Spooked On The Job: Your Haunted Workplaces

Yes. please!!!
And report back!!! :D
 
I've worked in a lot of prisons. Perhaps unsuprisingly there are very often a lot of accounts of experiences in certain locations and certain cells. Prisoners are a suprisingly superstitious lot.

One of my favourite and genuinely weirdest accounts was this. This was back from the days of "night-san". Cells didn't have toilets so at night you would have to ring a "night-san" bell and an officer would let you out to walk down the corridoor of cells and back again to return to your cell, obviously at night.

I was talking to a prisoner I knew well one day. Hard as nails but absolutely straight-up. Never played up. Honest, helpful, didn't use illicit drugs or booze and disliked those that did. Down to earth Londoner of Egyptian descent. In for major violence.

Anyway, he told me that one night he needed the loo so rang the bell, was let out by an officer who, trusting this man to lock himself back up in his cell when he was done, went back to the office. The man used the toilet and walked back down the corridor of cells. He passed a cell he knew to be empty and heard some scuffling sounds coming from it. Being the kind of guy who wanted to know everything that was going on on "his" wing, he slid the obeservation panel back and looked in.

At this point of him telling me the story he became visibly upset; shaking, I thought this very big, very violent, very confident man was going to break down in tears. He told me that when he looked through the observation window, into the cell, he saw a lion.

It wasn't what I was expecting to hear! What do you mean a lion? I asked...a lion. An adult male lion in the cell, not exactly pacing (too small) but turning in a circular manneer as much as it could as if trying to pace. I quizzed him a bit...like a ghost lion maybe? I was still confused. No, he said, a lion. Just a lion. A big maned, golden-furred lion. Huge head, huge paws. Guy was very unnerved and disturbed by it. He said he was more terrified than he had ever been in his life.

He said he watched it for maybe 10 seconds but it felt minutes. In the end he slammed the panel shut, legged it back to his cell, locked himself up and jumped into bed, blankets over his head.




I spoke with him a few weeks later about it. He had calmed down. And could now see something of a funny side. He admitted it had freaked him out totally, scared and confused him. But he didn't change his story one bit. He swore, on all manner of important things under the sun, that he opened that panel and inside that cell, that night, was a lion.
 
Coastaljames said:
I've worked in a lot of prisons. Perhaps unsuprisingly there are very often a lot of accounts of experiences in certain locations and certain cells. Prisoners are a suprisingly superstitious lot.
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not massively surprising to me, given that prisons are repositories of violence, scarcely sublimated sexuality and seething resentment
 
At the place I've been working at for about 4 months, I'm getting a feeling it might be haunted. It's far from an old building so I'm going to do a bit of local research. The experiences I'm having are something suddenly rushing past close to me in my peripheral vision, temperature changes and mood changes. To argue against this, I'm always on my own in the evenings, naturally tired at the end of a shift and there's lots of shiny steel and glass through a doorway that could be the cause of a combination of factors. But it just feels haunted compared to locations reported to be haunted that I've visited and felt the same way about with the same feelings and similar experiences. Tonight I turned to a doorway and a bloke was stood next to entrance about 20ft away facing me and then he suddenly wasn't .. large built and with sandy blonde or ginger hair but I only got a quick flash vision. I've previously seen a young looking man quickly walk from left to right in the customer area through that doorway a couple of times and have often thought I could hear someone talking inside my small shop when I've been just outside the back door having a smoke, I've rushed back in thinking a customer has come in but nobody has. That's the most common one I get but then I'm tired and had a stroke May of last year so have to be sceptical that the place is haunted.

Perhaps misidentification happens in work places like pubs and hospitals and other places people work long hours mainly because they're tired or perhaps when they're tired, that's precisely why they are more open to receive genuine paranormal experiences?.
 
That’s a nice little tale. I think that you make a very valid point re tiredness playing tricks with you. Many years ago I worked in an insurance brokers (remember them?) and one evening I was alone in the shop cashing up. The door was locked and the other staff had left for the day. As I was sorting the float for the following day, I happened to move around to put the till back on the counter....and I saw a bloke stood at the other side of the counter staring at me. With the blink of an eye ‘he’d’ vanished! The interesting thing was, he slightly resembled a particularly difficult customer who I’d been dealing with earlier in the day. I didn’t suspect then, or now, that it was anything remotely paranormal. I put it down to having worked a 12 hour shift, but it’s stayed with me all these years nonetheless.
 
