I was a former employee of Crabby Bill’s Seafood on Clearwater Beach in the Clearwater Municipal Marina. I wasn’t a server, host, nor did I work as a cook or a dishwasher. I worked from June/July of 2009 up until August of 2011 on the third shift. I was the only cleaning guy at the building, aside from the only maintenance guy who would build shelves, paint floors, grout tiles, etc.

The maintenance guy who worked years before I did, Kenny, is actually a really good friend of mine back then. He was the one who had me hired on because they needed someone from 10:00 p.m. until the job is finished. Mind you, the building is a two-story building but this isn’t what scared people away for a long period of time.

The reason why this company has had an issue with long-time third shift cleaners is because of all the well-accounted paranormal activity that had been reported to management and even the actual business owner himself. None of it had ever been taken seriously though.

Before my first night working as a cleaner, my friend Kenny was telling me on my way to work that the place had a lot of weird stuff that would happen EVERY. SINGLE. NIGHT.

He had told me that one time as he was painting the bathroom walls in the second floor restroom, he stepped out of the men’s room to look for a different can of paint but for the life of him, he couldn’t find it at all. He went down to the first floor, checked around in the cabinet where his tools and supplies are it. Nothing. He went back upstairs and checked into the men’s room to see if he had brought it back in. Nothing.

Here’s where it had gotten weird. As he walked out of the men’s room, propped up against the bathroom door was the same can of paint that he had been searching for that hadn’t been there ten seconds before he had walked back into the men’s room. He obviously couldn’t have closed the restroom door, not before laying a can of paint completely flat against it.

He’s had lights flick on and off. He’s been on the first floor and hear loud and notable footsteps on the second floor. He’s heard whispers and the eyes on the back of his head. These are his experiences, mind you. Now let’s hear about mine.

My first night there, I was cleaning the second floor men’s room. As I was scrubbing the bathroom sinks, I hear the toilet in the women’s room flush. At this point, the only two people in this building would have been myself and Kenny. As it turns out, I needed to ask him a question about my new job. As I walked into the women’s room, I called out his name to absolutely no response. I then checked every single stall in the women’s room. There was no one there at all. As I checked the last stall, I noticed that the water in the toilet had been filling itself back up. Meaning, it was ACTUALLY flushed and not just randomly running.

I immediately stepped out of the women’s room to the point where I could hear him behind the restaurant on the ground level, using a table saw to cut wood for shelves. Mind you now, where he was at and where I had heard the toilet flushed, it would have taken him at least a whole minute to get from that second floor bathroom all the way to the first floor, through the entire restaurant, and then out in the back with safety gear on as he was cutting wood.

I went downstairs and I asked him about him being upstairs in the second floor women’s room. He gave me a confused look and shook his head. Then he gave me that look, like the things he had told me about his experiences here were now happening to me. I told him that there had been no one else in the building except me. If there had been someone else upstairs, I would have bumped into them on a few occasions. Alas, it was just me.

That was my first night on my job! My FIRST night! The rest of the 21-months of my time there, things would happen all the time. There would be plates on the first floor kitchen that would just randomly rattle shortly after I would walk by the table. I’d try to recreate the rattling by walking, stomping, and running by that table. It never would never happen. I wasn’t able to debunk that. The table itself was pretty heavy so I know that it wasn’t me making the plates rattle.

I’ve had chairs randomly fall off of tables that were placed there so that I could vacuum and mop under those tables. I’ve had things randomly slam into the walls hard enough to shake the entire building. I’ve heard noises on the stairs, as if someone were walking up or down. This was a nightly thing and this had never bothered me.

That was, until out of curiosity I brought from my home a digital voice recorder. It was a slow night and I had a few friends down from another county. During the time they had visited, I placed the voice recorder on the second floor and then left the building to have a cigarette to chit-chat with my friends as the floor was also drying up top.

About 35 to 40 minutes later, I went back into the building after they had left and headed straight back upstairs. After stopping the recording, I plugged in my headphones and played it as I went through my night. Roughly around 40 minutes into the actual recorder… Something had been picked up.

Mind you, I was outside and my buddy and his fiancee were also outside. The noises of us talking hadn’t been picked up by my recorder. We were the only three people in the entire parking lot, yet you could hear a voice on my recorder sounding like a woman screaming, followed by crying. Exactly a minute later, you could hear what sounded like a male voice laughing.

It’s on my Facebook page so feel free to send me a message and I’ll link you to my uploads.

The EVP caught me completely off-guard but that wasn’t the scariest part. THE scariest part that had happened to me was roughly around 3:00 in the morning. I was entirely alone and I had just finished mopping the first floor. Since it’s the main entrance of the restaurant, I wanted that spot to look the absolute best and brightest.

Once I had finished mopping, I went out to smoke a cigarette while I waited for the floor to dry. I played on my iTouch, listened to music, made a phone call, smoked another cigarette, and then went back inside. That’s when the worst happened.

There is a lift inside this restaurant in the event that a customer wants to eat on the second floor but is in a wheelchair. Obviously they couldn’t force the patron in a chair to dine outside, so that’s where the lift comes into handy. It isn’t an elevator, mind you. The host/hostess will push you into the lift, go in the lift with you, and press to HOLD the up-button until you reach the second floor. The door will unlock and you can then leave the lift. The host/hostess will then press and HOLD the down-button to take it to the first floor. Once the lift hits bottom, the door unlocks again to which they return to his or her position at the hostess stand.

My experience: as I walked back inside of the front door to check on the drying of the floor, I heard the lift coming down from the second floor all the way to the first. Like I said, you have to hold the button down. If you let go of the button between floors, it stops. Something had held the button until it had reached the first floor because you could definitely hear the lift door click loudly as it unlocked.

I grabbed the closest item I could find as a weapon (in the event that someone had broken in and were using the lift to get heavy stuff downstairs) and moved to the lift door. I ripped the door open and found that it was entirely empty. As I poked my head into the lift room, I could hear something bump into the door on the second floor.

I immediately assumed that Kenny might have been messing with me. So I ran back to the hostess stand and called him from the phone. He told me that he’s sitting on his couch, drinking a beer, and catching up on his DVR. As I was on the phone with him, I could hear footsteps directly above me on the second floor. At this point, the hair on the back of my neck went up.

The noises were so loud, even Kenny on the phone could hear that. He told me to call the security guard. I hung up and called security. Security shows up and we walked through the second floor of the building. Mind you, the lights were off because I was done upstairs but I had to turn the lights back on. We went through the kitchen, behind the bar, and through the restrooms; nothing. We were the only two (living) folks in the building.

He presumed that I was on drugs or that I was just messing with him because I was bored. As he was walking down the stairs, poking fun at me, the lights to the second floor cut off on it’s own. His face went white as a ghost. We both ran down the steps.

The was the worst experience that I had ever had. Even the security guard believed me when I had told him what had happened. It obviously wasn’t me messing with anyone. He knew that I had told the truth.

After that night, my usual encounters went back to normal: rattling plates, footsteps on stairs, chairs falling. That wasn’t bad at all.

Submitted by K.R.