn’t been joking. And he didn’t believe me when I said I was making it up. He thought I was trying to reassure him.

    Soon, it was a well known fact that exchange was haunted. The ghost even developed a name – Albert. He’d been in the REME during WWII, apparently, and had come out of the war with shrapnel in his chest. Somebody had even seen him. It reached the point where engineers were reluctant to go to that exchange.

    So I started spreading the story that Albert was helpful. Somebody had dropped a screwdriver behind a rack, and Albert had pushed it to where he could reach it. Cables never got tangled at that exchange. All you had to do was greet him when you walked into the exchange, and he’d help you out.

    I’ve left that company now, so I have no idea if the exchange is still haunted by Albert, but I kind of hope it is.

  121. EvilQueenRegina*

    When I had a temp job in a building that was said to have been an old workhouse, rumour had it at the time that it was haunted. Someone named the ghost Edgar. The kind of occurrences reported were things like someone would be looking for a particular book, look everywhere and not be able to find it, then come in the next morning and it would be back on the shelf sticking out in such a way that they couldn’t miss it.

    It wasn’t something I’d particularly picked up on at first (I think I’d been there about 8 months before having even heard of Edgar) until we were about to move into one of our other offices, this one guy was leaving his packing to the last minute and then I came in on the Monday morning to find his shelf had fallen off the wall over the weekend, scattering its contents all over the office. He said Edgar must have got fed up of waiting and given him a helping hand. He also joked at the time that maybe Edgar had been the reason my predecessor had very abruptly ghosted after a couple of weeks (no pun intended), leaving her jacket behind.

    The odd thing was, after we left that building, the Edgar-type occurrences such as computers turning themselves off and books/files going missing and then reappearing started happening at the new address. (No idea if it’s still going on – I left that job in 2011 and the building has since changed hands).

  122. OrangeCup*

    I had a boss who died very suddenly of lung cancer (diagnosed and died within 3 months – don’t smoke, kids!). The week between Christmas and New Years later that year, as usual I was the only one working in the office. I had learned in this job that if I worked that week and took the first week of January off, it was like getting two weeks vacation for the price of one. Because everyone else took the week between Christmas and New Years off too and nothing happened, no emails came in and I didn’t have to do anything. So I usually spent half a day on the filing I never had time to get to the rest of the year and the rest of the time with my feet kicked up reading a book.

    Except the year she died, I swear I suddenly heard her voice in her office, which was right next to mine, sounding like she was asking me a question. She was a complete workaholic with a bad marriage so it made sense if she was going to haunt anywhere it would be the office, but she didn’t like me at all and the feeling was mutual so I was not putting up with an office haunting. I was like, “Not today, Satan….” and went to peer into her office. Luckily I saw nothing. I texted one of my colleagues who was into crystals and tarot and things, telling her to bring her sage when she came back after the holidays because we needed to cleanse the office. Once she did I never heard the boss’ voice again.

  123. EvilQueenRegina*

    Another one – when I was at university, the room I had in my first year was in this old building where there were always some vague rumours about it possibly being haunted, but there was never anything concrete, I never saw anything that seemed off, and just didn’t take any notice of it.

    Until the first day of my third year, when I happened to meet one of the people “Lucinda” who’d taken over that room from me the year after I had it, and she asked me about the rumours she’d heard that that room was haunted, that my roommate and I had seen our furniture moving by itself. To this day, I have no idea where that came from – I never saw anything like that, I asked my roommate about it and she denied all knowledge of it, Lucinda couldn’t remember who’d first told her that, and all I ever got out of anyone else was that they’d heard it from Lucinda.

  124. The Linen Porter*

    The old victorian hotel ~ 1826 I worked at had ghost(s).

    One afternoon I was closing up as the houskeeping was done and the floor supervisor had given me ”the list” ( 401, two spoons and glass, 402 tea mug and red cushion, 414 kettle etc.) so it’s basically I get the list done it’s home time… So running around and about I *know* room 404 is empty as I’d just done something there and I know any early checkins so definitely it *is* empty. Despite all this we *always* knocked and hollered ”housekeeping” as there is no such thing as an empty room…

    So I knock… and there is a knock back… I knock again… and theres a knock back… and I am seriously getting weirded out… doesn’t help the room doors are dodgy so the lock flashes red… so I step forward to put my keycard in proper, and theres a knock… I realise the floorboard is a bit dodgy, so when I put my weight on a certain spot, knock knock… Yeah, room 404 also had a notorious flooding bathroom so no wonder – the joists were probably rotten.

    But I did have a moment of freakout there.

  125. TheErst*

    I used to work in museums, and one in particular that was a giant historic house (think, 8 floors, around 175 rooms)

    1. TheErstwhileLibrarian*

      Oh ugh… I keep hitting enter by mistake. Anyway, this museum was massive, and filled with things that had been collected from around the country: portraits, dishware, furnishings–even some of the wall paneling and wallpaper had been painstaikingly removed from much older houses and installed. The man who built it, nowadays, would probably have been classified as a hoarder. However, he was obscenely wealthy, and so could just afford to add another wing when things got to crowded. All this background is to say, for a while, I didn’t have any unexplainable experiences (although several colleagues did). Until one day, I was walked into one of the rooms and froze. It was so incredibly cold. The museum was normally kept at a low ambient temperature, but this was a drop of about 20-30 in that particular room. The kicker? The man’s last surviving daughter had passed away, and her funeral was being held down the road at that very moment. I was standing in her old bedroom.

  126. CoffeeMug*

    When I was a teenager and into my early twenties, I used to work at nursing homes as a nurses’ assistant. When I was done my regular duties and no one had called for assistance, I’d spend some time with one of my favorite residents who lived in the biggest corner room with her roommate. At the very end of my shift (I worked second shift after school, so this would’ve been around 10:30 or 11) my coworker asked me to come with him to my favorite resident’s room to just stand there with him while he helped her because he was scared of the ghost who lived in there. I never felt any presences there, but watching this 40 year old man practically jog out of that room in terror did give me the heebie jeebies!

  127. Nonanon*

    All of these put my “early morning/late night experiments, startled by my own lab-coat wearing reflection” stories to shame.

  128. Ebar*

    Not the work place but a relative owns a former rectory and when I was a child there was the story of the one of the bedrooms being the MURDER ROOM (insert ominous music here).

    A few years ago I was taking to a member of the family and she told me she’d done some research and the story of the murder bedroom was absolute rubbish.

    The murder was in the dining room.

  129. I've Escaped Cubicle Land*

    2 Stories. Once worked at a animal shelter. Kennels were set up in 4 halls connecting like a lower case t. One night I go to make sure all is secure in the north hall as we are locking up. All other staff (2 people) are in the office at the very end of the east hall. right after I turned from the intersection into the north hall I clearly hear a female voice say my first name. Think when your mama or the aunties really want your attention now type tone. I automatically turn around (aunties trained me well) and there is no one there. Door to the office and the other coworkers at the end of the east hall is closed so it couldn’t have been them. Told a coworker about it after I finished locking up. Supposedly the original care giver who opened the animal shelter haunts the place. They also had a picture of a ghost dog in 1 kennel on that north hall.
    2nd story. Cubical Land was in an old building that had at 1 point been a car sales place way back in the day before being renovated and homing several government departments over the years. One 1 floor there was a conference hall with the door to it sandwiched in between a support pillar an a hallway wall. For some reason weird little alley way is were they stuck the copier everyone had to use. (mass traffic jams if a meeting let out when someone was making multiple copies) I’m making copies one day and I see out of the corner of my eye a older gentleman in an older style suit (Think the kind of suit Grandpa wore when I was a wee kid and was already fairly outdated) walk past the open door of the conference room. Which meant he would have had to walk thru a wall or past me to leave the conference room. He chose the wall. I over heard several interns complaining about it being creepy around the copier before it finally got moved to somewhere with more space.

  130. Flying Fish*

    I used to work at a small family-owned amusement park during the summers.

    Sometimes we’d hear a kids voice screaming at odd hours. It always scared new people and occasionally patrons.

    It was the peacocks who wandered the grounds. If you couldn’t see them, it truly sounded like a child screaming for help.

