9 Scary True Workplace Stories for Halloween
By Suzanne Lucas | Published: 2025-10-30 10:16:00 | Source: Inc.com
It’s the scariest day of the year, and often a nightmare for HR professionals who have to deal with people showing up to work dressed like… terrorists, He wears blackfaceor Dressed as Adolf Hitler.
But it’s not just costumes that can be scary. Sometimes, the scary thing isn’t a bad choice by an employee, but rather something that seems truly unexplainable. Here are nine true stories from scary workplaces.
Ghost takeover
People expert and business strategist Robin Schooling shared:
One of my favorite no-call, no-show resignation stories:
“Director: “What happened? We haven’t seen you for four days
Employee: “I was working Thursday night and I saw a ghost in the kitchen. She grabbed my ankle. I can’t come back
(And so… he left and never came back…).
Ghosts of the old hospital
An anonymous HR professional shared:
Our office is located on the grounds of an old hospital and built with recycled bricks. Often times, while in the bathroom, you hear footsteps in front of the stalls that lead to the sink, and then the motion sensor paper towel dispenser turns off.
Many surveillance cameras still capture footage of ghostly figures in the halls.
The damned office
Human Resources Consultant Stacy Dennis shared:
We had a desk where everyone who sat at it got kicked out. 🫣 It was a damned office.
A Halloween prank that went south
Career consultant Chris Hogg shared:
I worked at an airline (think engineers, think Dilbert) where every Halloween people, if they so choose, dress up in costumes. It was an ancient tradition, and many, but not all, dressed up.
One year, an engineer dressed as a gorilla, from head to toe.
So, there were about five of us standing around the coffee station, when the gorilla man, dressed only in his costume, came up behind a secretary (in her 40s) and tapped her on the shoulder. She turned around…and screamed…loud enough to be heard in the next interruption…she grabbed her chest…threw her coffee into the air…and backed/crashed into a nearby filing cabinet.
Needless to say, the engineer ripped the gorilla’s head off and apologized profusely, while I imagine visions of him being led away and accused of manslaughter danced through his head.
Later that day, he and I were talking, and he told me that he would never wear a Halloween costume again.
I’m sure he never did that.
Ghost puppy
Human Resources Consultant Katie Tanner shared:Â
He was in skilled nursing for a while.
There are many stories of people “surrounding patients” as they take their last breaths, or patients “talking to the walls” and then saying it was someone dear to them.
In one nursing home, there is a ghost “puppy” roaming the halls, barking and “licking the hands” of patients. (I swear I heard that several times while I was there).
Ghost cinema
Tim Baker, Chief Human Resources Professional, shared:
Years ago, before I worked in HR, I was the general manager of a large cineplex in the Greater Toronto Area. This goes back to the days of “movie projectors.” We had 14 cinemas in the building, so the projection room was huge and divided into two sides – east and west. Needless to say, at 2am while the exhibition booths were closing, it was quite scary – a long, dark corridor with many projectors. Usually, there were only two of us left in the building. Ghost stories were abundant.
One night, I went up alone to close the western booth. I was turning off the projector, and someone called me from the end of the corridor. I heard my name clearly. It could only be the other manager. When I walked in that direction, there was no one there. Then the other manager came walking towards me from the other direction. There is no way he could have walked down the stairs, through half the building, and then up the other stairs in that time frame.
I felt blood draining from my face, and I felt cold. He asked what was wrong. I just said, “Let’s get out of here.” He knew what I meant, and we left. I didn’t tell him until the next day.
Laughing ghost
HR expert Stacey Racho Ortiz shared:
My Tribe Casino was built right next to the cemetery, and the guard hut is located at the bottom of the hill. When cemetery security worked at the guard hut, they would hear voices, laughter, and hear footsteps next to the hut.
Ghost stealing socks
An anonymous HR professional shared:
I worked in a psychiatric hospital, and the human resources offices were in the building that was the women’s ward. There was talk that if you were downstairs alone, one female would pull your hair. I was watching CCTV footage around Christmas time, and there were stockings hanging on the wall for about three weeks. Twice, we saw those stockings, one by one, sliding down the wall and halfway down the hallway. People also saw a female figure in the attic window.
And for some people, it’s probably the scariest chair ever (and for others, the best chair ever).
HR consultant Michelle Vernon shared:
We once had a pregnancy chair – anyone who used it as their designated chair was pregnant. -Is this scary?
Happy Halloween everyone!
The opinions expressed by Inc.com columnists here are their own, not those of Inc.com.
(Tags for translation)Ghost Stories
ــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــ
