"I Almost Got Trapped In There:" People Who Work Mostly In Isolation Share Their Creepiest Workplace Stories
It can be really easy to explain any strange noises or spooky bumps in the night (or afternoon, I guess) when you're working alongside a bunch of other coworkers. Like, that thud probably wasn't a ghost, it was just Mark from accounting.
HBO
Well, you don't quite have that luxury when you're working a job with maybe one other coworker, or completely by yourself. And it's especially creepy when it's all taking place in the middle of the night when most non-creepy noise makers are fast asleep in their beds.
NBC
Redditor u/DuffTx asked, "Redditors who spend a lot of time working in isolation (research stations, etc) what are your creepiest experiences?" From security guards to locksmiths to everyone in between, here are 17 people's creepiest tales from being on the job:
1."One night, around 3 a.m., I caught sight of the camera we have aimed at the back door. There was someone standing there wearing a Scream mask, staring at the camera and not moving. I went to the back door — which was magnetically sealed and dead-bolted for overnight, meaning the door is next to impossible to force open — and looked out the peephole...but there was no one there. I headed back to control and saw them walk back into frame, wave at the camera, then walk away. I called the cops, but they never found anyone. The camera was live feed only and didn't record, so there was no proof."
2."My major has a computer lab that is two stories underground. I have spent countless hours using these computers and I have spent several nights down in what us students call 'the dungeon.' One night around 2 a.m., I went down the hall to go get some water. It's important to note that the lights use motion sensors to turn on and off. As I was filling my water bottle, at the end of the hall the last light turned on."
"There was just this dark gap between me and this last light way down the hall. I was only mildly creeped out...until I saw something move in the darkness between me and the light. I proceeded to nope my way home promptly."
3."I was working in Antarctica at a station with an elephant seal molting ground. I thought I had left something in a shipping container by the docks, next to the elephant seals. Mindful of my safety and being a bit lazy, I grabbed a ute and drove down there at midnight. I parked and left the vehicle running with the lights on. As soon as I got out, I realized it was seriously dark. Like, no moon, no building lights, 'can't see your hand in front of your face' dark. I hear heavy breathing coming from all around me, and I can hear the two-ton bastards starting to move. It was terrifying. Whatever I forgot waited until the next day."
4."I work in a liquor store. I do closing shifts alone for several hours in the shop until 10:30 or so. Pretty much nightly, I’ll be in the cooler and hear footsteps in there with me. One time, though, I was counting down my till well after closing and heard a bottle clank somewhere in the store. I walked over and found a bottle of wine standing upright on the floor in the middle of the aisle. I had just done my nightly walkthrough to make sure all shelves were in order, and it definitely wasn't there. I had also just mopped the floor, so it's impossible that I missed it. The tiles were still wet without a single footprint leading up to or away from the bottle. "
"I logged into the CCTV system and started looking back through the past 30 minutes of footage for that particular aisle. Nothing. At one point that particular camera just blipped out and when it came back, the bottle was there."
5."I work in a building that is high security because we have a lot of expensive equipment. If you want to get to my office, you have to walk through four doors that require keycard access. It's very quiet and sterile — lots of white walls, nobody around, very little furniture, gray floors, open ceiling so you can see the ducts. Sounds echo. I was working alone and noticed that there was another guy in the building. He was wearing the same shirt that maintenance wears, but it was weird because it was really late at night on a Saturday. He was also wearing jeans, and the maintenance people always wear black pants. He kind of gave me the creeps, so I closed my office door and stayed there. I could hear the echo of him walking back and forth for a while. He tried the handle on my office door twice. I heard the beep of him trying to open my office door with a keycard twice."
"It turns out that he didn't work there. He was the grown son of one of the workers and was walking around the building trying to steal stuff, but his dad's keycard won't open any offices because it's a handyman card with limited access. Handymen have to make appointments and you have to let them in, unlike cleaning people or the techs maintaining the servers who can open any door. He got caught on camera and security checked to see whose card had tried to open the doors. The guy got a fine for trespassing and his dad got fired."
