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Strange Things
I:
Never had the opportunity to write about something creepy as it's happening... and it's definitely not at all what you'd expect. I'm in my office building right now, broad daylight, open windows, sunny outside, coworkers sort of nearby... but I sit closest to the back entrance of the building, which is comprised of two automatically opening double doors made of glass.
The outer glass doors slide open if anyone walks near them. The inner ones are always locked and someone has to walk up and use a remote to open them for visitors, as there are very few walk-ins at a financial company like ours. We're also in the back of an office park, so the area is very nice and filled with tall trees, but very lonely and empty. Directly outside the back entrance, an old-growth forest stretches away for miles.
I was inspired to start writing about what I've seen today after it happened for a third time, just now. Twice today, once at around 8 am, and once at 10 am, I saw the outer doors open spontaneously. I am the only one that can see them from where I sit, and I'm partially hidden behind a plant that I put up in my cubicle so the rare visitor wouldn't see me and assume I was a secretary or something. I've worked here for a year, and never seen those doors open by themselves... but that's not the weird part.
All three times today that I've seen this happen, a few moments later the inner doors clinked against their locking mechanism and I could see them split apart about a quarter of an inch - as far as the lock allowed. I've now sat here and watched the phenomenon three times, and these doors are completely transparent, so I can see that nobody's there...
Each time, I also felt overwhelming fear and the urge to hide in the corner of my cubicle behind the obscuring plant. At first I chalked it up to playing along with my inner child, but I realize now that I felt the inexplicable fear at the first occurrence, too... before I knew something weird was happening. It's like my animal brain is terrified of something over there, something testing the doors, something looking in through the glass... something from the dim forest behind the building, testing the edges of civilization, looking in on another world...
II:
I've never experienced something creepy yet truly unexplainable, so this morning I decided to investigate what happened yesterday. My first instinct, of course, was to check the door from the inside when I first arrived. I thought that some sort of air pressure or mechanical failure might have caused the doors to attempt to open on their own, though the powerful fear and urge to hide was still inexplicable.
I pried the inner doors open to their limit while locked, the same quarter inch I'd seen yesterday. They were heavy enough that I can't accept air pressure as the cause... two sets of sealed glass doors simply wouldn't respond to pressure fluctuations by opening sideways... and the outer doors slid open by sensor activation yesterday, not by force. The problem, of course, is that I saw nothing at the doors that would have activated them one time, let alone three. Also, looking up - the mechanisms for each door were separate. Mechanical failure on one should have had no effect on the other.
I wasn't prepared to actually open the doors yet, as I still felt lingering traces of the unexplainable fear from yesterday. Instead, I opted to look through the glass and see what I could of the lonely back area that I'd never actually been in. As I expected, I could see a bit of old sidewalk and some grass that ended abruptly at a towering wall of old-growth trees about twenty feet away from my building. I was a bit relieved at seeing the cut grass, as that meant someone had to go back there and mow it every week or so...
As I stood there, I began to feel uncomfortable. The trees seemed to crowd closer with gloom, and I found myself staring into the thick underbrush. I had the strangest impression that I was seeing fragments of movement among the thick leaves, but couldn't pinpoint anything concrete in the seemingly motionless thicket. I'd most closely relate the sensation to that felt when looking at an illusory motion image. The vertigo passed after a few moments. This was around 8 AM, the time of the first door incident yesterday. Nothing else happened at that time, but it occurred to me that, standing in the door as I was, I was highly visible from a distance.
That realization, of course, inspired me to watch the doors more discretely at 10 AM, the time of yesterday's second incident. I watched the doors intently, but nothing happened for a long while... until my vigil was interrupted by a loud impact on glass, as if something had bounced off of a nearby window. It sounded like it came from a little further down the side of the building, rather than the door. I did check each of the darkly tinted office windows in the nearby back hallways, but none showed any signs of damage. Not the same event as yesterday, but the timing was oddly coincidental...
The third incident yesterday happened around 3 PM. Today, the third incident convinced me that something really might be happening... I was walking the back halls around that time, hoping to see or hear the thud from earlier, when I felt that familiar fear that I should run and hide. There was nothing between me and the outside but a series of long windows... but they were tinted, and should look like nothing but reflections from the outside. I fought the urge to run away, and instead ever so slowly approached the windows. The apprehension in me was a powerful single note that kept rising the closer that I got... but when I stopped moving inches from the glass, it did not. The fear rose to an almost unbearable level, and then... leveled off at just below total panic.
Confused, I looked back and forth, scrutinizing the shaded sidewalk and grass while my heart pounded painfully. The treeline towered closer here, covering the corner of the building in gloom. It seemed like a perfectly ordinary day outside, yet looking out there made me feel slightly disoriented, like the illusory-motion feeling from before... and then I understood what I was feeling. If I was unconsciously reacting to the presence of something outside, I knew now why the feeling had leveled off... it had stopped moving.
