Horrific nightmares definitely weren't in the job description! These people encountered way more than they signed up for on the job, and it wasn't even limited to creepy night shifts! There are some truly terrifying customers out there. Content has been edited for clarity.
No Life Jacket, No Radio
“I got this job after my first year of college as a watchman. It was in a remote area overlooking the Mississippi River. There was a lot of floating equipment tied up to the bank, and I was supposed to watch a radar screen and visually make sure that none of the equipment was stolen or sinking. To get to this tiny elevated office, I had to walk a few hundred feet through a wooded area. I never saw or talked to another soul. Thankfully, I had a radiophone in case I actually saw something. The previous two people doing this quit because they didn’t like the conditions, but it paid very well for a summer job and I got a lot of overtime. They didn’t provide one, but they said if I wanted to carry a weapon, I could. Big red flag.
I got used to it and actually liked the solitude. I don’t sleep more than about 4-5 hours, so staying awake was not a problem, A couple of times a night I’d take a big flashlight and go check to make sure all the equipment was OK, not sinking or floating away. One night I see this small crane barge is not tied very well and could easily float away if a passing boat rocked it a little. I am no deckhand, I tried to pull it in tighter, but with the current, it wouldn’t budge. My mistake was getting on the crane barge because I saw a rope I could use. That’s when it came loose. By the time I realized what was happening, it was too late to jump back.
So now I’m in the dark riding a breakaway barge, no life jacket, no radio, and there was very little marine traffic, so all I could do was ride. There were a lot of things we could hit and sink and I would likely drown. When I did see a tugboat, he didn’t see my flashlight. I rubbed against a bridge, then hit a large barge and started to go under it. The boom on the crane hit the deck and I was able to scamper up the boom onto the barge deck.
I was stuck on a barge, but at least it was tied securely. The crane barge I was on was now wedged against the bow. By daylight, a passing boat saw me and picked me up. I had hundreds of mosquito bites, but no equipment was actually damaged.”
Not Paid Enough For Attempted Kidnapping”
“I used to work at a coffee place. We opened at five in the morning, but we were there at four thirty to set up. We closed at eight at night and left by eight thirty or nine, depending on when we finished cleaning up. One night a week was a deep clean session, so we’d leave closer to nine thirty or ten. I did my fair share of both opening and closing in my almost four years there, and I definitely saw some pretty interesting folks in all that time, especially when opening. Lots of homeless people who were sadly mentally disabled or addicts. We were in a part of town that was not as nice as it used to be. One morning when I was opening, myself and my opening barista (I was the supervisor at the time) were the only ones in the store. I was in the back of the store setting up some tils, and she was in the front brewing coffee and tea and so on. Suddenly, she started screaming bloody murder.
I grabbed a box cutter and ran to the front. She had been cleaning a drain on the ground by the sink right next to the drive through window. She had been bent down, but when she stood up again, there was a man in with his face pressed to the window, literally inches away from her just through the glass. He was just staring at her, with this huge, super terrifying grin on his face, just up against the glass. He was super dirty and messy, and for some reason had a pink blanket wrapped around his shoulders. As my barista was screaming and crying, mostly shocked from how quickly he’d randomly appeared and how close he was to her, he started cackling like it was funny.
I don’t really know why, but that ticked me off so bad. I didn’t want to open the window obviously, so I just told my barista to go into the back of the store and made eye contact with the guy through the window, scowled as hard as I could, and pointed down the street and yelled at him. He looked totally taken aback at first, but then kinda stumbled away down the street. He lingered on the block for a long time, but eventually left for good. I kept an eye on him for a while and then went and calmed down my barista.
Another time, I was opening with a different barista. For reference, I’m an average-sized female, early twenties. This barista I was opening with is a late thirties male. When we opened the store, we’d wait in the parking lot for the other person to get there (one barista, one supervisor) and then walk into the store together. I arrived before him. When he got there, he parked a few spaces away from me. His car is black and small, so it could be hard to notice in the dark and from a ways away. When I realized he was there, I got out of my car to meet him.
He left his car too and was walking towards me when he suddenly started yelling, ‘GET AWAY FROM HER!’ and running at me super fast. I heard footsteps run away from behind me and was super shocked. Apparently, someone had been hiding behind my car, waiting for me to get out. They hadn’t noticed my coworker show up and was scared off by him, thank God, because I didn’t ever notice anyone was there.
