42 Chilling Stories From Security Guards Who Experienced The Scariest Moments On Duty

I was doing security in a hospital at the time, decided to do the basement patrol with a flashlight for funsies, I was sweeping the light into the offices when I saw a semi-transparent man staring back at me from inside on of the rooms. Well I nearly s**t myself before I realized I had caught my own reflection in the glass because of the flashlight.

I work for a major Cruise Line, part of my night rounds was accounting all the life rings in the open decks (we had an incidents where guests would throw life rings in the ocean just for kicks), while nearing the ship's bridge I pulled out my flashlight so I can see in the dark, but lo and behold there was a white figure standing in the corner near the life ring I was supposed to check, all the hair in my neck and arms rose as I stood frozen for a few seconds, only to realize it was deck officer in his white uniform making a phone call on his ship phone staring at me grinning like an idiot, knowing too well that he startled me. Alessio if you're on reddit, screw your Italian a*s man.

I worked swing shift (3-midnight) security at a ski resort. Every night when my shift ended I had to walk down the mountain to the bus stop to catch the last bus of the day to get home. It was about a 15 minute walk from the security office to the bus stop, it was thick woods on either side of the road and no streetlights, it was always dark as s**t. A pack of like coyote lived in the woods and every night on my walk they would circle me the whole way to the bus stop. I'd hear them making spooky noises, I'd see their eye shine through the trees, every once and a while I'd see one running across the road ahead of or behind me.

I was security for a large office building/warehouse, every shift had to do tours of the building. I was on the night shift, so I did the tour around 11pm or midnight. First thing that creeped me out one night was that I swore I heard someone running up the fire exit stairs. I opened the door found no one, I went back and pulled tape since each fire stairwell door has a camera right outside of it. I pulled an hour did not see anyone go in or out of the stairwell. The one incident that made me end my tour early one night was an administrative assistant had a Staples "That was easy" button on her desk that went off by it self. When I got up to that floor I saw lights were left on, which is totally normal thing to happen. As I got closer to the assistant's desk the lights shut off, I got such a weird feeling like someone was there. I went over to the area and announced myself to see if any employees were there working late, I got no response and saw no one. I started to walk away and the button went off right near me, I was not walking anymore lol. The assistant's desk was right under a camera and I pulled tape as well, did not see anyone that time either. I work on the day shift now lol.

First job as a security guard, I was patrolling a big factory when I started hearing a metallic "clang" repeatedly like every 5 seconds). Sound was really loud and at night, being isolated, it was pretty scary. I investigated and found nothing. Back to the guard post, I tell the story to my colleague, and he laughs at me, thinking that I exaggerated the story. Next day, same thing happens, except this time I radio my colleague so he can hear the sound. He started to panic a bit too, that s**t was definitely unusual. For days we kept hearing the same stuff without finding what it was, until one day, I noticed a partially detached pipe banging against a metallic plate...

The sound was just as loud as a fork put down on a plate, but was amplified like crazy thanks to the structure of the building.


Same job, one night I spotted a humanoid shadow passing quickly in front of me. Getting a grip, I decided to follow it, but immediately lost it (it was the same building as before btw). I called my colleague, as there was a maintenance team on night shift, and they are supposed to warn us if they enter certain buildings as they are under alarm. My colleague wasn't aware of that, decided to verify...and it was them, they just figured it wasn't worth the call as they didn't enter a zone that was under alarm...

Thing that made this creapier : I was only carrying a s****y flashlight that barely light up to 5m.

I don't know what was the story behind this one but. I once found a random finger on the road... A real human finger with the bone still inside. I immediately reported this and quit later on.

My uncle 's been a security guard for one of the biggest national childrens hospitals for a good couple years. He said the creepiest thing he's ever witnessed wasn't any phenomena, but that one patrol night past 3AM a woman ran out of one of the buildings bawling about her lost infant in the middle of the courtyard. Her cries were so loud and haunting even the neighbors close to the area still talk about it from time to time.

Not me, but my husband. He works security at a hospital. Let me tell ya, mental illness is no joke. He had to restrain a patient who was running down the halls naked, covered in blood, while ripping at the sutures on his neck. Why did he have sutures on his neck? Because he had tried to SAW off his own head with a handsaw.

I do security in a high security building. Every room and corridor is locked so you have to use a key card to get around. My card naturally has all access. I was alone at a late shift and the next guard will arrive in approx an hour. I did my round like usual and eventually got to this corridor. Scanned my card. Red light. What. I tried the door behind me. Red. I'm locked inside. This floor has no windows. I scan again in hope that it was just a mistake, no, red light. I get my phone, no signal.

I was locked inside a small corridor for almost 2 hours because somehow my keycard stopped working and I lost signal.

I was working an extremely remote warehouse site, where the guard shack (literally a shack) was at the back bays hardly anyone ever used.

