I work at a hotel, and I’ve been watching a man on the cameras run on the hotel gym’s treadmill for hours.

 I work at a hotel, and I’ve been watching a man on the cameras run on the hotel gym’s treadmill for hours.

I work the graveyard shift at a small, usually mostly empty hotel just off the highway. The hours suck, obviously, but other than that it’s a pretty cushy job. I clock in, settle down in the back office and watch downloaded movies or shows on my laptop. The connection sucks back there, but it’s a place I can sit out of view of the guests and relax, so I just prepare accordingly. Periodically, I’ll glance at the CCTV monitor hung on the wall in front of my desk. Mostly it’s just to see if there’s anyone at the front desk that needs anything, or to see when my coworkers arrive in the morning so I can brush the cheeto dust off my shirt and pretend like I wasn’t half-asleep only moments before they arrived. 

The cameras show several other areas of the hotel too- each stairwell, several shots of the parking lot outside and each exit door, the kitchen, laundry room, the lobby, and a few other areas. There’s also a camera in the gym, but no one ever uses it. The hotel I work for isn’t really known for their stellar cleanliness or functioning facilities. Our pool hasn’t been open to guests in months, and our gym has like one functioning treadmill, a couple weights, and I think a pull-up bar. I’ve been working here for a few months and I don’t think I’ve ever been inside.

Anyway, at about 2 AM (2 hours into my shift), I glance up from my show to check the cameras and notice that the light in the gym is on. The grainy footage shows a man, average looking, maybe on the older and fatter side, running on the one working treadmill. I don’t recall checking him in, but I’m not the one who usually handles that stuff- most people are in before my shift anyway. Whatever, I thought. I can hardly judge him, looks like he’s doing more exercise than I ever do. 

I go back to my show, getting up once to grab another bag of chips from the concession area. When I get back, I check the time- 2:32 AM. The one instance of actual work I do starts at 3, when I run the nightly audit on the computers, so I have to start keeping track of the time more closely around then. I spare a glance towards the cameras, and I’m surprised to see that the man is still running on the treadmill. Well, probably not still, right, like he probably took a break to do other workouts and now he’s back to running? Or maybe he’s been running this whole time, I don’t know shit about exercise.

In the crappy video quality, I could still see that he was sweating pretty hard- his shirt was almost an entire shade darker and his thinning hair was visibly slicked back. At the time, all I thought was, good for him I guess. Maybe this old fat guy should be motivating me to start working out for real.

I finish another episode before getting up to start the audit process, which usually takes me a couple minutes. Before I left the office, I checked the cameras again just because I didn’t like being surprised by a guest waiting for me at the desk whenever I went up. My eye immediately caught onto the treadmill guy. Not just because he was still running, which was odd enough- I mean it had been a full hour of I’m pretty sure nonstop running at a pretty quick pace for a guy like him. No, it’s because this time he was staring straight at me. Well, not me, but the camera in the corner of the gym. 

I froze. We locked eyes, even though I obviously knew he couldn’t see me. He was dead eyed with a slack, exhausted expression on his face. And yet, he was still running, his arms no longer swinging along with his run but instead hanging limply at his sides. 

I stood there for a long few seconds, confused and creeped out by what I was seeing. Right before I decided to write this guy off as a weirdo and turn away from the monitor to go do my job, he fucking smiled at me- at the camera, I mean. This creepy, wide smile that didn’t really reach his eyes, and the worst part was that his tongue just sort of limply flopped out of his mouth, as if the only thing holding it in was his closed lips. It just bounced around like he had no control over it, moving to the rhythm of his jog. It was also way too long- like a normal tongue would just stay in a person’s mouth if it was completely relaxed, right?

Needless to say I was really creeped out by this guy. I don’t know how long he was staring at the camera in the corner, or why he decided to smile right as I noticed him doing it. Obviously it was just weird timing, or he probably just decided to fuck with whoever might be watching the cams right at the moment that I looked up at him. But somewhere deep inside me, I felt like I was actually being watched.

It was about to be 3 AM, and if I didn’t have the audit done by 3:15, I’d get another write up and probably yelled at my boss about how it’s literally the only thing I have to do all night. As anxious as this guy was making me feel, I didn’t want to take my eyes off of him in case… I didn’t even know why, honestly. However, I swallowed my nerves and tore my eyes away from the screen, and fast-walked my way to the front desk with my mind made up to do the audit as quickly as possible. 

Let me describe the layout real quick here. The back office is around the corner from the front desk. Down the hallway, past the elevators, the lobby where we do breakfast, the pool, and the laundry room is where the gym is. It’s not the most well designed hotel, and there’s a few twists and turns leading to the gym at the other end of the first floor that makes directing guests verbally an annoying task. That also meant that as I stepped out to the front desk, I didn’t have a straight shot to be able to see the gym. On the one hand I was relieved that I was kind of far away from the weirdo, and on the other I was made even more anxious that he was now no longer in my sights. 

I booted up the ancient computer and started printing reports, filing them away in various folders with one hand and signing stuff that needed to be signed with the other. I’m sure I got some stuff wrong, but my priority was finishing this quickly so I could return to the office. 

I felt exposed out here. Couldn’t see anything but the lobby, the sound of some pop radio playing way too loud drowning out any other potential noise. Every second for the 10 minutes that I was out there I felt like something really wrong was about to happen. 