AMC
6."I worked as a lab student in Alert, Nunavut, the most northerly inhabited place in the world. I was there for my second term and it was January, which meant we were in total darkness. The lab I worked at was an atmospheric lab, so it was far from the main base, maybe 5 kilometers. Around the lab there were ‘lifelines’ leading to all of our instruments outside. This particular Wednesday was a flasking day. Basically, I loaded up a sleigh with evacuated flasks and would walk about 300 meters from the lab, open up the flasks, and then walk back to the lab. We then sent them south for analysis. Since we had to ensure that we got the best samples, we always had to walk into the wind. That meant we couldn't use the lifeline. I had my little headlamp on and walked out, pulling my sleigh into the darkness. I was a couple hundred meters out when suddenly, everything went dark."
"I turned around and the lab was gone, the station was gone, where we parked our truck was gone. I was alone, with only a headlamp and a sleigh of empty glass flasks.
I panicked. I had no radio, no phone (not that they work up there anyways), and no clue where anything was. The wind was strong enough that I couldn’t even find my tracks. I accepted my fate and just stay put, heart racing. After two of the longest minutes of my life, the power came back on."
7."I've been working in my trade for about 20 years. It can be difficult to focus when all the young bucks are asking you questions and blaring terrible music, so I tend to start work when everyone else leaves for the night. I started hearing sounds upstairs, like people talking, walking, and opening doors. I dismissed it as my imagination for a few days, but it got to be too much to ignore, so I started investigating when I would hear things. I never found anything, and it really started to creep me out."
"As it turned out, one of the guys that lived near the shop actually made a hidey hole nest up in the attic to hide from his girlfriend like some kinda dumb ass phantom of the opera."
8."I was working in a SCIF (a secure, electromagnetically shielded and soundproof room for doing high-security work). Such facilities have extremely strict and onerous rules for entry and exit, so basically you only go in if you have to and there are two-person rules that make it desirable for you to stay in if there are few people inside. One day, after being cooped up inside for hours, we exited the SCIF. The halls of the building were completely empty. Other labs were completely empty. The break room was completely empty. It was zombie movie, Twilight Zone creepy."
"Freaking out, we went to another part of the building which had windows, unlike the SCIF. Outside we saw a blizzard with over a foot of snow on the ground and a massive amount still coming down. I saw my roommate, who I had carpooled with, pushing his car through the snow to exit the parking lot. This was before cellphones, so I bolted down the steps and out to the parking lot (in dress shoes), and barely caught him before he drove away. I almost got trapped in there."
9."I used to work security at a famous venue for theater and performance arts. It was the ground-level basement and sub-basement under a big Victorian-era train station that also ran nightclubs and music gigs. I dated the head of security for a while and she described the shit she saw on a regular basis. At the end of a shift, she would lock all the shutters and then sweep through the building, making sure everyone was gone and the lights were off. The sub-basement was a warren of corridors and storerooms that roughly formed a square loop. She would work her way around the loop, switching everything off. When she'd get back to the place she started, she'd find that all the lights had switched themselves back on behind her. The lights worked completely normally the rest of the time."
"Doors she had closed would be wide open when she passed them again, too. Many of them used swipe cards or RFID fob locks to open, and all of them led to dead ends — changing rooms, bathrooms, store rooms, etc.
There were two figures she saw regularly — a young girl and a faceless shadow of a man. The girl appeared lonely and lost, but the shadow man seemed malevolent and would follow her at a distance as she locked up, often standing in the doorways of rooms she needed to enter and disappearing as she got closer. She thought the shadow man might have been manipulating the lights to lure her into the un-refurbished sections of the basement, which lead to the sealed sub-basement below the level of the river half a block away.
A group who ran a 'guided tour' experience in the basement (with costumes, props, dry ice effects, etc.) had a run-in with something when they first visited the venue to scope it out. The last member of the group was trailing a little behind, and as they entered that unfinished area, something clamped around his ankle and tripped him up. He said it felt like a hand. The floor was smooth cement, so there was nothing to trip on and not poorly lit by any means.
I don't believe in ghosts or the paranormal but I do take her word that she truly believes she saw what she described."
