There's always something creepy about working the graveyard shift. From the long hours, the loneliness, and that perpetual feeling of being watched, you're bound to run into some creepy stuff late at night. These workers share their unsettling stories of things going bump in the night.
“LET ME IN PLEASE! THEY’RE AFTER ME”
“I used to work nights at a distribution warehouse.
One night we were closing down and as I’m sweeping up I see everyone standing by one of the trailer bays. As I walk closer I can hear some yelling and then LOUD terrifying screaming.
I walk up to the door and there is a man wedged between a trailer and the door.
‘LET ME IN PLEASE!!! PLEASE THEY’RE AFTER ME!!! HELP!!’
His arm is reaching towards one of the workers begging us to let him in.
My boss goes outside around the opposite way so he can’t see him and eventually calms the guy down. He also brings him a coat because it’s December and also this guy is shirtless.
The police eventually come and tell us that the man had escaped from an inpatient home and they had been looking for him all night. His shirt had got caught on the barbed wire fence he scaled, he also ran through wetlands.”
Crazy Gas Station Drama
“Worked at a gas station in high school, was my first job. The gas station was a 7-11 out in nowhere. and if that isn’t cliche’ enough, I’d only been working there a week. It was about 1 am and it was me and this cute college-age girl, a loud F-150 with a diesel engine pulls into the parking lot and the girl starts having a panic attack, grabs me by my shoulders, and says ‘Please, don’t tell him I’m here!’ and flings herself into the main office. The big guy comes in, looks like he walked right out of a fast and furious movie, buzz cut, prison tats, wife beater, whole nine yards. Walks up to the check-out and looks around ‘Can I help you?’ I ask
He stares me down, I’m not a coward but I’m not the toughest bird in the tree either. His eyes full of hatred he says “thought someone would be here, I’ll come back later” he buys a bag of Doritos and leaves. The girl comes out of the office sobbing her eyes out, waddles over to me and wraps her arms around me, grabs my head and plants a kiss right on my lips, and says ‘Thank you!’ Keep in mind I don’t know this girl and also I’m technically a minor, 17.
Found out years later through some impromptu sleuthing that the dude used to basically be her hustler, he was her boyfriend, but he rented her out to other dudes to make money. She was running from him and he’d literally tracked her across the state. Dunno what happened to him or with their situation, but I do know she started banging another employee and quit not long after I did, I worked at the gas station for two years.”
My Heart Felt Like It Was Going To Explode
“I used to drive cab overnight for 14 years. I’ve seen so much. I’ve seen shootings, stabbings, beatings, brawls, people getting jumped, blood, terrifying insanity. It’s hard to find the most disturbing, but I’ll tell one that makes me look good.
About ten years ago on Halloween at 3 a.m. on an empty downtown street that was slightly more industrial than commercial I saw three frat guys running down this old homeless-looking black guy and just pounding on him when they caught up to him. He’d get away for a second (they were all wasted, so it was sloppy) and they’d come in with more punches. They weren’t well thrown, but he was too inebriated to react, so they were heavy and thudding. I had two wasted kind of hipsterish older college kids in my car. A heavyset, soft guy with the hipster glasses and not an ounce of hardness to him and a cool looking girl he was within some intricate homemade knit hat. They were kind and cool.
Anyway, I slowed down as we passed the running fight thinking ‘Dang!, I can’t let this happen. Dang!” The customers were urging me to drive and I was trying to not be caught in shock and the bros literally knocked the guy into and onto my trunk and started hitting him. There was a smear of blood across the clean bright yellow that hilariously reminded me of McDonald’s.
‘DRIVE! PLEASE!’ yelled the hipsters.
