When you think of scary or creepy experiences on the job, most people tend to picture a person who works in a relatively scary setting park ranger, haunted house designer, morgue.
But sometimes, there are creepy moments in those everyday, ordinary jobs. Something about it happening in such an unsuspecting place makes it seem way worse.
Thanks to these folks for sharing their incredibly awkward stories with us. If you'd like to read more, check out the source link at the end of the article.
Comments may be edited for clarity.
Every few months, in a department with over 20 women, we'd all come in in nearly identical outfits. It was odd. We were all ages and races and styles, but there'd be a day when everyone would show up in a black skirt and red blouse. A few months later, everyone in brown slacks and a cream colored dress shirt. A few months later, gray skirt and black sweater. We could never figure out the trigger (tv show character looking fly in that outfit the night before, a visitor to the building who appeared polished...nothing). It always creeped me out, as it seemed to represent some sort of group think or collective consciousness working on us.
I work in residential environments as a service technician. I go to houses and apartments and condos to do my thing.
I was working in one particular condo building with over 70 floors and about 8 elevators. The elevators are in two groups of four, with two giant elevator shafts. Just picture one giant square that is the lobby and two smaller rectangles in that room that are the elevator shafts. The two shafts are identical looking.
This is relevant because it's easy to get disoriented as to which direction you are facing when you exit an elevator.
Anyways, after doing a bit of work on the 65th floor unit, I realize I have to go to Parking level 1 to a utility room. No big deal. I hop on the elevator and press P1, and take a lonely ride down 60+ floors.
I reach P1 level, and when the elevator doors open I hear weeping. I'm immediately worried for whoever is crying, so I start to pinpoint where the noise is coming from.
It's a child crying, and since all the walls in this area are bare and concrete, the sound is echoing and seems to be coming from everywhere.
Panic didn't set in until I had searched 4 corners of the square room and hadn't found anyone. Now I'm no mathematician, but I'm pretty sure four corners is all of them...so my mind starts racing.
I decide to nope out and head back to the door that would eventually lead me to the utility room that I was supposed to be working in, which I had already passed earlier on my search.
I round the corner and there I found the source of the noise. It's a little girl, with straight black hair, crouched down, sobbing into her knees, facing the corner. I don't know why I didn't see her before, because I already checked that corner. So either I am mistaken, or she heard me get off the elevator and was actively moving away from me. For a moment I considered running because it looked like it was straight out of The Ring, but that moment of nonsense subsided and I asked her what's wrong.
Turns out she was just lost and scared, so I escorted her back to the concierge desk so security could help her back to her room.
Nothing really creepy after the fact, but for a moment, I thought she would turn around with no face or something.
I am a teacher of adult students, and one student of mine is kind of intense and creepy. Actually, she's based at another school, but specifically started attending classes at my school after meeting me. When I first started, she kept giving me 'welcome presents' as I was new to the country. Just simple things like food, postcards and books, which was a nice idea but it seemed a little excessive. She added me on social media and then got upset when I didn't reply to her constant messages (I told her that I don't really use social media).
Anyway, I didn't see her for a few months and figured she'd just gone back to her own school or stopped studying or whatever, and was relieved that she'd clearly got bored of me. But then last week she comes in and gives me an envelope full of photos of me during lessons that she'd taken... without me knowing. I was a little weirded out to say the least.
For those concerned, I wouldn't worry about me too much guys. The girl's creepy, but she's just a young (20s) girl interested in the foreign teacher. No restraining order necessary. This is China and I get a lot of weird attention for being foreign here, this just happens to be one of the more stand-out cases.
That being said, if you don't hear from me in 24 hours, well you know what happened.
Right after the Virginia Tech shooting my old office got an anonymous death threat in the mail. I was made of cut up magazine letters, calling out the name of the office and its owners. They called the cops and closed the office for a couple days. Turned out to be from an employee who had just been fired for a number of reasons. I don't know what happened to her.
I responded to a "welfare check" for an elderly woman who hadn't been seen in a few days. Found her in a dirt basement wearing her wedding dress, dead. Sad.
New Year's Day, 1995. I was in the middle of 3rd year university, which I guess you could say was my job at the time. A bunch of friends had come down to visit me and my roommate for the festivities. We were all pretty hungover from drinking the night before, and went out for the usual "nice day out, a bit chilly, I don't feel so good" post-greasy-breakfast hungover stroll around the neighbourhood.
Two of these friends were twin brothers. One of them, we hung out with all the time. The other we'd just met for the first time. He was pretty normal the night before, joining in the fun, but on this day, we were all hanging around a local basketball court shooting hoops with an old basketball we'd found in the grass, and this twin brother kept following me around all over the place with the creepiest grin I'd ever seen in my life. Staring right into the nether regions of my soul, the whole time.
I'd back away and join the group again, and he'd keep following me around. When we were walking back to the apartment, it was just me and him walking down the sidewalk behind the group, and he moved over in front of me, stared at me with that creepy look again, and fell down to his knees as if to worship me or something. I didn't know what to do... "Hey buddy? You all right? We're heading back now, right?" And so on. He wouldn't say anything - he'd just be there on his knees, looking up at me with a clenched face and squinted eyes, as if he were looking directly into the sun or something.
Later that day, my roomie said he was tripping balls, so I thought nothing of it and moved on with my life. A few weeks later, we got a phone call from the twin brother we usually hung out with, and it turned out that this other twin brother went over to his aunt's place with a knife and stabbed her. She didn't die, but you know, still pretty bad. He had even called the police before going, because he knew he was going to do it but he couldn't stop himself from doing it, because you know, "the voices" and so on.
The ensuing court case was widely covered in the media as this was a relatively smaller community where this sort of thing doesn't happen on a regular basis. I was reading one of the articles and one of the testimonies was that this twin brother was hearing voices in his head. He believed to his very bones that his aunt was the devil, and that he had been commanded by God to go and kill her.
So, who was this "God" that told him to go kill her? Well, as the newspaper article described, it was a guy in a group he hung out with on New Year's Day. Didn't take me long to realize that he was talking about me.
This was 22 years ago. I know for a fact it was a mental illness, but just knowing that I had somehow "commanded" him to go kill his aunt stays with me to this day.
When I was 17 and worked in retail as a cashier, I had a very old couple come through my line, buying a wok. The husband who was at least 85 started making conversation with me about the wok, and asked if I liked Chinese food.
Yeah, I like Chinese.
Do you want to go out with me to get some Chinese? He winks at me.
N-no sir.
Oh. Well. He looks a bit disappointed and turns to look at his wife who is on the phone with someone. Would you at least like to come home with me and live in my basement?
...no.
The rest of the transaction took place in terrified silence. His wife never said a word. I wonder to this day if he was trying to joke, because he sounded so sincere, or if he was suffering from dementia or something else that make him not realize how creepy that sounds to someone young enough to be your great grandchild.
I worked from 2pm - 11pm at a gas station In one of the nicer cities around here and I had a gentlemen look me in the eyes and ask if I'm enjoying my last day on earth? Walked away before I could answer.
I used to manage a small family-owned retail store. It was the 4th of July and the owners of course took the day off and dropped the responsibility on me. We had two stock boys bringing up some items on the forklift when I hear banshee screaming coming from outside the store front. One of them comes flying through the front door on one leg spewing profanity before collapsing on the ground. I look down and see his actual ankle. Like the bone. Blood is going everywhere.
Dude was riding tandem on the forklift (a giant safety no-no) when the driver took a hard turn and sent the kid off the side, running over his foot. The driver screeched to a halt, thought he stopped on the kid's foot (he didn't) so he popped the forklift in reverse and ran over the foot again.
Anyway, I learned that day that I keep my cool in emergency situations. I grabbed and elevated the kid's foot, instructed someone to call 911 (always tell a specific person to call 911, never say "someone call 911") and another person to get towels to try and stop the bleeding. I held his foot up until the EMTs came. They managed to save the kid's foot but he had a battle ahead of him. His foot went necrotic and he went septic (I think that's the right term) at one point, but he survived.
I don't work there anymore. There were a lot of unsafe practices going on and the owners didn't treat their employees very well. I left about 3 years ago and surprise surprise they shut down about a year and a half later.
