Facility managers encounter some strange and scary things in their buildings. From handguns to homeless people, inspections and complaint responses have turned up truly remarkable and head-scratching finds.
In honor of Halloween, FacilitiesNet asked readers to submit their most terrifying and horrific tales — and they didn't disappoint.
Read on, but consider yourself warned.
"We had gotten a call from the NCO Club on a base in N.C. saying there was a bad smell in the kitchen. When we arrived, we, too, could smell a putrid odor but couldn't work out where it was coming from. Finally one guy got down on the floor next to a conduit penetration and said the smell is coming from down there, pointing to the floor. We when outside to the crawl space entrance and took the cover off only to be hit by a swarm of flies and a horrific smell that sent two guys off puking.
We had to get 'Scott Air Packs' and were tethered to emergency ropes to enter the space. After a bit it was discovered that the commercial dishwasher's garbage disposal had come apart from the hubless coupling and had dumped ground up food and water into the crawl space.
But it gets worse. As the plumbers/storm management crews washed/vacuumed out the space, the entrance became flooded with the debris blocking the crews from getting out! So imagine if you can, limited space, sweating to death, crawling in crap, and covered with flies, then you see your escape route flooded out. It took 15 minutes to clear the entrance enough for the crews to get out. It took weeks to totally recover from this small disaster."
"Working at Logan Airport in Boston, the rat and cockroach infestation is real. When entering at 4:45 a.m., my first task was to remove people that were sleeping on the banquet seating to remove the dead rats from under the seating. This is prior to watching them run up the back of the monitor cords as I start my workday."
"A person living above an auditorium classroom cloud ceiling. They pooped and peed above the ceiling and we had to get hazardous materials group involved in the clean up. The call came in as an odd odor in the classroom."
"At a hospital where I worked for many years. In one of the mechanical rooms, you could hear what sounded like a group of people talking in the background. You couldn't make out what was being said, but you could plainly hear it. Rumors abounded on how this room was haunted. Later I discovered the noise was coming from a big mixing valve."
"We found 38 small potatoes flushed down a toilet and clogged a restroom sanitary system."
"We had a restaurant in the lower level of an office building in the central business district of Washington DC. The restaurant manager was very good at catching large furry creatures. He called me down one day feeling terrible.
He told me he heard a trap snap in his office ceiling, and it ran across the ceiling during peak lunch and fell from a ceiling tile in the middle of two women's table. He said all he could do was offer them a free lunch as they looked at him in disgust while departed the restaurant never to return."
"Our Chinese Ministry program had a pig roast and the pig was brought in a large wooden box. So we had a 'pig coffin' outside our facility entrance!"
"A storm with high winds snapped some guy-wires connected to the boiler stacks on the roof. Watching those swaying made my blood run cold. The cost of getting those repaired was almost as alarming."
"In the middle of the night I heard a banging noise in one of the service corridors so I went to investigate. I determined it was coming from the morgue, so you can imagine the hesitation and anxiousness I had while opening the door...something out of a movie. It ended up being a bearing out in an exhaust fan, but definitely gave me a chill."
"In one facility I managed in Dubai, we had an unusual case of a 'fridge monster.' The break room refrigerator was infamous for devouring employees' lunches. We conducted strategic reviews of kitchen layouts and created policies, but it persisted. Operationally, we decided to place a humorous sign on the fridge, warning of the mythical 'Fridge Monster.' The sign became an office legend, and miraculously, lunch thefts decreased."