    1. Elsajeni*

      One of the Girl Scout camps I went to as a kid had a neighboring farm that kept peacocks — really, kind of the ideal neighbor for a summer camp! You could not ask for better conditions for campfire ghost stories.

  131. Veryanon*

    I’ve told this story before but it bears repeating for Halloween (okay, the day after).

    I once worked for a well-known convenience store chain based in my area, owned mostly by a particular family. The corporate office was this family’s old “summer home” which had been built in the late 1800s. Supposedly a ghost haunted this building; it was the ghost of a maid who had fallen in love with the son of the family, and because they were wealthy and prominent, the son was not allowed to marry her. So she died by suicide by hanging herself in the dumbwaiter (IIRC). Many of my co-workers had stories of seeing the ghost or experiencing spooky things while working late at night, which I just chalked up to the house’s colorful history.
    One day I was working at my desk, and had my phone on its charger, when I had to use the restroom. I was only gone from my desk for a few minutes, and no one else was around at the time. When I came back, the phone was gone, and my computer screen had just started printing out “NONONONONONONONONONONONONONO” repeatedly and didn’t stop until I hit a key. I still have no explanation for why it was doing this. I looked all over the office for my phone but couldn’t find it anywhere. I was a bit freaked out but continued working.
    I got up from my desk again a little while later to get something to drink and came back to find my phone hooked back up to its charger, and the “NONONONONONONONO” thing happening again.

    Was it the ghost? Was it someone playing a prank on me? I still don’t know.

  132. LifeBeforeCorona*

    A co-worker had a motion activated toy that gave a cheery good morning when you walked by. BUT, when the battery was low you got a low slow gutteral “gooood mooornnning” that creeped everyone out.

  133. flefs*

    Not a ghost but thinking about it still makes me shiver. A few years ago, my company renovated its old building. Part of this was to remove dry wall that had been put into the basement decades ago. Behind, there was a small space that could only be accesses through an extremely tight crawlspace. In this space were about 20 shoe boxes, all filled with hundreds of wallets and some purses. All very neatly organized but it looked like a scene from a horror movie. Someone had stolen them, removed the money and hid them in this space. The wallets still had IDs, drivers licenses etc in them. It was my job to go over everything with the police. This was shortly after a major terror attack in a neighboring country so they were very thorough (identity theft …). Result: the wallets were probably stolen between the late 70s and mid 90s. We compared the dates with list of former employees. As only a very tiny person could enter the space the police suspected a very sweet office admin that had since retired. She was the only empoyee who had access to the adjacent rooms, was small enough to get into the crawl space and worked during the time of the thefts. However, statutes of limitations had run out so the police did not follow up. I still remember going over all of these old documents and checking them against old employee lists. It was very creepy.

  134. Oolie*

    I used to work in the research wing of a hospital. My duties included using the election microscope, which was in the subbasement around the corner from the morgue. One day I was headed for the EM room, took the corner quickly, and bumped (literally) into an unattended gurney with a covered body on it. I immediately blurted out, “Oh, sorry!” and rushed into the EM room before it occurred to me that there should not be an unattended body in the hallway (and also that my apology was probably unnecessary). So I went back, and it was gone. To this day I’m not sure if I was being pranked, if someone really had left the body for the exact 30 seconds the encounter took, or if I was hallucinating.

  135. badger*

    So, funny story: I read this post yesterday and then not ten minutes later had an email come in from my work phone message service. The email always includes a copy of the sound file and a rough transcription. The transcription was, “I don’t know what to do,” over and over and over, followed by “thanks for watching!” and I thought perhaps someone had accidentally recorded their TV or something, so I listened to the sound file, and it was a minute of pure static white noise. I couldn’t make out ANYTHING in it. And normally if the transcription software can’t recognize something, it just says “not clear.” Nothing came up when I googled the phone number and I’m sure not gonna call it, I’ve seen that horror movie, I know how it ends.

    I did send my boss a message just in case a demon popped out of my laptop, but so far all is quiet.

  136. Mystic*

    I once worked at a (known) haunted amusement park in Ohio. There is a small center section on the way out, which has no lights (and is known to be a place for teenagers to hide.) Music cuts off at 11pm.
    I’m making my way to the front, and as I walk by the dark center, I hear a giggle. Sounds 8-10yrs old. I stop, investigate. No one is there, no footsteps sound, no other giggles happen. was very interesting. of course, I’m a ghost investigator now, so all is good.

