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Is Your Office Haunted?
WormholeFiend writes "You know Halloween is around the corner when websites like Forbes.com releases a story wondering about the supernatural. From the article: 'Maybe the spirits have decided that spooky mansions and creepy battlefields are passé. Maybe they want to cash in on the glamour of corporate life. Maybe they just wanted the sushi.'" Anyone out there have any encounters with a spiritual Milton?
With this crazy looking thing: Jack-o-lantern computer
It has a built in motherboard, case fans, dvd burner, internet, wireless keyboard and mouse, the works. Pretty powerful for just being a pumpkin IMO... They even posted the instructions on how to build your own if you are so inclined Heh..
Having worked for many years in London, I have been in more than one haunted office. The most recent was an international bank that built their plush new London offices over what turned out to be an important Roman site (discovered when they dug to create the foundations). Lots of strange things happened in the basement server rooms, ops reporting that they had seen figures even though they were there alone during the night, peoples voices and such like.
$1000 is a pittance compared to the fame you'll achieve for even being connected to scientific proof of ghosts. Obviously people would put up $1000, and for more, if only to make much more money off the book deal and talk show appearances. I'm just James Randi would be honestly happy for the JREF to part with their million to be a part of something so momentous and significant to our understanding of the world.
English is easier said than done.
This doesn't have much to do with the truly paranormal, but it does have to do with office Halloween tricks that go severely wrong.
At a firm I once worked at we had a jokestress named Maria. She was pretty good natured, and every Halloween she's pull some sort of a prank. Usually they were quite benign, such as a plastic skull in the coffee container, or some such.
However, one Halloween she decided to go a bit further than usual. She thought it would be entertaining to dress the photocopier up as a Hawaiian skeleton (I'm not sure why). So she bought much white paper, and some flower necklaces, and stuff like that. She dressed the photocopier up, and some people were amused by it.
Just before lunch a slight problem arose. Some of the flowers had gotten sucked into the machine through the paper intake. Apparently some of the flowers jammed something inside, and things started t really go wrong.
Jim, who was one of the systems administrators able to fix copier problems, thought he could get it unjammed. So he opened the side panel of the machine to work on it, but apparently forgot to turn the power off. The paper feed mechanism somehow caught onto his tie, and started pulling him in.
Luckily somebody was around kick out the power cord, but not after the machine was even more broken, and the toner tank ruptured. Jim was covered in that awful powder, and he ended up tracking it all over the office on his way out. Maria was swiftly dismissed.
Cyric Zndovzny at your service.
I'm a little bit surprised that no one has mentioned Amazon.com yet -- but my understanding is that their headquarters is haunted by a number of spectres. For those who are unfamiliar with the building it's a remodeled hospital that was built back in the '30s. The most common 'sighting' sounds a lot like a "who farted" kind of joke. One of the elevators, apparently, will fill with an unbearable stench -- some riders have been known to nearly vomit when they smell it -- while others are unable to smell it at all. Before amazon moved in the building's owners had recieved so many complaints about the smell in this elevator that they hired teams of investigators to find the source of the contamination, tracing back the ventilation shafts, and so on.... No cause has been found and the reports continue.
I want a new world. I think this one is broken.
..in a train station that was a waypoint for moving the dead in the American Civil War, as well as being the site of a new bride's suicide. At night. Graveyard shift. Still creeps me out.
Our office is in a old train station / depot..
I have been working the night shift on and off for the past four years here and most of the time it just seems like a empty building.. But every once in a while you can look out the window of the computer room in to the hallway and see a shadow pass and no one here out there or even in the building..
I have walked down the hallway and had cold chills run up my back. The wost spot is when your in the bathroom and you can here doors out in the hallway open in shut and no one is here except for me and the other operator that has to stay in the computer room. (manned 24/7)
The worst account I can remember is from a exworker named Sheneika, she left the computer room and went to the bathroom,, about 3 minuets later she came running in to the computer room cussing the other worker for banging the hell out the the bathroom door.. Ted said he didnt do it ad didnt leave the room.
So they start checking the sercurity cameras. ( I work in a lottery office)
So they look at the cameras and watch Sheneika walk down to the bathroom and about 3 minuets later she comes tearing out of the bathroom running full steam back in to the computer room.. Ted never heard any noise but she said it was like some one kicking in the door.
This place will give you the creeps.
This Sig for rent.