Dwain Pipe said:
That’s a nice little tale. I think that you make a very valid point re tiredness playing tricks with you. Many years ago I worked in an insurance brokers (remember them?) and one evening I was alone in the shop cashing up. The door was locked and the other staff had left for the day. As I was sorting the float for the following day, I happened to move around to put the till back on the counter....and I saw a bloke stood at the other side of the counter staring at me. With the blink of an eye ‘he’d’ vanished! The interesting thing was, he slightly resembled a particularly difficult customer who I’d been dealing with earlier in the day. I didn’t suspect then, or now, that it was anything remotely paranormal. I put it down to having worked a 12 hour shift, but it’s stayed with me all these years nonetheless.
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It's either that or we're both being haunted by the same bloke who died on the job and is coming back to warn us all ;) ..

I also used to sometimes catch sight of a woman (again peripheral vision so I'm suspicious of those with the tiredness factor .. hospital night shift and sitting at the nurse station inbetween rounds) who'd walk into that side room .. patients at the end stages of life would be moved to that room. Sometimes they'd recover but it was pretty much the 50/50 chances of survival room .. different patients who'd never met each other would say things like "Who was that nice nurse?" .. or "Two children got into bed with me earlier but I'm worried where there Mother is?" .. sometimes they'd be hooked up to timed diamorphine pumps with a 'booster' button which is another factor but a few other staff noticed and mentioned this 'woman' .. the building was originally built just to look after TB patients in the 50's (?) as I remember being told.
 
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I spend a fair amount of time at an office just off Tverskaya Street in Moscow, a very central location a stone's throw away from the Kremlin, in fact.

Russia has nothing like the same volume of ghost legends attached to it as Britain does but here is one about this area.

It is that there is a spectre of a huge black cat on the street which is seen to come out of walls and dive into buildings after midnight and also vanish into thin air. It is also said that this apparition directly inspired the writer Mikhail Bulgakov's impenetrable novel Master and Margarita, which features a satanic talking black cat amongst its characters.

This feline does make it into Britian's Encyclopedia of Ghosts and Spirits as well - so that.s fame of sorts. Here's a local English language coverage of it (Confused? You will be!):



https://www.rbth.com/articles/2010/11/08/mystical_moscow05094.html

I have been in the area at some quite unsociable hours and it would be lovely to say that it has some kind of spooky atmosphere - but...no. In fact the environs can be downright pleasant, particularly on a clear spring evening when the nearby Kremlin is lit up.

While doing a search on this I noticed that Washington has a similar ghostly black cat legend, which is interesting....
 
Thanks to COVID our big old shop closed and we said good bye to the ghosties we had there. We got moved into a dinky version in a supermarket and I do wonder if they’ve followed us or we’ve got new ones.

Last week I ended up in charge and closing the shop on my own. As I was waiting for closing time I could smell cigarette smoke. We do have an alley that runs behind us but you don’t tend to smell the manky stuff that goes on there and this was a good couple of feet into the shop. Interestingly cigarette smoke had been smelt at our old shop. Also we have movement activated lights and an aisle I was nowhere near turned on by itself. I thought I saw someone down there when no one was there today but that could have just been my imagination.
 
My haunted current workplace has been mentioned on'ere somewhere. Looks like it's on another thread.
Anyway...

My place is WELL spooky. I love it. :)

Last night I popped in late on to collect some bits and pieces.
A colleague arrived to sign out out from her shift and we chatted. One more person was due in after her so she said she'd wait and them cycle home with them.
Soon afterwards we heard the building's front door open and slam. Colleague went to see who it was, nobody there.
She looked all round; there's nowhere to hide and we were alone.
I said 'Yeah, that's the ghost.' :cool:
Colleague: o_O
:chuckle:
 
Hey, Forteans, it's me, Ulalume, back with another report of mysterious happenings at my husband's shop!

Oddness has continued apace since I last posted, mostly in the form of disembodied voices, a couple of sightings of the Cooler Lady mentioned upthread and some peculiar lights and movement on the security camera. A couple of weeks ago, my husband's assistant was frightened out of his wits while cleaning the restrooms after closing time. He heard a woman's voice call out "Hello?" Hello?" from the other side of the door and thought he'd locked someone inside the shop. But there was no one there.

What has inspired me to post here tonight, though, was this:

OH was mopping the floor after closing time tonight, and after having given a brief swish across a particular area of floor, he stepped a few feet away to the mop bucket for more water. When he turned back, he saw what appeared to be a bare footprint on the still damp patch.

He says it certainly wasn't there earlier, nor had anything like that turned up before, not in that area nor any other. He says he would have noticed, as he's rather finicky about scuff marks, etc. He was alone in the store; the doors were locked, and it probably goes without saying that it's highly unlikely anyone is going around barefoot in February, even if they could have snuck right past him.