  137. Risky Biscuits*

    The academic library I used to work in was noted to have a particularly spooky basement level, and many student workers (and some full-grown adult workers, cough cough) refused to check that floor at closing if the lights were off. It was not only very dark, it just had an overwhelmingly creepy and oppressive atmosphere, especially if you glanced toward the very dark, far back wall, and even new employees would sometimes come back saying they felt like they were being hunted.

    They refurbished the floor a little bit by tearing out the old microfiche and map cases along the back wall. They didn’t change anything about the lighting or anything like that, but after that change, the basement level was just dark, not creepy-feeling.

  138. Office Drone*

    Not my experience, but one I heard from a docent on a haunted house tour. Someone in the group asked her if she’d ever seen a ghost. No, she said, but she’d heard one.

    The house in question is a historic landmark in the “old town” area of a major U.S. city and well-known for being haunted. Local elementary schools often send students there on field trips. That day, the docent said that the children in the school group were a bit loud. Not rowdy, or acting inappropriately, just boisterous with kid noise. Since they weren’t causing harm, she didn’t think to say anything.

    Suddenly, she heard a voice. Not a physical voice, but a voice only she seemed able to hear. It said, “Can’t you do something about the noise?”

    She quieted the kids. Because no one wants to tick off a ghost when one has to work among them every day.

  139. SusieQQ*

    Not spooky per se, but still a fun story.

    I used to teach math at a community college, and our department was adjacent to the criminal justice department. Every semester one of the criminal justice instructors created a fake crime scene for the students to process, and as I had one of the larger offices in the building, it was the perfect location. He would dress a mannequin in bloody clothes and sprawl it in the middle of my office, then plant evidence like a cell phone, blood splatters, fingerprints, and the weapon (a bloody hammer). I looked forward to it every semester, but I imagine that if someone were to see it without understanding the context, it would be alarming.

  140. Sun&Honey*

    I previously worked in a very old building that used to be an “Asylum for the Insane” back in the early 1900’s. (That was its actual name!). The offices had all been patient rooms. There were stories shared amongst the staff about seeing glimpses of various resident ghosts, like the Pink Lady, a former patient who wore a long pink dressing gown. Sometimes I worked long hours as the only person on our floor, and on more than one occasion I heard footsteps, jingling keys, and voices, but of course no one was there. The old creepy elevator doors would open and close on their own. I never sensed malevolence, but a coworker would only work at night if she had her dog with her, since the dog would let her know when something supernatural was afoot and she could nope out of there ASAP.
    Side note: I found an old patient registration ledger in the basement once, listing patients and their reasons for being admitted. Women were institutionalized for things like “menopause” and “hysteria after 12th pregnancy.” It was incredibly sad.

    1. Dog momma*

      I took care of a 97 yo lady that was ” put away ” for ” baby blues” ( post partum depression ) back in the 1920s. Which is horrible, but if she was totally non functioning, what else could her husband do? There was very little if any treatment at that time for PPD, & there were kids to take care of unless he sent them to the orphanage as he had to work. That’s all we knew but we all thought what if he was just a jerk & got rid of her that way.. at least 60+ years in the state hospital!

  141. Water Everywhere*

    More than one person has reported hearing footsteps when working late and alone in our building, myself included. It’s a bit eerie but there’s never been any sense of malevolence to it. I think our ghost is an introvert who prefers to have the place to himself after business hours, and the footsteps are his way of telling us to go home already :)

  142. Chirpy*

    Several of my coworkers insist the store is haunted, but honestly, the building is so messed up (electrically, mechanically, structurally) and we often get animals sneaking in (and occasionally people), that I think that explains all of it.

    Things fall off the shelves on the sales floor, mostly, but a few people think there’s some kind of presence in the warehouse. (There’s definitely enough electrical interference in there to mess with wifi, and we know there’s animals – I saw 3 birds today, and there’s rats.)

  143. Haunted Red Bull*

    In college I worked at a cafe often doing closing shifts, and there had often been rumors of the building being haunted. Shoe prints on the ceiling of the walk-in, plates dropping when no one is around, that sort of thing. One evening as I was in the back on dish duty I turned to see a can of red bull leap from the shelf, directly into the wall opposite, and into the ground. Not like, it fell and rolled. It fully jumped the 5 or 6 feet to hit the freezer opposite the dry storage, at right about chest height. I yelled at the ghost to “knock it off!” because that was my responsibility to clean. Didn’t have a problem after that.

  144. RPOhno*

    At the start of my career, I worked on an old radioactive materials manufacturing site (still active, but had gone through many changes). I was surveying a venillation mezzanine, which was already a little spooky just from being crammed full of ductwork to the point where you couldn’t see the far end from the door, and from the lighting being so bad you needed a flashlight with the lights on. Old workbenches tucked into hidden corners covered in yellowed old schematics, and a constant low whoosh and hum from blower motors that probably triggered some deep-seated instinctual terror response to infrasound. If I were to pick any place I’ve been as a horror movie set, that mezzanine would be at least in the top 3.
    Anyway, I ducked under the last duct that blocked the view to the end and swept my flashlight around, same as every week, but this time my light settled on something that looked like a dishevled humanoid form clothed in tattered robes and my ears, already straining to hear anything in the barrage of white noise, were assailed by an otherworldly shreik. I nearly had a brain aneurysm out of pure fright, but somehow managed to hold my ground just long enough to notice a few details.
    My survey meter had shifted to point at a grossly contaminated HEPA enclosure and was emitting the most tortured electronic scream imaginable, and the “cloaked figure” was a chair with a ratty blanket tossed on it.
    Glad I wasn’t vaporized by some kind of radioactive ghoul, and equally glad no one else was there to witness my reaction, but that mechanical space already felt off, and the not-a-ghoul experience didn’t help…

  145. Youngin*

    So my partner does MOT which is setting up barriers and controlling the flow of traffic via cones, barrels…etc. He occasionally has to work overnight. His current company predominantly works on Palm Beach Island in South Florida. I also work here, as a builder. 

    One of his first overnight jobs was on the beach about .2 miles south of the Worth Avenue Clock tower. He did his shift and came home per usual the next morning. When I got home after work the following day, I asked him how his first night went. He said “honestly, i was a little freaked out but i think i was imagining things”. I, naturally, pressed him on it. He told me that for 3 hours of his shift, him and his coworkers heard drums beating and chanting, despite not only being the only ones there, but because it was the end of summer they were practically the only people on the island. He also said that he heard children and women laughing. I was like wow, weird, but he doesn’t believe in the paranormal so i just kept my thoughts to myself. 
    A day and a half later he had the same shift and he and his other coworkers heard the same thing. Except this time my bf swears someone grabbed his shoulder and said “Welcome”. He was VERY freaked out. When he told me about it later on I did some research and ended up learning of the Jaega Tribe that were the original peoples of Palm Beach county. I always knew that Native Americans were here first, as a builder we occasionally come across remains and there is a committee dedicated to exhuming them. 

    Long story short, we learned that the Jaega tribe celebrated the arrival of fall with a big festival on the beaches. We think he was hearing the native people celebrate, and that he was ultimately welcomed by one of the leaders. We both feel very warm and happy when we pass by the clock tower during late August and I like to believe we are feeling their warmth and happiness as they celebrate.

  146. Alden*

    A little late for halloween, but I still think about this experience a lot. I used to work at a little historical society in an old building. The building itself was absolutely full of weird antiques—shelves of dusty old tomes, boxes of uncategorized donations (aka dead people’s belongings, bc everybody thinks ‘you know who wants my dearly departed grandma’s old crap? the friendly neighborhood historical society!’), old artwork on every wall. Highlights of the art collection included no fewer than three paintings of long-dead children whose eyes followed you around the room, an actual tombstone, and a painting of a ghost (a family portrait where a deceased or disgraced family member had been painted over, but you could still see just their eyes in the right light.) It was all kind of charmingly odd during the day but let me tell you it was spooky as hell in there at night.

