Story 251 (Creepypasta): The Department on the Fifth Floor

"Humor me for a second," Jessie said as she perched herself on the corner of my desk. "Tell me everything you know about the people on the fifth floor." That's what's burned into my head, that moment. She was wearing this fuzzy sweater, a bubblegum-pink eyesore that should have looked terrible but somehow came across as almost classy on her. It was no wonder most of the guys in the office had asked her out - which was probably why she hung out with me all the time. I was safe. I had a serious girlfriend (now my wife) and wouldn't have hit on a coworker anyway. My girlfriend never met Jessie, but always referred to her as my "work wife". She kinda was, it was platonic but also just... very familiar. I miss it a lot. Now I just have that moment that replays itself in my head, Jessie asking me to humor her and reflexively brushing a hand past her ear as if to tuck back the long brown hair that she had cut short a week before. Smiling, happy and a little excited, wanting to know about the fifth floor.

And I didn't know anything. Fifth floor was marketing overflow on the northeast corner, but the rest was behind a badge reader. I leaned back, trying to think, and Jessie's smile got bigger - it was clear this was the entertainment for the day (actually doing our jobs required a fraction of our attention). I knew I could ask someone higher up in the company, but that would ruin the game so I pulled up an org chart instead. One by one I went through the departments - HR on sixth, treasury on third - checking them off. Nobody - other than the aforementioned corner with a few undesirables from Marketing - was on the fifth floor. "Maybe it's leased out like that suite on the first floor, or maybe it's vacant?"
"It's not leased out," she said as she leaned back and looked around to see if anyone was listening, "because it's past the outer doors which means you have to be an employee here to get in. And it's not vacant. There are desks in there."
I hadn't even considered that she had already been inside, but it turned out she had come into the office just after four in the morning that day ("long story involving my engine catching on fire, I'll tell you about it later" she said - though of course she never did) and she got off the elevator at the wrong floor. The cleaning people were just leaving that area, and being a bit impulsive she had ducked in. Jessie hadn't looked around long, not wanting to get in trouble, but on her way out she had left a ball of paper in the stairwell door so it wouldn't latch.

So that was what we did with ourselves to avoid work. We waited until the stairwell was clear, pulled the door open, and pocketed the ball of paper as it fell out of the doorframe. I remember that I held the door open and gestured for her to go in first, making an exaggerated sweeping motion with my arm. She nodded and even mimed a curtsy before heading in. We thought we were so fucking cute. We were partially hidden by a fake plant and the desk closest to the stairwell was completely empty, no computer or anything, so we felt safe taking a look around. We could see down an aisle of cubicles - they were the same kind that had been on the third floor before the big remodel, beige fabric walls and grey desktops with little whiteboards and rolling file cabinets. There wasn't anyone sitting at any of the desks, but we could hear voices somewhere nearby.

Jessie looked nervous and wanted to head right for the main exit, just looking at whatever she could spot on her way by, but I felt confident we wouldn't get caught and wouldn't be in much trouble if we were so I wanted to snoop some. We compromised, making a wide loop around the main block of cubicles. I could still hear voices, the usual background murmurs of an office. Talking, typing, the occasional laugh. A phone ringing. But it was all at the other end of the office, with the cubes near us abandoned - not like the empty one by the stairwell, they had personal items and plants and things - but the computers were a bit outdated, with the big chunky monitors, and the calendars I spotted were from 1997 even though at this point it was May of 2004. It was like a corporate archaeological site, a preserved snapshot of the past. Nothing was so old that it was crazy to see it there - other than the calendars - but it was all just old enough to be strange.

By the time our loop reached the far side of the office, over near a tiny break room, something was bothering me. We stopped, silent for a moment, and then we realized what the problem was and I got goosebumps down my arms. I don't remember if one of us actually asked the other out loud, but we both knew the question - where were the people we could hear talking? All those little noises were coming from somewhere, but we had circled the area without seeing anyone and now all those sounds seemed to be in the direction we had come from. I cut across the middle of the room, not waiting for Jessie, and mid-way there I could hear talking on all sides of me. Like before it was muffled, just too far away to make out words. I turned, looking in all directions. "Hello?" I called, "Is anyone here? Hello?" There was no response.

I turned to call to Jessie, but I didn't see her. Jessie wasn't tall and the older style cubicles had higher walls than the new ones, but I still should have been able to see her head over the tops. I called out to her, walked along looking down every aisle, looked into the break room. I thought she might have gone out through the main door, but decided that she had done it to mess with me and so I went to leave by the stairwell instead - I pictured her lurking out front, laughing because she knew I was spooked, and I didn't want to give her the satisfaction. When I got to the stairwell door I took one last look over the mysterious department - I hadn't actually figured out which department it was supposed to be - and noticed something.

