mak5158 Thread

Some stories I've told before. Others I haven't. Some I manage to forget until something awakens it, like a beast on the dark.

I worked for a campus police department while in college. I used to hang around the office between classes, because why not? One day, the chief comes in and asks if he can get a plinclothes search party for this kid that hadn't been seen in two days. Sure, I says, and all thirty of us spread out in pairs to search. While near the south corner of campus, we're looking in bushes near buildings and in some access paths, normal passed-out drunk locations, and I see this guy staring at me while standing on a landscaping wall. Fuckin weird. Mention it to my partner, and he's all 'think about it later, we gotta search. Eventually, we come to the other side of that wall, and the chief comes over the radio, calling off the search. After so many hours, we're giving up. My actual shift started a number of hours later, and I'm immediately pulled aside for a security shift. It's at the exact place where I was when the search was canceled. I arrived in time to see the man from the wall being carted into an ambulance. He had fallen off the wall after drunkenly climbing it two days before. My partner and I swore we wouldn't say shit about what we'd seen.

Another time, same job. This university has a nuclear reactor used for research. Since its output is supposedly weapons grade material, it has pretty tight security hooked up to the system at the dispatch desk including audiovisual surveillance and motion and vibration sensors. One day I'm chilling with the dispatcher on a night shift because I've got a spare hour and a motion sensor goes off in the control room. Nothing appears on the video. Dispatcher grumbles at "that damn cat". Sure enough, in the breakroom next to control a cat walks out of a wall, sits on the table for a second then vanishes. Over the course of the next 10 minutes we watch as alarm after alarm activates, including one labeled "reactor pool" usually accompanied by video of a cat. I watch amazed as the dispatcher calls the unit sitting outside the reactor and reports that "Schrödinger is at it again". A grumpy full time cop walks through the building, clearing room after room, including a few with a cat watching. He reports all clear. No cats.

Another I've told before. [–]mak5158 29 points 5 months ago I moved into a new house over the winter. My first actual house I've owned on my own, so I was pretty stoked. And we just had our second kid just a week before signing, so we're excited to get her room remodeled for her. Walls painted, floors redone, making this house ours. Of course we set up a baby monitor first thing, as the children's rooms are on the opposite side of the house. At first there were no issues. Baby didn't enjoy the room during the day, she'd stare at the walls as if she didn't like the pale purple paint. We painted them a nice orange that weekend. We also got a cat. That's when things started getting weird. The cat and the baby now had no problem with the room in the day. Our daughter was too young to do much other than be calm or fuss, but the cat was old enough to be a bit more expressive. All day she'd stare at the southeast corner of the room. At night she'd arch her back and hiss, as if threatened. We'd start hearing faint noises like talking over the monitor at night, but never loud or clear enough to make out. I'm nothing if not a logical man. That corner had an old dresser that was rescued from an old Army hotel when it closed. Perhaps the cat could sense old smells it didn't like. There was also the entrance to the crawlspace under that corner on the outside, so a lot of wires entered through there. Both children and small animals are sensitive to electromagnetic radiation. I went under the house and removed about 100 feet of extraneous wiring from Tue previous owner's satellite TV, and rewired that section of the house to eliminate possible interference and replace old wires with shielded cable. We also moved the dresser. Just in case. But the noises didn't stop. They grew more frequent. The cat refused to go in the room during the day. It would sit awake in the crib all night, body between the baby and the rest of the room, eyes locked to that corner, occasionally growling or hissing. We stopped letting our son have his radio on at night, in case we were hearing that. As we met our neighbors we would ask if they had any small children, but none had baby monitors of their own. We installed an alarm system, and I took to keeping my favorite rifle loaded by the bed. Occasionally the alarm would claim our daughter's window would open, but no alarm would sound and we'd find it secure when checked. We ran out of explanations. We began letting our daughter sleep with us so she could get better rest. For lack of a better option, I continued renovation. We finished the bathroom, started on other rooms, but didn't do any more in the nursery. Out of a morbid curiosity, we left the baby monitor on at night. The noises still happened, but with that room being unused, they sounded almost sad. After a week or so without any use of that room whatsoever, I was lying awake after a long day at work, watching an episode of Bones. Out of nowhere, clear as day, a woman's voice comes over the monitor and calmly says "It's okay. I'm leaving now." The monitor clicked off. We've had no problems since. I talked to my wife about it, and we recalled one phrase the old owners said during the closing. They had their third kid and the house wasn't big enough anymore. We had noticed a fair amount of construction material they left behind. "Well we had thought of an addition" she said looking at her husband, "but then there was that thing..." They didn't make much eye contact after that.

TL;DR: Dead guy shows me where he died. Schrodinger's Cat plays in nuclear reactor. Baby Monitor and the Lady.