People Are Sharing Terrifying Things They've Experienced While Working An Overnight Shift, And I'm Spooked AF From Some Of These
A few months ago, I wrote a post based on a Reddit thread of people discussing the scariest and creepiest encounters they've experienced when working the graveyard shift — or very late or overnight hours — at their job.
Nickelodeon / Via giphy.com
Well, there seems to be a lot of people who have had spooky late-night moments at work — because many, many commenters chimed in with their very own situations. Here are even more spooky graveyard shift stories.
Some of these stories have been slightly edited for clarity.
1."I once picked up part of a night shift. It was 3 a.m. by the time I got back home, and my apartment building ran out of spots inside our gate — so I parked on the two-way street closest to my building. My family lives in a very safe, well-lit neighborhood, so I was scared. As I pulled up to my spot, I noticed a tow truck taking a turn about and heading in the opposite direction and passing my now-parked car. The tow truck was hauling ass which was a bit strange, but I didn’t think anything more of it. I get out only to realize that my apartment can only be accessed through the main gate. (I live closest to the back, exit-only gate so that was inconvenient.) As I’m turning away to start walking towards the main gate, I see the tow truck from a distance driving in my direction."
"For some reason my fight or flight response kicked in, and I hid behind some of the other cars parked on the road. I see the tow truck take the same turn they were on when I first saw them — only to head back in the original direction and turn on the road the main gate is on. I waited in my car with the doors locked for about an hour before I decided to make a make-shift shank in my hand with my keys and book it as fast as I could. My intuition may have saved my life. I have no idea what would have happened if the driver would have seen me."
2."I work in an old fiberglass factory. The company I work for bought it a few years ago, but I don't know who owned it before. One time on New Year's Eve, we weren't making any products, so they had us sweeping and cleaning. I’m very unlucky and got stuck with sweeping the most remote area of the factory where they store old chemicals next to the entrance to the basement. The door to the chemical storage was just cracked open, but I didn’t really pay much attention to it and closed it again. I got a little bit creeped out by that, but the real scary part was after I had finished sweeping and started heading back to my supervisor, I walked past an old hallway with all the doors shut and the lights a little flickery. I decided to peep into the hallway, and there it was: a dark shadow silhouette of a person at the end of the hallway. It just walked into a wall and disappeared. I quickly walked back to my supervisor."
3."I’m an operating room nurse, and we all take turns covering call on nights and weekends. Due to how close I live to the hospital, I’m usually there before the scrub person or anesthesiologist. It’s a Friday night and, as usual, I’m the first person there. I go to set up the room we usually use for call cases. This entails getting lights on, making sure the temperature and humidity are in range and air exchanges have been done, and turning on any equipment that needs to be turned on."
"As I was doing my checks, the vital signs machine starts going off — meaning there isn't a heart beat. This was odd because the machine wasn’t hooked up to a patient, so it shouldn’t have been getting any readings. Here’s the thing though — earlier in the week, I had been the nurse in that room for an elective case on a patient in their 30s. Unfortunately, a catastrophic error occurred, and the patient died after we coded them for over three hours. You better believe I high-tailed it out of that room and set another room up for the case."
4."I worked at a grocery store, and it was in a bad neighborhood. So periodically, I'd go to the front and check my car. Well, one night as I was up front, every register started turning on and off rapidly. And the receipt machines started going off like crazy. They were trying to print, but nothing was coming out. I literally said, 'Nope,' and turned around and went to the back to continue work."
5."My dad used to work the third shift at a power plant and thought he heard someone following him, whistling, 'Strangers in the Night' one night when he was making rounds alone. He thought a coworker was fucking with him, but couldn’t find anyone. He realized one of the machines was making a whistling sound and assumes it was that, but he said it really freaked him out."
6."I was an RA in college, and one of my duties was to cover the campus switchboard two evenings a week. There weren't many calls after 6 p.m., and the switchboard office was next to a busy student lounge. One dark winter evening when the lounge was deserted, a call came in shortly before 10 p.m., when I would be shutting down for the night. It was an internal call from a campus extension and came up on the call ID as 'RA Room 313.' We RAs had our own room extensions — cell phones weren't common yet. There was no RA in Room 313. There was no phone line in Room 313. Room 313 had been converted into a restroom in the 1970s. There was nothing on the line but a few seconds of static, then the call cut out. On that job, I dealt with medical emergencies, fires, death threats (really), and violence, but that strange phone call was what freaked me out the most."
