Submission | After Closing Time, the Cold Air in That Hall Always Drops Half a Degree First

(This is an anonymous reader submission; the contents are unverified.)

I worked the night shift as a security guard at a museum for 4 years. I can't say which one. The following, I never wrote into the handover log — if I had, my supervisor would only have recorded it as me being run-down.

The night roster is rigid. Handover from the day shift at 22:30 — count the keys, check the case sensors, sign off the inventory check on the terminal — then hand over to the early shift at 06:30. In between there are 4 patrol rounds, with a checkpoint at every corner to be tapped with the wrist terminal. There are only a few boxes to fill in on the log:

On duty     22:30     Off duty     06:30
Patrol      23:00 ✓   01:00 ✓   03:00 ✓   05:00 ✓
Anomalies   None

In 4 years, the box for anomalies has never held anything but 'None'.

The first thing is the cold air. Every day after closing, once everyone's gone and the lights switch to night lighting, the temperature in a certain exhibition hall drops half a degree first, then comes back. You can't see it on the monitoring panel; that line stays flat. But standing in the doorway, my skin knows. I borrowed a small thermohygrometer and left it on the threshold for 5 nights running, and it picked up nothing.

I mentioned it once to Old Zhou, the other night-shift man. He didn't look up. He said he'd been doing this 9 years, and that in his first year he'd thought that hall was cold too. Then he told me to walk down the middle on patrol and keep off the wall.

The second thing is the surveillance. The feed from that hall lags 3 seconds behind the others. I counted it off against my own watch held up to the lens: the second hand went round 3 marks before the picture caught up. I reported it to maintenance 2 times; they replaced the cabling, replaced the unit, and it still lagged 3 seconds. After that I learned my lesson and stopped reporting it.

The third thing is the placards. There's one exhibit whose placard I passed on every nightly patrol; after 4 years I could recite it with my eyes closed. One morning before handover, I found an extra line of small print on it, describing the object's 'original purpose' — a claim I had never seen on that placard before. I took a photo. The next day that line was gone, and gone from the photo too.

I went and asked the print shop. They pulled out the label-change orders for me: the labels on that wall hadn't been touched in 2 years. The woman in charge asked whether I might be misremembering. On my way out I heard her say to the person beside her that someone had asked about the placards in that hall once before.

The last one, I hesitated a long time over whether to write it. In that hall, at the very back, against the wall, there's a large display case; the inside of the glass occasionally fogs over. Mist made of water vapour condenses into droplets on glass and slides down. This doesn't. It hangs where it is, its upper edge as level as if ruled. I've shone the duty torch across it at an angle. After the fog clears, there's sometimes a mark left on the glass, as if drawn with a fingertip: a circle, missing a small segment, left unfinished.

I've wiped it off a few times. After a few days, it's there again. One of the cleaning women has wiped it too; when I asked her she was wringing out a cloth, and she said just wipe it, don't ask.

I don't believe in ghosts. Doing this job long enough, I've seen electronic faults and static. But these 4 things — to this day I don't have a single explanation that holds.

If you also work the night shift at a museum, and you happen to understand what I'm talking about — don't write it into the log. And don't go wipe off that circle.