The building where I work is located on a site that is known as Gallows Hill. Hangings used to take place there many, many years ago. There have been reports from cleaners stating that whilst cleaning the building at night when the offices are mainly empty; a cleaner has had her feather duster removed form her hand by an unseen force and she has been repeatedly beaten round the face with it. Another report was from a cleaner who whilst cleaning the toilets was confronted by a man with a bloodied face - she ran screaming from the wash room (apparently) and when her colleagues investigated there was nobody there. Neither of the cleaners returned, they both quit. The office is now a complete mess.
I've had a couple of 'spooky' occurances at my previous job. I was often the last one to leave, so it was up to me to turn out all the lights and lock up. There was a spot in the hallway where if I came around the corner at the right speed, I'd see the outline of a human figure for a brief moment. The weird thing was, I could almost recognize the form. Somehow I recognized it as a coworker that had left the company long before that! I hadn't been in touch with him for over a year. Was he coming back to tell me something? Well, at least he was smiling, just as I always remembered him.
... same thing, doing my rounds, turning out the lights. Then I noticed the building across the street. There was a figure in the window that was standing perfectly still. I could barely see it, but I could definitely see its eyes. It freaked me out. This was in downtown Portland. This is an area of town full of 'historic' buildings, including the one I was working in. Was some spectre looming around? Well, it was easy to believe that considering it was night time and nobody else was about. Very creepy.
Another night
Welp, now for the anti-climactic bit. Niether were ghosts. The outline of a figure I saw? Trick of the eye. That corner had some boxes and loose stuff piled up. Looking straight on at the pile, it didn't look anything remotely like my coworker. I think what happened was a trick of my peripheral vision. As most of you know, the outer areas of human eyes are keen on detecting motion more than they are with recognizing images. Can't claim to be an expert on the topic, but I think the human brain is constantly looking to recongize patterns, and when it finds one that seems to be relevent, it fills in the blanks. Hence, I saw my coworker. If anybody's curious, he's alive and well.
I suppose I could go into a little more detail about my theory here. There's a technique called 'EVP'. It's used to record the voices of ghosts. If you ever get bored one night, do a search for EVP and find some samples. It isn't definitive proof of the existance of ghosts, but at the very least it's a fun way to kill an evening. (usually there are stories attached to these sounds...) I visited a site once that had a number of EVP samples. Unfortunately, ghost speech isn't terribly easy to make out. Though it does sound human, it's barely more than garbled garbage. What they did was they presented a sound and said "first you listen to it and then try to work out what it's saying, then click on this link to see suggestions of what people think they've heard." The reason they do this is to prevent you from being 'suggested' into believing what you're hearing. After listening to a bit, I worked out why. The sound file downloaded and looped over and over again. I couldn't make it out. Then I read the first suggestion. Suddenly, I was hearing it! Neat! Then I read the second suggestion. And.. wait.. now I'm hearing that one. They were two very different sentences. As a matter of fact, I thought I could hear a different inflection in the words used by the 'ghost' that time around! It was the same sound looping over and over again, but now it was sounding different. Okay, I took the scenic route to this point, but I think what I was hearing was not the sound directly, but my perception of the sound. My brain thought it heard a particular sentence, so that's exactly what made it into my conscience mind. I think the sight of my coworker was a similar phenomenon.
And the figure across the street? Somebody with an odd sense of humor. It's a cardboard cutout. For whatever reason, they put it up against the window on the 3rd story of the building. The light was dim enough that it was very tough to make out, but the next day I was able to see it quite clearly. I mentioned seeing his eyes. It felt like they were following me almost. Again, trick of the eye.
I don't know what I think about ghosts. I can't say I firmly believe they exist, I can't say they don'
"Derp de derp."
In the list of things that qualify as paranormal, ones of them is: "...Pyramid Power. Reflexology. Acupuncture". How is acupuncture paranormal and/or why does it needs to be proven? I was under the impression that it's been considered a valid medical practice already.
A woman I know used to do a lot of security jobs. When she was working for the City of Portland there were lots of rumors that the courthouse was haunted. The upper floors were spooky at night, and nobody particularly liked working the late shift there. One night one of their security guards was making his rounds when he saw someone in a sort of hooded robe standing at the far end of a hallway, apparently messing with a door as if trying to unlock it. The guard said something to challenge the person, when the figure suddenly rushed down the hall at him as if flying. He braced himself to get tackled, but whatever it was either went by him or through him, and when he turned to give chase there was nobody there. No sounds of fleeing footsteps, no doors opening and closing, nothing.
