I used to work as a custodian at a middle school for almost five years, and I was usually on the overnight shift.

I would clock in around 10 at night and stay until right before the sun came up, when the buses started pulling in.

At first, I actually liked the job.

I didn't have to deal with the kids running down the hallways, teachers complaining about stuff, or anyone really.

The quiet didn't bother me, and I liked being left alone to do my work.

But as time went on, I started to notice how different the school felt at night compared

to during the day.

It wasn't just quiet. It felt dead.

The building creaked and groaned like it was breathing, and when you're the only person

in there, even the smallest sound will set you on edge.

You'd hear a locker pop open on its own, or the pipes

knocking in the walls, and your brain would make you think it was footsteps. I learned to ignore

a lot of that, but one part of the school I never really got used to was the basement. The school

was old, built in the 1950s, and the basement ran underneath half of it. It wasn't finished

nicely like the classrooms. It was a concrete maze of storage rooms and long, narrow halls

with pipes and wires hanging overhead. Some of the rooms were full of old desks, some had boxes

of outdated textbooks, others had broken furniture stacked up. It always smelled damp

and musty down there. The fluorescent lights buzzed and flickered when they even worked at all.

A lot of the time you had to bring a flashlight just to see where you were going.

When I first started, one of the older custodians told me to avoid the basement unless I absolutely

had to go down there.

He said it wasn't worth the trouble and joked that it was haunted.

...