Of course it was the overnight shift, 11pm - 7 am, that I had to work there. There was one grimy 3 foot x 3 foot window to peer out of - into nothing.

Like, literally nothing. A huge, empty, flat, field devoid of anything.

I sat there with a tony lamp reading a book when I heard this weird scraping noise and breathing. I went on RED ALERT and clicked off the lamp to assess the situation.

Again, scraping, and soft padded footsteps.

I readied my pepper spray first and quietly opened the door behind me. Nothing was directly behind the door (which exited towards the warehouse), so I crept to the front of the shack, peered around the corner and...

...came face to face with a big ole honking deer.

I know, funny now, but it wasn't then.

Omfg I forgot the one that actually did happen to me!

I work a large power infrastructure site with heavy security, alarms all over the place, armed guards, and cctv cameras covering d**n near every inch. Our cameras automatically track motion. Anytime anything moves on camera the software renders a colored line box around the object with a little squiggly line tracer trailing off of it showing where it's path so you can tell at a glance if anything is moving on screen and from/to where.

One night I came on duty and the off going shift told me and my partner they had done several patrols the night before and everything was clear. Then the last one they came around a corner and found a f*****g doll standing right in the path of where he normally walks by. Freaked him out. So he kicks it off to the side and carries on. Weird that it's here at all though since it's a fairly industrial site.

So I go on my first patrol and sure enough there's the doll right where he said he left it.

Over the next several days the doll disappears and reappears at different locations in the same area. And not over the day shifts when there's people around but in the middle of the night when there's no one on property but security.

Well one night I do my patrol and, sure enough, fix the location of our creepy doll guest. Later that night I'm in the control room with my partner and I pick up a motion trace on the camera pointing at that area. Now where the doll was was just a little too far away, and the camera resolution a little too low, and the lighting a little too dark to actually be able to see the doll.

But none the less we're getting the hud for a motion trace on screen in real time and where both watching eyes glued to the screen, jaws on the floor just about. Now this motion trace stars exactly where I saw the doll on my patrol. And the bounding box is about the size of. A doll. We can't actually see anything moving but we watch this trace wander around the area, then go off screen and disappear.

Next patrol. No doll.

So that was a fun week. Our guest has moved on though and it's back to boring around here thank god. D**n if we didn't all wanna f*****g shoot that thing though.

I scared the bananas out of a guard by accident once, I felt really bad about it.

We had a cook returning to our kitchen after being off due to injury. The night before he was to return, we stuffed his uniform, mounted it up on the table, turned off the lights and went home. The cook who came back thought it was hilarious, the guard - we forgot about and who walked through the restaurant alone in the middle of the night - politely asked us not to do that again.

Doing site work out in the countryside and had two other lads on shift with me at an old university site, shut down, was in the process of being sold but still required us to keep it from being smashed up.

We've got one guy down the road in a cabin watching the road while me and the other guy are in the main building, watching cameras and talking s**t, as you do and then we here this shrieking outside. We went out, it sounded like a kid or something screaming out and it's not the first time kids have wandered onto the site and snuck into the building. We're super worried because obviously none of us want to deal with kids after they've impaled themselves on a fence or something so we've ran out and tried to find where the racket is coming from.

Let me be clear, it's like 1am, cold and foggy and most of the site lights had been turned off as the buildings were no longer used and we're hearing this shrieking, whatever it is it sounds bad and as we're getting closer me and the other fella are dreading what we're about to walk into, it sounds like someone is getting m******d at this point.

Foxes. F*****g foxes banging in the trees just beyond our perimeter, as we saw them they stopped what they were doing and darted but jesus christ it s**t us all up. If you've never heard them before, try and find it on google or something but it's pretty unnerving.

Ayyyy my time to shine.

Head of security at an industrial facility here. Disappearing people are an interesting one. Watching someone I don’t recognize walk around a random area outside that nobody should generally be walking around, they go to move to the next camera zone.....they’re gone. There are no doors or anything they could’ve gone it.

One of my guards had a really good one. He’s a tough old hillbilly, not much scares him. We have this long hallway with motion sensor lights every few feet or so that click on as someone walks under them. Well, it was Christmas Day a few years ago, he was totally alone in the plant, and he starts walking down this hallway. From the other end, the lights start clicking on as if someone is walking under them, but nobody is there. He got a little unnerved, but went ahead and yelled “HEY WHAT THE HELL YA DOIN” which is is go to “something is suspicious” line. Nothing and nobody there.

Other than that, we’ve got this office hallway. Our office is right outside of it, off of the lobby. When you’re there and there’s nobody else, you’ll hear doors slamming and stuff from that hallway. The lights will click on on their own, stuff like that. I’m used to it now, but I can’t explain it.

