Remote Workers Share The Creepiest Things They've Noticed While At Work

I used to work in the Gulf of Mexico on oil rigs for years, and it may not exactly be creepy, but I found it really unsettling.

In deep, open water, the water itself is really clear, so everyone can plainly see all the tuna and barracudas hanging around the rig, waiting for the onboard cook to throw off whatever food waste he needs to. Every once in a while, a huge great white shark would swim up from underneath and snatch a tuna and it really took like less than a second. They're really scary.

I've worked in Canada's north for a few years now in oil and gas.

It's pretty creepy when during night shift you realise a moose has just been standing at the tree line staring you down for an unknown length of time.

Or finding bear tracks crossing the tracks you just made 5 minutes ago

Honestly the silence of a snowy forest in the dead of night 100s of km away from anything is pretty spooky. When Your only contact to the outside world is a radio channel nobody's listening to, you feel pretty alone.

I used to be a delivery driver, which doesn’t sound very remote because it isn’t. However, I did have to deliver to some pretty remote places. One time I delivered to a trailer park just barely inside our designated “delivery zone” and it was very dark and poorly lit.

I leave my car running and keep the headlights and inside lights on to go deliver the pizza. Upon returning to my car, I sit down in the drivers seat and look up to see a creepy old man standing less than 3 feet from my side of the car. He was just staring. It was the equivalent of a jump-scare.

I just started driving forward, had to do a u-turn to get out of the park. When I turned around the man was standing in the middle of the road, so I freaked out for a second before speeding around him only to watch him attempt to chase my car out of the trailer park. I put in my two weeks after that.

I was on a boat sitting on anchor in a secluded bay in the early hours, in southeast Alaska a few years ago. I stepped outside for a smoke and all of a sudden I heard the most horrific sounds of a wild animal being murdered by another wild Animal. It went on for probably 10 minutes, I know it’s just nature but man, I can still hear that sound in my brain and it haunts me.

I used to do agricultural work, alone in a field for 10 hrs a day kinda thing. The pure amount of times I heard the sound of running & snapped up to see literally nothing there was horrific. I was convinced it was surely animals between the trees for a while but the weirdest moment was when I heard it loudly from a row of trees next to me & immediately ducked under to see the feet of whatever animal was running by and there was absolutely nothing.

I remember trying to stay calm and walking really fast to the toilet block and sitting in there for a good long while before I came back. I never thought I'd be so freaked out in the day time but there wasn't a soul nearby for quite a way & it really amped up my imagination.

When I was 15 years old, I was doing my 4am newspaper delivery round on bicycle. I was driving into the garden of this one subscriber where I saw two guys with flashlights looking through the windows of the house. I was a bit in shock and just said 'Goodmorning guys'. They were just as much in shock and an awkward silence followed.

I tried to break the silence by asking if I could pass them to deliver the newspaper through the door. One of the guys said the person living in that house did something to his family and they took it as an opportunity to get away in their car that was still running.

When they were gone I rang the doorbell at the house to tell them what happened and they should keep an eye out.

I worked night shift at a prison for years.

The one thing that really creeps you out is when a hit is put on someone in the middle of the night.

Inmate's code says it is kept as quiet as possible. No one says a damn word. The only thing you'll hear are grunts and moans from the victims. Then, it goes and stays silent. If you hear it happening, it's already too late to stop it. It'll be over before you pull your keys out.

Occasionally, if someone needs medical attention the first sign we got was an inmate approaching the bars saying they need to go to medical (and are usually bleeding all nonchalant.)

The creepy ones are where no one shows up. All you get is grunts of pain and that's it.

I’m not sure if this counts because it’s a farm but when you live on a farm you work on a farm so I guess I’ll tell it. I grew up on a farm and in high school used to mess with my friends by hiding and making them find me. One night my friend was over and we were waiting on this other guy. We see him pull up so we take off running to hide. It’s funny because they have to wander around somewhere they’re unfamiliar with or go ask my parents and be told too bad you’ll have to find her. It’s like forced hide and seek. Anyway this one night I saw my friend hide in one building while I ran for the trees.

I was hiding under some bushes and heard breathing. Like human breathing. There were no animals around. It creeped me out so bad I ran out of hiding to greet my friend. I felt so uncomfortable for the rest of the night. Some time during the night my dad heard something and went out to investigate. In the morning he discovered that one of our cows was killed and butchered.

I was a field geologist in the Outback about 12 hours north of Adelaide. One day I was driving the truck and saw what looked like a flagpole sticking up in the middle of nowhere. I wasn't anywhere near a farm or anywhere else that people would be, so I decided to drive over and check it out. It was a dead dog fully impaled on a spike. Like, from butt to mouth. Took some pictures and had my boss call the cops, but for the rest of the assignment I was freaked out that some maniac was out there with me.

Edit: I don't know if it was a domestic dog or a dingo or something. It was pretty well decayed when I found it.

I worked at a public forest. One day we had someone report a dead animal on the side of one of our trails. A few of us from the front desk hiked out to see what it was. It looked like a giant piece of...liver maybe? Just a pile of smooth red meat...no blood around. And it was wrapped up in a t shirt, with some coins scattered around it. We called our rangers to go check it out, and one of them was pretty sure it was a placenta.

The weird part is, you have to check in thru a front desk. So someone either snuck a placenta/liver in or gave live birth/removed an organ on our trails. We never got an answer on what the pile of meat was, how it got there, or why.

During college that was located away from major cities, the woods were all around us. That being said, there was a highly rated trail, the Loyalsock Trail, which was about an hour drive from the university. I invited a friend to come with me as he had never been on an extended backpacking trip. A 50+ mile trail that we intended to backpack over the four day weekend. I am an Eagle Scout who has spent countless hours in the woods and went on backpacking trips consistently throughout my college experience. As many have said before me, you get used to the minor “spooky” things happening; Coyote howls, raccoons in the middle of the night, even the occasional unknown noise. The scariest thing to find in the woods, however, are people.

We were about 20 miles into the trail and, being Pennsylvania where the underbrush and trees line the trails pretty densely, I always walk about 100 meters off of the trail to reduce the chances of me disturbing people/people disturbing me (especially in the early morning when I choose to sleep in). Following that same strategy, my friend and I go out of our way to be in this amazing spot a good ways off of the trail where it would even be difficult to see our flashlights from the trail. This spot was on a peninsula where a creek met a river, meaning there was only one way into our camp and only one way out. We start a fire, cook our food, and drink some (but not enough to get either of us drunk). We put the fire out about midnight and head in to our individual tents. All is quite. It is the fall semester, so leaves are on the ground, the moon is brightly shining through the bare trees, and the air is cool. The only noise is the occasional time when I would hear my friend turn over in his sleep. Then, I hear the voices...

The voices sounded very close for being on the trail 100+ meters away. I check my watch; 3am. Who hikes at 3am? We are 20 miles in. I slowly get out of my sleeping bag, slowly unzip my tent, only to see my friend peaking out of his tent in the exact same fashion. He quickly moves his finger over his mouth in an exaggerated “hush” signal, then used the same hand to frantically motion towards the way of the trail. Then we see them. Four adults, three men and one woman, walking directly towards our camp. No lights illuminating their path; They are walking silently at this point. Only one of them has a backpack; An impossibility for the long hike they were 1/3 of the way through. Being a long trip, you bring wood cutting supplies to chop branches into smaller branches to burn; For me, this was a survival knife. Grabbing the knife, believing it is my only way of defending myself, I am more disheveled than I ever have been, especially knowing that a knife is barely defense at all. These people walk into our site, sit down by our extinguished fire pit, and just sit there for what felt like an eternity.

