3 Halloween Mysteries

Generally speaking, ghost hunting television shows tend to enjoy a spike of popularity around the Halloween season and, due to my job as a security guard, I tend to get requests to share spooky stories right around this time.

Now, let me ask you a question. Between a security guard and professional ghost hunter, who do you think has the more difficult job? Below, I will recount to you 3 spooky incidents that happened to myself and other security guards during the night shift. And you can judge for yourself if it would be easier to deal with the spookiness by your lonesome self or when you are being surrounded by a squad of cameramen, lighting technicians and miscellaneous gophers.

#1. The Haunted Bench

In my book, there’s a story about a haunted school where two luckless teenagers had a ghostly encounter with a man in white. I was there at that time and received their complaint about a stranger who was loitering on school grounds. However, after searching through the school in the dark (it was 7pm in the evening), I found no trace of any intruder.

And that, unfortunately, scared the pair of teenagers so much that they promptly resigned from their part-time job that very night. They never returned to the school.

After that incident with the teenagers, my colleague at the school had a spooky encounter of his own. You can read about it here.

He was locking up the place one evening when he saw a girl sitting at one of the benches in the school. All alone. At 8pm in the evening. Well, it’s not an odd occurrence really. Sometimes, students stay back late for one reason or other. Not an odd occurrence at all. EXCEPT this particular girl vanished mysteriously into thin air within seconds and was never seen again.

But what about the haunted bench, you ask? Well, according to the testimonies of the teenagers and my colleague, both the man in white and the disappearing girl were sitting at the same bench…

Towards the end of my assignment at the school, I was doing my usual patrol around the school grounds when I noticed that the bench had been removed from the school. I talked to the cleaners but no one knew why.

#2. Rude Awakening

This happened to a night shift guard who was assigned to guard a warehouse. There wasn’t anything particularly spooky about the warehouse, nor was it stuck in the middle of nowhere.

For the first few nights after getting the assignment, the guard played it safe. He kept himself awake and alert for surprise inspections from the management. After a few nights of non-activity however, he decided to cut loose and indulge in a bit of drinking. Several bottles later, he was fast asleep. Well, no harm no foul, he thought. The warehouse was done for the day and nicely locked up for the night.

But then, in the middle of his booze-induced slumber…

BANG! BANG! BANG!

He jerked up from the comfortable armchair, his mind still befuddled with alcohol, and saw a strange woman banging on the guardhouse’s window and glaring at him from outside the guardhouse’s window. Probably due to all that booze in his system, he felt anger instead of fear. So he got up from his “bed”, opened the guardhouse and chased after the strange woman who had appeared so suddenly in the middle of an empty warehouse.

But, according to his testimony when he later told us his story, he couldn’t catch up to her no matter how hard he ran. And when he thought he had finally cornered her inside the warehouse, she had mysteriously vanished.

And what did the night guard do?

True Security Guard Ghost Stories: A Halloween Special

Many security guards work twelve-hour night shifts, in eerily quiet buildings and sometimes quite remote areas, so it shouldn’t surprise anyone that urban legends and spooky tales have sprung up among our community. This Halloween, if you want to give yourself a good scare with some stories from beyond the grave, chat up a security guard.

Or you can keep on reading.

Because people kept asking me for ghost stories after they found out that I had worked the night shift at various notorious buildings in Singapore, I decided to include some in my yet-to-be-published book, Guards Gone Wild!. As a sort of fan service. So, there they are. Three chapters containing stories of close run-ins with the spine-chilling aspect of security work.

Haunted School

“At this particular school, one of the unbendable rules pertained to the treatment of ‘night students’, the unquiet spirits of students past. According to reliable eyewitnesses, they showed up from time to time, still neatly attired in uniforms of yesteryear, prowling the corridors during the hours of darkness.

‘Ignore them,’ my fellow guard warned. Especially when they tried to grab your attention with friendly greetings. Maybe a ‘hello’, sung from one of the upper floors or a wave of a hand if you were caught looking in the right direction.”

– Excerpt from Haunted School.

But strangely enough, even while my colleague had his fair share of spooky encounters and even while the weekend part-timers were harassed, I myself was never bothered by the ‘night students’. The Haunted School chapter tells the story of two unfortunate weekend part-timers who saw “someone”, a man wearing a white shirt who looked suspiciously like a student, pull off an impossible disappearing act and were so freaked out that they promptly resigned from their job.