    I first started working there in the late fall, and one of my duties was to close down the building when all the visitors had left. That time of year the sun set around 4PM, and by the time I had to lock up at 5 it was absolutely pitch dark. One night when I was in there alone waiting to close up, I started hearing voices. It was a woman’s voice, SUPER clear but quiet enough that I couldn’t actually make out the words, and it sounded like it was coming from right behind me. It almost felt like someone was having a whispered conversation over my shoulder, but I knew I was alone – we had a policy of escorting visitors in and out of the building, so it wasn’t a lingering patron.

    And of course the light switch was all the way at the other end of the floor from the exit, so to close that night I had to turn the lights off and then walk to my doom through a darkened library that I now knew was full of ghost ladies whose souls were trapped in the books their grandchildren had donated.

    (I later found out that due to a quirk of the ventilation system you could hear conversations happening on the second floor really clearly if you were close enough to a vent on the first floor, and I was hearing my coworkers chatting upstairs. But I maintain that there were definitely SOME ghosts in that building.)

  147. A_Jess*

    I have two I hope that’s okay:
    This happened when I worked at a summer camp. I was all by myself cleaning out the former health center which was a small two room cabin. And I kept hearing a rocking chair in the main room while I would be working in the bedroom. I came into the main room and the sound did not stop. So I walked into the center of the room and looked at the noise.
    I told it that “I know you are here, but you are scaring me so please stop.”
    And the sound stopped instantly.
    ———————————————————————
    Another time at the same camp I was walking across a field late at night when suddenly in front of me was the white lady.
    She was a well known ghost who was dressed in all white nightgown like outfit with long black hair. She definitely saw me but I stayed stock still & she faded away.

  148. KatieP*

    The print shop I worked in from ’99 to ’04 was haunted. No one ever talked about it, but when the temperature sensor that was configured to detect human-sized fluctuations gets set-off in the middle of the night by a drop of 20 degrees in an area without ventillation, there are a lot of knowing looks. We also had a PBX-style switchboard in the room next to where the cold spot triggered the alarm. We had intermittent phone problems where two extensions would dial each other, or your own extension would dial itself and you’d get static on the other end of the line.

    Actually seeing the ghost was oddly a lot less spooky. I was standing at the sink in the break room at about 7 AM when a silhouette about 5’10” tall and maybe 150# walked through the breakroom. I caught it in my peripheral vision. There was no one else in the building at the time – next person got there about ten minutes later and confirmed that I had been alone at 7.

  149. A person*

    I used to work for a cleaning service and had several creepy instances:

    One house in particular I hated cleaning alone. It was a rental unit so it was always empty when we cleaned it. Every time I was there, when I was in the basement (finished basement with a door… like not even dark and gloomy) I felt super uneasy and would always hear footsteps upstairs like someone walking on the kitchen tile in heels. I also always heard talking when I was down there. Real enough that I would walk all around the house (inside and outside) to try to find who was talking. I cleaned that house with my sister a few times too and she also hated it. She wouldn’t clean the basement bathroom alone (to be clear… we cleaned like 30 bathrooms a week… this was the only house that was a problem and only the basement one). One time we were asked to put a rolled up rug in the utility room in the basement… it was big so it took both of us to pick it up to move it. We walked it to the door of the room and couldn’t bring ourselves to cross the threshold. We ended up just throwing it in there from the doorway.

    I also was cleaning a different house with a friend once and we had started in the basement. The owners were home at this one. We both were just cleaning like usual and then stopped at the same time and were both like “something feels weird here”. We wanted out of the basement. We finished up down there and went to the next level. One of the owners just sat silently in the living room and watched us the whole time we were in there which felt weird too. We were doing a thorough clean so we had to do closets too. When we went upstairs we found soooooo many Oija boards into that house! There was something there….