The other thing is that this guy was a real veteran security guard who had worked there for many years, very level-headed and dependable. But that night he left the building and went home without even clocking out, then called in to say that he was quitting and never going back. He wouldn't even report to the building during the daytime to turn in his keys and other stuff. His supervisor had to go to his house and pick them up.
Many of the buildings at Hickam AFB in Honolulu still have the spalling from the attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941. The PACAF NOSC is (was) in one of these buildings. I was told while I was there that in the room the NOSC occupied 6 men lost their lives during the attack. Allegedly there were sightings after hours of these men.
Even if it isn't spooky it's certainly both sobering and historic.
-- Cerebus
My former office was an old Victorian house on a bluff overlooking the waterfront. It was originally built by the mayor of my town, and for twenty years it was the best restaurant in town. The woman who owned my company bought the building, and she had me oversee the extensive renovations to make it into an office. Great work if you can get it. I loved this building. I even got to pick out my own office (naturally, I got a water view - not bad for being the IT geek).
But everyone in town "knew" the house was haunted. I talked to several people who used to work there when it was a restaurant, and one of my friends actually lived in the upstairs part for several months. He told me that one night, he heard a loud crash from the kitchen area downstairs. He started to go down the stairs to investigate, and heard a series of identical smashing noises. When he got to the kitchen, a box of fluorescent bulbs had been opened and smashed all over the place. He said he sometimes heard strange noises and often felt uncomfortable there.
A former waitress told me that several times, she would set down a tray of dishes in one place, turn around, and then when she turned back it would be moved. The former owners told me all kinds of similar ghost stories. Every Halloween the local paper mentions the building as being the most haunted place in town.
One day, a van full of soldiers on leave from a nearby base pulled up. Apparently, they'd seen my office on some TV show about haunted houses, and had come to check it out. I gave 'em the full tour. One woman, as soon as she set foot upstairs, turned around and went outside to wait in the van. Freaked her out, I guess.
Now, geek that I am, I was always the last person to leave the building at night. And very often, I stayed until the wee hours, all alone in the building. And not a damn thing ever happened. No weird sounds, no smashing bulbs, absolutely nothing.
Although I had to admit... I didn't mind going into the scary old basement when I was alone at night, but going upstairs at night used to freak me out something fierce. Dunno why, it was beautiful and well-lit, but damn, it was just creepy. Daytime wasn't so bad, but at night - forget it.
One night, someone forgot to close a back door properly, and the alarm went off late at night. I showed up to deal with the cops. Since a door was open, they insisted on checking out the building. The cop knew the reputation of the building and was a little spooked himself. When we got upstairs he really got nervous - he told me that he just didn't like it up there. He couldn't believe that I'd work in such a spooky place late at night by myself. I'm like, you're a COP. Which of our jobs is more dangerous?
I like to think that we did such a good job restoring the house that the ghosts took off. Or maybe I scared the ghosts off. Who knows. I'm still a little disappointed, though, that nothing ever happened while I was there. I figured if there were strange things going on all the time, I'd set up a bunch of webcams and such... but nope.
Oh yeah, later, I found out that one of the previous owners had passed away in one of the upstairs bedrooms. On the other hand, the first owner died when he fell down the basement steps, and the basement, aside from just being a spooky old basement and crawling with spiders as big as your hand, wasn't nearly as ooky as the upstairs. So go figure.
Radio waves do exist, and they existed then.
:p
Indeed they did. So did quantum mechanics and x-rays. But no one had a clue that they existed.
The lack of understanding has NOTHING to do with the cause and effect.
And the lack of observable (at the time) effect, for example with x-rays, has nothing to do with the fact that they still existed, whether we knew about them or not. Similar to paranormal events. To think that we have anything more than the feeblest of grasps on the nature of reality at this time is the height of arrogance. We didn't know much back then, and we sure don't know much now. You are simply making my argument stronger.
If for example ESP existed, then it would be demonstrable regardless of our understanding of it.
Sigh. Could a person 200 years ago, given the knowledge and skills they had at the time, have demonstrated quantum theory? No. Can we demonstrate esp powers with what we have now? No. Might we in future? Maybe. Getting it?
You know, the most interesting thing to come out of this discussion for me at least, has been the amount of responses and modding and the type of modding. This tells me that the slashdot crowd is TERRIFIED of this topic, for reasons I have yet to fathom. As for you, you are producing circular arguments that have no bearing on what I say, and I see no likelihood that your mind will ever be changed, which tells me a good deal about you, also. Still, you did hook a good deal of karma out of it, although I think the well has run dry, but you'll be up to a base 2 in no time.
