Heya. This happened in January of '78. I was working nights at the Lakeside Steel facility in Gary, not the main plant, the smaller one off Route 20. Janitorial work. Third shift, 11 PM to 7 AM, five nights a week. The pay wasn't great, but my wife had just had our second kid and we needed the income, You know how it is. I'd been there maybe four months at that point. Long enough to know the routine, short enough that I still got creeped out being in that building alone at night. And I was alone, completely alone. Management shut down production on weekends for maintenance, so Saturday nights it was just me and about 200,000 square feet of empty factory floor. The place was old. Built in the '40s, I think. High ceilings, those big industrial windows with the wire mesh in the glass. Most of the machinery was shut down on weekends, but you could still hear things settling, metal contracting in the cold. Every sound echoed. I'd gotten used to it, mostly. You had to, or you'd drive yourself crazy.
This particular night, Saturday, January 14th, I was running my usual route. Start on the main floor, work my way through the offices, then hit the break rooms and restrooms. I saved the machine shop for last because it was the dirtiest. Metal shavings everywhere, oil on every surface. Took twice as long as anywhere else. Around two thirty in the morning, I was heading down the east corridor toward the machine shop. That's when I noticed the lights. The hallway lights in that section were mostly burnt out, they'd been meaning to replace them for weeks, so it was pretty dark back there. Just a couple of emergency lights, that greenish glow they give off. Couldn't see much beyond about ten feet. But there was light coming from under the machine shop door. Not the overhead fluorescents. Something else. Kind of a bluish-white light, flickering slightly. And that section was supposed to be locked. Off-limits for cleaning because of some calibration work they were doing. I had a note about it from my supervisor.
I should've left it alone. Should've called it in. But I was curious, and honestly, I figured maybe maintenance had left some equipment running. I had a master key that opened most doors, including that one. I unlocked it and pushed it open slowly. The light was coming from the far end of the shop, near the big lathe machines. And there was something moving back there. Small, maybe four feet tall, hunched over one of the machines. My first thought was a kid had somehow gotten in. But this wasn't a kid. It was gray. That's the first thing I noticed. Completely gray, this smooth, almost rubbery-looking skin. The head was too big for the body, and the arms were thin, longer than they should've been. No hair that I could see. It was wearing something, maybe some kind of tight suit, hard to tell. The bluish light was coming from something it was holding, like a small device or tool.
[ Story continues in the full game... ]