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When staying back late in the office, have you ever had the hair stand up on the back of your neck? Here are three stories of workers who have experienced unnatural occurrences at the office.
More than a decade ago, I used to work in the customer support office for the US market of a large digital wallet service. Their office was located near One World Hotel at TTDI.
I worked there for about a year before moving on. Recently, I met up with some of my colleagues, and we discovered all of us had an encounter with the supernatural while working there.
The Printer that Sent Messages from 2006
Working IT support, it meant that there were numerous overnight shifts where it was just me and Hisham doing the routine overnight maintenance processes, and things did go bump in the night.
We had an old printer that was an absolute beast of a machine. It was one of the old-style gigantic multifunction scanner/fax/printer units that was just shoved into a corner.
I’d noticed it on my first day and asked about it. My supervisor shrugged and said, “It’s always been there.”
I asked why it was powered and loaded with paper and toner if no one used it. He hesitated for a moment, then said, “Biar aja. Not worth messing with it.”
After I asked about that printer several times, he finally told me, “Ada hantu-lah benda tu!”
I gave him a look and he just shook his head, saying, “On your first overnight shift, you’ll understand.”
So, on my first overnight shift, it was quiet. At 2 am, the aircon suddenly turned cold, and then I heard it: A electrical, machine hum.
I started hearing sparks fly, and then a smell like burnt plastic. I stood up to check out what was wrong, but the other technician on duty grabbed me by the shoulder and said, “Relax bro. 2 a.m. Biasa aja.”
The printer gave a clack and the hum increased in volume, and then it started printing at a phenomenal speed: Almost 120 pages in a little over two minutes.
As the hum died away, as if it had just powered off, it continued to spit out printed page after printed page for another minute or so.
I stared at the stack of paper in the out tray, and carefully picked up the first page and read it: The printouts were a report of transactions from 2006.
That made no sense, because we didn’t have access to any data that was more than 3 years old.
I carefully put the print out back and then went to check the network to see where the print job had originated from. The system had no record of the print job, because the printer wasn’t connected to the network by cable or WI-FI.
I decided to just follow the advice I was given and leave it alone.
The ghostly hand that played with women’s ponytails
Maria shared her own haunting experience from the same office:
“I was in HR and when I started working there, my hair was pretty short, but it began to grow out naturally. Once my hair grew long enough, I started tying it back with a scrunchie into a ponytail.
The first day I wore my hair in a ponytail, several colleagues came over and quietly warned me not to wear my hair like that, because the hantu (spirit) in the office would not like it.
It was then I noticed that others had nicely styled hair or a tudung, but nobody wore their hair in a ponytail. I didn’t believe in such things, so I thought nothing of it and got back to work.
But that day felt different. It happened after I got back from lunch.
I was at my cubicle when there was a sound of faint shuffling feet and whispering right behind me. I felt someone lightly tugging on my ponytail. It was like having a toddler just gently pulling on your hair.
I turned thinking there was someone behind me, only to find no one there. I was convinced someone was just too quick for me to catch when I was on the phone or absorbed in my work, so I rearranged my cubicle so that my back was against the wall and nobody could sneak up behind me.
But this feeling of my hair being pulled only continued, even with my back against the wall.
It happened a few more times during that day. Each time it happened, the pulling got harder and more insistent, and it was starting to hurt!
I remembered what several of my colleagues had said and undid my ponytail and tied it back up in a different style. The pulling sensation stopped at once.
I’ve never worn a ponytail to the office again.”
The entity followed me from the office to the car
Amirul was one of my colleagues in the IT department. He was more than haunted, he was chased by something. He shared his story:
“I’d been working from 3pm-11pm as team leader and my supervisor asked me to extend for a few hours to help with the quarterly reports. It was almost 1am by the time I was done, and I called a Grab to take me home.
It was after midnight, so security had closed part of the road, and I had to walk about 100 meters to get to the waiting Grab Car. I saw his headlights in the distance, and since I was walking under the streetlights, I waved to him when I was about 50 meters away.
He flashed his lights once to acknowledge me and I kept walking. Suddenly, when I was about 20 meters from the car, the driver turned on his high beams and started leaning on his horn. Then I heard him shouting at me, “OI! CEPAT!”
I broke into a sprint, thinking he was trying to spare me the 5-min waiting/late fee. I got into his car safely, and that’s when things got weird: He started playing verses from the Quran on his phone at full volume, dropped into gear and took off down the road like he was racing against time.
I asked him what he was doing. He told me that he saw a Pontianak chasing me. That’s why he asked me to run, because he didn’t want me to get eaten, or worse.
He dropped me off at my condo, and just as I got out, he advised me to go home, take a shower, and launder my clothes immediately. My last sight of him was through the closing doors of the lift of him standing next to his car, saying prayers, like he was blessing his car.
I took his advice, and also slept with the lights on for the next couple of days. Luckily, nothing untoward happened to me for the rest of the week. But I immediately applied for a transfer and moved out of that office within two months.
Do you have any haunted office stories?
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