10."I used to work as security in a super old theatre that hosted a few plays a year. The shifts were usually 12 hours or more, in which I opened and closed the theater and made sure all the people rehearsing got in and out as needed. It was chill because I would essentially be sitting behind a glass wall playing World of Warcraft for 12 hours while getting paid. I never got the creeps there, but everyone believed it was haunted."
"Lots of little things went wrong all the time. For example, the theatre had offices on the third floor, which — 100 years ago — was where the janitor's apartment was located before it was turned into offices. Well, every single key card to get into the main office door would get demagnetized. Sometimes doors wouldn't even open with their traditional keys. Overall, people felt pretty unwanted up there. This also happened on the doors into the foyer and the actual theatre. People suddenly couldn't get out one minute — thinking I had accidentally locked them in — and the next minute the doors would open no problem. Working there definitely made me question my own sanity sometimes."
11."I work as a one-to-one in a hospital, which means I pretty much just watch to make sure the patients don’t rip out their tubes. When I was working nights, it was basically just a patient and myself in a dark room. One night I was with a patient in a double room, but the other bed was empty. I couldn’t see the other bed, though, because a curtain divided them for privacy. In the middle of the night, a nurse came in and asked if I needed anything because my call light was on. I told her that I'd never pressed the button, and it turned out it was actually the bell from the empty bed that'd gone off. I was freaked out the rest of the night!"
12."I work at the Discovery Channel Telescope in the middle of the Coconino National Forest. A typical night usually includes myself (the telescope operator) and an astronomer. One night during hunting season, we had a curious elk that was wandering around the security fence perimeter. We could hear it bugle over the audio feed from the observation deck and hear it crunching around when we went outside. This lasted for about 30 minutes before it finally wandered off. About an hour later, we heard several gunshots nearby. This was bad, because there was no hunting allowed for 1.5 miles around the facility, and signs were posted everywhere. Given that the astronomer that night was taking long exposures (about 2 hours for each image), I decided to go walk around the inside perimeter of the security fence by myself, to see what was going on."
"I had my red LED headlamp on and kept seeing the glistening eyes of elk all around the facility. It seemed to me like they wanted to come in to hide from the hunter(s). It was creepy, but not the worst part.
I did the same walk about an hour later. I didn't see a single pair of elk eyes. They were all gone. Right as I was about to head back inside, I hear someone clear their throat. There was a man standing at the entrance to the facility, on the other side of the fence. This dude simply asked, 'You seen them elk round here? I've been watchin 'em come up the hill. Really need some elk.' I informed him that I haven't seen them, but he called me a liar and said I was protecting them.
He sat there at the gate until twilight then wandered off into the woods. I told the forest service about it the next day and they said they've had reports of a man going onto people's property and stalking prey, even going as far as to hang out on their porches. We now have IR cameras outside the observatory and heavy-duty security features on the entrances because of that weirdo."
13."I was photographing a waterfall in a deep basin, and I was the only one in the basin. I was alone from 6 p.m. to 10:30 p.m.. The trail that comes in was right up against a rock face that was straight up and over 400 feet high. When I was heading back up, there were bare, wet human footprints going up the stones of the trail. I followed them up and saw the muddy footprints lead right into some bushes. A few moments later, I heard a blood-curdling scream from the same bushes. It sounded like a mountain lion — which are common in the area — but their footprints don't look like a human's."
"I ran faster than I’ve ever ran before. I called rangers to my mile marker and I’ve checked back since then. No missing person reports have been filed, nor was anyone’s car in that area that night. It was easily one of the scariest experiences I’ve had."
14."I've never told this story to anyone. In all my years as a locksmith I've been in plenty of uncomfortable situations. I've been in plenty of places someone would tell me was haunted. I would just think they were lying and go about doing my job as fast as I could to get away from them. Only one time in twenty years did i ever feel like I was actually in a haunted place."