A few weeks later though when I was closing with a different barista it happened again. My barista’s partner was picking her up from work that night and was waiting in the parking lot since she got there a little early. Luckily, my barista’s partner was also a cop. She noticed someone was crouched hiding behind my car and called her partner to tell her to tell me what was going on, then went to investigate and shoo the guy away. As soon as he saw her, he ran away again. My barista and her partner both walked me to my car though just to be safe.
So yeah, two attempted kidnappings within two weeks was pretty creepy. All for 15 bucks an hour. Go figure.”
Horrifying Visitor
“I am a security guard at a condominium, and I have two overnight shifts and two day shifts a week. I work alone. On Saturday, February 2020 at 3 a.m., on one overnight shift occasion, I was just doing my desk duties like any other night. It was dark outside, and several buildings around me had a power outage while ours was still up and running. Some streetlights were still up but noticeably dim. From where I work and sit, there are huge windows on my right side, and more big windows in front of me. When I got back to my front desk to pick up my flashlight, all set ready to go, there was this bald person approaching the windows from my right. He was wearing all black and had no facial hair. He banged his head slowly on the window with his eyes wide open. After he hit his head about 4-5 times, he stared at me. He did not blink whatsoever. I could see the tears running down his eyes. I sat down on my chair and I stared back at him. We basically stared at each other for a good two minutes. He banged his head again a couple of times, and then he pulled out a pen from his sneakers and started using it to try to carve the window. I flashed my flashlight on his face, which he tried to obscure with his arms.
He then ran away towards the parkette. At approximately 3:30 a.m., the guy went back and found a way to our front entrance, though he stayed at the vestibule. I flashed my flashlight on his face again and same results, he ran away. He must have hated flashlights. The power on the neighborhood buildings turned back on and I never seen him ever since. I still do my external patrols because work comes first, but what scares me the most are those gang of raccoons patrolling the area.”
“Looking At Me Like I Was Prey”
“I think I almost got murdered once. I was young and really broke working as a waitress. I did not have a car. My shift ended at 2 in the morning on weekends, and I had about a mile and a half to walk home, most of it along a long country road. No buses ran that late. A guy pulls over and asks if I have a smoke. I didn’t like that he asked that, how he know I smoked, for one? I wasn’t smoking right then, but I had been five minutes before. Also, why didn’t he just ask if I wanted a ride, like all the other guys who pulled over for me. He was looking at me like I was prey. Like he was making a decision. Real bad. I was spooked. I told him I was out of smokes, and he drove off.
Within a minute, a minivan pulled over, and a Baptist soccer mom told me to get in. She had two or three little kids asleep in the car. I remember thinking, dang, I wouldn’t have stopped for me, if I had kids in the car. But she did. Took me home. Gave me Baptist literature and talked about God. That was the only time I’ve ever taken somebody up on a ride. I think she was probably a guardian angel. I think maybe that guy was going to swing back around for me. I think he probably already had swung around for me once, how else did he know I smoked?
I can’t forget his face, him looking at me, making a choice.”
“Something Following Me From Above”
“I was working overnight security at a boatyard (they assembled tugs), and there were numerous docks and very large warehouses where things were assembled. The job was great, as I could essentially play video games or do homework all night, minus a 20-minute walkabout every two hours. The only problem with this job was the totally bizarre and creepy things that continually happened while on shift. You have to understand a large, rusty, foggy industrial yard like this late at night in near total dark, minus the lights you turn on (then off). I for one am a very logical, science oriented person. Yet we went through probably about 35-40 guards in the year and a half I was there, the latter half being lost to other posts despite being paid DOUBLE at this one for much, much less work.
While working there, I heard all kinds of stories, but I’ll give you some of the ones I personally experienced. One night while patrolling one of the assembly warehouses, I heard something following me from above. It was the strangest thing. I couldn’t find the source of the noise, but every time I turned around, I could hear something scatter and run. Something big. Go back to the security room and look through the cameras, and it’s a massive cat. Some sort of mountain lion. I had to call animal control, and they hunted and caught the thing like 5 hours later. The next night, it’s back. I can see it in the cameras, and call again. This time they couldn’t catch it. At one point I was actually directing animal control to the thing which I could see on the camera, and they were walking around right past it. They never ended up with the second catch.
Another night I was walking across one of the large, empty sections of the yard and was hit in the leg by a wrench. A large, 5-lb wrench. It hit me hard enough where I stumbled and almost went down. The thing is, there was literally no place this could have fallen from, the nearest roof was a good distance away. Someone would have had to of tossed it like a football to hit me with it.