What he can't kill, he has sex on. Trent.
When I was attending Junior High a long time ago, our social science teacher would tell us stories about how the school was haunted by a ghost that had followed him from a previous job. He went on to say how the ghost was very mischevious and that he would make doors fly open and objects fly. We all laughed and thought his stories were amusing, but we never thought they were real.
Until one day... during my science class, a vial which was located on an upper shelf inexplicably *levitated* itself to the middle of the classroom in such slow motion that everyone's attention was immediately diverted to this strange phenomenon. Without warning, the vial then flung itself into the chalkboard at the front of the classroom at an extremely high speed, shattering itself.
That poor science teacher never came back after that. Although I don't believe in ghosts at all, even to this day, I can't explain how in the world something like that could happen, or how something like that could be engineered.
This strange light was only know about by a few hunters in the area until around my high-school years. Then a small group of my friends and I found out and would visit the place a few times each year. The word spread and it became a bit of an attraction and even became part of an initiation ceremony for a fraternity at a nearby college. Several of our parents even saw it. This was all in the 90's. Since then the area has been logged and the road has been blocked off.
I personally saw the light several times. And I know about 2-dozen more that have seen it...kids, youths, adults, professionals, a youth pastor, etc. I am a mechanical engineer so I have studied physics and thermodynamics and have a pretty good grasp on the physical phenomena that might have caused this. I have also studies various "swamp light" phenomena. But I cannot find a plausible explanation for what I saw. I'm not saying that the light was supernatural but I am saying that it is very difficult to explain. For example, I have seen:
Seeing the light was one of the coolest experiences of my life. I hate that the area was destroyed by logging. Even on nights when we didn't see the light we could still scare the crap out of each other just because of the surroundings.
Simple people talk of people, better people talk of events, great people talk of ideas.
This didn't happen in my day job office, but a "place of work" of another kind. My wife was chair of a local charity, which is a toy library - it lends toys instead of books. They had wangled a total refurb of their premises from a local firm, who do a project for charity each year. This year, it was our turn, and all we had to do was to clear out all the toys and old shelves to give these guys space to build and paint.
The library has three interconnecting rooms in a shared-use building, all charities. The old shelves were metal, and I went down one night to dismantle them. Just before I left, my wife told me that the place used to be a funeral parlour. Sure enough, one room had metal-lined walls, and there were two enormous metal-lined doors lying in a back corridor.
It was November, the raid was dripping all around, and the heating system was making very strange noises. Very spooky. The shelves were held together by square bolts, so I had to use an adjustable spanner. I soon got into the groove, and had an efficient system for dismantling the shelves. I'd work with the shelves upside down, and the metal shelves would form a tray that I'd keep my tools in.
So, it's night, spooky noises, dull lighting, no music, and my thoughts turn to the fact this used to be a funeral parlour. Then, I get a big suprise: the spanner, which was set to the correct size for the square nuts, was fully open - about 25 mm instead of 10.
Lots of silly thoughts went through my mind, especially curious ghosts examining my tools. I checked where my car keys were, mentally planned my exit route, and, a little spooked, I carried on working.
All was fine for about five minutes, until the spanner didn't fit again - and this time, it was fully closed! I was so, so close to legging it, but I told myself that there was no such thing as ghosts, that any tortured spirits would haunt their homes and not the funeral parlour they lay for a few days. So, I stuck it out, although I was very "observant" from then on.
An accident as I packed up provided an explanation. I stepped over a toolbox, and landed on the adjustable spanner. It slid forward and the little adjusting wheel moved - closing the spanner jaws. When I'd been working on the shelves, sometimes my spanner would slide along the shelf, and it must have closed on one occassion, and opened on the other one.
I'm so glad that I didn't run out of there in fear, especially after the spanner moved for the second time. I kept telling myself that there is always a logical explanation for all events, and it turned out that there was!
Note to ACs: I won't mod you up, even if you are being funny or insightful. So take a chance! It's not real life!
When you say "There's no such thing as the supernatural," on what basis do you make that statment?
How can you prove that they don't exist?
Are you saying that non-material things are non-material, or that the non-material does not exist?
What about duty, honor, love? Do they exist? Are they natural?
Slashdot is a poor place to make an absolute negative assertion.
Respectfully,
Anomaly
But Herr Heisenberg, how does the electron know when I'm looking?