Reddit user u/GreasyTobey asked: “What’s the creepiest thing you’ve heard someone at your job say?” The thread quickly filled with stories of problematic bosses and patrons and inexplicable, eerie encounters. Here’s what people shared:
1.“I had someone call my work and ask for me. They told me they wanted to eat my heart. I kept trying to see if they needed an appointment, and they kept repeating themselves. When I said I was going to hang up (thinking that would prompt them to say they were joking), they just very calmly said, ‘That’s unfortunate.'”
2.“One night, while I was making my rounds, an older client got up to go to the bathroom. He kept looking behind me and said, ‘Who’s that behind you?’ I turned around, and there was no one behind me. It was 2:00 or 3:00 a.m., which freaked me out because he kept staring behind me like someone was there. Maybe a week later, they had moved him to a hospital, and he passed. I still wonder what he saw.”
3.“I worked the front desk of a hotel and was relieving night audit (the person who works through the night) from their shift, and they said they got multiple calls from an unoccupied room.”
4.“I work in a library at a reference desk. We get a lot of older folks or people who, for whatever reason, can’t look up anything on the internet on their own. I answered a call from a man who wanted me to try and look up a specific woman. The only result with the info he gave was a missing person. He then gave me another woman’s name and a little more info. She was also a missing person. I apologized and said I couldn’t get him more info than what I’d found, and he just laughed and asked if he could have my number instead. Big NO from me on that one.”
5.“I work as a funeral director, and one day, there was an open-casket funeral. The family gathered, and there was one woman who seemed out of sorts. She was dressed casually and just kind of meandering about. I observed her for a while. She went to the casket and appeared to be giving the deceased some reverence. She then had to pass by me to leave, and she was clearly inebriated and said to me as she was leaving, ‘I just wanted to see a dead body.’ She gave me a drunk girl grin and staggered off. She just staggered into a funeral off the street. Who does that?”
6.“I’m an EMT. One night, I had to grab something from the ambulance on a call. It was 3:00 a.m., and I was riding the elevator up in a nursing home by myself, but this little old woman got in and rode up with me before the doors could close. She smiled wide and said, ‘You’re a good person. What you put out into the universe will come back to you. You’re going to be rewarded…with a quick death.’ Still smiling, she kept talking after that, but it was just white noise to me.”
7.“First day at a new job: ‘I could stab you right now, and nobody would find your body until the end of the day.’ He said this while stabbing his work cart with a screwdriver. He didn’t get any better over the years I worked with him. He ended up getting fired for comments like this.”
8.“They said before the company potluck: ‘You know you can kill someone by putting eye drops in their food.'”
9.“I was with a sweet gentleman who was passing, and he just wanted to be home. He was seeing and naming people he saw who had died in the hospital. His partner couldn’t believe it. He kept seeing a baby with me. Without giving details, there was a baby I was with at one point who passed. I went home and cried my eyes out.”
10.“‘Who is that man standing in the corner over there, and why is he just staring at us?’ There was no one else in the room, and the man who said this died the next day.”
11.“I was checking the voicemail at the dialysis clinic when I opened one morning because sometimes our patients would leave us a message the night before if they knew they were going to be late or miss treatment. A sweet older patient had left a message that said, ‘I’m sorry, ladies, I won’t make it tomorrow morning. I’m going to see Hazel.’ Hazel was his wife, who had passed away four years earlier. I immediately called his house, no answer. I called his son, who was listed as an emergency contact, and he told me he was just about to call us to let us know his father had passed away in the night.”
“His dad had gotten all of his paperwork with his will out of his safe, watered the house plants, put money for each of his utility payments in labeled envelopes, put on his best suit, shined his dress shoes, left a message for us at the clinic, left a message for his choir director letting him know he wouldn’t need a ride to practice in two days, then he sat down in his recliner and died. As far as I know, and according to his family, he didn’t do or take anything to expedite his exit. He just went to sleep in that recliner.”
12.“I was working on an ambulance and got a 5150 call (the police code for when someone needs mental health services). Everything was going well until he started talking to himself. I asked him about a cool demon tattoo he had. He said that the demon was the one he was talking to. ‘He wants me to kill you before we get to the hospital. But I keep telling him that you seem like a good guy and just want to help people, but he still wants me to kill you.'”
13.“This customer always flirted with me and always gave me gifts or money, but what really threw me off was when he told me about his new job where he’d be making $100 an hour overseas for a few months. He said when he got back, he’d have enough money to ‘buy me.'”
14.“I worked at a snowcone place all through college. A guy I’d never seen before came through the drive-thru, and as I was taking his payment, he said, ‘You’re wearing a hat today. You don’t usually do that,’ which was true. I went in the back and let my coworker finish serving him.”
15.“‘Make the kid in the corner shut up!’ an older lady said at 3:00 a.m. while she pointed to the empty corner. There was no kid. She passed not long after. Honestly, this kind of thing happens a lot. If you start seeing ghosts, I’m putting the crash cart in front of your door.”
16.“When I was a teenager, I worked at a local novelty ice cream store run mostly by other teenagers. There were a lot of lulls, so I’d get bored a lot because I worked alone most of the time. One day, I got a phone call on the store’s landline from a person asking to do a survey on women’s fashion. I was bored, so I did it. They asked if I liked wearing various articles of clothing, from materials to different types, and finally, it started getting weird. They asked if I liked wearing stockings and lingerie and what kind of shoes I liked wearing. They started asking me what I was wearing and what color and type of underwear I had on. I was overly polite and naive, so I didn’t realize it was a creep call until it got weird enough that I just hung up. I do not know who it was, why they called the shop, or if they were watching me.”