Another night, I heard the super large hangar open despite the controls for it being locked. I was weirded out but decided to investigate. It then closed again. Then opened. Then as I’m getting ready to troubleshoot this thing the bathroom door RIPS open, slamming hard enough to give me a heart attack and every stall door slams open.
Given we were on the docks there were a lot of seagulls. Occasionally, one or two would sit on the end of the pier and watch us do rounds. One night a small flock of them, probably about 5-10 flew into a really compact ball. It was super weird, I’ve never seen them do that before. They then proceeded to follow me around at a set distance. If I approached, they went away. When I walked away, they followed. When I went into the guard shack, they all landed on the roof. The weirdest thing.
The last example I’ll give was one of the few deaths that happened on site. A worker was not wearing a harness while doing a warehouse roof repair. He fell through and landed on some machinery a good 40 feet below. He was dead by the time the ambulance got there. The following day, the roof caved in on the CEO’s office during an international conference call, sending him to the hospital. The weird thing is the main office building was newly constructed, with no maintenance issues whatsoever.”
Straight Out Of A Horror Movie
“I got sent to a mental health facility for a night shift. I was told that there were 3 night staff, and 2 of them were on one wing, and I, the newbie, would be on the other wing along. I figure it’s just the non agency staff wanting to work together and whatnot, but whatever. The job requirement was to peek into the bedrooms every hour and make sure the patients hadn’t hurt themselves or respond to any bedside calls. The hallway lights were turned off though, so I had to do this with an electric torch. This sounds like a horror movie set up already right! There were a lot of odd noises, like doors opening and closing, and odd tappings, so I kept popping out of the lounge to check if someone was in the hallway. No one ever was.
Anyway, during one room check, I peeked into the room and no one was in there. The bathroom door was open, no lights on, no patient. It was just me and my little torch beam. I looked under the bed, behind the curtains, checked the bathroom again. I turned to leave the room, and as my torch swung around to the doorway, there was a white human figure, with long white hair, head hanging forwards, arms hung at her side, highlighted by the weak and white beam. I let out a little screech of surprise and fear.
I then went to the doorway and took the patient back to her bed. No idea where she was hiding, her bedroom door was locked from the outside until I opened it.”
That’s One Angry Ghost
“I worked at a movie theatre and most often worked the closing shift. One night, me and another manager were sitting in the small office. She was working on the nightly deposit and I was finishing up inventory numbers, We had a CD player that we would listen to at night with a stack of CDs sitting next to it. I stood up and changed the CD and sat back down. About a minute after, the entire stack of CDs LAUNCHED itself across the room. One of the CDs hit my co-worker in the back of the head. She looked around and saw me sitting there dumbfounded with the CDs scattered all around me and the office. We quickly finished up and left.
A couple of days later, one of the other day shift managers calls me and asks me what we were doing the prior night. She seemed really annoyed, which was out of character for her because we were friends. I asked her what she meant, and she asked me why we had dumped all the security tapes onto the floor and left them there. I told her we hadn’t touched the security tapes at all.
The tapes were stored on top of the CCTV monitor on a small VHS tape shelf. The shelf hadn’t been moved and only the tapes were on the floor. She also said that all the sleeves from the tapes had been removed and thrown all over the place too.”
What Did They Want With Cows?
“All through my 4 years of college, I worked at my university’s dairy farm. I worked the night shift almost every Friday night. My job at the farm was pusher. This means that I move the cattle up to the parlor to get milked and I clean their stalls. Now a typical night will only have three people at the farm. The milker, the pusher, and someone to watch the calves and the cows that are about to have calves. There can be another person just doing other things on the farm, but it’s Friday night in rural America, so that’s not what most people are doing. I was walking back to get another pen to the parlor when I look outside and I swear I see someone sneaking around outside the barn. I do a double take, since I am not used to seeing people around at night. I didn’t see anything, so I shrugged it off and assumed that it was just my eyes playing tricks on me in the dark. As I am walking the cattle up to get milked I saw it again.
This time it was very clearly a person walking around. I thought it was odd, being it was 1 a.m. in the morning, and I didn’t notice anyone else doing work on the farm. I made up some excuses in my mind to ease myself and continued on. Now it’s about 2 a.m., and I just finished cleaning the last pen and I am about to go get the cows from the parlor when I see that person again. This time, they are clearly staring at me. It’s hard to tell in the dark, but I’m pretty sure I made eye contact with them. I am a little panicky at this point, because no one should be out there just staring at me. I make my way up to the parlor and hope that are just some weird curious stranger and will go away. As I am bringing the cows back, I clearly see someone in one of the other pens moving towards me. I am now freaking out and run up to the parlor to inform the milker and to get an idea of what to do next. We decide first to absolutely make sure it wasn’t another employee. So we head to where I saw them metal pipes in hand and we see them. The milker, being the braver one, calls out to them and as soon as they see us and our metal pipes they take off running. I did not see them again the night or any night after but stupidly, we did not inform a manager or the police. This experience really made me question why I was working the night shift in the first place.”
