A short retelling of one of my paranormal experiences working the night shift in one of the oldest buildings in the Makati Business District in the Philippines. This is told in both English and Tagalog separately.
This is featured by one of my favor...
Ah, yes. Insular Building — one of the oldest original structures in Makati City, having been built back in 1962. I have one very memorable experience there.
Oops! This image does not follow our content guidelines. To continue publishing, please remove it or upload a different image.
In 2005, I used to work for a well-known American call center provider which had its training facility on the sixth floor there.
We were in training back then, and trainees often got the night shift. That meant that aside from the fastfood store and the building security office, our office people were the only ones in the building at night. Both the store and the security held offices down at the ground level, and the call center training facility did not have any other personnel on-site aside from us.
It was my third day, rather, night on the job. It was 2AM — time for our first 15-minute break of the shift.
The smoking area was located at the ground level, and it was just my luck to be the last trainee to get to the elevator. As I went in, it gave off the warning sound indicating that it reached the maximum capacity. The elevator could only accommodate a maximum of around 10-11 passengers at any given time, and there were 12 of us taking our cigarette break.
"Just hurry up and make sure to follow us, man," one of my co-workers said as the elevator closed its doors.
This being an old building, the only pair of elevators there weren't exactly known for providing a particularly fast service. They tend to creak in agony as they went up or down the shafts, regardless of how light or how heavy its contents were. They were literally older than I was. And so slow they were, I joked around saying those things were run manually by hamsters instead of actual electrical current. Environmentally friendly. State-of-the-art... the best of third-world elevator technology. What more could you ask for, yes?
Anyway, I had to take the next one going down — solo.
It wasn't supposed to be a big deal. I got on the next elevator which came after about three minutes.
I went ahead and pressed the "G" button.
As I stood inside the thing by myself, I was starting to get pissed at the thought of effectively losing a total of about five minutes before even being able to take in my first whiff of nicotine — a much needed chemical to prevent me from dozing off and earning the ire of my flamboyant, megalomaniacal technical trainer. He'll probably throw another fit if any one of us came back even five seconds late from the break.
It was then that I realized that the elevator was going up instead of down. The slow, creaking elevator made its way to the 11th floor — a floor that was completely empty.
As it opened, I saw how wide, dark and empty it was in there. There was nothing on the entire space since the last tenant moved out the week prior. I knew this because they were moving the last of their office equipment on the first night that I was in the building.
I looked around, and not even an office divider or the carpeting were left as far as I could see. One could only see as far as the elevator light went; the area was at least a thousand square meters.
