I grew up in a small town south of Detroit, most of the people in my family are or were employed at a factory, machine shop or assembly plant in the area. Around here it's common to hear a lot of stories about people getting killed or maimed by machinery or some other hazard at the work place. As my father used to put it "Things at the plants were a lot different before those P****'s at OSHA came in and changed everything." After hearing a few stories myself I never understood why dad thought OSHA was a bad thing.
I myself, I was just a humble security guard at one of these places. The plant that I used to work at was a foundry back in the 1950's up until it was shut down and converted into a warehouse some point in the 1980's. For those of you that don't know what a foundry is, it's a factory where steel gets casted into different forms.
My story starts in 2006 when I got hired by a contracted security company, I was assigned to a midnight shift at this place. Some of the older people there used to tell me that the place was built on top of a county owned grave yard, (I've never confirmed this.) But I'm pretty sure it was just an old man trying to scare the younger guys. Interesting enough the place I worked at was the first factory in the country where a person was killed by automated machine.
We had to do a patrol round through the basement of this place. The first time I went down there it was just as I imagined, dirty, dusty, lots and lots of junk and spare parts and best of all nice and dark. While you were down there you couldn't get a cell phone signal and our hand held radios got a spotty signal at best.
In what I think was an effort to save energy they had installed motion activated lights that would stay on for about 20 minutes before turning off and would turn on when you were within 7 or 8 feet of walking underneath them.
So one night in the summer of '06 I was doing my rounds down there, there was one area where for some reason or another the automatic lights wouldn't turn on. As part of the round you had to walk straight through this area so I always carried a flash light for the occasion. I was about half way through my round when I had to walk through this dark area when I see the shadow of what appeared to be the outline of a man walk out about 12 feet or so in front of me, he walked behind a support column and disappeared. I thought to myself about how strange that was and continued on my way thinking that it could have been someone else down there messing with me.
I had to go back down there the next night and this time something felt different. There was a strange stir in the air and I hate to admit it but it felt as if I were being followed. What ever this feeling was I couldn't shake it. I make my way back to the area where I'd seen the shadow the night before, this time no shadow man. I made my way into an area that was like a big hallway and of course it was dark and I wasn't close enough to activate the lights. I stood there for a second looking into the darkness when about mid way down the hall a light comes on, then another and another. So me with my flash light standing ready to swing at whatever was coming down the hall towards me felt a slight cold breeze. The real strange thing was that my co-workers were having similar experiences of seeing shadows and feeling cold gusts of air in places where you shouldn't.
I ended up working there for way to long and in that time I saw the shadow man several more times and felt the cold breeze a lot too.
I've since moved on from that place but I do have a lot more creepy stories about it and other experiences that I've had. But I do wonder sometimes if these things I saw were just tricks of the light or people that meet their end and are still on the job.
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