    Unrelated to cleaning job, I was babysitting for a weird creepy family once when I was in high school. I had babysat for them before, but I hated it. The kids were terrors the parents were weird and they always stayed out til like 2 am which was late for a high schooler and they lived in a rural area so it was so dark and the house was creepy (I love the dark… and also lived in the rural area, but it was uneasy there). One day they told me the little one hadn’t been wanting to sleep in his room, but if he was bad I could threaten to make him sleep in his own room or if he was really bad actually put him in there. Lo and behold… after I put them to bed (he was in his brothers room in the bunk bed) the boys started fighting so I went in there to break it up. He was trying to kick me so I told him if he didn’t stop he’d have to sleep in his own room. He didn’t stop so I took him to his room (I rarely made empty threats when babysitting). I opened the door and saw some dead mutilated animal right in the middle of the floor and it smelled awful in there. I was absolutely not going to put a 4 year old in there with that! I asked him if he’d settle for sleeping on the floor in his sisters room since his brother didn’t want him in there. He accepted those terms and went to bed without further ado. The parents could not come home fast enough (although it was still several hours that I had to stay there after that)! I didn’t ask them about it… or tell them what happened cuz they always drove me home and I was scared at that point. I just told them the little one was in his sisters room on the floor because his brother didn’t want him in there. They took me home and I never went back to that house.

  150. Jenny Islander*

    Weird one at an office where somebody used to bring in flowers and leave them for everybody to enjoy. She used her own vases, which everybody knew.

    And then the vases started cracking.

    She had a lovely ceramic vase that was glazed inside and out. The glaze (but not the clay) crazed, both inside and out. It hadn’t been dropped or even put down too hard; it was just cracked when she came to pick it up. Well, it was an old vase… she chalked it up to the vase exceeding its functional life.

    But one day I came to work and noticed something invisible and sticky appeared to have trickled and dried. I cleaned it up, following the trail across surfaces, until I ended up just below the surface a lovely ruby glass vase was resting on. It looked fine–completely undisturbed, flowers perfectly arranged. So I moved it to see whether the stain was also underneath the vase–and a huge piece of the vase just came away in my hand. The entire vase had shattered in such a way that it was still holding together, barely, and the sugar water inside had trickled out, so recently that the flowers had not wilted but long enough ago that the water had dried.

    Just her vases–nothing else. But two was enough. We never figured out what the heck was going on, but she now uses plastic and foam flower holders from the supermarket!

  151. Former BEC*

    I often joke about hauntings-that-aren’t. We have a TV in our lobby with a rotating ad thing happening that is never turned off. A poster outside our windowed lobby door to the hall has a full-sized woman smiling from the view of the closed door. And there’s a VP’s private bathroom directly above my office. It’s creepy AF when you’re by yourself because I can hear the TV through the walls, get jump scared by the poster, and I’m pretty sure there’s off-hours custodial staff using the VP’s bathroom. Over the summer I frequently worked late hours and weekends and was not the only one. We threw such a fit about “the effing ghosts that are totally just the dang TV” that we got a new policy implemented that mutes the TV between 5pm-8am…apparently it can’t be totally turned off, but at least it’s something.

  153. Las Vegas*

    I’m late but I have one!

    I worked at registration at a lake resort where people stay in rustic cabins with their families. One summer, a guest had recently been in a popular mainstream horror film that just came out. One of the themes in the film was that a haunting can stick to a person instead of a place and follow them around. I asked her what filming was like, hoping she would say it was a fun project to work on, but she said it was very scary and disturbing.

    Shortly after she checked out from her stay, we started having an issue with the electricity across half the camp where the lights would briefly dim and then brighten a few times per hour (exactly like someone was dimming gaslights!) I was alone in the office one day and a man in a jumpsuit came in and say he was here to look at the electricity and set up some monitoring. I said cool, okay and let him behind the desk. He set up a small, cubical teal leather box that produced a constant reading that printed out from a metal arm onto a spool of receipt paper. It looked like the things that measure earthquakes. A few weeks passed, the lights continued to dim, the receipt paper constantly printed a reading in the office, and no one ever came back to check it. I asked my boss what it was for and when they would check it. She said she didn’t know what it was or what it was checking for and she hadn’t handled the contractors. I looked up what the instrument could be, nothing came up that made sense and I never figured out what it was. It was left there through the end of the season but had been removed when I returned the next year.

  154. Anonymousse*

    After I went to art school in the aughts and graduated into a recession, art jobs were hard to find. I moved home to rural VT with my folks to save on rent and worked mainly at a locally owned general store/grocery that was very old. I have stories about that building, but I also worked at a museum in a nearby town on Su days only, as my “art job,” to stay connected to the world of art.