My friend speaks up and asks what they are doing in our campsite. Without answering the question, they ask if we have any food. Having packed as lightly as possible for the long trip. We had only a few extra Mountain House, MRE-style meals. I grab one out of my bag and toss it to one of the men. In rapid succession, I ask why they aren’t using a light, if they need help finding the trail, and why they are hiking so late. They respond with the following:

“We don’t use lights”

“We know where the trail is”

“It is better to hike late at night”

Unnerved at this point, my friend asks them to leave. They respond by asking if we want to light the fire and hangout for a bit. No we do not. They grab their bag, get up, and leave without speaking another word. We watch them leave and take shifts making sure that they didn’t come back. Needless to say, we both got very little sleep that night. When the sun rose the next morning, we finally got “real” sleep. By the afternoon, when we woke up, it all felt like a weird dream of sorts. The only evidence was a fuzzy cap that they must have dropped that I have to this day.

I have never had something as weird/spooky as that happen in the woods and hope to never have it happen again. In the eight years since that trip, I haven’t been back to the Loyalsock Trail.

On our drill ship that was built in China, we noticed on the drawings there was a room. We went to look at it and couldn’t find an entrance but the spacing was obvious there was an extra room.

It might not sound so creepy unless you’ve been in these shipyards where two things are known to happen: stowaways, although I doubt it in this case, but also hundreds of workers at any given time following orders blindly. So we confirmed that the room had all six sides, yet not a single weld on the outside. There is only one way this could’ve happened and im sure youre starting to get it now. They must have welded from the inside for this room and then realized they had no way out upon completion if the gasses didnt kill them first.

Its extremely heavy around that room. People say they hear things. I have definitely. This isn’t some old ship either. I rode this ship from China to Amsterdam after completion and then the maiden voyage to America. I guess it happens quick.

I was serving as a fireman for my nation’s compulsory national service.

Once, we were call into the forest to retrieve a body who was found hanging on a noose, deep along one of the running trails. He had apparently committed suicide by hanging himself off a tree, was found by a few morning joggers.

What’s creepy was, we found a straw doll at the foot of the tree, it was stabbed with a few red bobby pins in the head, facial area. And there was also an unknown talisman that was half burnt where the doll was sitting. When we took the body down, we had to carry him a few kilometres out of the forest and halfway along the journey, a previously unnoticed wound on his face started bleeding.

One of my man sweared that it was bleeding from the same spot as where the bobby pin was stuck on the doll but we could not confirm it as we left the doll where his body was found, for the police.

Pass the body to the paramedics and booked our way out of the area.

Edit: wow thank you for the upvotes and the award. Glad that everyone enjoyed the story.

Yes this happened in South East Asia, where almost all religion exists here.

I do a lot of work out in the woods. Creepiest thing was finding some headless doves. I also found sticks arranged in circles and paint on the trees in the same spot. Not sure if it was part of a ritual or not, but that's what I saw.

Edit: Okay lots of great points that it could have been just wildlife or cats catching the doves. That's totally possible. I've seen cats do that before too. To add some more context, the type of doves found were not native to this area. It's possible they escaped or were released and had a run in with a hungry house cat. And the painted circle of trees and sticks nearby was coincidence. Who knows--I certainly don't know what really happened so it's all speculation. It's still the weirdest/creepiest thing I've ever found.

When I was a kid living in Queensland, Australia I used to "bush bash" meaning, walk off the beaten track through thick scrub. I knew the national park my house backed onto like the back of my hand. I knew from the topography where I was at all times. Both my parents were ex-military and had a sort of "hands off." Trusting me even as young as 12 to venture off on my own into the wilderness.

So I could just pack a lunch, and my sister and neighborhood friend would come with, we'd head off early in the morning, returning just before sunset usually.

Once, when I, the oldest, was about 14, we had been following creek beds and bashing over heavily forested hills towards an area I'd never been.

We came down a hill, through a gully full of ferns and followed a dry creekbed for another hour, the sides of the creek became steep and rocky, before long we were passing through a gorge.

As we emerged from the gorge, we noticed what looked like a dwelling. Being idiot kids we wanted to see what was up. It looked abandoned at first. But as we got closer we saw that tarps had been affixed to the ramshackle structure. Chicken-wire surrounded what looked like a pen just outside.