17.“I’m a paramedic and had a call years back to a nursing home. We arrived, and none of the staff knew who had called (not unusual). We checked the rooms and found a juvenile male sitting with an older sleeping female. He stated, quite calmly, ‘I was going to kill her, but I called you because you’re better.’ It caught us off guard in a major way. He was extremely calm, cooperative, and polite throughout the process. He had serious psychological issues, recognized the thoughts weren’t good, and knew 911 was better to ensure he got help. He wasn’t a visitor. Staff didn’t know how he got in or when, but it wasn’t a locked unit, so he likely just walked in without anyone noticing or caring.”
18.“I worked in a toy store. Once, a child said to his mother, ‘I’m so thirsty, I could drink all the blood in you.’ I’m still shaken to this day.”
19.“When I was 22, I worked in a bar and had tables to take care of, too. Before he left, this guy grabbed my arm (after having too many drinks and giving me a $100 tip) and said, ‘I would love to drink your bath water and would be honored if I choked on it.’ I worked at a culinary school a few years later, and a coworker in a different part of the school said, ‘Your eyes are so beautiful, I want to rip them out and store them in a mason jar on my desk to look at when I’m feeling down.’ Those were probably the oddest/creepiest ones from work. Lots of stories about men approaching me with creepy things outside of work, too.”
20.“I was driving up to the Upper Peninsula of Michigan through Wisconsin with a new guy at work. It was my first time working with him. It was a pretty quiet ride most of the way. There was nothing to look at besides trees and farmland. He randomly said, ‘This would be a great place to hide a body.’ I’m not sure if he even realized he said it out loud. I didn’t say a word; I just kept driving.”
21.“I worked as a patient care technician in a hospital. I was giving a bath to an aphasiac patient (totally coherent, but couldn’t speak due to a stroke some 10 years back). My badge got caught in her hair as I leaned over her. She all of a sudden said, ‘Ow.’ This woman hadn’t spoken since her stroke, so we were both very surprised. I looked at her with my mouth open in astonishment. She was just as shocked but knew the message she wanted to get out.’ I want to die,’ she said quickly, like she’d been wanting to say it for a long time. She looked directly into my eyes.’ What?’ I asked. ‘Let me die,’ she spoke again clearly. ‘What do you mean?’ I asked.”
“There was a long pause, and I saw her face shift to a disappointed frown. She wasn’t going to speak again. I told the nurse and charge nurse. Then, I got busy, and soon, my shift was over. I returned the next day, and her room was filled with flowers, ‘feel better’ balloons, and a bunch of family. Her husband was sitting on her bed, flipping through a photo album and showing the family pictures of when they were young. I could tell by her face how angry she was. She would not look at them. I realized that the husband and this family had medical power of attorney over her, so they decided whether she lived. And they wouldn’t listen to her.
I look around the room at her IV, her feeding tube, and her oxygen. They were all there to help her live because they wanted her to. She was done, but they wouldn’t let her go. And she was trapped inside her head, wanting to rest and be done with the hospital, be done with her long-suffering. She was totally coherent but unable to decide anything for herself because we couldn’t hear her. I think of that often, and it’s a nightmare for me. So scary.”
22.“While standing next to 200 gallons of highly flammable Pentane, my coworker said, ‘Ya know, I just don’t have much regard for human life.'”
23.“A lady was with me who had never encountered a deceased person. My patient passed while she was standing there in the house. She asked me if he was dead, and I said yes, he had passed on. And she asked how I knew. The lights flickered off then, and the dogs outside started barking.”
24.“I worked in a department store as a teenager for a summer to help them with inventory, and then I stayed on for a bit after. There was one employee who other co-workers said was a bit strange. I never interacted with her, but I walked by her at a clothing rack toward the end of my stay there. She was moving hangers one by one from the top of the rack to the front, repeating the word ‘murder’ after she moved each one.”
25.“When I was 16, I worked at a grocery store. It was Mother’s Day, and one customer wished me a happy Mother’s Day. I thanked him but said I was a little young for that. He replied, ‘Oh, you’re never too young.'”
26.“I worked at a cellphone retailer and had a regular customer. He would tell me about his son, the fire chief in a neighboring town. He’d go on about how his son would like to meet me and how nice and perfect I’d be for him. I politely declined and explained I lived with my boyfriend. He returned a few days later and said, ‘I must confess: I took a picture of you and showed my son. He said you’re really hot.’ I immediately made him delete the photo while I watched. WTF?”
27.“When I was a window clerk, this customer kept ‘complimenting’ me on my voice, how sexy it was, and how he wanted to eat me up. He said he was going to wait for me all day outside and kidnap me. It was terrifying because I couldn’t tell if he was joking or what, but I felt uneasy.”
28.And: “I interviewed this younger girl/woman (likely fresh out of high school) for a job at Spencer’s. I asked her to share a leadership experience of hers. She described being one of many counselors at a Christian summer camp. One night, they went into the campers’ bunks masked with guns and brought them out one by one, saying things like, ‘This is what happens when you don’t believe in God!’ She smiled through the whole thing, and I had to do everything I could to hide my absolute horror. She did not get the job. I really hope she found her way out of whatever cult she’d been a part of.”
Good grief, I’m officially disturbed and distraught. Have you ever had a creepy encounter at work? What happened? Tell us in the comments or submit anonymously using this form.
Note: Submissions have been edited for length and/or clarity.
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