The Office Ghost Who Only Likes Cold Coffee
Our office building is very old. It is the kind of place where the floorboards groan under your feet and the fluorescent lights hum with a nervous, electric buzz that never seems to stop. The vents are constantly clanking, making metallic wheezing sounds that make you look over your shoulder, wondering if someone is walking down the hall behind you. Most of my coworkers just sigh and roll their eyes, saying the building is falling apart and the management is too cheap to fix anything. They treat the creaks and groans as normal background noise, but I know there is something else living in our breakroom. About six months ago, I started noticing small, impossible things. It began with the coffee machine. Every morning, like clockwork, I walk in at 8:00 AM. I am the first one in, so I make a fresh, steaming pot of dark roast. The smell is supposed to be the best part of my morning, but things stopped making sense pretty quickly. By 10:00 AM, the coffee in the pot is ice cold. Not lukewarm, but genuinely freezing, as if it had been sitting in a refrigerator all night. The pot is always full, so I know for a fact that no one drank it. I remember the first time I noticed it. I poured a cup, expecting that familiar heat, and nearly spat it out when the freezing liquid hit my tongue. It felt like I was drinking iced coffee that had been left out in a blizzard. When I told my coworker Sarah about it, she just shrugged without looking up from her screen. She said the machine is just old and broken, probably having thermostat issues or a faulty heating plate. She did not even blink. But my coworker Dave, who sits three desks down from me, thinks it is strange, too. He is a skeptic by nature, but he has stood by the breakroom door with me a few times just to watch the pot. He told me he has felt the air around the machine turn incredibly chilly, even on hot summer days. He says the heat just vanishes from the morning pot in a way that defies physics. It is not just the cold coffee, though. Things started getting even weirder. If I leave a mug on the counter at night, it is always empty by the next morning. There is never a drop spilled, no coffee rings on the laminate surface, and no mess. It is just an empty, sparkling clean cup, as if it had been through the dishwasher overnight. It looks like someone—or something—drank it. I started feeling like I was losing my mind, but I kept track of it for weeks. Last week, I decided I had to know for sure. I tried an experiment. I brewed a fresh mug of coffee right before everyone left for the evening. I placed it carefully on the breakroom counter, right next to the machine, and I wrote a small, handwritten note on a yellow sticky pad that said 'Welcome.' I placed the note right in front of the mug. I walked out, locked the office door, and tried to sleep, though I spent most of the night wondering what I would find. The next morning, the room was very quiet when I walked in. The air felt heavy and still, thicker than usual. The note was still there, right where I had left it. But the mug was completely empty, and the ceramic felt like an ice cube against my skin. The coffee was gone. I have not told anyone else at work about the note. I do not want them to think I am losing my grip or looking for attention. I don't want them to make fun of me or treat me like the office weirdo. I want to keep this secret to myself because it makes the office feel different now. Instead of being afraid, I just accept it. Now, I brew a little extra coffee every single night before I go home. I fill the pot just a little bit higher than I used to. If a ghost is haunting my office, I want to make sure they get their caffeine. It has become a part of my daily routine, just like checking my email or grabbing my files. It makes the long, boring workdays feel a little less lonely. When I hear the vents clanking or the lights buzzing, I don't get annoyed anymore. I just think about the empty cup and the freezing cold pot. We are a team, in a way, just two people—or one person and one entity—trying to get through the workday one cup of coffee at a time. I find comfort in it. Life is strange, and work is hard, but knowing that I am sharing a cold cup of coffee with someone who was here long before me makes everything feel just a little bit more magical. I am not even sure if it is a ghost, or just some remnant of the past stuck in this old building, but I don't mind. I like leaving the fresh pot out. It is a quiet gesture of kindness in a place that usually feels cold and uninviting. The silence of the breakroom doesn't bother me anymore. In fact, sometimes when I set the pot down, I swear I hear a faint, soft hum that matches the rhythm of my own breathing. It is enough for me.