"I spent the first fifteen years on the job in metropolitan Atlanta. I moved to a more rural area in the state for the last five. This particular house was probably built in the 1930s, all brick, directly next to a main road. It was still a two-lane road, mind you, just pretty heavily traveled with lots of traffic. It looked like a plain place, nothing uncanny about it from the exterior. The overgrown shrubs and trees gave it weird, shadowy places that I took no notice of at first. Inside, the house was completely different. It seemed to be refashioned at multiple times, but nothing ever tied together. It had an odd, angular feel to it. Walking into that place, I could feel the air change. With every door opened, it felt like air didn't move at all.
I walked into the kitchen and nearly scared a carpenter to death. 'Fuck I can't wait to get out of this house,' he said. 'You'll see what I mean.' He gathered his things and left before I got back to my van with all the lock cylinders.
From the moment I walked back into that house, I felt like I was being watched. It was silent, and several times I felt like something was reaching for me. You know, that electric tingle that you get watching someone slowly move their hand to your body. I went into overdrive and hauled ass as fast as I could. Job done.
The funny thing was I had probably passed that place a thousand times before. Like I said, it was a heavily traveled main road. It was in an isolated stretch and not only had I never noticed it, but I realized passing it a few weeks later that even though it was obviously there and easy to see, I still managed to overlook it when I was watching for it. It's like the place didn't want to be seen.
A couple of months later, I got back to the shop and noticed a coworker had been there that day. This guy was a former Marine and gym rat. He was as tough as they come. I asked him what he thought of that house, and he made a face like I'd asked him about his worst memory ever. He said it was the creepiest house he'd ever been in. I just let it go after that, I also never went back there again."
15."My dad worked at the haunted Toys "R" Us in Sunnyvale, CA. He worked as a night watchman back in the day to pay for school. It was a cool gig — he got to sit around and study while being paid for doing next to nothing. Weird stuff happened there all the time, though. Objects would fall off shelves as you walked past them. Lights would flicker on and off. Strange noises would be heard from the other side of the hall. Once, he said out loud, 'If there is a ghost here, pop that red balloon in the middle of the room.' Right as he finished his sentence, the balloon burst. He promptly turned on all the lights in the building and got as close to a door as he could for the rest of the shift."
Monkeypaw Productions
16."I worked two jobs on Black Friday. My first job was from midnight to 6 a.m. at the mall. After that was over, I headed to my second job at a local bead shop, which was located in an old house. It was still dark when I got there and we didn’t open until 10, so I went inside to sleep on the futon upstairs for a couple hours. When I opened the back door, I could see the silhouette of a person standing in the back room. They were about 20 feet away from me, but the street light was shining in through the window behind them and I could see it perfectly."
"I froze for a couple seconds thinking someone had broken in, but when I flipped on the light by the door. The silhouette vanished. I said, 'Oh, fuck that!' and went to sleep in my car instead."
17.And finally, "I used to be a night janitor at a movie theater. We would go in at 4 a.m. and clean until the doors opened at 11. To save time, we would sometimes come in around the time the last movies were finishing and just sleep in one of the empty theaters, making sure we would be there when the shift started. Our basic MO was to use electric leaf blowers up and down the aisles of each theater, blowing popcorn and trash all the way to the bottom. Then we'd clean the seats up manually for anything gross or to retrieve larger debris. This was expedient but also very loud, so it was easy to lose yourself in the work."
"Of course, the lights were on in the theaters to better assist in the cleaning. Usually, we were the only ones there at the time, so whenever something strange happened, I would chalk it up to whoever else was working the shift with me.
There was one standing rule, though, that we all followed to the letter: No one went in the projection booth. There was no reason to go up there, anyway. We didn't clean it, all our supplies were downstairs, and — most of all — it was haunted.
There is a phenomenon that happens with theaters and projection booths. No matter what, you always feel like you're being watched. When you're walking around — unable to hear over the sound of the blowers — in an empty movie theater, and you happen to glance up at the booth only to unmistakably see someone standing there watching you, you will shit your pants. Especially when you go out into the hallway and find the other guy in his theater working. It was terrifying. The other guy and I went to either end of the building, blocking the two exits of the booth, and tried to trap whoever it was up there and find out what exactly was going on. No one was in there. We decided to leave it alone from then on."