That desk, the one that I was certain was empty just minutes earlier when we arrived, had a computer and personal items on it. And a pink sweater draped over the chair. I looked closer and there was a picture pinned to the cubicle wall of Jessie holding a slice of birthday cake, surrounded by smiling people. It was clearly taken right there on the 5th floor and I didn't recognize any of the people as working at our company - I almost didn't recognize Jessie either, since her hair was longer than it had been even before her recent haircut. There were some other items, similar but not quite the same as the ones on her real desk. The calendar (October 1997) had her handwriting on it, as did a notepad sitting next to the keyboard. I felt like I should be laughing. It seemed so absurd, that she would somehow go to all that trouble to play a prank on me. But it didn't feel like a prank, and I couldn't bring myself to laugh. Instead I just stood there, straining to hear her voice in that distant murmur.

I left after a moment, went back to my desk and stared at my inbox for the rest of the day. I wiggled the mouse just often enough to keep the computer from going to sleep but otherwise I did nothing. I went home in a trance, told my girlfriend not to come over because I wasn't feeling well (which almost backfired, since she wanted to come and make me soup and pamper me) and crashed in my bed almost immediately. The next morning it all felt like a dream. When I got to work Jessie's desk was cleaned out, and my boss said he was told she had to transfer to another location due to "family issues". I couldn't get any more information about it, and despite how close we were at work I didn't know any of her friends or family to follow up on it. I quit a few months later, without having gone back to the fifth floor. Every few years I try to look her up, on Facebook or LinkedIn or whatever. I never have found her, but on the other hand I've never seen a missing person story pop up either.

So I tell myself it's fine, that it was an elaborate prank. I picture her, from that morning, sliding onto my desk and saying "Humor me for a second" and ask myself if she could have planned it, if she could have somehow gotten the help she would have needed to pull that off. I remember her in that terrible sweater, smiling, asking me about the fifth floor like this was all a great game - and I hope to god that that's what it was. I just don't believe it.

Story 248 (Creepypasta): Sometimes I'm Somewhere Else

I'm writing this on my phone, hunched over a table in a Nebraska Starbucks, so please forgive me for any typos. My laptop is about a thousand miles away right now so I don't have a lot of options. I'll probably have to get a room at the Quality Inn right outside, so I guess I could use their business center.

I'm sorry I'm rambling. I don't really want to get to the point, it's going to make me sound like a crazy person. It's possible I really am crazy of course, though I don't think so. And it's possible that my problem - the most immediate part of the problem anyway - will just fix itself. That's why I'm at a Starbucks, actually.

Here goes: I don't have any fucking idea how I got here. This started a long time ago I think, back when I was maybe eight. I remember we went to a restaurant and I got up to use the bathroom, but when I came back out everything was different. Different tables, different customers, different decorations. I just stood there and stared for a bit, then walked outside. Across the parking lot I could see the correct restaurant, with my mom's old station wagon parked out front. I ran over and found my family and didn't tell anyone. What would I have said?

There were other times. I got onto the correct bus at the end of the day once during my sophomore year but after a while realized it was on a different route, and when I looked around I saw blue eagles on the school jackets and folders the kids had. I wasn't just on the wrong bus, it was a bus from the wrong school entirely. Again, I didn't tell anyone. I had minor incidents, ones that might have been my imagination. I would go for a walk and end up too far away from home. I would turn down an aisle 9 in the grocery store even though I had just left aisle 23. One time I got drunk and ended up in the wrong bar. Those ones were all easy to shrug off.

The thing that was always the same, that it took me a little time to notice since it didn't happen very often, is that I was always tired afterwards. I would get "lost" and then feel weary, like I had just worked out. After I noticed I got paranoid, and whenever I suddenly felt tired I would look around in a panic. There were plenty of times I hadn't moved, though. I decided I was just seeing patterns where there were none, and went on ignoring the "glitches" as I thought of them. I almost posted to Reddit about this once before, but had one of those sudden feelings of exhaustion right in the middle of it and lost my train of thought so I just went to bed instead - and then in the light of morning it seemed too crazy. I deleted it all.

I've been tired a lot, lately, even though as far as I can tell I've only glitched out a few times. I ended up on the wrong level of the parking garage last week, and left a different conference room than I had entered a bit before that. Nothing extreme. But I was tired all the time, and I got a few comments on it. My coworkers told me to get more sleep, and Ian - who is particularly blunt - told me to go shower and shave. He wasn't wrong, it was like I had stayed up all night in my office even though I had actually only been there for forty-five minutes.

All this I could handle. It was worse than when I was a kid, gets a little worse every year, but it's not the end of the world. But then about an hour ago I got on the elevator at work and as the doors shut I noticed it was all wrong. The elevator was dingy, and it only had buttons for two floors. I assumed I was somehow in an elevator in a parking garage, but when I pushed the door open button I found myself at a Quality Inn somewhere in North Platte Nebraska. My work is in Phoenix Arizona.