‘Dang! I can’t!” I put it in park and jumped out as they were sort of spilling across the street continuing the assault. The homeless-looking guy went down and they were around him hitting and kicking. I’m a fairly big guy and I have some experience and training, but I had literally no physical weapon against three much younger (though I was only 33. Not old yet) guys. I am extremely physically confident though and know how to project power. The older fellow was in survival mode. He wouldn’t have been any help. I ran up and peeled one attacker off by his arm as I passed by (not wanting to get caught in the middle when I stopped) and swung him over a curb and just started acting a lot tougher than I actually am. I pretended to be armed. The homeless guy regained his feet and staggered off, bloody, while the other two turned towards me. The guy I threw down was getting back up.
My heart was pounding out of my chest and out of my temples and I got ready to throw and kept trying to talk them down with sense and threats. Two slightly more sober bros came up and I thought ‘Well dang…five now…well that’s just great…’ but they put their hands out, palms towards me, in peace, and started talking the other three down. The guy had gotten away and the attacker bros were kind of half moving the other way. I got in the cab before they had an inebriated change of mind and decided to go for me and I drove off huffing and puffing and feeling out of my mind.
After I drove for a minute in silence, the heavy-set hipster guy says, I kid you not, ‘You’re a freaking superhero, dude.’ We all started laughing. I got them home, but my heart didn’t stop feeling like it was going to explode for about twenty minutes.”
Bizarre Night Of Insomnia
“I am an insomniac, although it is mostly under control now. To pass the night away I used to walk around the city all night from about midnight until sun up.
One night I was walking through a neighborhood when I saw someone who looked to be wearing a fur coat going through a wheelie bin. As I got closer, something looked wrong, but I was distracted by a guy walking toward me. He was carrying a slim Jim and opening the doors of all of the cars he walked past. He didn’t take anything from the cars, he just opened the door, left it ajar, and moved on to the next car. I didn’t want to get closer to him, but I didn‘t want to cross the street either, so I just froze. The door-opener guy stopped in his tracks, too, and turned toward the wheelie bin. He says, ‘Raccoon’ and I turned to look and sure enough it was the largest raccoon I’d ever seen. As we are looking at the raccoon, I was distracted by a light in the window of the house behind the raccoon. There was a man standing in the window completely exposed and tumescent also watching the raccoon. The raccoon turned to look at us and then waddled away down the middle of the street. The guy opening doors then went into the house we were standing in front of and the nudist guy turned off his light.
I was left standing alone on the sidewalk wondering if I had just witnessed some elaborate performance art.”
Blood Coming From Under The Door
“My first year working nights as a paramedic. We get called to a lady who gave birth and her baby wasn’t breathing. We arrive on the scene to a blood bath and a woman holding a baby rocking back and forth. The child was deceased and the mom in ’emotional shock’ otherwise she is healthy and stable. She doesn’t want to be transported only wants to hold her baby. The baby still had part of the umbilical cord attached.
At this time my weird sirens were blaring and I’m looking around the house. The pictures in the house are of a couple and it’s obviously not the lady clutching the dead child. I point it out quietly to the police officer on the scene with us. And continue to look around. I see a little blood coming from under the door of what appears to be a closet. Again I alert the officer and he draws his weapon and I open the door while standing to the side. The woman in the pictures falls out of the closet and has deep cuts and stab wounds all on her body. Her abdomen was also cut open. It was at this time the cop and I realized what happened.
This lady who is holding the dead baby attacked and killed the mother and cut the child from her womb. Then called 911 for some odd reason. I don’t think we ever found out why.”
Oh, And By The Way The Building Is Haunted
“I used to work for a private security company about 20 years ago.
Along with alarm response, we covered patrol checks, and occasionally checked in/provided back-up to security guards at individual sites.
One night in particular I was working overtime covering off a particular run I had never done before. I know the city well, so finding the buildings wasn’t a problem. I was, however, warned about one particular building. The CEO was facing charges, and the Board wanted extra overnight checks to ensure the CEO wouldn’t try anything shady. No problem. Oh, and by the way, the building is haunted. ‘Sure,’ I said. ‘I’ll leave Casper a coffee for you.’
Now, the way this building is set up, is three floors, vertically stacked, a single hallway with offices on either side and stairwells/exits on either end. Not a big building. Including paperwork, in and out in 10 minutes, tops.
