People always refer to the staff that cleans the office spaces at night as “the night crew”, but I work by myself. I do three floors, 14 common areas, conference rooms, break rooms, and the bathrooms in the middle of the night. Normally I just listen to podcasts or music on my phone.
There’s one floor that I don’t like, and that I’ve never liked. I had actually switched buildings with one of my friends that I partner up with sometimes because I always got a weird feeling about this particular building… well, this particular floor.
The first event I remember was the microwave beeping in the break room, like when someone keeps pushing buttons. Whenever I hear a noise in an office building, I worry a little bit because nobody should be in there at that time. The warehouses are empty, and there’s no security guard inside of the building. They typically only do their rounds from the outside looking around for suspicious activity.
I went over to the microwave, and saw that it’s door was open. I closed it, and it popped open again right in front of me. I figured it was broken, but it did freak me out a little bit. I just left it like that, with the light on and everything.
The next thing I remember from that place was my vacuum cleaner refusing to turn on and having to switch outlets two separate times during my shift. It’s annoying having to manually sweep everything and not being able to vacuum up afterward. I don’t think anyone noticed that I hadn’t vacuumed two rooms that night.
The third thing was by far the creepiest thing I’ve ever witnessed. It was around 4am and the last thing I needed to do was to clean up the bathrooms, collect up all the trash, and take it to the dumpsters out in the back corner of the property.
As I opened up the bathroom doors, I heard a loud growl coming from the inside. It wasn’t even like an animal sound, nor was it human. It was some type of really low, slow, almost crackling growl. I ran back outside the bathroom, I had only taken two steps inside, and stood outside of the door leaning against the wall for so long that the motion detectors turned off the lights. I guess I was standing there, frozen, for longer than I had initially thought.
The growling started up again, with loud noises of doors slamming inside the bathroom. I ran down the hall and down to the first floor. I sat on the stairs like a wimp, not knowing what to do. I needed to get the bags out, at least. I could apologize for the bathroom mess later on, that really didn’t matter to me. But this was the second of the two buildings that I did by myself, and I needed the money.
I don’t know how, but I gathered up the courage to go back up to the second floor, and get into the bathroom. I sprayed the toilets with disinfectant, loosely swept up the floor, and wiped the mirrors. I went back to flush the first of the toilets, but as I did, the others flushed by themselves too. I wasn’t going to wait any longer. I quickly walked outside, went downstairs, grabbed my trash bags, and booked it into my car.. trash bags and all. I would dump everything out at home.
This happened around four months ago. I hadn’t been in this building since then, and apparently I haven’t been the only one that has experienced weird things in here. I mostly hear about chairs being moved and doors slamming shut, but never the deep growling.
That’s the building that I have to clean tonight. I’ll be by myself again. Let’s hope nothing happens.