Giant White Mass
“Last year I started working the graveyard shift at a newer hotel. It was built basically over the spare pasture for the farmer that still lives next door. One night I’m doing my late shift thing (which was absolutely nothing), and I was standing at the front desk browsing the internet. The front door is perfectly visible from where I was standing, and I thought I saw a flash of white, out of the corner of my eye that came from that direction. There’s a lot of stray cats around here, so I didn’t think anything of it at first, on top of the fact that I was half asleep and there was a good chance it wasn’t anything anyway, until I noticed it a second time, but much slower.
I look up and out of the sliding glass doors, I saw a giant white mass. If that was a cat, it was an absolute monstrosity. Nervously, I walk towards the door to investigate, not knowing what kind of sumo wrestling feline I was about to encounter. I finally am able to see out towards the street, and lo and behold, there were four horses loitering in front of our hotel. I failed to put two and two together at first and had no idea where they came from, and if you can believe it, the hotel didn’t provide me with any horse handling training, so I had no idea what I could do. The hotel is right next to a busy highway, and even at 3 in the morning, I was worried about the horses wandering around unattended. I ended up calling the police and telling them, ‘I don’t know how to explain this, but there are unattended horses outside.”
I didn’t see anyone show up, but the horses were back in the pasture behind the hotel the next day, so everything must have sorted itself out well in the end. I know that wasn’t very scary, but it was when I experienced it.”
“As My Eyes Adjust I See Them”
“I used to work the late shift as classroom IT support for a college. We didn’t get a lot of high priority calls from night classes so, among other duties, we’d get a lot of repairs and maintenance done that couldn’t be done when the classrooms were in use during the day. I don’t mind the dark, so I wasn’t in the habit of turning lights in classrooms on if I was just going to do something real quick on the computer. Well I had a ticket to install something on the instructor PC in a classroom I had never been to before. It’s about 10 p.m. when I get around to this ticket and I head into the room. I get about halfway across the room and suddenly freeze. The hair on the back of my neck is standing up and I feel 100% that I’m being watched. No, I’m surrounded!
Then as my eyes start to adjust I see them. This entire classroom is encircled by hospital beds sticking out from the walls. And in every bed there’s a person sitting up, looking right at me! OH MY GOD.
‘OH, I’M SORRY!’ I blurt out, before finally realizing that they’re all just plastic dummies and I was in a Nursing classroom.”
Area 51 Will Want TO Hear About This
“Back in 1998, I was fresh out of high school and working my first job as a security guard. My friend worked security in the nearby city, and I was in the habit of talking to him on the phone every night. One night, around 4 a.m., we were talking and out of nowhere he says to me, ‘Hey man, do you see that?’
I was surprised because he probably worked at least ten or fifteen miles away, but I looked around and it dawned on me that everything around me, inside the guard shack and outside, was bathed in a faint emerald green light. I told him so, and asked where it was coming from, and he just said to me to look up. I did so and there, just above the treeline, was what I can only describe as a small emerald green sun, about a quarter the size of the yellow one we all know and love. It didn’t move, and the light didn’t fluctuate. It was just there, like any other star in the sky, like it belonged there, illuminating the entire countryside for miles and miles around. I stared at it awestruck for hours. My shift ended at 7 a.m., after the sun had risen, and it was still there when I left.
I suspected I would wake up and see a blurb about it in the evening news along with an explanation, but there was nothing in the media, and no one I asked had any idea what I was talking about. As far as I know only three people saw that thing. Me, my friend, and the guard who relieved me that day. He later told me that he went in to the building for a few minutes after I left and it was gone when he came out.
I never understood why no one else seems to have seen it. Granted, it was giving off a very dark green light, and it took a moment for me to notice it even after I had been told to look around, but whatever this was had been in the sky for at least three hours, and was illuminating a minimum of ten square miles covering a section of the suburbs and the city of Rochester NY. Even at that time of night, thousands of people would have been up, so someone else must have seen something, but to this day I’ve never met another witness. I’ve never seen a UFO report anywhere else, and I’ve never heard of anything that seems like a rational explanation.”