Zeke Newbold
Carbon based biped.
- Joined
- Apr 18, 2015
- Messages
- 1,249
This is a lovely story - full of wonderful details, but I'm not so taken with these Things Going Bump in the Night tales - I mean in terms of anything paranormal. Most buildings make noises - it;s just that we don't hear them in the daytime through all the chatter, phone calls and car engine noises.Hello all.
This is probably not the most exciting story posted, but rest assured that everything that I am going to tell you certainly happened.
This story is not the most frightening thing that has ever happened to me, but it is certainly the most baffling experience that I have had.
To give a bit of background, I had a job back in 2001 doing IT work. At the office where I was working it was possible to gain access at any day and time through the use of a swipe card to open the main door. You had to then sign in and out using a book left at reception, as the receptionist would not be there outside of normal office hours.
One Friday night, I had been home from work for a few hours when I realized that I had left my phone charger in the office. Since I did not have a spare charger, my phone battery was almost flat and the office was only a fifteen minute drive from my flat; I decided to go in to pick it up. That evening I was reinstalling Windows onto my home PC so I needed to download some drivers, but I did not have the internet in my flat. So - I could do two jobs in one trip.
I got into the office at about 8PM. It was mid-October, so it was dark when I got there. The office building itself is quite old - built in the 1950s it had wood flooring throughout, single panel windows, and big chunky cast iron radiators. It was also surrounded by tall trees, and the interior lighting at night was barely adequate. A lot of people found the place spooky even in the daylight! The place never bothered me to be honest; well - up until this night!
In order to get to my desk it was necessary to enter the main doors, walk past the reception desk and then turn left, and push open some double doors which lead into a long corridor. This corridor has doors to a number of small offices on the left hand side, and the last door on the left led to a bigger open plan office that had my desk. The right hand side of the corridor also had doors to smaller offices and a large meeting room. The corridor ended with a double door fire exit with a "push to open" bar on it.
I got to my desk and put on a desk lamp I had on it. The lights in the office were off, but I could see to get to my desk due the light coming in from the corridor. I pocketed my charger, and started using my work PC to open up the website with the graphics card drivers I wanted. I clicked download and sat back in my chair watching the progress bar. I always remember the fact that the download had got to 13% - probably due to the fact that at that point I heard this very loud scraping noise coming from the meeting room.
To me, it sounded exactly like a metal chair being dragged across the wooden floor - indeed the meeting room had that kind of chair. The striking thing was that the sound was so loud and piercing that it sounded like someone was pushing down hard on the chair while dragging it across the floor - the kind of thing my mates in school used to do to annoy the teachers at the end of a lesson. The noise was so loud it made me jump.
I got up from my desk and went to the meeting room - entirely expecting to meet a cleaner, security guard - someone like that. When I got into the corridor I saw that the meeting room door was a few inches open, and the lights inside the room were off - you see that jet black look in the open gap as you are standing in a lit corridor. I stuck my hand into the gap and reached in for the light switch - rather nervously I must admit! I flicked the lights on and pushed the door open - only to find nobody in there. The chairs were all tucked up under the table. Everything was in order.
I had become quite concerned about burglars at this point, so I checked that the windows were all locked - they were. No broken glass either. There was only one door in and out, and I even looked under the meeting table. Nothing. The thing that struck me was that the room was bitterly cold - like walking into a winters night.
I then went back into the corridor and checked all the smaller offices - all the doors were locked. This was not a surprise as the people who had their own offices would routinely lock them when they went home every night. As I was trying all the door handles, I realized that there was no way someone could have gotten out of the meeting room and ran to the end of the corridor to get to reception and outside - it only took me five seconds to get to the corridor from my desk, so I would have seen them - and there was a hard wood floor, so I would have heard their footsteps as well. If they had tried to go the other way to get to the fire door I would have walked into them as they would have had to come past my office door. The fire door was also closed and secure, and it makes a lot of noise when opened as well - so I would have heard it opening.
