I Work the Night Shift… Something Clocks In After Me

Written by Elias Morgan

My name is Elias Morgan, and I work the night shift as a security guard in a hospital that officially shut down years ago. Only one wing is still used for storage, but the rest of the building remains dark, silent, and mostly untouched. I was told I would be completely alone from 10 PM to 6 AM. For the first two weeks, nothing unusual happened. Then one night, after scanning my badge at 9:59 PM, I checked the digital log out of boredom and saw another entry appear exactly one minute later that simply read Guard On Duty with no name attached. I thought it was a system glitch until it happened again the next night, except this time I was staring at the screen when the scanner beeped by itself at 10:00 PM, flashing as if it had read an invisible badge.

After that, the cameras started detecting motion in sealed parts of the hospital. At 2:13 AM one morning, Camera 12 in the abandoned east wing triggered an alert. When I pulled up the feed, I saw the long hallway flickering under emergency lights, and at the far end there was a tall shape standing near one of the old patient rooms. It looked wrong, stretched too high toward the ceiling, its proportions distorted like the video could not process what it was seeing. Every time the frame refreshed, it seemed closer. Then the feed cut to static. Seconds later, the badge scanner on my desk beeped again and logged another Guard On Duty entry even though it was hours past the start of my shift.

The front lobby doors slowly slid open on Camera 3 even though no one was outside. I heard footsteps echoing across the tile floor, slow and deliberate, stopping right outside the security office where I was sitting frozen in my chair. The handle never moved, but the air in the room felt heavier, colder, like something was standing inches away from me on the other side of the door. The scanner beeped once more and logged Break Started under the same blank profile. When I forced myself to look at the camera feed, I saw a blurred figure directly in front of the office door, its head tilted sharply and its body unnaturally long, as if it had folded itself to fit inside the building. The image warped violently before cutting to black.

I woke up after sunrise with the morning staff shaking me. They said I must have fainted, but according to the system logs, I had completed my entire shift. The doors had opened and closed multiple times during the night, motion sensors had triggered across different wings, and at exactly 6:00 AM, the system showed Guard Clocked Out. I never scanned my badge. I never left the chair. I quit that same day, but every night at exactly 10:00 PM, I still receive an automated notification from the security app saying Elias Morgan Clocked In followed by one minute later Guard On Duty with no name attached. Whatever took my shift that night is still reporting for work.