It's never been this bad. Never. I've moved maybe a hundred feet most times - a few were probably further but even then it couldn't have been more than a few miles. This was at least a thousand. My phone was dead somehow, but that's been happening a lot lately so I had a recharger. I got it started back up and called my boss, let him know I wasn't feeling well and left early. He was surprised since he had just been talking to me and I seemed fine - as far as he's concerned he spoke to me right before my noon meeting which means either I hallucinated that phone call or I'm not crazy. It's not physically possible to get this far that fast, not even on a plane.

I came to the Starbucks partly because it was right outside the Quality Inn, and partly because I had the thought that with Starbucks all looking the same it might be easier for me to get back. I mean, I go from a bathroom to another bathroom - a hospital room to another hospital room (don't ask), a bus to a bus. If it's going to happen anywhere a place like this should be the easiest. The thing is, I've never done it on purpose before and the more I think about it the more I think I don't want to. I used the bathroom right after I got here, and I've got a good three days’ worth of stubble on my face (I don't grow beards well so that's not as much as you might be picturing). I'm not just tired but almost ready to collapse, and my feet feel like they have blisters. When I connected to the Starbucks wifi, my phone said it was backing up my photos - I looked and there's just a picture of a long dark tunnel (I can upload it if you need but it doesn't really show much of anything). It says it was taken at 4:37pm today, but it's not that late yet.

So I'm thinking maybe it only seems like I just around instantly. Maybe I'm actually going somewhere, spending time there, and then returning - and it's just that I don't always come back to the right place. Why else would my phone keep suddenly being out of charge? Why do I need to shave? Why am I so tired? I think that photo was taken about three and a half hours after I vanished out of an elevator at work, and then I was there long enough for the battery to finish dying. Maybe much longer than that. Days, probably. I don't feel hungry, I could use a shower but I don't think I smell bad enough for it to be that long. It doesn't totally add up.

I don't really care about that part though. Mainly what I'm worried about is the question of what happens to my memories of that place. If I'm right, if I'm going somewhere, do I forget afterwards? Or am I not aware in the first place? Is someone - something - in control of me? And yet, I have to hope it happens again and takes me home. Maybe I'll crash at the Quality Inn instead, then rent a car in the morning and start driving. I don't know what I'll do if this keeps happening. Will it keep getting worse? Will I appear on the wrong side of the planet, with grey hair and tattered clothes? I think there's nothing I can do but hope it all turns out okay somehow.

I just did it again. I had finished this post, everything up to the paragraph above, and was trying to decide if I really should submit it. Once I put this out there it's admitting that I'm probably crazy, or worse - if I'm not crazy that something that can't be understood is happening to me. I was stalling, and got up to buy one of those muffins that always look so much better than they actually are. I paid the barista, and then when I turned to go to my table I was at the far end of the Starbucks. The barista didn't seem to notice. I was still holding the muffin but it's moldy and crushed, like I clenched it in my fist. My wallet had been in my other hand and was gone, so I reached into my pocket and it was there along with something else - a torn sheet of thick yellow paper, with a few words written in what I hope is ink but smells like the inside of an abandoned sushi restaurant. 'DONT TALK ABOUT IT' is all it says, no explanation or even punctuation.

So maybe I shouldn't post this. I'm thinking about the other time I was going to post this, where I glitched out and then felt too tired to keep going. Was that a coincidence, or was something trying to make me change my mind? But that photo of the tunnel, and the thick black 'ink' on that paper - both fill me with dread somehow, the same feeling as that time I found bloody tooth in my jacket pocket. I haven't thought about that in a decade, but now I'm wondering again where it came from. Fuck it. This is something I have to do. If whatever is behind this is evil, so be it. Better to get my story out there. And if I'm crazy, or if I wrote the note myself... I'll cross that bridge when I come to it. I just can't think about this anymore, not by myself. Wish me luck.

Story 247 (Creepypasta): The Tunnel Behind the Wall

A little background: Pretty much as soon as I turned eighteen I started saving up for a house, I guess just because it was a thing I felt like I was supposed to do to count as an actual adult. But the prices just kept going up and up, faster than I could save money, and eventually I gave up and spent it all on other things. That's why when the housing market finally crashed I still couldn't get the kind of house I wanted. I had to settle for a smaller, older, fixer-upper way outside of Phoenix. Still, it was a nice property and the house backed right into what a lot of us here in the Phoenix area call mountains but reasonable people in the rest of the country would probably call a pointy hill.