This happened quite a few years ago when I was at Uni. My friends and I were living on a ground floor flat and my room was at the front of the building, outside my window was the front garden.
My boyfriend (at the time) and I had literally just finished having sex and I put my head on the pillow and glanced to my right, which is where the window was. There was a gap between the curtain and the window and I was met with a pair eyes watching me.
We both (me and the peeper) had the instinct to look away and then quickly look back. At this point, I shouted to my ex, that there was someone watching us from outside. He jumped, opened the window and shouted various amusing warnings. He could see that the grass was disturbed so that someone had been there and by the looks of it more than once.
From further inspection the next morning, we found out that he had jumped the small hedge and exited through my neighbours garden.
I told my friends and was pretty freaked out by the whole event. However, my lovely friends decided to walk by my flat late the next night and bang on the window and make sex noises. I almost crapped myself.
I was 18 yrs old and it was my first time ever operating a dozer with an open air cab n roll cage. I was clearing trees out of a waterway on a farm. All of a sudden I'm knocked out. Come to and blood is running down my face into my lap. Dozer pushing up against a tree just spinning tracks. My neck and head hurt. I thought I'd been shot or something. No idea. Nobody around me. I wasn't told how to shut off the dozer as it was an older 6C so you don't just turn the key off. I called my dad and he runs over and pulls the idle bar all the way down and it shuts off. We both are clueless as to what happens then he sees a branch behind my head that I must have drove thru and pushed it forward pretty far and it snapped back into the cab and hit me in the forehead. Never saw it or anything.
I work in a supermarket, early shift, and part of my job is changing the shelf labels for the price changes each day. Just this Wednesday I was putting new labels on a shelf of hand soap when, about two foot along the shelf from me, a bottle shot off and landed in the middle of the aisle. I looked along the aisle at my colleague and she just shrugs her shoulders and says,"happens all the time!"
I've never directly witnessed anything else but, being one of the first on the shop floor each day, I'm now questioning all the items that I see sitting in the aisles first thing and guessing I can't blame untidy customers for them all.
The summer after high school, I worked at a grocery store in the small town I grew up in. I was unfortunate enough to get moved to a stocking position, which meant coming in at 9pm and placing groceries onto shelves every night until 8am. There was only me and one other woman who worked that shift.
One night, we were on our break around 4am. A good portion of the isles had been stocked. As we sat and drank our coffee and conversed, the sound of glass shattering shook us alert.
The conversation immediately stopped and we stared at each other.
"Did you hear that?"
"Yes. It sounded like glass breaking."
We sat for a few more moments listening.
The front of the store was large glass windows and any one of them could have been smashed and someone violent and potentially serial-killerish could gain access to the grocery store. This was our concern.
I stepped out of the break room and looked for any sign of an intruder. It was a big store, so they really could have been anywhere. I was relieved to find that they were not, however, right outside the breakroom.
I slowly made my way to the front of the store. All of the windows were intact.
"What the hell broke then?"
I started walking down the length of the store, scanning each aisle for a sign of an intruder or anything that could have caused the sound of breaking glass.
And then I found it.
(Continued on the next page)
Lying in the middle of the aisle, a glass bottle of ketchup. The bottle was shattered and ketchup was splattered everywhere. My first thought was that it fell off the shelf. However, I quickly realized that since it was in a glass container, it would have been stocked onto the bottom shelf. Sure enough. The other bottles on the bottom were in slight disarray, as well. But how did a bottle that was stored an inch above the floor, fall with such velocity to shatter and splatter? Everything pointed to it being thrown.
By this time, my co-worker had found me investigating the broken bottle. We agreed that had gravity been the culprit, the bottle would have simply fallen and stayed within inches of where it fell. Not land 3 feet away with enough impact to shatter the bottle and send ketchup everywhere.
The answer was clear. Ghosts. The grocery store must have been built on the site of some blood-soaked field of war. And now, an angry ketchup flinging ectoplasmic emanation was lashing out at the living. Jealous and hungry for our life energy and our ability to have tasty condiments atop our burgers and or...if you're that kind of person, mac and cheese.
I bent down and looked at the shelf more closely.
I reached my hand back behind the bottles... and that's when I felt it. It's gnashing teeth biting hard into my hand. It yanked me hard towards it.
Oh. Sorry. Actually. That part didn't happen.
Biscuits.
It was biscuits. Someone had thrown a container of refrigerated biscuits behind the ketchup. It had soured, built up pressure, and exploded. The explosion was enough to fling the bottle off the shelf.
So a warning to all of you. Don't be a dick and put a can of biscuits behind non-refrigerated products at a grocery store.
While cutting lawns along this bike trail, me and a coworker found a mostly decayed, severed from the knee down, leg.
Cops were called, they questioned us and we never found out any more about what happened.
Pretty creepy.
My sophomore year in college I ran into this guy that was a year younger than me. Let's call him Mitch. Mitch and I were acquaintances that ran in the same circles. He was a nice guy. Smart. And quiet. At parties he would fold these really cool 3d shapes in the corner instead of interacting. He would always just...watch everybody.
Anyway, I ran into him at a bus stop and I stopped to say hello. We had an awkward chat about our majors (him physics, me chE) and I asked if he had any contact with a mutual friend that went into the army. He said yes and I said 'Great! Could you pass him my number!'
He opened his wallet and pulled out a peice of paper, the only thing in there. It had my name, university address, and phone number.
I'm a stay-at-home parent. My 3 year old, who is normally very happy go lucky, was extremely concerned the other day. He kept looking around the room talking about "the rhino" (who knows what a 3 year old might translate as a "rhino"). This went on for about 20 minutes - he was very concerned and looking around the entire time. So, we get to a point where he says the rhino is moving. My wife asks where the rhino is... "he's coming to Daddy." yeah, um, I'm Daddy and my butthole puckered just a wee bit at that comment....
Fast forward about 4 days (last night), and he starts talking about "the ghost" - my daughter asks my son "where is the ghost", my son says "he's biting Daddy."
What the actual heck.
I work for a company with multiple sites. The couple who own the business tend to acquire new sites from their connections to the Catholic church. We're talking old church buildings, halls, rectories - really anything they're not using anymore.
It wouldn't faze me, but I visit our centers a lot, and I have heard some weird crap from our workers.
One center is in a really old church, which over the years has been different restaurants and local ventures. When we acquired it, the building was derelict, and there was a homeless man living there. Business there always fails after a few years and to tell you the truth, were not doing so well ourselves. Everything looks like a dark cathedral when you're shutting down and every sound you hear feels like it's coming from the basement, which has a proper old school crypt vibe.
The worst is one in an old house weve occupied for years. Were turning the attic into a new room, and two of the workers refused to go up there. Turns out they had an experience with a trapdoor in the middle of the day. One fell flat on her face, covered in cold sweat after they opened this door.. . and I wouldnt believe it but the other worker was there as witness.
But the best part of the whole thing? We get these centers exorcised on the regular by a local Priest.
Realtor here. I held an open house in a very rough neighbourhood in Vancouver, BC. As I showed a 35-ish year old woman around the townhouse, I saw a drug addict emerge from an alley. As we went upstairs I noticed through a window that the naked-from-the-waist-down addict was shuffling closer to the 'open house' sign in the front lawn. My potential buyer asked to see the front yard again, though I tried to take her out back as I kinda had a bad feeling about the front door. I was correct. As we opened the door, this most nude heroin addict was standing on the doormat. There was a needle sticking out of her boney elbow and she was scratching/picking at it furiously. My buyer screamed and ran out the door as the addict snapped the needle in half, leaving metal in her arm with blood spitting out. I dialled 911 emergency and watched the Vancouver Police/paramedics take care of this poor addict. I took down my 'open house' signs and went home to hug my wife and children. It was a very tough and terribly sad day, but creepy? Heck it was awful.
When I worked fast food, this old man came in, ordered a meal, and sat reading a book for over an hour. He had this horrible cough and when he would talk to random strangers, he just seemed a bit off.
Well, he went to the bathroom and I was busy and when I looked for him again I thought he had left. A little bit later I went to use the bathroom and this old dude had crapped all over the toilet seat and floor, and then rubbed pennies in it. The poop (from his hands) was all over the walls and sink. It was creepy because I had no idea if he had any contagious disease and we had to bleach the bathroom down. Also why was he playing with his poop and pennies???
