Chilling Night Shift Encounters
There’s nothing like working the night shift. For some reason, when the sun goes down, all sorts of weird and scary happenings come up. From strange noises and sightings to intense and brutal encounters, these workers have seen it all.
Keep reading for some chilling tales of scary experiences people who worked the night shift had that will make anyone happy to see the light of day.
1. Dodging The Dog
There is a legend in trucking of "seeing the dog". It is like seeing a black cat or having one cross in front of you, and it is a sign of bad luck in the trucking industry. Most of the time, the saying goes, "If you see the black dog, you’re about to die. Get off the road ASAP"! I didn’t believe it—until it happened to me.
One day, I was out driving somewhere in the desert of Arizona on I-10. It was around 3 or 4 AM. I had been driving for around eight hours and had already taken my 30-minute break around four hours before.
While I was driving, no one was around, and I hadn't seen a car or truck in more than 20 miles. Then, I saw what looked like a shadow figure off in the right-hand emergency lane. I shook it off, thinking it was just my eyes playing tricks on me.
So I lit up a smoke, opened the window to let the cool air in, and sat up straight in my chair to try and focus. I kept thinking to myself, "Only two or three more hours and I'm done for the day and can get some sleep".
About five to ten minutes later, I saw the same figure shaped like a wolf with an arched-up back. It was all black without any eyes, teeth, or anything.
I turned on my bright lights—which was like lighting up a football field—and the figure was gone. I sat there thinking, “What on earth”? I shook my head and pat myself on the cheeks to wake myself up. I kept on driving—but my nightmare wasn’t over yet.
About 30 minutes later, the same thing happened, except the figure was lurching towards the middle of the lane. I was the only one on the road. No one was behind me or in front, and no one had passed me from the other side in about 15 minutes.
As the figure lurched towards the middle, I saw what looked like yellow eyes looking straight at me.
I hit the brakes hard without locking them up and swerved a little. I was sitting there screaming and cursing. I almost went off the side of the road and put that 78,000-pound truck and trailer in the ditch.
I pulled over on the side of the highway. I popped my brakes, stood up inside the truck, and took a few deep breaths, trying to rationalize what I just saw. Then I remembered the folklore about "seeing the dog". I said, “
I'm going to bed at the next rest stop". I rolled up to the next rest area about 25 miles down the road and called it quits for the night. To say it scared me is an understatement. I never saw that figure again.
2. How ‘Bout Them Apples?
I was working day shift on a drilling rig in the middle of nowhere. It was hours away from the closest small town, out in the bush. The rig manager came to me and told me I had to switch to nights on "boiler watch"
to supervise the new guy and make sure all the assigned tasks were completed. He failed to complete his to-do list the night before, so now I was on nights.
I worked with this kid, and he seemed good. I thought he had a solid work ethic, so I couldn’t understand why he failed the previous night. We completed all the work inside, and then it was time to get a few things done outside. I told him, "
Let's get after oil changing that loader". He said that he couldn't work outside in the dark. I laughed and told him we were going to do that oil change.
He was scared, showing real fear, so I asked him why. He told me that he had done everything asked of him inside and went to start work outside on the buildings on the lease. He got hungry, so he grabbed his lunch.
He left an apple on the truck's hood and walked away for a few minutes. When he came back, the apple was still on the hood of the truck, but there was now a bite out of it.
He looked on the ground, and human shoeprints were leading out of the trees, to the truck, and back into the trees.
Because we were in the middle of nowhere, there was no way someone should be out there in the bush in that temperature at that time of night. I start thinking.
That meant somebody was watching him from the darkness of the trees and took the time to mess with him. This person was either the funniest guy alive or a super strange bushman.
Looking at where we were, the chances of him being the funniest guy ever were slim. So now we had a strange man in the bush watching us. As a 6'4” tall 260lb rig hand, I was weirded right out by this story.
It sent a shiver up my spine when I realized how that must have gone down. We went out, and the footprints were still there. We changed the oil, but we both had pipe wrenches in case we had a visitor. It still creeps me out to this day.
3. With A Wave Of A Hand
I used to work in a large department store. Every year before the Thanksgiving/Black Friday sales, we would go in on Wednesday afternoon and work until midnight to prepare the store.
The main lights would all go off after the store's regular closing hours, leaving us working by just a few dim bulbs dotted throughout the store, which made for a lot of spooky dark corners.
One year we had a skeleton crew, just three or four other people and me to do the whole store, so we split up. I was out on the floor, our manager was in her office, and my other coworkers were either in the back or in their designated areas.
At some point, I looked up and across the floor to the opposite side of my area.
The store was mostly one big open space, and I could easily see over the tops of all the shelves and clothing racks. As I was looking across the space, I saw an arm reach up over one of the racks and wave.
It was a creepy sight because whoever it was would have had to crouch behind one of the racks to avoid being seen and reach their arm up over the top.
I could see so much of their arm—all the way to the shoulder—so I don't know how anyone could have managed that. I waited to see if it was one of my co-workers, but I didn't see anyone come out of that section.
I knew none of my co-workers should have been in my area, and we all certainly had better things to do than hide behind racks waving at each other.
I called a co-worker and asked her to go with me to that area, but we didn't find anyone. I chalked it up to being tired and my eyes playing tricks on me in the dimly lit store, but it was seriously creepy.
4. Things Did Not Compute
I was working in a hospital late at night building a new cabinet for IT. I was on a deserted ward; all the patients were three floors below, and the only access to the ward area was via a smartcard RFID onto a door fob INSIDE the doors.
So, only people inside the ward could let anybody in. The ward layout was completely open without any beds in it, and the only cupboard was the one I was in, with the door propped open with a fire extinguisher.
I was working on installing the UPS into the rack, and the door to the cupboard shut. I thought, "I must have kicked the fire extinguisher or something". I put the UPS down, opened the door, and the fire extinguisher was gone.
I looked around, and the area was deserted. There was no noise, and I didn't hear anything. The fire extinguisher had just disappeared into the ether.
I called security because I was potentially alone with someone who had just lifted a fire extinguisher and might want to off me with it. I asked them to check the cams. What they saw was chilling. Sure enough, some blurry object—according to them—swooped and picked up the fire extinguisher and ran off to the left. There were only two doors in and out of the ward, and you needed a smartcard to get in and out.
Mine was still on my person, so whoever—or whatever—it was must have had one or some kind of device to spoof the RFID chip reader.
I had security run the access control logs, and sure enough, an entry in the list corresponds with roughly the time the fire extinguisher disappeared. I never got an answer about what happened before leaving to work elsewhere.
