Toccoa Traces Journal

I worked the late shift at a plant here in Toccoa once. PackPro. Big place, long floors, machines that never seemed to stop. Most folks came in by day and went home by dark. I came in when the sun went down.

After dark, that place felt off. Not bad, not mean. Just off. Like the walls held on to old days and would not let them go.

The long floor at two in the morning, with just one lamp left on.

The floor was long and bare. Rows of machines stood in the dark, still and quiet, till the next run. The hum of the place never quit, even when the work did. It sat in your chest. You felt it more than you heard it.

Some rooms had no lamps on at all. You stepped in to fetch a part or check a bin, and the dark just sat there, thick as smoke. Your own steps came back at you off the walls. More than once I stopped and turned, sure that someone was close behind me. There was no one there. There never was.

I am not the kind to chase haunt tales. I do not go looking for them. But I will tell you plain: that plant felt haunted. It felt like folks had lived hard lives in there, and like some part of them never left. Not a thing you can see. A thing you can feel, in your gut, at two in the morning when the floor is yours alone.

The old hands knew it too. They did not say much. They just grinned when the new guy asked why the back hall stayed dark, or why no one liked to go down to the far end by himself. They had their own tales, and they kept them close.

I left that job a while back. I do not miss the hours, and I do not miss the ache in my feet. But I think about that place sometimes, when the town goes quiet and the lamps burn low. A town is not just its hills and its rivers. It is the rooms where folks spent their nights, and the hum that stays in the walls long after the work is done.

If you ever work a late shift in an old plant, you will know what I mean. You do not have to believe in haunts. You just have to stand alone on a long floor at two in the morning, and feel the place look back at you.

— Earl