He was startled, to say the least - he checked it against his own footprint just to make sure it wasn't somehow his own, but his tracks were a few inches bigger and the tread on the soles of his shoes were clearly visible.

Here's a photo of the print:

mysterious footprint.jpg


He estimates it's approximately a woman's size 7 US (which would be about size 5 in the UK, I think.)

After leaving it for a while to see if anything else would happen (nothing did) he mopped over it, and it disappeared as easily as any other damp footprint on a freshly mopped floor.

Note: I straightened the photo a bit and had to shrink it to fit the forum, but these are the only changes I made to it.
 
Was this mystery footprint in one of the restrooms, or elsewhere in the shop?
 
Welcome back, @Ulalume !

My guess? A foot-shaped oil/fat/grease mark (spill?) which repelled the water & detergent from the first assault by mop, but succumbed to the second.

maximus otter
 
This isn't a haunting, but it may be in future!

Our shop is brand new, we moved in last March. Towards the end of last year I had an elderly customer, who'd not been in since the new shop was built. He asked me if I knew about the history of the site, which I didn't. He then told me that the site used to be the old cattle market, before it was built on to be a garage, which we bought up to build the shop. The gentleman then told me that he had to be one of the few people who could boast that they had bought a cow, a car and a loaf of bread from the same place.

So I shall be all agog on the late shift for the any sounds of mooing.
 
catseye said:
This isn't a haunting, but it may be in future!

Our shop is brand new, we moved in last March. Towards the end of last year I had an elderly customer, who'd not been in since the new shop was built. He asked me if I knew about the history of the site, which I didn't. He then told me that the site used to be the old cattle market, before it was built on to be a garage, which we bought up to build the shop. The gentleman then told me that he had to be one of the few people who could boast that they had bought a cow, a car and a loaf of bread from the same place.

So I shall be all agog on the late shift for the any sounds of mooing.
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We have the sounds of mooing. I call it the ghost cow but it’s just the wind.

 
I work in an Arts Centre in an old Victorian town hall none of us are comfortable being alone in the auditorium you feel like you're really not alone. I personally would describe it as busyness around you and the motion sensor lights come on when there's no one near them. Also most of the staff would rather walk up two flights of stairs than get in the lift which opens onto the dark auditorium the lights don't come on until you step out of said lift.
 
I funny one was recounted to me by a work colleague recently. He was asked to collect old files from another Department and return to our offices. These banker boxes of files were stored in the basement of the other building, one that had a reputation for ghosts back in the day but is now renovated. It used to form part of the city morgue Im led to understand, I dont want to name the place here. Anyway he went over and reviewed the files in the locked up basement with the facilities manager and advised he would return next week to remove them and have them delivered to our offices. He arrived on the following Friday to carry out the work to find the boxes all neatly stacked at reception and had them moved to our place by courier. Afterwards he rang the facilities man to thank him for doing the moving himself but the man advised he was on holidays and no one in his Department had touched the files. It remains a mystery as to how they got to reception. Perhaps a ghostly Service Officer pushing a trolley in the half-light. Its weird all the same as the area was locked up and no other staff had the keys.
 
Feech23 said:
I funny one was recounted to me by a work colleague recently. He was asked to collect old files from another Department and return to our offices. These banker boxes of files were stored in the basement of the other building, one that had a reputation for ghosts back in the day but is now renovated. It used to form part of the city morgue Im led to understand, I dont want to name the place here. Anyway he went over and reviewed the files in the locked up basement with the facilities manager and advised he would return next week to remove them and have them delivered to our offices. He arrived on the following Friday to carry out the work to find the boxes all neatly stacked at reception and had them moved to our place by courier. Afterwards he rang the facilities man to thank him for doing the moving himself but the man advised he was on holidays and no one in his Department had touched the files. It remains a mystery as to how they got to reception. Perhaps a ghostly Service Officer pushing a trolley in the half-light. Its weird all the same as the area was locked up and no other staff had the keys.
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Helpful poltergeist abhors untidiness.
 
Feech23 said:
I funny one was recounted to me by a work colleague recently. He was asked to collect old files from another Department and return to our offices. These banker boxes of files were stored in the basement of the other building, one that had a reputation for ghosts back in the day but is now renovated. It used to form part of the city morgue Im led to understand, I dont want to name the place here. Anyway he went over and reviewed the files in the locked up basement with the facilities manager and advised he would return next week to remove them and have them delivered to our offices. He arrived on the following Friday to carry out the work to find the boxes all neatly stacked at reception and had them moved to our place by courier. Afterwards he rang the facilities man to thank him for doing the moving himself but the man advised he was on holidays and no one in his Department had touched the files. It remains a mystery as to how they got to reception. Perhaps a ghostly Service Officer pushing a trolley in the half-light. Its weird all the same as the area was locked up and no other staff had the keys.
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It means the crack lab is accessed from the basement and "they" don't want anyone in there!
 
