I’ll start by saying that I’m documenting this in case I get fired, I’m still technically in my probation period at work so I don’t know if bringing this before my superiors will lose me my job, but I need evidence out there in case I need to bring this to anyone else.
I’m a receptionist for private student accomodation. It’s not the most exciting job in the world, mostly dealing with entitled university kids who think money can buy everything and everyone. On top of that, there’s also the mocking from said entitled young adults who don’t think a man should be a receptionist, a pretty frequent occurance for me, especially since my direct superior is a woman younger than me.
Safe to say, I’m not exactly fond of the students I have to help at work. Thankfully, I can usually hide behind my desk Monday to Friday, but the weekends is where I take the brunt of the comments.
I work both days on the weekends, mostly because my supervisor is a young mum of two, and also because I don’t exactly have a social life or a partner waiting for me at home. So I volunteered, giving my supervisor Cammie some time to spend with her young boys.
It’s long hours, a lot to deal with, and can be incredibly boring. But the worst part of my weekends is the hourly task I’m set. You’d think checking the boiler temperatures once an hour would be easy right? I just go into the Plant Room, check the water heaters and buffer vessels temps, and get out right?
Wrong.
The first weekend I worked, roughly 4 weeks ago now, my manager came back in for 8 AM, stating he has to walk me through the checks. It’s not my first student accom job, and I’ve checked previous Plant Rooms before, so I thought this was unusual. But hey! Some places are really particular about how they do things, and how certain emploees enter dangerous spaces like these, so doing a first walkthrough with a manager wasn’t too bad, and he’d volunteered to come in on his day off anyway so I wasn’t too freaked.
My manager, David, showed me which key to grab to unlock the Plant Room, and took me out into our courtyard. The courtyard is big, space enough for benches and ping pong tables, and a couple of yards of grass and flowers. On one side, you have the entrance to the Reception space, and on the opposite side sits to Plant Room, it’s double doors sat right next to those of the Bin Store.
The bin store stinks, even with the doors shut. It’s 400 odd student’s waste and rubbish, which half the time they can’t even be bothered to throw into the industrial size rubbish bins, so there’s rotted food and spilt milk puddles over the floor. Needless to say, the close proximity to the Plant Room meant I wasn’t too suprised to find that room also stank like landfill.
Unlocking the Plant Room door, there’s a small concrete patio, for lack of a better description. It’s a small sunken area of concrete, barely big enough to walk 10 steps in from side to side, and the floor is covered in that caution tape, yellow and black stripes to warn of the large step up into the main Plant Room.
One thing I will mention, is the Plant Room isn’t loud, per se. It has a quiet hum of boilers and water tanks, but nothing that would stop you from hearing if anyone else was walking about. The concrete floor echoes even with the lightest of footsteps, and the actual machinery takes up so little space in the large concrete room, that it makes you wonder why it was built so big.
David took me into the little patio area, and handed me the clipboard hanging from the wall. I was to take the temperatures from all three buffer vessels, and all three water heaters.
It’s a five minute job at most, the machines are all grouped together closely and you can practically see the thermometers from one spot in the middle so it doesn’t take long at all. But before I could head in up through the large step, David put a hand to my chest and stopped me.
He told me I had to follow a set of rules, cautionary procedures for an environment like this.
Always turn the light on before heading into the main Plant Room (that one felt almost patronising, as how else would I be able to see the thermometers in a pitch black Plant Room?)
Be in and out of the Main Plant Room in less than 8 minutes (weird, but he could be worried about the door being unlocked for too long and a curious student just wandering in)
If you hear any noise that sounds like someone else is in the room with you, but the lights are still on, complete temperature checks in the next minute and leave (this was where I was starting to get a little freaked out)
If the lights turn off at any point whilst you are in the Main Plant Room, do not turn on your phone or emit any light, and try to leave as quietly as possible. (definitely freaking out now)
If the floor in the Main Plant Room is red or brown, do not enter for that hour.
You will always be safe in the Patio.
Now, I was getting spooked by these rules, even though I was trying to rationalise them in my head. The Main Plant Room has an exit that leads onto the main street, so perhaps there has been some issues with homeless people getting in through the secure maglocked doors?
David explained that whilst it’s best to check the Plant Room once an hour, it wasn’t necessary to check so strictly, and that checking was mostly to ensure we hadn’t lost heat in the building. He said the students would make it known if heating had gone down, and also pointed out the big laminated sign by the clipboard hanger that had all the rules clearly posted, in case I ever needed a harsh reminder. The lamination looked new, but the sign itself seemed to be old, the paper yellowed and the text slightly faded.
That first time in the Plant Room, nothing happened. Nothing happened for that entire weekend. No scary power outages, no noises, nothing.
It was the second weekend when it all started.
I work 6AM to 6PM weekends, a long 12 hour shift, meaning I’d be checking the plant room 10 ish times a shift. Mostly because I wouldn’t check during my hour break, and also because it was easy to forget to check on the hour every hour. You can get caught up doing other things, and David had made a point of telling me that I only needed to check as often as I could, not exactly on the hour.
But that second weekend, I’d not slept much the night before my shift, and I completely forgot to check until roughly 9:30 AM. I grabbed the key, headed into the courtyard, unlocked the door, and for safe measure- checked over the rules once again.
Stepping into the Main Plant Room, I headed straight for Water Heater 1, then check 2 and 3 before doing a 180 to check the Buffer Vessels. That was when the noises started. It sounded like faint tapping, like someone was clinking their nails against a pipe somewhere in the back of the room.
I remember whipping around like crazy, trying to check behind pipes and see further into the darker areas of the large room, anxiety kicking in that I wasn’t alone in the room. That was when the rational part of my brain kicked in, screaming at me louder than the anxious half that I only had a minute left to check the Buffer Vessels. I don’t think I even wrote the numbers down, just glanced sparingly at the small dials and temperature gauges and then hauled my arse back to that patio.