The first time I was walking the top floor back towards the front stairwell, I was shining my flashlight into various offices, noticing the ornate woodwork on the exquisitely done wood paneling, and paintings of old men I didn’t recognize. And about 3/4 of the way through the hallway I heard it. A chair being dragged across the carpet. I was alone in the building. I had just walked through all of it. I turned around and shone my flashlight on a chair now placed in the exact middle of the hallway. Where I had walked 5 seconds prior. Had the chair been in that spot when I passed, I would have walked through it…
With the hair standing up on the back of my neck I checked the nearby offices, then put the chair back against the wall beside the end table, just outside the office door where it had previously been. I went downstairs to do the paperwork and heard the shuffling upstairs again. Went to the landing on the stairs where I could see the hallway with my eyes at floor level, and saw the chair back in the middle of the hallway.”
“Death Is Coming,” She Said
“Years ago I was a night shift CNA for an assisted living facility.
I had a resident that had a wild week. She didn’t have dementia/ Alzheimer’s either so it added more weirdness to this situation.
It was about midnight when I was doing my rounds when she burst out of her room holding her giant cross and looked white as a ghost. I asked her what’s happening? Did you have a bad dream? She replied after she caught her breath that was someone in her room telling her to get out. Now we have wanderers in our facility and I looked around in her room thinking one may have spooked her. I found nothing. She followed me around that night and didn’t go off to bed until 4 am. I thought that was the last of it. I was wrong.
The next night it happens again. She once again claims a man is in her room telling her to leave. Once again I check her room and find nothing.
This is where things got really weird. One night when I was in the back helping a resident my buzzer went off that the front door was opened. I quickly finished up what I was doing and bolted to the front door. Those doors are locked at night. When I found the corner to the front office I see her standing outside with the door wide open; she was looking at the sky in awe. I asked her what she was doing as it was 2 am at this point and she looked at me put her hand on my shoulder and said ‘Death is coming for X. I had to let him in.’
I coaxed her in the building with a cup of decaf coffee and some biscuits. She told me about the man in her room again and how he’s making it difficult for her to sleep. Curiosity got the best of me and I asked if she can tell me what he looks like.
I really don’t believe in the paranormal. I feel like everything can be explained, but I can’t explain how she accurately described a resident who lived in her room years ago. He was an angry man who didn’t want to be in the facility in the first place and passed away after refusing his medication. He didn’t like anyone in his room except a few CNAs. She even got his name right.
Her family started getting concerned for her well being and asked to have her transfer rooms. After she was moved down the hall her nightmares stopped.
I asked the other PCWs and CNAs If any of them mentioned anything about the previous resident in her old room all have stated they didn’t.”
Okay, Now That’s Pretty Ominous
“A gorilla.
I work at Walt Disney World in Florida, and more specifically I work at Animal Kingdom, which is half theme park, half zoo. Now, due to Disney’s conservation efforts, they give the animals quite a bit of freedom. They are enclosed, but the enclosures are very large, and their sleep areas are well outside of guest view, its actually a pretty great set up for the animals. We also don’t confine them to their sleep areas at night. So I was working the graveyard shift, 10:30 pm to 8:00 am, and as I turn the corner to cross a bridge into the next area, I see a massive figure on the other side of the bridge. One of the gorillas had gotten out of their enclosure and was just walking around the park. I nearly shat myself, as, if you know anything about gorillas, they can be pretty violent. I called it into my boss and they told me that this happens sometimes and to just stay away from it and they will get the caretakers to come to do their thing. Honestly, it was the craziest thing I’ve seen in my time there.”
A Vanishing Act
“I drove a taxi for a few years out of college and not being a morning person I chose the night shifts. Being the city that never sleeps, driving the night shift was good money. One night after dropping off a customer at a night club, two very tipsy girls and a guy got in and asked to take them to one of the boroughs. It was after midnight so there are plenty of wasted people looking for a ride home. The drive was about 35-40 min long. I remember overhearing them talking and laughing in the backseat while we were going across town but I didn’t pay much attention. It was only after I came out of the tunnel I realized it had gotten very quiet in the back. I checked my rearview mirror but couldn’t see anyone.