As my eyes traveled across it, I suddenly caught another pair of eyes looking directly back at me. A rottweiler. We started slowly edging back away from the property, but it was too late. The dog started going nuts and, worried that it was coming after us, or at least alerting the person/s living in the hut, we bolted.

I went back to the area a few times, but not too close to the abode itself and found discarded bones from small game and other bits and pieces, spent .22 casings and such.

As an adult and knowing the area, it's very likely we stumbled across either a homeless person camping out. Or a meth lab. As the area, as I would find out as an adult, was absolutely riddled with meth labs.

I work for a power company restoring power after a storm. Was working when a lady came up complaining that her power went out. We explained to her thats why we were there and she should have power back soon. She said, "oh good, my son went down in the basement and now I can't find him". I went with her with a flashlight down the road to a run-down house that was partially caved in. She walked inside and I went to follow. As soon as I walked into the door she disappeared from my sight and I called for her multiple times. No one responded so I ran back to our work truck to call for help. A man that was living on her street called to me asking what’s wrong and I told him the situation. He looked at me with a cold stare and said a mom and her son died in that house 4 years ago. I'm still shook to this day.

Actually I don't work in remote places, but when my father was sent to Alwar, rajasthan for archaeological study, I encountered a very strange thing.

Our house was near a small forest. One morning I saw a group of blue bulls(a kind of asian antelope). They were 5 in number, and they were running in circles around a skull for like 30 minutes and then one of them took it into the forest and they all followed him silently. It was such a weird sight, it still gives me creeps.

I was the creepy occurrence.....

I live on a ranch off of a quite dirt road. Our distant neighbors (nearest house is about 1 mile away as the crow flies) have had issues with people stealing things out of their out-buildings and storage sheds in the area. It was also late in the year, so it was starting to get dark around 6PM. So as a result every time I would see headlights go down our road I would watch to make sure they weren't stopping on the property.

One evening I see a vehicle going very slowly down the road and come to a stop at the end of our driveway (about 120 yards from our front porch). The vehicle is parked right in front of a 60's pickup I have parked, so I think whoever it is might be looking to steal it, or just looking over the property. Whatever the case, I decide to put on a black coat and grab my rifle to go investigate. It's dark out, so I stay out of the headlights of the vehicle so I can get close. I can tell it is a white van, but I don't see anything else distinguishing about the van. When I'm about 50 yards away the van backs up and turns into our driveway. I freeze as the headlights wash across me standing in the middle of my driveway....and I see the reflective Fedex logos on the side of the van.

Needless to say the Fedex driver probably sh*t his pants as he suddenly sees a dark figure standing in the middle of a field, in the dark, holding a rifle. Surprisingly after I try to give a friendly wave and smile he continues up the driveway to the house, and I get to explain the situation and we both have a laugh.

So that's how I got to be the creepy guy in some Fedex delivery driver's story.

I know a forest ranger who regularly stays at these remote cabin / fire tower outposts. She’ll wake up in the morning and look out the window to soak in the landscape only to see influencers posing for photos.

Used to be a supervisor for a janitorial company and a couple times a week I had to go to a middle school and clean their hallway floors and gymnasium with a zamboni type vehicle that mopped and scrubbed the floor. When I was there I had the whole school to myself. Used to get finished quickly and go to the library and read while eating my dinner. Well, one morning after being there, I get a call from school security and they want me to come in.

When I get there I see a police car too. Uh oh, I think. They ask me a few questions like “did you notice anything out of the ordinary or strange while you were here last night?” No, I hadn’t (usually have headphones in). Security then shows me camera footage of someone breaking into one of the classrooms WHILE I WAS RIDING THE ZAMBONI not far away. I was there for another two hours. Nothing was stolen. But the worst part was they didn’t have footage of the person leaving, they didn’t go out the way they came in, and police had to sweep the entire school. Never did find out what happened with that one.

