Last year in August, I had a creepy night shift experience that has turned me away from ever working alone at night time.
I work for a private ambulance company as an EMT. I was in school at the time, and scheduling offered me a shift that worked with my class schedule but still allowed me to work full time. We have several types of ambulances, including a specialized mobile ICU for transporting sick children (oddly enough that has very little to do with the creepy part of the story). It’s a rare kind of shift for EMS because you work alone. The healthcare team is a registered nurse and a respiratory therapist from the nearby children’s hospital, and you’re basically there just to drive. Every time there’s a call, you go pick them up from the hospital and run the call, then drop them and the patient off at the hospital and return to the station alone. I had the night shift for this kind of ambulance, and there was only one rig operating at night.
Because we need to have two of these rigs available at all times, when one of the special rigs goes down for maintenance, they move all the specialized equipment into a regular street ambulance temporarily. When the specialized rig comes back to the station, someone has to move all that equipment back. At this same time, our bay was under construction so all the rigs were parked outside. There are two parking lots on opposite sides of the building, and the station itself is in a sort of office/warehouse cul-de-sac next to the freeway, so it’s pretty far removed from everything and is very isolated at night time.
On the night of, it was probably my second or third shift. A rig had just returned to the station and no one had switched it all back yet. Dispatch asked if I could do it. I was very new and barely knew where any of the equipment went. In one parking lot, the newly returned rig was parked, and in the opposite parking lot the fully stocked day rig was parked. I figured I would just go back and forth between the rigs and compare set ups so I could put things were they actually go. I would go into the put-together rig, make a list of what was in one cabinet, and go to the other rig and move equipment into that cabinet. I’d also lock the rig I wasn’t with incase a supervisor stopped by.
As I’m returning to the rig to move equipment, I hear something being shuffled around inside of something big and metal. There’s a dumpster in a dark corner of the parking lot, so I look over and see the silhouette of something very tall digging around in the trashcan standing on two legs with long arms. My stomach drops and I hold my breath. It’s tall enough to just bend over and touch the bottom of the dumpster. Fight or flight finally kicks in and I just slowly back away towards the door never taking my eyes off of it. I badge myself in, close all the blinds, and call dispatch. There’s cameras on the sides of the buildings that they have access too, so I ask them to look at the cameras to see if anything is out there. After a few minutes, they tell me they don’t see anything. I told them someone else is going to have to finish changing the rig because like hell am I going back outside. They said to call if anything else happens.
Didn’t sleep for shit that night, and for the rest of the time I was on that shift, I was very hesitant to step back outside. Luckily, most nights there was a street shift on, I was just unlucky enough that one day that they had called in. May have just been a homeless person and my night brain was playing tricks on me or something, but it was the most unsettling experience for me. Gotta say I was glad when they finished the bay and I could do that kind of thing inside locked doors again.