Is there more paranormal activity at night or is it simply that with buildings devoid of workers, lights turned down, and machinery turned off, apparitions and voices, movement, and footsteps can be perceived that might have been there all day without notice. The first line of witnesses for the paranormal on a nightly basis are people who live in haunted houses and those who walk the grounds at night looking to the night sky when others are asleep. Security guards witness a lot of weirdness. Today, I'm going to share just some of it in this post -
Here's a few videos to start -
The video above makes no sense to me. So, a light showed that this guard could not see? It looks pretty obvious there is a cart next to the "ghost" and my guess is cleaning crew. Who is the person who took this video? Don't have a clue. I don't consider this one valid in considering evidence, but a critical eye is important.
In 1984 at the Indian Point Nuclear Reactor Complex on the Hudson River in New York had an unusual event. A police officer working as a security guard and was on an outside routine round near one of the reactors when he looked to the sky.
(LINK) “I saw these lights coming at me. They were white with a yellow hue. I watched them for about ten minutes, and, at that time I estimated they were about a quarter of a mile from me. They were approaching form the northeast, going southwest, coming directly toward me.
A few years earlier, on New Year's Eve 1982, the same area saw a UFO that had lights in a triangular pattern on a large fuselage that went overhead (LINK).
Security guards walking on grounds routinely at night are the first ones likely to see UFOs when citizens are fast asleep in bed.
A security guard contacted me several years ago. A company bought an old school with all its buildings and acreage, but locals kept sneaking into it, so they put fencing around it and hired him to basically hang out and walk the buildings routinely at night while renovations were just beginning.
He said it was an easy gig, mild weather, kind of boring, but he managed to work in his head on ideas for a book he was trying to write. He came before sunset, left after dawn. All he was required to do was periodically inspect the buildings at random times so no one could get used to his patterns.
One night, about a week into the gig, he went to inspect the gymnasium building and locker room areas. The building was about 50 years old, so it had seen some better times. Some of the windows had been broken out by curious lookie loo's just before the purchase of the site, and a few kids had tagged the walls with spray paint scribble. But, all in all, he liked the building because on warm nights is stayed rather cool.
Standing in the center of the basketball court, he flashed his light around the space and made out the team murals on the walls above the bleachers and then the light crossed over something black. Something black and small. Something black, small and human-shaped.
He startled and prepared himself to give chase to some hoodlum, when the shadow darted behind a sign on the wall. Behind the sign? His heart pounded as he raced up the bleachers to pry the fabric sign from the wall and peer behind with the flashlight as if he expected to find some child back there, but it was obvious nothing was able to go behind the sign, as it was tacked down on the top and bottom. The most he could do was pull it a few inches from the wall.
He flashed the light around the bleachers and listened to the silence. Except for his heavy breathing, there were no footfalls or creaking doors, no sounds of anyone but him.
He finished his rounds in the building, looking around a bit more closely than usual, behind doors, in closets, bathroom stalls....
For another few weeks, he got into a real rhythm, even brought his writing tablet to scribble notes about that book he was determined to complete. He made an office for himself in one of the classrooms and every hour or so he'd get up and walk the site. He was getting himself in better shape, having some quiet time, and getting his writing done. It seemed like the dream situation.
Little things were distracting him more and more each night, though. He would hear what sounded like voices in the corridor, walk through oddly cold spots on warm nights when the buildings would still be warm from the daytime. A few times, he thought he heard a locker close in the gymnasium or footfalls on the bleachers, but there was no one to be seen.
One night, after the crew had been there all day removing the bleachers and tearing everything down in the gym, the guard did his rounds in there, shocked by how much his footfalls echoed on the wood floor with nothing to absorb the sounds. He walked purposefully through the room that now seemed twice its previous size. His flashlight bounced off the walls. The hoops were gone, the signs, the seats, even the lighting fixtures.
Strangely, even though the building was completely empty, except for him, the guard felt like he was being watched.
"It's just the stupid empty space around me." He explained to himself.
When he lit the path toward the door to the locker rooms, a dark small figure darted from left to right in the flashlight's beam. He tracked it with a trembling hand, but there was nothing to the right, not anywhere at all. And the figure was dark. Dark and small. Dark, small and human shaped.
He raced into the locker room, thinking maybe he had registered its movement wrong. Damn, it was short! It was probably the height of a third grader! The guard stopped in the doorway, shining his light to the right and left. The lockers had all been removed, lights, mirrors, sinks, toilets, everything had been removed.
"Hey! This is private property. You will be prosecuted." He yelled out, his voice ricocheting off the hard surfaces. The flashlight revealed no one in the room, but the crew had removed the windows, leaving the dark night outside to offer an easy exit.
The gymnasium became the guard's nemesis. He dreaded trudging through the big vaulted building and wondering if he would run into the "darter" again. He made a routine of not walking into the center of the room, but instead hugging the wall so he had his side covered and one less area to watch. He would shine the flashlight over the cavernous void and enter the locker room area, the whole time ruminating about the fact that deep down inside he knew there were no trespassers, at least not living ones.
A few months into the work situation, the guard decided to talk to his buddy who once attended the school. He asked him about the history of the place and then casually tried to make it sound like, as a caretaker, he was curious about what era the school had seen.
His friend told him the basics he already knew, when it was built, a few notables who attended the school over the years, but then the conversation turned dark.
"I don't know how you walk that place at night. I used to play basketball and we'd have practice at night, leave the place at maybe 10 or 11, turning out the lights." His friend shook his head.
"And?" The guard gulped.
"Well, seemed like a lot of the guys were seeing some kind ghost or something. A little dark thing that raced around real fast. You could see it out of the corner of your eye, and it'd be gone."
The guard's palms sweated. He felt relief it wasn't just him imagining it, but then a sense of dread that there was something freaky going on.
"D-did you ever find out what it was?"
His friend shrugged. "One of the guys on the team said it was because the land was atop of Native ground. But, another kid thought it was a student who killed himself in the gymnasium. He hung himself from the side of the bleachers. A freshman. I think it was back in the 70s they said."
"Do you know the kid's name?"
"Nope. But, I guess you could find out. Why would you want to know? They're going to tear the place down, aren't they?" Then, as if his friend recalled what his buddy did for a living he excitedly asked, "did you see something? What?"
The guard shook his head. "I don't know. I use a damned flashlight. It's easy to miss things or think you see things."
The guard went back to work a bit more focused and determined to act like an adult and remember that whatever it was, it was more scared of him than he was of it.
The job didn't last much longer for him. They were getting ready to close it and lock it up as they renovated the gymnasium, but in the months before that, he ran into the darter a few more times, heard a locker slam, even though the lockers weren't there anymore and a few times, heard feet pounding up a few steps of the bleachers that were nonexistent.
When he left the job and went on to the next guarding gig, he decided to change the thrust of his book to writing about his experiences with the night.
I lost touch with the guard, but I often wonder what else he saw at future sites. This story that he let me take note of was a pretty common one experienced by security guards at night.
Expect a post coming up about hauntings in office buildings.