My oldest brother used to work the overnight sprinklers on a golf course. He took me out one time just for fun and as we were driving uphill on a fairway, a figure of a lady appeared in the headlights at the top of the hill. My brother steered a little to the left of her and kept driving right on by. I stared right into her eyes as we drove by and she stared back. Her eyes glowed like a cat in the night.

As soon as we were out of voice range I asked my brother "What the hell was that?!" He calmly responded, "Yea, she lives on the golf course and likes to terrorize the workers from time to time. I usually see her out here once a week."

Alright. Cool.

Coolcoolcool.

Some friends and I were fishing a small pond just after dark for catfish. We started to hear sounds coming off the water like someone throwing softball sized rocks, but they were coming from all over the pond. We thought someone was messing with us and we called out a few times for them to stop, but we eventually got freaked out and left. Cut to a few years later, I’m fishing a different pond and hear the same sound. Turns out it was a beaver slapping it’s tail on the water to drive me from it’s territory. When beavers become problems in rivers, they relocate them to ponds in town.

I once delivered some soda to a grocery store in the middle of nowhere around 2010, like an hour from any freeway, and the manager had at least 50 pictures of Burt Reynolds pinned up in her office. Does that count?

Lived up north for a while on a 3 year job. A local took me way out into the woods one night because he swore that at midnight at this one spot you could see the ghostly carriage where some people froze to death.

Obviously expected to see nothing.

So we're sitting there in absolute pitch black darkness. You can't see your hand in front of your face or anything around you. The sky is slightly, slightly grey from the thin cloud cover reflecting distant lights but that's it. You can't even really make out the tree line.

We never do see a carriage. Or anything.

At about 12:20 or so we're just smoking and chatting, thinking about leaving, when we hear the unmistakable sounds of someone walking through the underbrush. Loud crackling of breaking sticks and branches.

But still, everything is black.

It gets closer and louder, but we don't see anyone coming. There's nothing. And all we can think is how it's basically suicide to trudge through these woods at night. Good way to get a stick in the eye at the very least, and eventually you will twist an ankle or break something when you step off a ledge - the ground around here is very uneven.

But it's definitely someone coming. Crack, snap, snap...

In the pitch black? Nope. We drive the hell out if there.

We weren't afraid it was a ghost. We were afraid it was a person insane enough to be marching through the woods without a light. Do not want to meet that guy.

Update: for those of you comforting yourself that it was just an animal...

When I say "up north" I want you to imagine a place where you literally have to drive 3 hours to arrive at the closest city, and another 3 after that to get to the next one.

And when I say noise I'm not talking squirrels. Think rhythmic, and think large branches snapping on the ground. I'd been up there long enough to know what a possum sounds like.

That big it might have been a bear, but a bear wandering around at night is not normal - which I suppose means it would have been pretty messed up, and that makes it worse. Moose? Possibly but those things are scarier than bears. No joke. They're the size of a truck, use those antlers at anything that gets too close, and disappear into the woods like ghosts... but we didn't hear hooves so...

My story isn't exactly what was asked for but should be good padding while this post is so new. In middle school, I worked at the school during the summer, doing general painting and helping the maintenance guys. We had to drive out to the fkoff middle of a Floridian forest to pick up some pine lumber for the gym's new bleachers, and when we got to the mill at like 7am, the whole place was locked down with police.

They had found gasoline cans and pill bottles out in one of the tree farm groves, telltale signs of kids abusing substances, but supposedly the cops were there because they found human remains. I was pretty young and I don't remember anything outside of my little kid point of view, but I remember seeing streaks of dark blood running up the trunks of several pines. I've since learned from the guys I was with then that a teenager was killed by a bear after attacking it, and the blood was either from the wounded bear climbing the tree or dragging a hurt person up with it, but I'm sure many of you can agree with me that bears don't do that.