I had to bring some of these reports back to the office to file them away while the audit process was running on the computers. Normally I just did this at the end of the process to not make as many trips back and forth, and because as soon as the process ended I had to update the system to roll over to the next day- if I didn’t do that part within a minute of the process ending, the whole thing would get fucked up. This time though, as soon as the computer started processing, I raced back to the office to check on the cameras again, if only just to confirm that he was still doing the same thing. 

The first thing I noticed when I got back was that the light in the gym had turned off. I hadn’t heard the heavy gym door open and close from the front desk, but maybe the stereo was just too loud to hear it. I began scanning the rest of the displays, trying to find him on his way back to his room, in the stairwell or the elevators or wherever, just to give me some peace of mind.

At first, I didn’t see him anywhere on the cameras, until my eyes glanced back at the gym display. It was subtle, but the dim light on the treadmill display that indicated that it was in use looked like it was still on. I thought that maybe he just forgot to turn it off when he left… and then I saw him.

He was still in there, still running. I just hadn’t seen him at first in the dark. His body was barely lit by the treadmill, but that’s not why I noticed him.

His eyes were two pinpricks of light reflecting off the display, still staring directly at me. 

I choked back a gasp when I saw that. Why had the lights shut off while he was still in there? They were motion sensors- maybe if he was standing perfectly still they’d turn off eventually but there he was, still running at the same pace. He was clearly exhausted, his whole body drooping forward as his arms swung back and forth, but his legs continued moving at the same speed as they were an hour ago when I first noticed him, and his head was craned at an unnatural angle to keep staring at me. 

In the back of my mind, I considered that maybe this man needed help, some sort of mental illness thing that made him keep running, but my fear kept me rooted to the spot, not breaking eye contact. I still had the audit process to complete, but there was no way I was taking my eyes off of him again. 

“What the fuck,” I muttered under my breath, but as the last word left my mouth, he suddenly stopped running and fell off of the treadmill, landing headfirst on the tile floor. The cameras didn’t record sound but I could swear I heard a crack. In my shock, it took way too long to react to the lights coming back on and him standing with his neck clearly broken and his head limply hanging backwards off of it. As soon as he stood, he ran out of the room, passing the laundry camera, the pool, and making it halfway through the lobby before I broke out of my paralysis to run and slam the door to the office shut, locking it in the process.

A slam against the door shook the office two seconds after I had closed it. And then another, and another, like he was using his body as a battering ram. I looked back at the cameras but there were none pointing directly at the back office’s entrance. The only thing I could see was the trail he left of blood and what looked like shit all the way from the gym to the lobby. The entire room shook with the force of this fucking thing slamming itself against the door, and every call I tried to make to the police failed again and again.

The door was heavy, but I didn’t have faith in it holding up for that long if he kept going at this rate. I just kept looking back and forth between the door and the cameras, selfishly hoping that a guest would notice the commotion and draw this thing’s attention away from me. I don’t know what would happen to them if they did, but at the moment I was only focused on getting the fuck out of the hotel. 

After a few minutes- three, to be exact- the banging stopped. It took a second for me to notice, but once I did my eyes shot to the monitor. He was definitely still there, since there were no bloody footprints leading away from the back office. 

I wish I could forget just how long I stood there, staring at the screen and willing it to show this thing walk away. But the display on the bottom right of the monitor showed me each excruciating minute. Which is how I knew exactly what time another guest started making his way down to the lobby.

At 6:28 AM, I noticed movement on the camera that was pointing at the 3rd floor elevator. A young man, dressed in workout clothes, carrying a gym towel. My heart sank, and I began to think of ways to warn him or somehow prevent this thing from doing whatever it was trying to do. I could’ve pulled the fire alarm. I could’ve grabbed a chair or something to use as a weapon and jumped out at it. Hell, I could have at least stopped watching.

I didn’t do any of those things. I watched as the man entered the elevator at the 3rd floor, and descended down to the lobby. The second those elevator doors opened, the creature that had been standing in front of my office door for the past 3 hours and 18 minutes made its move. With a speed I could barely keep up with over several camera displays, its mangled body ran on perfectly functioning legs towards the guest, slamming into walls and leaving a bloody imprint on them as it went. 

The guest made it one foot off of the elevator before this thing tackled him back into it. I only saw a spray of blood hit the opposite wall as the elevator door slowly closed again. 

This was my chance to get the fuck out of the hotel and never look back, but again I found myself rooted to the ground in fear. I couldn’t bring myself to tear my eyes away from the monitor, so I watched as the elevator door slowly opened once again.

The guest walked out, just the same as he had walked in. He had the same chipper smile on his face, and I watched as he walked past the front desk, past the lobby, and the pool, and the laundry room, all the way to the gym. I was out the door and on my way to never coming back again before I could see him enter.

I’m writing this in my car a few miles away from the hotel because I couldn’t stand to go home yet, but I figured I should make my version of events public just in case. I know that man is running on the treadmill right now, and my coworkers or whoever else comes into the hotel next is going to have to deal with what I went through all over again, but I can’t bring myself to care. I even feel too claustrophobic to stay inside my car at this point after spending so long in the back office. 

My legs are still shaking, and the only thing I want to do right now is run, as fast and as far away as I can.