    The building that housed the museum used to be a fancy Victorian that housed a very wealthy, maybe one of the only wealthy families from the Victorian age in the area. Soon after I started working and got the tour of the building, the curator/manager told me that there was a building ghost, who I remember being named “Albert.” I was told about Albert while being shown the breaker box in the basement. They told me sometimes the power would go out, and “don’t worry- It’s just the nice, totally harmless ghost Albert, playing a trick on you. He just wants attention. You just have to go switch the breaker back on.” Sounds totally fine and easy to handle on your own, as a 18/19 year old small 100 pound teenage girl holding a flashlight in a well lit cellar with your boss next to you on the stairs.

    Cue weeks of boredom later. I’d entered artists names, titles of work and media used into an ancient database sometimes, but mostly I’d be sitting at a desk reading a book trying desperately not to fall asleep. Somehow in this office, I could not stay awake. I’d been working there for a few months, mostly doing office work, labeling things, dusting, and tours if any showed up, which was very infrequent, until one day.

    One day, the power finally went. It was a sunny day, with no storms. After hearing about Albert, I dreaded the thought of going to the basement, knowing that’s what “he” wanted, and that we all just happily refer to this ghost as if it’s funny, when it’s obviously not at all when you are working alone on a weekend. I looked out the windows and even opened the doors and went out on the porch and saw that the streetlights and lights at other business buildings around me were still on, and only the power was off in the house/museum and I Had to go switch the breaker.

    I did go down into the cellar, incredibly slowly and mechanically, on auto pilot, drunk with very pretend courage I didn’t know I had, with the hairs on the back off my neck on end, a flashlight ready to nail a ghost on the head, in my right hand. Nothing happened. I switched the breaker, the power came back on. I laughed at my foolishness to myself and shook my head at what a damn idiot I can be with a ghost story, lights out and my imagination, and make my way back upstairs into the foyer, and entrance to the museum to find a bone chillingly creepy man waiting for me, wanting a tour of the house and three exhibits. That’s literally my job, so despite my hesitation, I lead him along.

    He was skinny, older, I’d gauge him as at least forties now that I am older, maybe fifties. His hair was darkish, grey. I remember his eyes having huge eye bags, and now that I think of it, they were deeply grey, and I’d even say he looked haunted. I know that sounds like a cliche considering. So I give this man this tour, room by room through this old, fancy Victorian house and show him the few exhibits and send him on his way and send him out the door, making sure it’s shut behind him. Deeply Creepy vibes. I remember telling my brother and friends about it. He spoke nervously, laughingly very breathy.

    Then the next Sunday comes, and other than labeling an old shows work to be returned to the artists, the only tour I have is that man. A born people pleaser, teenaged me just plasters a wary smile on my face and does the tour. And I tell my friends and my brother and they tell me if he shows up again, I should call the police or call them and they’ll handle it.

    The next Sunday, he comes again, except this time, he tells me he can walk around himself, he knows the place well enough now. For some reason, I let him. I tell myself he’s just a weirdo who is lonely and it’s nothing. I call no one. I try to kind of listen to his steps and keep track of where he is. Somehow, I lose track of time, even briefly fall asleep despite my deep creep of this man. Hours go by, I have finished my work and am terrified because I didn’t see him leave and believe I would have heard the very distinct, loud click of front door. The only public entrance and exit. I don’t know where he is. I have to make sure all guests are out before I lockup and leave. I run through the house yelling, “We’re closing, please make your way to the exit!” As I run through the echoing halls that are completely empty of people, I am thinking of all the private rooms that weren’t used as gallery, studio or public space that this man could also conceivably be in. Or he could have left? I yell into the cellar, opening the door at the top of the stairs, not even going down- that I am closing up and it is time to leave, now!

    No one is there. I lock up and leave.

    The following Sunday, I come in, give the man the same weird weekly tour for the third time but this time, at the end he say, “hey, what’s your name again? Kim? Oh, that’s a nice name. My names Albert, but you can call me Al.”

    Then I dropped dead and died.

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