I worked at a state correctional facility for juveniles. One night, while I was working a boys unit overnight, we got a call over our radios to do a physical headcount. No big deal, we do them several times a shift, usually means someone important is doing random checks on campus and they want to be extra careful. I count my kids, call it in and go about my business. Not 10 minutes later we get a second request for another physical headcount. I’m thinking dang, someone can’t count. But then we get a 3rd call, and everyone is starting to feel nervous about it.

A few hours later when our on-duty supervisor came to look over our dorm, we asked him wtf was going on with the physical headcounts. Apparently a nurse had looked out one of the windows of the infirmary and had seen an inmate very clearly running around the soccer field. She said the figure went behind a building and disappeared so she called it in. Pretty f*****g wild. No cameras pointing in that direction to confirm if she did actually see what she thought she did, but we all didn’t really like the vibe of the campus already so her experience did not help lol.

I’ve been working security for almost 15 years now, so I’ve had plenty of minor incidents. The worst is when you’re checking a building and can hear that there’s someone else in there with you but you can’t find them.

My first security job was student security at a college. We’d be out at night on campus in the more populated areas, offering walking escorts and calling in suspicious activity. We always had someone on shift around the quad, etc. but it was a great job because you could show up pretty much any time and they’d let you work extra hours. When we had more people on shift, they’d start assigning us to more remote places on campus to keep us spread out.

So I’m working one night with a lot of other students and I’m assigned to patrol an area way out on the edge of campus in pretty much the middle of nowhere. It was around the college observatory, so as far away from other buildings as possible to cut down on light pollution. As I’m walking the road around the observatory, I hear something in the woods off to my right. I look and see the eye shine of something staring at me.

It’s big, because it’s looking back at me right at eye level.

I grab my mag light and point it over to see who/what it is.

Immediately about 40 more pairs of eyes light up in the trees behind it.

Freaked me out so much I can’t even remember at what point I realized it was a herd of deer.

I volunteered at a children's museum for a while, I would basically just watch the rooms and make sure nothing bad happened that required calling up for first aid etc. One time the power went out so of course we evacuated, and once all the children were out they asked me to sweep the entire building top to bottom to make sure there wasn't anyone left. It's amazing how much more sinister a fun indoor play area is when you're crawling around inside it in the dark as an adult. Definitely felt like I was at the start of a horror movie.

I've got one but it's a bit morbid I'm afraid.

So I was new the security game, and had only worked as a fill in guy for the first few months. My boss called and asked me to fill in a few days and nights at a farm machine factory, the security company before had withdrawn from the contract, leaving who I worked for to take it over. I get to the premises and take over from the night guard, he was really young looking, must of just turned 18, turns out he was even more new to the company than I was. I ask him how it's going, small talk, the normal and he tells me that something is weird about a certain area of the factory and that he hears a slight gargling sound, so he checks that area quick. We laugh it off and I go on with my first day shift.

First night shift:
When doing patrols you had to punch a ticket to prove you had done your checks. I get to the area the kid said about the feeling (although I had forgotten his story) and go to punch my ticket and I can just feel someone is right behind me turn around with my torch (it's darker than batman) and nothing, just the feeling.

Second night:
Same spot, pitch black. Doing the first checks of the night. I hear the ticket punch machine do its thing, I shine my torch, nothing. I walk up to punch out and hear a quite gargling sound coming from the middle of the factory floor. I just plain s**t my pants and book it out of there.

Third (and final) night:
Same place, pitch black, first checks, hear sounds, shine torch, nothing, shine torch in the direction I'm walking, something. I don't know what but as soon as I saw it, it was gone. Book it out again with the gargling sound emitting behind me.

I was done. Told my boss the truth, that the place scared the s**t out of me and that theres some very weird stuff going down. He then thought it would be a good idea to inform me that the company that withdrew from the contract did so because their security guard was k**led by having his throat slit while on patrol of the factory. Never went back.

Got a call from the head that one of the two of us needed to head to a different location. We decided I would go. Couple hours pass and we get a call the guy, I was with initially, hadnt done his check in and wasn't answering. I figured he went to sleep so I offered to go back and check, try and save his job if he had just nodded off. I found his car empty and running, door open and he was gone. Started to look around the immediate area and found his radio and phone half smashed. Long story short I backed out of there and called it in. They called the police. The police found him hogtied and hurt and a whole bunch of metal gone. Not too long after the police arrested a group of guys trying to do the same thing with a stolen uhaul.

Back when I was a guard I was working some Christmas parties. Basically making sure no one took their drinks outside. I sat at a table by the door all night unless anything crazy happened. This guy would come out and talk to me frequently. He was super friendly but more and more intoxicated each time he returned. Offered me a joint at one point which I turned down. The last time he came out his friendly tone was gone. He was monotone and looked super serious. Came up to me and said "how f****d up is life? It could just end at any time." I basically said yeah man crazy. Then dead a*s serious says 'think about it. I could pull a gun and shoot you in the f*****g head right now if I wanted to". Then just gave me a cold as f**k look and walked away. Didn't see him again. Gave me real creepy vibes.