And yeah. doors were being closed as described. Guess what? All the doors had one thing in common. They were being held open by magnetic door holders. they’re fire doors. Building code here requires that they be self-closing in the event of a fire alarm to prevent the spread of fire. But that’s really rather inconvenient in long hallways where people don’t want to be opening big heavy doors everytime they’re bringing a cart of shit through. Thus, the electromagnetic door holders that turn off whenever a fire alarm goes off. Well. if you guessed that the fire system had been programmed to turn off all the door holders at 23:00 each night, just long enough to let any being held open close… you’d be right. All it took to verify that was to send a five minute email to the facility engineer, who spent all of ten minutes checking settings on the fire alarm system and turned it off.

This was when I was a manager, and I was doing a sort of covert investigation where I go in and have them train me on the site. there were problems. those problems all stemmed from a fundamental lack of curiosity. Which stemmed from a fervent belief in the supernatural. Voices in spaces that are supposed to be empty? they weren’t teenagers smoking dope, it was spirits. One example of spirits that loved to fuck with him? one hallway had firedoors that sectioned off a t-shaped hallway, that was lined with businesses (mostly offices.) he was supposed to go down the hallway, checking and locking all the doors and generally making sure everything was in good order. the firedoor in the middle of the hallway, kept closing on him. Rather than looking into what the issue was, he wrote it off as demons fucking with him, specifically. The reality was that the doorhoder was going bad (probably had been for a long time. as that happens their holding power gets weaker. this door holder’s holding power was just strong enough to hold the door when it was static, but any kind of touch or slight pressure was enough for it to close. Including changes in the air pressure as you walked past. When I pointed this out to him. Well. Lets just say he’s no some other company’s problem.

Guess what? walls be thin, yo. Frequently, office buildings with multiple tenants are remodeled in strange ways. especially if they’re older- things get partitioned weierd. spaces get remodeled and lighting and power doesn’t be as you’d expect. In any case, in this particular building, the idiot in question didn’t realize that the very short custodial closet didn’t go all the way “back” from the hall- she should have, though. She’d also never gone into the space that wrapped around the maintenance closet to run beside the space that she kept hearing voices in “that shouldn’t be there!” Those voices were caused by people working late.

this particular building is historic- that is to say, it was a tire warehouse built in the 1890s. It’s really quite a lovely building. Giant limestone block foundation, old tan brick. cedar beam construction. one of two stairwells that hit ever floor has fire sprinkler stand pipes running through each landing. not surprising, considering. the building is old. It’s drafty as fuck. And at night, in order to save energy, because it literally predates central air, they turn the system off at night (or run it to a lower set point.) This results in a fairly consistent rate at which it cools off. the fire stand pipes cool off at a different rate, though, and clunk against the landings the pass through. They do so in a way that sounds like someone walking down the stairs. Incurious guards just wrote it off as some ghost or something, but all of the long term tenants will tell a story about how there was a guy that died from a tractor tire falling on him. (didn’t happen, by the way. Though numerous people did die here. mostly jumpers.)

I mean. Seriously. gurrgle gurrgle. burble burble. Tickety tick. still not ghosts.

yeap. okay, need to clarify, I mean, our local lynxes and bobcats, as well as the occasional mountain lion passing through. If you ever saw Annihilation, with the “help me” bear. yeah. it’s like that. Randomly. Out of the dark woods. and not coherent words so much as screams. (that account happened to border a large statepark that had some cats living in it.)

So, most office building’s HVACs work on positive pressure. This way, when a door gets opened, the hot air goes out rather than the cold air coming in. (or cold air going out, hot air coming in. Depends on where you are and the season.) for whatever reason, one of the office spaces just had massive open vents (I personally suspect this was a remodel that got left in the wall. the vent just connected the main lobby/entryway to the space (above a plenum ceiling) Another feature of building HVAC systems are the airlock doors as you come and go. Guess what happens when you open both airlock doors and have a window you’re not supposed to have open, open? All your air rushes out, getting replaced by cold air.