I thought they must have been really tired to pass out so quickly. I couldn’t see down to the back seats due to the divider in yellow cabs. The rest of the ride was silent. Once I got to the destination, I turned on the lights inside the car and announced ‘We’re here.’ When I looked back I only saw the guy. He got up after I called him out a second time. The first thing I asked him was ‘Where did the girls go?’ And he replied ‘What girls?’ I said the girls who got in with you. He said he was alone. This is one of the incidents that stuck with me as I could have sworn I saw them get in and heard the giggling of those girls in the back.”
The Lady That Lived In The Ceiling
“One night during a floor set at VS, we were throwing away trash and going in and out of the stock room, cleaning the floor, removing merchandise, counting registers, opening boxes, etc.
We had music blaring and we’re singing, goofing off while working and all of a sudden some lady walks out to the register and wants to purchase her items probably about 45 minutes after we closed and did the nightly routines of clearing out the fitting rooms, recovering the store, vacuuming. None of us knew she was there. None of us saw her. She wasn’t in the store. She wasn’t in the back. Not in the bathroom. Not under tables. We think she may have been hiding in the ceiling in the dressing room waiting for us to leave so she could rob the store but since she realized we weren’t leaving she thought it best to come out. It was the absolute scariest moment. I think there were 12 of us in the store that night all over the place and none of us saw her. What if she had a weapon or a knife or something? She totally could have gone through our personal items and taking things. But she paid for random things and left. She acted like nothing out of the norm was going on.”
Some Stereotypically Spooky Biz At The Morgue
Not a strict night time worker, but working at night. I worked for my county morgue. I would retrieve a body and bring it to the morgue. My coworker and I are talking as we are leaving the building. It’s maybe 2 am. I am facing him, at the end of a long hallway. He is facing me, behind me a giant glass door. Just out of the corner of my eye, I see a black mass peak out of one of the autopsy suites and pop back in. I looked over his shoulder but shrugged it quickly before he said ‘You saw that, right?’ He had seen what I saw in the reflection of the glass door. We went down the hallway to find the building completely empty. When we leave, we are responsible for locking up. We high tailed it out of there, knowing very well what we had just experienced.
My company was a third party contractor, so we did other forms of body removal, including removals for funeral homes. At this particular funeral home, I had heard stories of people having experiences here, but never any of my own. It’s about 3 am on this call, and I drop the body off in the embalming room. When we clean up our equipment, we spray it down with disinfectant spray and give it a quick wipe. For whatever reason, I felt impelled to treat this body with much more respect than others (I treated all bodies with respect, but for some reason, I felt the need to go above and beyond for this soul). I took extra care of him, and clean extra thoroughly of my equipment. Things that we touch that aren’t typically washed in our clean up. I’m leaving the building, and as I am walking out of the door, a whisper in my ear says ‘thank you.’ My heart drops as I know I have to turn around to lock the door behind me. No one was there, and no one lives in the funeral home. I was the only one there. I high tailed it out and refused to go there alone since.
Mysterious Barefoot Woman
“I used to run a small bakery that was kind of hidden and quiet in MD. I would get there at 4 am alone and it was pretty creepy. The actual bakery where I baked the goods was across a small alley from the store so I was always running back and forth setting up the shop. One day I walked outside with a basket of cookies and there was an elderly woman walking towards me holding a newspaper and she said here’s your paper. I took it and said thank you and realized she had no shoes on ( this was wintertime) she turned and started walking away. I quickly opened the door and put the paper and cookies inside and went to see if she was ok and she was totally gone. I looked for her but she was gone I literally had my eyes off of her for 30 seconds. This bakery pretty much only got business from regular customers and I knew everyone by name that came in and I asked everyone about her and described her but nobody knew who she was. I contacted the police that morning in case she was missing or had dementia but nothing ever came of it. In the years of working there, I’ve never seen a soul there early in the morning and we did not have a newspaper delivery subscription.”