And I can't see an injured bear makin it up several pines in a row while bleeding that much. So, technically, I saw a creepy thing while at work in a remote area! Look up lakeland mill casualties or something to find it, the story of the kids death was in the local paper

We have a PTO pump spot that comes out of a canal for our rice fields. When I was like 12 years old my uncle found two bodies dumped in the little sump area where our pump sat. Both of the ladies that were dumped there had the same tattoos so they think it was gang related but it was 45 minutes away from where that “gang” operated. I still look in the hole every time I go by there and that was 20 years ago.

I've been locked inside a vast Gothic cathedral at night, alone inside the structure practicing the pipe organ for a forthcoming recital.

During thunder & lightning storms as I sat up high in the gallery at the console:

Intense lightning flashes would cause the saints and other departed souls depicted in the stained glass windows to light up with such dramatic energy that it seemed as though they were about to step right out of the window and start roaming the cathedral nave.

Even their stained glass jeweled eyes glowed with a "fiery spirit" of reality - as if they had resurrected at that very moment.

Used to teach outdoor education. Which was essentially just summer camp during the school year and school groups would come up and spend a few days at the camp. On their last night we would always tell them a scary story around the campfire. It was the same scary story every time. We worked in partners so there were always two staff members for every school group.

One staff member would tell the story and the other staff member would go hide in the forest and make scary noises. So, I’m telling the story and every few minutes there’s like a snap of a twig or rustling in the bushes and of course as always the kids all get freaked out and they start getting scared. It’s very fun. Well, as I’m telling a story I’m walking around the campfire looking at all the kids faces and I noticed a familiar one.

My partner Eric. Sitting there smiling at me wondering why I’m staring at him. My heart has never started beating so fast in my life. Eventually I sped through the story and all the kids left and I explain to Eric that I thought it was him in the woods and his eyes got very wide and he said are you telling me that that wasn’t one of the staff members? So we both RAN back to the main road.

I work in a restaurant that has a heavily wooded country park next to it. I used to live the other side of it and would drive around it to get to work. One particular day, I had car issues and had to walk to work, going through the woods as it’s a 20 minute journey rather than an hour around.

Anyway, no issues, get to work, do my shift, finish just before midnight. I’d planned to walk home the long way but one of the girls who worked there lived near me and said she was just gonna walk through the woods as it was quicker so I thought fk it, can’t be that bad, I’ll walk with her then.

So off we go, into the woods, surprisingly easy to see. It was a full moon. “Beep” my watch chimed as it turns midnight. “Ahh, Happy Halloween,” she says.

It dawns on me, I’m walking through the woods on Halloween, at night, during a full moon. Every time I watch a movie and someone does something dumb like that I always think no one would be that stupid to do it in real life. Didn’t get murderer but I’ve never powerwalked so hard in my life.

I used to work at a Boy Scout Summer Camp. Every week I had to take a big group of campers to a "secluded" spot for their wilderness survival badge where they had to build a shelter out of sticks, leaves, etc and sleep in it overnight. The spot was only about 1/2 mile from the main camp, but we took them a circuitous route that made it seem really secluded.

Anyways, on this one night all the campers had made their shelters, we had cooked dinner, and were all just sitting around the campfire. It was getting late, maybe 11:00, so I sent all the campers to their shelters for the night and started cleaning up the fire. That's when we heard in the distance what sounded like church bells. They were pretty faint, but myself and my fellow staffers could definitely hear them.

They went on for about 30 minutes, ringing every 30 seconds, or so. We were all a little creeped out, as there were no churches or towns within 20 miles of us. After the bells stopped, though, the singing started. It was too faint to hear the words, but it sounded like church choir music, but a lot of people, and a lot more enthusiastic. Also, it was almost midnight at this point. The singing went on for well over an hour, sometimes quieting down until we almost couldn't hear it, sometimes getting so loud we thought it was getting closer.

All of the campers were super creeped out, but I lied to them, telling them there was a church service going on in camp, and that there was nothing to be scared of. Eventually, at almost 1 AM, the singing stopped. I found out a few days later that there had been a large KKK rally only a few miles away that night, and that's what we had heard.