7."I work in one of the oldest restaurants in the world with a massive wine cellar. I'm the assistant head sommelier, and my office is in the cellar. One day, I was in my office between services and saw someone in our uniform walk by my door. At first, I thought it was a coworker who sometimes comes back between shifts. Then I realized that whoever it was had literally walked through a wall because my door outside my office takes a sharp left and there's just a wall on the right. Whoever walked by had been walking left to right. I freaked out. Plus, the guy I saw had been elderly and didn't look like anyone who works at the restaurant. I still get the feeling I'm being watched in certain parts of the cellar and often see someone peeking out at me from around the corners."
8."I work in IT, and awhile back, I was working at night running cables and upgrades. I worked alone, and at times, I would see these shadows run past my office door and would hear noises out in the cubicle area — chairs moving like someone was sitting in them. One night, I went out to use the bathroom which is outside in the office area. As I walked into the men's room, I saw a shadow go by. I took care of business and went back into the main office area. As I walked through the door, at the receptionist's desk, the phone rang one and a half times. There was a cemetery across the street from the place I worked. I figured it was someone from there."
9."I work in a senior care home, and I was on the night shift. A resident rang her bell and asked me, 'Could you please get this man out of my room? He's keeping me awake.' It was not uncommon on my floor for residents to wander, so I asked what the man looked like so I could go see if someone was out of bed. She said he was in a suit, hat, and wrapped in bandages because he appeared to have been burned, and that he crossed from her bedroom door and went behind her window curtains. Even if she was hallucinating, WTF is that???"
10."I used to work closing at a grocery store in a rough neighborhood I was living in at the time. My route home consisted of passing an abandoned mall. There was a heavy enough police presence that I was never afraid of walking home by myself. Except for this one night. Guy came up to my register trying to buy some alcohol. He didn't have an ID, and didn't like that I wouldn't flout the law for him. Dude looked younger than me, and I had just turned 21 myself. My manager had to get involved. He started pacing the parking lot, until our security kicked him off the property. HOURS pass and said manager leaves for the day shortly as we close for the night. He came back, not even 10 minutes later, as I'm preparing to leave. He had recognized the angry guy, loitering in the parking lot of the abandoned mall, holding something and watching our parking lot. He called me an Uber and wouldn't take no for an answer."
11."I work overnights in a warehouse. Sometimes, the conveyor belts on the first floor sound like shrieking women. The first time I heard it, I stopped and looked around because I genuinely thought someone was being stabbed."
12."I work at a 24-hour alarm monitoring center and normally work the first shift Monday through Friday. One night, I was managing the second shift because the regular manager was on vacation. My coworker called me from the opposite side of the building — they split up the operators when the pandemic started in 2020 — to ask my break times. She was the supervisor working under me and would have to cover when I went to break. As I was talking to her, she said that there was a woman walking around over there."
"There was only four of us on duty that night. One was working from home, and the other person was in the room with me, which meant that the supervisor was alone on the other side of the building. I found out later that several people have seen this phantom woman walking around the east side of the building. The maintenance man told me that about 20 to 30 years ago a woman died of a heart attack in the building. And another woman died in front of the building as she was crossing the street to get to work in the building. We believe that she may be one of their spirits."
13."I had moved to Houston, Texas and was working at a chicken place when I was about 19. I usually worked the shift that closed the store each night. On night, walking home, a beat-up car with a male driver was pacing me. The driver said he'd give me a ride home and to get in the car. I said, 'No thank you.' He started to insist and said, 'Get in the car.' Fortunately, there was a very small shopping strip on the way home with a 7/11. I ran to that 7/11 and asked to use the phone as I was being followed (this was in the 1980s). The guy actually came into the store and started yelling at me for not getting in the car, but then left. I called my manager at the chicken place as he was still there counting money and begged him for a ride home the rest of the way. I got a ride home every night after that."
14."When I was in my early 20s, I used to work overnights in a 24-hour pharmacy. It was a big two-floor building, and I was alone at the register around 2 a.m. when a man walked in and asked for a pack of cigarettes. I turned around to get them, and when I turned back, he had exposed himself and was just staring at me saying nothing. I froze to the spot. I knew if I yelled nobody would hear me since all my coworkers were on the lower level. We stood like that for maybe a minute, and then he just walked out."
15."I was working at a restaurant where a lot of employees had paranormal experiences. Once while playing on Snapchat, we used the dog ear filter while taking pics of each other, and the filter kept picking up a face where no one was. Another time, I closed the restaurant, and it was a perfect close. I woke up the next morning with messages from my employee about papers thrown all over. We checked the cameras, and they were blank."
16."When I worked at an Olive Garden, closers all stayed together and walked out together. There had definitely been robberies in the past, so management was super concerned for our safety. One night, I (female) left with two other female coworkers, chatting and laughing loudly. The front had an extended entry way, so outside of it was filled with plants and bushes. As we left, a guy popped out of those bushes as we passed, looking sketchy. I made eye contact with him, but in that split second, one of our male coworkers came out and called, 'Hey wait up!' The guy then sunk back into the bushes as we passed. We all got to our cars safely, and it wasn’t until I was sitting in my car that I had realized what had just happened and how weird and scary it was. Everyone else made it out ok that night, but I don’t know what that guy had in mind."
17."I work at a hotel and ended up covering for the overnight shift as needed. We're a relatively small hotel, so we only have one person on staff at nights. One night, I went into the back office and past the security room. I glanced at the cameras and saw myself standing up at the front desk. Turns out that the security feed was running behind due to an update in progress, but I didn't know that at the time. Scared the shit out of me!"
18."I was a night shift security guard at a huge factory way back in the '90s. I used to wear my hair in a half-up ponytail, so the rest of it stayed down. I was walking my patrol round through the large warehouse-type building, and my ponytail flicked like I'd tossed my hair. I figured it was just a bug or something, so I shook my fingers through my ponytail and kept walking. Then I felt my ponytail getting lifted, twisted slightly, then dropped as if someone was playing with it. It happened two more times in the time it took me to hightail it through the building."
—Pahz
19."When I was in college, I worked as a pool manager and coach. A few nights a week there would be very late practices. The pool facility was so old that the locker rooms didn’t have showers or lights. Most people changed on deck or just left in a towel. I usually closed by myself, and there was one time I decided to use the bathroom before closing. Big mistake. As I was washing my hands, in the dark, movement in the mirror caught my eye, and I saw a dark figure behind me. I was so scared I didn’t turn around, just ran."
20."My sister was working late at a hotel. A guy stepped off the elevator, dumps his girlfriend on the floor of the elevator, and said, 'She overdosed,' before walking out. My sister preformed CPR, and an ambulance came and revived her. She couldn't stay at the hotel due to criminal activity, so she walked out and overdosed again later that night and died."
21."I worked nights at a long-term care facility. I usually worked alone, but thankfully, this night there were two of us. I got paged around 2 a.m. from the bathroom of a resident who had passed the previous day. My coworker and I went together to see what was happening. We opened the door to see a body sitting up in the bed. Apparently, the resident's daughter stayed the night to clean her moms stuff and hadn’t told anyone. No idea how the bathroom pager went off."
22."I work night shifts at a grocery store most days. We have just accepted that there is a ghost of some kind. We have had things just hit walls, and I hear random things. Most recently, I heard a little girl say, 'I love you,' when I entered the backroom."
23."My pregnant co-worker and I were closing one night when two men started circling our restaurant. They wouldn’t leave and were just waiting for us to come out of the restaurant. They also banged on both doors at the same time. We couldn’t see their faces as they were covered. Police took a while to arrive. A few months later, the same coworker and I were almost held at gunpoint by a group of teenagers at the drive thru. My coworker slammed the window on their hand, and we hid in the freezer."
24."I used to work at a long-term acute care hospital. Most of our patients would be there for the rest of their lives. Over the course of two years, three different patients who were altered all asked about the little girl standing in the corner."
25."I was a nursing assistant in a nursing home. We had a resident pass away that had developmental issues. One of her favorite things to do was go to the sink and wash her hands, countless times a day. I worked the night shift the evening after her passing, and the sink turned on in her dark, empty room. I nearly shit my pants walking in there to turn it off."
26."I work as a night caretaker. When setting the alarm to leave, there was a couple of times where it said, 'Movement detected in Room 12.' I've never found anything, but it trips me out every time."
—u/jonsnow312