The house was two stories, which isn't common for older places in Arizona and especially not for out in the desert, and the lower level was partially underground due to the slope of the "mountain". That meant it stayed much cooler than it otherwise would have but I also think it was to blame for the scorpion infestation. The walls were covered in that awful dark faux-wood paneling that I associate with 1970s rec rooms for some reason, and when one of the panels popped out a bit I wasn't sad because I thought that might give me the needed motivation to replace it all. I tried to press it down but could feel that there was damage of some sort. Pulling it away, it was clear that the drywall behind it had pushed into the room, and through the hole I could see a void. Now I was worried that some wild animal had made a den in some crawlspace between my house and the mountain and was scratching at the wall.

I cleared that side of the room and pulled off the paneling, then cut a section of drywall off so I could get a better look at the space behind. First thing I saw was a metal bar, and then as I pointed a light in I could see it was a concrete tube. It looked like some sort of huge drainage pipe, though I couldn't for the life of me think of why there would be a drainage line - especially one big enough for me to walk down (or at the very least kinda crouch and waddle down) leading into or out of the mountain. I called the city and eventually got through to someone who told me very authoritatively that it wasn't a city works thing and had to have been put in place by a private party who had owned the land.

The house had been foreclosed on so I bought it from the bank after the foreclosure auction didn't get an acceptable bid. My realtor said the person that had it before the bank hadn't actually lived there and had intended to flip it, so that meant the last actual owners were a few steps back. I figured I could go through the title for the house and see if I could get names, I know in theory it's all out there to find but it seemed like a lot of work and my immediate issue was the hole I had left in the wall. I could have repaired the drywall pretty quickly, but in a fit of curiosity I made the hole bigger instead. I borrowed some bolt cutters and removed the padlock and chain that was holding the bars shut and opened the thing up.

There was a layer of dried mud and grass on the bottom, but no actual moisture and no smell. I crouched down and headed inside, flashlight making the concrete walls around me very bright and yet still leaving a circle of total blackness in front of me. I wasn't too spooked yet, and was kinda enjoying the adventure of it. Eventually I came to a fork, and headed to the left where I quickly hit a dead end. There was a circular concrete room, about ten feet across and totally covered by a nest. Dry grass or hay, a shredded blanket, some other bits and pieces I couldn't identify. There was a stuffed animal or maybe a dog toy - a blue bear clearly without any stuffing in it. Just like before, everything seemed dry and there was no smell. I heard something behind me and nearly jumped out of my skin, but when I spun around there was nothing there and I started to wonder if I had imagined it.

Still, there was that other fork to investigate so I headed down it - but that, too, stopped at a circular concrete room. No nest in this one which let me see that the floor was slightly indented towards a tiny little drain in the center which was almost comically small considering the size of the tunnel and room; it wasn't any bigger than a sink drain. There were also some random bits of debris. Some rocks, about one beer bottle's worth of green glass, and a pile of what I thought at first were little white pebbles. I leaned down and got a closer look, and when I saw they were teeth I felt a sense of absolute panic overtake me. I stopped thinking at all, and if I could have run I would have but instead had to settle for a frantic shuffle - banging my head into the top of the tunnel repeatedly.

When I got out, the room was trashed. The television was on the ground, papers from my desk were everywhere, and the door was open. I called the sheriff’s department and a deputy came out, and he looked at me like he had seen a ghost. He walked right past me into the house and looked around like he owned the place, and only snapped out of it once I tapped him on the shoulder. He apologized and said that he hadn't heard anyone bought the house, and I got the distinct feeling that he thought it should have remained vacant but I can't promise that was anything other than my imagination which I think you can imagine was running wild at that point. I told him my whole story, and when I got to the part about the teeth I realized they hadn’t been bloody or anything. They looked like baby teeth that had just fallen out naturally, which was somehow both better and worse than the alternative. The deputy headed into the tunnel and came back later with red-rimmed eyes and a blank expression. "Allergies," he said, but I swear to god he had been crying. He told me to seal it up, and said I must have left the door open and let a coyote in while I was in the tunnel.

I wanted to object to that, but honestly it was the best explanation. Sure, something could have been in there and passed me while I was in the other side of the fork - but the tunnel had no food, no water, and had been closed up for years. There was simply no way there could have been anything living in that tunnel. The deputy left, and as he got into his car I saw something fuzzy and blue peeking out from his pocket. I can't say if it was the stuffed animal for sure because I couldn't bring myself to go back into the tunnel to see if it was still there. I found a padlock I used at the gym and re-chained the entrance, and as fast as I could I put the drywall back up - I even put the hideous faux-wood paneling back on so I could be done faster. I sold the house at a slight loss but nothing too terrible, and tried not to think of it again.

But the part that haunts me is that when I was cleaning up the mess, after the deputy had left and while I was still trying to convince myself everything was fine, I lifted that television off the ground and uncovered a dusty human footprint on the floor.