I once worked as a live-in staff member in a college dormitory.
During the summer we housed the few summer school students who remained on campus (nearly 30). It may be significant to point out these students tended towards the highly academically-motivated, often times high-stress students, if quiet.
One warm day in late June my office received a call from a concerned sibling that she and her family was unable to reach her brother who lived by himself in a room on the summer school floor. This wasn't unusual as our office frequently dealt with students avoiding their kith and kin due to frayed nerves or general social awkwardness.
Our normal protocol to check on a student is to try to reach them by our emergency contact information, failing that - go check their room to verify they're living in the building and perhaps available then and there, then have them call their family to verify we followed up on the original request. Also - we are to only enter a room with another staff member present to ensure personal safety of staff and students. I failed to reach this student on his room and mobile phone, and was working short-staffed so since I was on my own I decided to pop up to his room and check on him. I arrived on his floor around 2 in the afternoon and the floor seemed deserted as I had expected. I found his room number and immediately noticed the sound of a movie playing on a TV or computer from behind the door. I knocked three times and announced that I was a staff member checking on his health and safety.
No answer.
I didn't think this was that remarkable, college students are notorious for leaving electronics running while not in the room. I checked the floor showers and bathrooms and found them deserted.
I returned to his door and knocked three more times, waiting about 20 seconds between each knock.
No answer.
This is when my instincts started to buzz. I worked in residence halls a number of years as a professional and something about all the pieces of this puzzle weren't adding up; family concerned about his health and safety, electronics running (someone must have started them recently, within the time frame of a movie run-time), summer school students and their idiosyncratic behavior, something wasn't right.
I was by myself, so I probably let myself get more worked up than if I was with someone else. A deserted dorm floor, even at 2 in the afternoon, oftentimes evokes Kubrician memories of the Overlook Hotel . . . (continued on the next page!)
I decided that for some sense of closure or sanity I needed the immediate resolution of keying into this student's room, even though I was by myself and not technically supposed to do so.
I knocked on the door one more time for good measure, again announced myself as the hall director. I keyed into the room and my spider sense went off even stronger: The room appeared relatively vacant; the student appeared to be living out of a suitcase (which is unusual for someone staying no less than 8 weeks for a summer school session). The bedding was tussled like someone had been sleeping in it and all the lights in the room were on. And as I had suspected, there was an open laptop on a desk running on battery power playing The Matrix. But no student. I began to start rationalizing to keep from feeling unsettled; surely this student and I had crossed paths on my way to his room (I'd never met him before so I wouldn't recognize him otherwise) and perhaps he was just down in the lobby picking up delivery food for a late lunch.
Sure, that's it.
Then I turned to leave, planning on trying to reach the student later in the afternoon or that night. As I turned to leave I noticed another odd piece of evidence; the accordion closet doors (which are removed in most rooms due to disuse, particularly single rooms like his) were still in this room. And they were closed.
Odd. I couldn't remember the last time I actually saw someone use those cranky, dysfunctional doors. Then my intuition spiked higher than ever. CRAP CRAP CRAP. I realized I was alone in a room with a potentially suicidal student who may, in fact, have completed just that. And I am about to be "that guy" who discovers the body and then has a storm of paperwork and undesirable tasks, not the least of which would be calling the family back to break the news.
I felt like I was talking to myself when my voice cracked as I spoke to the closed doors and announced my name and title and that I would be opening those accordion doors in 3 seconds.
I fumbled with the latch on the doors, and finally managed to get them disengaged, and as I slid the doors apart, I was unprepared. I don't know what I really expected, a hanging? gunshot wound?
I'll tell you what I didn't expect: a very tall man staring at me embarrassingly as though I had found his secret hangout. We stared at each other for a good 15 seconds without blinking, breathing or speaking. I finally realized what was going on and my natural emotion was disbelief. All I could think to say was, "Um . . . are you in here hiding from me?"
He looked at me and said, "Yeah."
My heart was still racing, I turned to leave and before I shut his door I turned back to him and said, "Call your sister, she's worried about you, and, frankly, I am too."
