Just a few minorly creepy things from a coffee house

This story isn’t as impressive as a lot of the ones on here, but I swear it’s true. They're all things that happened when I worked the night shift at a local coffee house in high school. Alone, the experiences might not be much, but they still creep me out, because I could never really find a convincing reason as to why these particular ones happened. These all happened the last year I was there.

This coffee house was in an old brick building in a small town that pretty much died by 8 pm. I worked there Monday-Friday from 6-11, so it wasn’t unusual that I didn’t see a single soul from 8-close—and that includes on the street out front. It was a ghost town at that time. One night, I was sitting at a table folding Java Jackets, spacing out when I heard a crash in the kitchen. Confused, I get up and walk in there to see what’s going on. There is a really wide shelf over the sink where all the heavy pots and pans are stored. Being the only one working there at night, I’m positive that I had pushed all of them to the very back of the shelf so there was at least a two inch gap between the end of the shelf and the pots (I frequently put my drinks on the gap). There were about 8 pots and pans laying in the middle of the kitchen floor. Not in the sink where they should have landed if they had tipped off the shelf. In the middle of the floor. It was slightly disconcerting and I tried to recreate it by putting them hanging slightly off the shelf and shaking it, but they still wouldn’t fall.

I didn’t think too much of it at the time until a couple of weeks later when I was mopping the floors. There is an old espresso grinder we had (not the automatic kind) that had a very heavy switch. Up was ON, down was OFF. It took a good amount of force to flick this switch and I maybe used it once a night. I had probably run the grinder a couple hours earlier. I’m on the other side of the building mopping, when all of a sudden I hear that loud grinder turn on. I look over there and just see it going to town. The mop falls from my hands and I get the creepy feeling that someone else is in the building. I cautiously walk over and turn it off. I call out, check the kitchen, the bathroom, the back patio. No one is there. I stand outside to have a smoke and try to get my hands to stop shaking. When I went back in, I tried to maneuver the switch in such a way that it’s stuck in the middle (maybe it just flipped on that way). That old switch was so heavy that, even after trying for 15 minutes, I could not get it to stay in a neutral position. It was either firmly on or firmly off.

The last thing I saw is the one that really defies explanation for me. It was a couple of weeks later and I had just finished mopping. I take the mop bucket out the back door and dump it, turn around, walk in the back door and just freeze. There on the freshly mopped floor are white, child-sized, bare footprints. They lead from the back door (which I had been standing in front of—no one came in) to the register. And that’s it. No prints leading away, they ended at the register. I run out front and scan the street, but there is no one to be seen. I chill out there for awhile, get some fresh air and walk back in to examine the footprints. Wiping a finger across gets rid of them, but there was no powdery substance or anything to explain the color. I could’ve sworn though, that there was an extra dollar bill in my nearly empty tip cup, though, so at least it tipped. Maybe he/she felt bad for me.

Anyways, haven’t told many people about this. Just figured I’d share and that a couple of you might be interested.