The Night Shift

In 2022, I worked at a remote call center outside Amarillo, Texas. It was a 24/7 operation that mostly handled late-night emergency customer service for a few medical and security companies. I was on the overnight shift—11 p.m. to 7 a.m.—and for the most part, it was dead quiet. Maybe three or four calls per hour.

There were six of us in the building during the night. One manager, four agents, and a janitor. We sat in a row of small cubicles with headsets, screens, and fluorescent lights buzzing above us. The kind of place where time moves slow, and caffeine is your only lifeline.

The weird stuff started in early October.

I got a call at exactly 2:12 a.m. The caller ID was blank, which wasn’t unusual—we often got calls routed through encrypted lines.

I answered with the standard greeting: “Thank you for calling, how can I assist you?”

There was silence. Then a faint voice—female, shaky.

She whispered, “He’s in the room with me.”

I froze. I asked her to confirm her name and location.

She whispered again: “He’s watching me.”

Suddenly, the line cut to static. I flagged it as a potential domestic violence incident and passed it to the manager. He looked at the phone number’s trace report and frowned.

“It’s not showing any origin. No signal path. Almost like it was never connected.”

We logged it and moved on. Strange, but not impossible. Sometimes our systems bugged out.

The next night, it happened again.

Same time. Same voice.

“He’s in the room again. I can’t move.”

Before I could respond, the line went dead.

This time, I was ready. I checked the call log. It had the same weird signature—no origin, no trace.

I told my coworker about it. She laughed nervously and said, “Maybe you’ve got a haunted headset.”

That night, I stayed late to review call recordings. I found the audio file, labeled 2:12 A.M., 10/10/22. I hit play.

What I heard made my blood run cold.

There was no voice.

Only the sound of breathing. Shallow, rasping breathing—like someone gasping through a blocked throat. Then a long, dragging sound, like something heavy being pulled across tile.

No one else believed me.

On October 12th, the call came again.

This time, the voice said: “He’s standing behind you.”

I turned around so fast I knocked my headset off. Of course, there was nothing there. My manager told me to take the rest of the night off. Said I was probably overtired.

But that same night, the janitor—a guy named Reggie—quit on the spot.

He said he saw a man standing in the hallway outside the bathroom. Said he looked “too tall to be real” and “his eyes were wrong.” Reggie grabbed his stuff and left without even clocking out.

The next few nights were tense. Everyone was on edge. People started calling in sick. My coworker Ellie said she kept hearing whispers in her headset—even when no calls were coming in.

October 17th. The power flickered at exactly 2:12 a.m.

All the monitors glitched. The lights dimmed for two seconds. Then my screen lit up with a new message window.

It wasn’t from our system. It was black text on a gray box, centered in the middle of the screen. It read:

“DO NOT ANSWER THE NEXT CALL.”

I stared at it.

Then the phone rang.

2:12 a.m.

I didn’t answer.

No one else did either. We all just stared at our screens.

The call rang for exactly 30 seconds. Then the lights came back to normal. The window vanished.

We reported everything to the tech supervisor. He said there was no way that message could’ve appeared. Our system didn’t allow custom pop-ups.

We showed him the security footage.

It cut out from 2:11 to 2:13 a.m.

Two full minutes of missing footage. All the cameras. Gone.

That was the last night I worked there.

Two weeks later, the building was shut down.

They claimed it was budget cuts.

But I still have a copy of that call recording from the 12th.

Sometimes I play it back. And every time, I hear a new sound—something that wasn’t there the time before. A voice. A knock. A scream.

And every time, it gets louder.