needlestuck Thread

So, this is a day late and will totally get lost, but here goes.

I work nights at a residential treatment program for teenage girls recovering from drug addiction. The program is housed in an old duplex that they have opened up so both sides are in use. The program houses 15 girls max and there are two staff on 3rd shift, me and a coworker. We split the shift into four hour increments--one staff is upstairs on the floor with the bedrooms monitoring the clients and the other is on the main floor doing whatever. We switch halfway through the night and it's easy money like nothing else. The way the house is laid out, since it's an old duplex, is that there are two living rooms--one on each side of the house, kind of mirrored in location, and two main stairwells that are side by side.

Creepy shit doesn't really happen there--the most that you get is some girl running off in the middle of the night or catching girls having sex with each other or whatever. Normal teenage shit.

Well, I come into work on Thursday night and I putz around for a minute and then head up one of the flights of stairs. I notice the one of the doors to the living room on the side of the house I will be on is partially closed, which is a little odd--the door is a massive, heavy wooden sliding door that most people don't want to fuck with. Weird, but whatever.

I go upstairs and take my seat and fuck around on my laptop and whatever. All the clients are sleeping and I check their rooms about every half hour like I'm supposed to. Around 1AM, I decide to go downstairs to grab a drink. The door to that living room is completely closed, which is very weird but I figure my coworker decided to take a nap in there and closed the door against the light. Except that I didn't hear the door close, which is impossible. Those doors creak and groan and scrape on the floor and bang when you open/close them. But, whatever. I'm not going to chance waking up my co-worker because she's fucking cranky in the middle of the night. I grab my drink and go back upstairs.

Around 1:30, there's this massive crash on the first floor. I call out to my coworker and ask her if that was her. She responds--from the other side of the house--that it was not, and gets up to check the first floor. I get up and check on all the clients, figuring that one of them got up when I wasn't paying attention and is sneaking down for some food or trying to get out or whatever. All the kids are in their beds and my coworker says that there's nothing out of place. She checks all the doors [we have four--two front, two back] and they are all locked. I'm a little freaked, but, still, whatever. I decide, just in case one of the kids is fucking with us and has learned the schedule that we check rooms on, to do random checks so, I'm up maybe every ten to fifteen minutes to check rooms.

While I'm on one side of the house, I hear footsteps on the other so I jet over there to see who is out of bed and fucking around. They all appear to be asleep and they are all actually in their beds. I'm getting pissed.

This continues until 3AM, when we switch places. I go downstairs and my coworker is in the office and asks me if I locked the cabinet with all the snacks in it and the staff fridge. I had not. She gives me the weirdest look and tells me she had left them all open because she goes in and out to get food/drinks during the night. I then ask her if she had been sleeping in the living room under me and she says no. I am thoroughly freaked out and ask her if she heard the door close to that room and she once again tells me no. I could fucking feel the blood drain out of my face.

Our program is in the middle of a city with lots of homeless folks so, at this point, I thought maybe one had somehow gotten into the house. I am nervous as fuck and run around and check all the doors again--that I had checked at the beginning of the shift and that my co-worker had checks after the big crash. One of the front doors is unlocked.

So, I gather my fucking courage together and, while my co-worker hides in the office, I go to the living room and began to push the door open. I was fully expecting a crazy person with a knife to be curled up on one of the couches or a former client to have crawled through a window and be passed out on the floor, but it was empty..and the light was on, where it had been turned off before. None of the windows were open, nothing.

I am freaked out to the nth degree and am convinced that someone is in the house. I search the first floor while my co-worker goes up to the second floor and checks all the beds again, where all the girls are sleeping and accounted for. Co-worker is a very religious Spanish woman and she begins praying and talking about putting scissors in the bible to ward off the devil and all kinds of shit.

I sit on the couch in one of the living rooms and am wide awake where I am usually taking a nap. I keep hearing shit moving around upstairs and my co-worker keeps checking the beds and all the kids are asleep. I walk the inside perimeter of the house again and, as I cross over the landing at the bottom of the sets of stairs, I see a man standing on the landing above me out of the corner of my eye and I jump a foot. I look fully and, of course, there's nothing there.

Around 5:30AM, one of the day shifters comes in and settles down to watch a movie in the other room. I let her get settled and fuck around on my phone a little more and go in to talk to her around 6:30AM. Before I can tell her about all the night's craziness, she asks me which client is awake and crying and processing/talking with my coworker at the top of the stairs.

No client is awake, no one is crying, and my coworker is not talking. I tell her this and then tell her about all the crazy shit that happened and she flips the fuck out and tells me how the half of the house that everything kept happening on is haunted and how all kinds of stuff has happened to her there. Co-worker comes downstairs and we are all comparing notes and we hear someone walking in the kitchen.

All three of us head out. One of my co-workers runs upstairs to check beds and me and the other one check the kitchen--we go from opposite sides, as there are two entrances. We meet in the middle and...nothing.

By that time, it's 7AM and it is time for me to get the fuck out of there and, boy, was I happy to go. Told a bunch of my other co-workers what happened and they apparently think of me as the calm and logical one, and they are freaked out. I work for the next week on high alert and nothing else, thankfully, happens.

I am still convinced that someone snuck into the house--either one of the girls had a boyfriend or dealer come in or someone broke in or whatever. We have zero security beyond the locks on our doors and it is entirely plausible that someone could have gotten in. Fucking crazy shit. I have never been so freaked out at a job as I was then.