As soon as I pushed the double doors open, a rancid, rotting meat scent wafted from somewhere. At the time, I assumed it was because some student had left the bin store doors wide open, so I shut them after locking the Plant Room doors.
I was terrified to go back in another hour. But again, that rational part of my brain screamed that it was just anxiety, I was blowing things out of proportion, and that I was just nervous being alone in such a scary looking room.
It probably didn’t help that I’d been watching those scary real life horror videos about people getting stuck in machinery and such, so I told myself I was worked up over nothing.
I was wrong.
I headed back in after an hour and a half had passed, enough time to calm myself down with a nice cup of tea and my brain sorting through student issues. Unlocked the door, flipped on the lights, steppped into the patio, and stopped dead in my tracks.
The floor of the Main Plant Room was red. Bright crimson, and shiny. The usually matte grey concrete floor was glistening under the fluorescent lights, and I could smell iron in the air. I knew immediately that it was blood, fresh blood even. How it got there and why was not my priority, but getting the hell out of the Plant Room was.
Not even a mug of earl grey could calm me down after that, and I seriously debated never going back into that Plant Room. I debated forging numbers for my manager to look at on Monday morning, and I thought long and hard about quitting this job. I stayed out of the Plant Room for several hours that day, tooo scared to even be worried about the verbal jabs some of the students had thrown at me.
But eventually, bad luck struck again. Several students had come down to report their heating wasn’t working, and others complained about a lack of hot water. Which meant I was forced to head once more into the Plant Room, and to my suprise, nothing happened.
The same boring old Plant Room was there when I unlocked the door, and nothing at all happened when I nervously stepped in to take the readings. I noted that all three were down to aboutt 30 degrees celcious, which was way lower than they should have been, so I called out our emergency plumber and that was that.
In fact, nothing happened for the rest of the weekend, leaving me wondering if I was daydreaming the whole thing. I have an overactive imagination, I like to see faces in trees and stuff like that, so perhaps the boredom of reception work had finally got to me, and I was letting the general spookyness of the room get to me.
I did speak to David on Monday though, he’d called me in to chek up on me after my first 100% solo weekend shift. I explained half-heartedly that I thought solo work might be getting to me, and he asked me if the Plant Room had given me any trouble.
I remember feeling dizzy after he asked me that. Blood rushing to my ears as iif this was confirmation of all my worst fears. I asked him what he meant, and he explained that the Plant Room was difficult to handle sometimes. And so I explained the red floor and the noise I heard, him nodding along like this was normal and I was the crazy one for being so scared.
“The Room is part of the Job.” He had said. “If you follow the Rules, you will be fine. So stop worrying.”
Which leads me to last weekend, in which the Plant Room threw everything at me.
The floor was stained a dark brown hue that I knew in my gut was dried blood, and the noises were getting worse and worse, like there was something in there with me. A few times the noises started the second I stepped into the Patio, and I would be forced to retreat until the next hour.
But last Sunday, around roughly 5:40 PM, after I had stepped into the Main Plant Room, the lights went out.
Immediate panic struck, I remember feeling that need for light, and reaching for my phone in blind fear, until I screamed to myself internally to NOT light up any part of the room. I was lucky, I had barely taken three steps into the Main Plant Room, and the Patio was just behind me. I took two steps back, slowly and quietly edging towards the safe haven that had been promised, and heard the most friightening sound of my life.
It was a deep, low growl, proceeded by heavy and fast footsteps, headed my way. I could hear them rattling in my brain, the sounds going right through me and causing all the hairs on my body to stand on end. I wanted to freeze, to curl myself into a ball and weep, but I forced myself to take that final step backwards and fell backwards into the Patio. I hit my head pretty hard on the concrete flooring, but I was safe. I could hear shuffling over the high ringing in my ears, and I opened the eyes I hadn’t even noticed I was holding so tightly shut to see the glorious fluorescent tubes above me lit with that beautiful dim lighting.
I didn’t go back into the Plant Room that day. Lord knows I couldn’t be persuaded back into there. Not even for a million pounds.
I called my GP on Monday, said I’d taken a fall at work and wanted to have my head checked out for a concussion. He managed to squeeze me in on an emergency appointment and gave me a written note that I had a concussion and would be back in this weekend.
Unfortunately, that meant I didn’t see David last week. I couldn’t explain to him what had ocurred at the weekend, and I wasn’t able to argue my case for working alternative weekends with Cammie.
I came in this morning to a written handover, detailing things I would need to know for this weekend, and at the bottom, in bold, capilised letters;
ENSURE YOU ARE CHECKING THE PLANT ROOM AT EVERY HOUR
I checked this morning, more fearful of this than anything else in my life. The first hour was growling, and I took the temperatures quickly. The second hour was patchy red and brown flooring, and a stench of blood and rotted meat so foul I could only gag. The third and fourth hours were uneventful.
The fifth, sixth, and seventh hours, the noises got progressively worse. Footsteps, growling, tapping and banging noises, all accompanied by a metallic smell. The eighth hour is the one just gone. The lights went out, and I managed to get back to the Patio without a concussion this time. But my eyes had adjusted to the dark well enought that I caught a shadowy glimpse of a figure, lurking just past the step into the Main Plant Room. It was taller than me, and thin. Unnaturally thin. Thin enough to hide out of sight behind pipes and boilers. I opened the door a crack, letting the natural sunlight into the Plant Room, and it darted away, moving at an impossible speed.
I am afraid. I’m writing this out on my personal tablet, and putting this out to whatever forums or groups I can. I don’t know what will happen in the next hour, and I don’t know if I can survive the lights going out again. I’m so afraid.