Truly Bizarre
“I worked as an engineer in Denver. Unfortunately being security detail came with the job considering the hours 2 pm-11 pm
I was doing rounds and we had noticed the previous day that a lock to an electrical room had been removed. It was mid-winter last year and we figured someone was trying to stay warm. As much as I want people less fortunate to get ahead any way they can, it was my job to make sure there wasn’t someone occupying some spot on the property. So I go to check on the room.
I walk up and notice the door is cracked ever so slightly. Pop my flashlight out and beam it in there. Now the room did exactly what it was made for without any budge room. There was maybe slightly less than a foot of space between the wall and the machines that were in there. Thinking it would be impossible for someone to be crammed in there I do a lazy scan and go to shut the door. As I’m walking down the staircase I hear a shuffling in there. It’s late, there’s nothing going on and I was newish to the city so seeing owls or big rats was somewhat a thrill. Easily entertained I guess.
So I go back up pop out the flashlight again but this time I crouch down to see the space beneath the machines. Sure enough, I see some legs. I call out to whoever it was and tell them they need to vacate. They stay still for a long moment until they started to wriggle themselves out from the tight space. I stayed there cause the procedure would be to lead off the block entirely. A woman pops out, looking rough as heck and starts muttering absolute nonsense. She’s taking her time and it is blowing snow so I start to get a little aggravated and tell her to hurry up.
This woman turns to me sticks her tongue out at me with her mouth gaping broadens her stance and starts to dig in her crotch.
She pulls out a warm totally in use tampon and throws it at me hitting me in the jaw/neck area.
Then proceeded to clamber away yelling something about murdering a diddler.”
Who Was That Guy?
“I worked at a hotel with a huge banquet room for parties of 300-400 people. It was a week night and typically the hotel has low guest count and no people in those rooms so we turn the lights off. I was walking through that room to cut through and saw the outline of a person leaning against the wall at the other end of the room. I thought it was another worker named “Simone” since he typically hung around that area since it connects to the pool to the hotel. I gave a head nod and said what’s up? No response, weird, went about my way and left the room.
Came back 10 minutes later and saw the same shadow outline standing their against the wall and I said what’s up? And still no reply, so I began to walk over and it became clear it wasn’t Simone, I turned and left the room finding it weird that someone was just standing in the banquet room with barley any lights on and not responding. The next day I asked Simone if he was in the room yesterday and he said he wasn’t working yesterday and neither was the other pool attendant.”
A Very Gross But Kind Of Cute Story
“Worked at a movie theater in high school. A few really messed up things happened there, but this one is freaky-fun.
The staff were (mostly) funny, quirky, wholesome kids, who didn’t really drink or party, so we all made friends and would go out after shifts to hang at IHOP or somebody’s house. One night I had a closing shift with some of my favorites, and most of us worked the opening shift the next morning. It’s already past midnight and we’re all hopped up on free Coke (a-Cola) so we went to L’s house nearby to play flashlight tag. Teenagers don’t need sleep!
L lives right next to a nature preserve. We played around outside for a while, and when the sun started coming up we all took her dog for a walk in the preserve. It has a dirt road with trails off the sides. Right before we got to the trail we saw a dead possum in the road. The possum’s head was mush but it was still moving. The dog ran up to sniff it but then came straight back to us. We sort of crept up to it and saw something crawling around inside its belly. The possum had died on impact, but it had babies in its pouch who were still alive and trying to stay warm. They were covered in a sort of a yellow goo and smelled terrible. Really sad. Well, there’s not much we can do, so we continued walking a loop through one of the trails. Everybody was quiet. When we got back to the road, the possum was still there and the babies were still alive.
Long story short, I brought home a shoebox of baby possums at 6 am, gave them to my mom, and went off to work the morning shift a few hours later. Love you, Mom!”