Though I've never experienced anything myself, the cleaning team I manage in my current job swear that the building we occupy is haunted.

Which would be fine, if the building was of an age, however it was only built 6 years ago...
It's a purpose built three storey office building, on a business park, on the edge of Sheffield.

However, my team (and I have no reason to doubt them) claim to have had the usual items disappear then reappear elsewhere, changes in temperature (though that can be explained by the cheap air-con system that was installed), as well as the slightly more unusual sighting of an older gentleman in a flat cap, and tattered jacket walking around the 1st floor mezzanine level.

Previous the building, the site had been scrubland for some decades, and before that it was part of the site of a steelworks.
Could it be the spirit of a long dead steelworker wondering quite what has happened to his place of work...?

Well, given the amount of glass, lighting and shiny surfaces installed, I'd suggest an optical illusion of some kind, but my team are insistent.
 
BaronHardacre said:
Though I've never experienced anything myself, the cleaning team I manage in my current job swear that the building we occupy is haunted.

Which would be fine, if the building was of an age, however it was only built 6 years ago...
It's a purpose built three storey office building, on a business park, on the edge of Sheffield.

However, my team (and I have no reason to doubt them) claim to have had the usual items disappear then reappear elsewhere, changes in temperature (though that can be explained by the cheap air-con system that was installed), as well as the slightly more unusual sighting of an older gentleman in a flat cap, and tattered jacket walking around the 1st floor mezzanine level.

Previous the building, the site had been scrubland for some decades, and before that it was part of the site of a steelworks.
Could it be the spirit of a long dead steelworker wondering quite what has happened to his place of work...?

Well, given the amount of glass, lighting and shiny surfaces installed, I'd suggest an optical illusion of some kind, but my team are insistent.
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Our supermarket is built on the site of the old town cattle market. After the cattle market went defunct, it was a garage. I had a lovely elderly customer tell me, just after we opened, that he'd now bought a cow, a car and a loaf of bread from the same site over the years. I half expect to hear ghostly mooing of a night.

But we don't. It seems to have been sanitised by the new building. I want to do some research to find what was there before the cattle market (probably something to do with the old railway that ran past). I can almost bet that if I find that it used to be the old coal yard, someone will start 'hearing' noises of coal being moved.
 
I once worked as night-shift cleaner for a city arena/ice stadium. When built, part of it was on a cemetary where the interred were moved ... but were they all found?*
At about 5 AM - when the main floor and stands were completely cleaned - the main lights were shut down, leaving only safety lights on under the balcony, illuminating the top rows of the seating blocks. It became a 'thing' that sometimes - just sometimes - you'd see a shadowy figure out of the corner of your eye standing at the top of block 13.
At the very top of the building, part of it is horseshoe-shaped, with frosted windows facing outside, protected by a metal bar. The inside wall were the "V.I.P." spectator boxes. Part of our job was to clean each box then locking up as we went. We always started at the end of the 'shoe', one doing each arm. One night, I had done the first couple of boxes when tapping sounded from the protecting rail. Bear in mind that the curve of the corridor meant that until you got to the middle, eye-line was about 35 ft. I called on radio to the bloke on the other 'arm', asking if he was having trouble with the vacuum cleaner. Nope. I assumed it was a joke and carried on. The tapping kept happening sporadically. By the time I got to the middle, and able to see my oppo. The tapping sound, clearly from the arm I'd just done, sounded a couple of times then stopped. Now I knew all the rooms I'd done were empty and locked. Hmmm.
Finally, each loo had a utility room - with cleaning equipment, sinks, buckets and so on. The design of each loo meant that there was almost immediately in front of this utility room a lesser-used storage cupboard. One time I was filling my mop bucket and I heard rapping from the cupboard door. I opened it - it was locked of course - imagining some bright spark had hidden inside it - only to find it was filled with boxes of out-of-date brochures, old staff uniforms fit for recycling and general rubbish. Not enough room for anyone to hide. Amused, I re-locked the cupboard and for the rest of the time I took to fill my bucket, it still knocked. I admit, I couldn't be bothered with the old "one knock for yes - two knocks for no" routine; I had work to do and it was the early hours of the morning. On the way out, however, I did pause in front of the door and say "Save your energy - I'm leaving now" with no response. :D

*I appreciate the trope of buildings on old burial grounds etc. being infested with spooks, but this was factually correct.
 
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