I was not frightened - I just felt baffled, as it didn't make sense. I knew from the sign in book that I was the only person in the building, and I had checked all possible hiding places as well. There did not seem to be anything else I could do, so I went back to my desk, pulled my USB key out of my work PC and got the hell out of there!
As a footnote, the people I work with were quite fun guys and I decided after the event to keep my story to myself, as I knew that they would find the whole thing hilarious and I would never hear the end of it. I kept quiet for a couple of years - until I left the company. On my last day the team took me to the pub for a farewell drink, and since I was leaving I told my boss my story. I entirely expected him to laugh at me but instead he went quiet for a few seconds, and then proceeded to ask me why I thought he used a laptop for his work instead of a more powerful desktop PC. When I told him I thought he just preferred a laptop, he told me that the actual reason was that he always makes a point of packing up and going home before it gets dark outside - and he had a laptop so he could keep on working from home during the autumn and winter when it got dark before our finishing time of 6PM. I asked him why this was, and he told me in all seriousness that on a number of occasions when he had been working late in his office, he had stopped what he was doing as he was getting in his words: "a strong sense of threat and menace" from the corridor outside his office. He added that on a few occasions he had gotten up from his desk to check the corridor, as he got a very strong feeling that someone was standing by his office door. He never saw anyone. The thing with my old boss was that he was a big ex-rugby player who was very no nonsense and was not scared of anything, so for him to tell me that some invisible force could unnerve him enough to make him leave the building was quite a shock to hear.
I know that when this story gets posted it might attract criticism or people trying to investigate further, so I have not mentioned any specific names or places. I am also still in contact with my old co-workers, so in order to protect their privacy (and my career!) I have not mentioned any names. Rest assured that all these events happened as stated.
In conclusion, I want to state that I don't believe in ghosts at all. I personally think that anyone who claims to have seen one is either mistaken, or a hoaxer. However, to this day I cannot come up with an explanation for the source of that sound. I was alone at the time, so there is nobody that can back my story up; but I know what I heard.
A while back I used to work as a roving security guard and did so for just over two years.This meant that I stayed long hours throughout the night alone in many different types of buidlings.. I have no ghost stories to tell (although some of my longer serving workmates did) but I have a few Odd Noises stories...
One night I was stationed at a textile factory - some kind of lockstitcher or weaver kind of place. It consisted of one storey containing a number of rather old machines which were automatically ticking over on their own (sometimes letting out jets of steam, for example). I suspect my main role was to function as a firewatcher.
The night passed without incident. However, towards the end of my shift - maybe at around 6 am (but still dark as it was winter) - I began to hear scrabbling and pounding noises that sounded as though they were coming from the roof. I began to fear that someone was up there - such as intruders, or, more likely, a bunch of kids and became quite nervous.
( A paranormal explanation never occured to me)* So I rang Control (this was a fairly big deal because we were meant to ring them at a set time every hour - but otherwise not bother them unless there was something serious to report).. I told them that I thought someone might be up on the roof. They asked me to wait for a bit.
The next thing I know, I get a call from some comatose geezer who turns out to be a foreman, or something, from the factory (I must have got him up). He asks me to go and look at a certain dial on a certain wall. Is the red hand pointing upwards? I go and look.The red hand is indeed pointing upwards and I report this back to him. `Ah,` he says. `That'll be the sound of the water entering the pipes.`
It turns out that at a certain time in the morning a whole load of pipes on the ceiling (I look up and suddenly notice a lattice of metal pipes up there) are flooded with water - to send to the machines, or cool them down or yadayada...whatever - in preparation for the working day. But what an unholy rumpus it made! And nobody ticked me off for raising the alarm.
* And this is significant in terms of `confirmation bias`. My job was to deter and report intruders - so that's what I was looking and listening out for. If I had been there for some other purpose I might have framed things quite differently.