Right in front of me.
I'd been staring right at it...
I, of course, leapt away like a startled animal and bolted to my desk, while the uncontrollable fear faded with distance. I huddled here, hiding, for the remainder of the day. Now I'm sitting here trying to think it through - my coworkers all left 15 minutes ago, at 5 PM. I still haven't seen anything unexplainable. Maybe I'm just playing to my own fears. Still, I feel watched... circled... as if something out there in the woods is trying to figure out a way in...
III:
I used some of my Memorial Weekend to further investigate what’s been happening, and I found some interesting facts. The geography behind my building involves a few miles of heavy forest, struck through by a large abrupt canyon – a feature that Ohio residents are probably familiar with. The canyon causes a natural ‘wedge’ between developed areas, and on the other side of this untouched wilderness is a major construction site.
My initial theory was that infrasound from that construction site caused the things I experienced last week. There are articles that detail how infrasound can cause unexplainable fear and other sensations, and perhaps infrasound had something to do with the spontaneous opening of the doors. The loud impact on one of the windows still went unexplained, but that could have been anything.
Tuesday’s events made me question the simplicity of my answer. Confident in my explanation, I walked the back hallways at 8 AM. I felt the inexplicable fear as I expected, and could even detect the illusory motion sensation again when I looked out at the trees. I paced along the tinted windows, feeling the invisible wellspring of fear and vertigo seem to follow me… keeping step with me just beyond the glass. I felt intensely watched, despite knowing that the windows should only show a reflection from the outside.
Even knowing that it was just a reaction to infrasound, the fear was still very real, and hard to handle. I decided to overcome it once and for all by stepping outside during the 10 AM event. When the fear and vertigo came, and it began to follow me along the back windows again, I walked down to the side doo
r usually used by maintenance. It was metal and rectangular, and had a traditional handle. The fear was more muted here away from the windows, but I could still feel it, and my thoughts ran through all sorts of horrible things that could be on the other side of the door.
Still, I knew there was nothing out there. Even if there was, it’s not like it could have even seen me to follow me as I imagined it had been doing. I was about to open the outwardly-locked door when something occurred to me… the windows were only reflective from a distance. Up close, they could be seen through. Something up against the glass could have been staring right at me the entire time… so I hesitated.
The door shook.
I ran back down the hallway in a panic and watched it from around a corner. I watched the handle in intense fear – real fear this time – but nothing further happened. The more my thoughts analyzed the sound, the more I became convinced that it was the same impact I had heard on a window last week… and it had come from outside. I was careful to stay away from the windows during the 3 PM event, but I heard another impact on that same door around that time.
Today, Wednesday, I stayed at my desk through the first half of the day. I felt slight waves of fear at 8 and 10, but I couldn’t be sure if it was my imagination. I spent the entire day configuring ideas in my head, trying to make sense of things. I couldn’t accept infrasound as the cause of physical impacts… but certain symptoms of what I was experiencing definitely matched. I finally came up with something that got past my cynical mental armor and actually shocked me to my core.
What if there really is some sort of entity out there in the woods? The area is completely undeveloped, rarely traveled, and heavily forested… something old or strange could certainly exist there. What if the infrasound symptoms I’m experiencing aren’t from the construction a few miles away, but from the entity itself, and it’s being driven out of its natural habitat by the construction’s infrasound pollution?
Whatever it is, it doesn’t seem to understand what a building is, as it hasn’t tried other sides of the structure yet – like the front doors – but it does seem to have a sort of animal intellect, enough to understand that I am something alive inside some sort of shelter… and it’s trying to get inside. At today’s 3 PM event, I stood at the two sets of glass double doors that originally opened by themselves last week, and watched the forest.
I stood there, in what was probably a very stupid move, and felt the fear and vertigo approach. As terrifying as the result of that move was, I now know for sure that something more is going on. As I stood there, watching empty space that made me feel heady, the outer doors slid open of their own accord. Last week, the inner doors were then pulled apart as far as their short locking mechanism allowed.
This time… they didn’t move.
The outer doors stayed open for almost two minutes. I felt paralyzed, struck through by my painfully beating heart, but I continued to stare at the nothing that was standing there staring back at me. I feel that somewhere in that long moment was a clear declaration of intent on both our parts… acknowledgement that the game of cat and mouse we’d been playing had just gotten serious. Then, the fear faded, and the doors slid closed again. That was an hour ago.
I’m engaged in this now. I’ve never believed in anything strange or paranormal – not for real – but now I’m dead certain something is happening. I’m going to look into getting a camera and audio equipment, and I’m going to try to collect actual evidence on this. There’s nothing more to say for now, except that I feel like I’m going to war.
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Investigator’s note:
No further writings were found.