The Third Shift at the Drayton Mill

I never gave much thought to the old Drayton Mill, even when I was a kid growing up in the rust belt town of Meridian. It had been abandoned for decades, a hulking brick carcass on the edge of the Kanawha River, its windows shattered, its smokestacks like hollow fingers against the sky. My friends and I used to dare each other to ride our bikes past it at dusk, laughing at the shivers it gave us. I figured it was just the usual creepiness of an empty building, nothing more.

That was before last summer, before my mom took a traveling nurse assignment in a town two hours away, and my friends and I rented a tiny house near the old mill for the season. We were young, restless, and the rent was dirt cheap because the landlord warned us about the ‘draft.’ We thought he meant the wind off the river. He didn’t.

Our house stood on a street that dead-ended at the mill’s rusted gate. From our porch, we could see the outline of the main building, the way the sunlight never quite touched its east side, even at noon. We spent the first week exploring the woods around it, skipping stones in the river, and laughing at how the old machinery creaked inside. But then the sounds started.

At first, it was just a low hum at night, like a refrigerator turning on. Then it became a rhythmic clanking, metal on metal, coming from the mill. We’d lie in our beds and listen, convincing ourselves it was the wind rattling loose tin. But one night, my friend Marcus, who slept by the window, said he saw a light flicker inside one of the upper floors. We all went to look, but there was nothing but darkness. He swore it was there, a pale, yellowish glow, like an old incandescent bulb.

The next morning, we decided to investigate. We slipped through a gap in the rusted fence and pushed open the heavy, groaning door. Inside, the air was thick with dust and the smell of oil and rot. The floor was littered with broken machinery, old barrels, and rusted tools. In the center of the main floor, we found a row of old metal lockers, their paint flaked, their doors hanging open. On one of them, in faded chalk, someone had written: ‘Third Shift Ends at 6.’ Weird, but we shrugged it off.

That night, we were sitting in our living room, watching old movies, when the power flickered. Then the hum returned, louder, and we heard a new sound: footsteps, heavy and regular, crossing the floor of the mill. We turned off the TV and listened. They were slow, dragging, as if someone were walking with a limp. Marcus whispered that it had to be a squatter. But I felt a cold knot in my stomach. There was something about the rhythm, the way it matched the thump of my heart.

We decided to confront it. Armed with flashlights, we crossed the street and entered the mill again, this time at night. The darkness swallowed us, and our beams cut through the dust like searchlights. The footsteps had stopped. We wandered through the cavernous space, our boots echoing, when I saw it: a figure, tall and thin, standing at the far end of the room, near the lockers. It wasn’t human. Its skin was pale and slick, like a slug, and its limbs were too long, its fingers trailing almost to the floor. It didn’t move, but I felt it watching us, its eyes like black pits. We froze. Then Marcus screamed, and we ran.

We never went back inside the mill, but the activity escalated. The hum became a constant drone, and at night we’d hear the footsteps pacing outside our house, circling, pausing at the windows. We’d draw the blinds, but the shadow of a figure, tall and wrong, would stretch across the wall. We started sleeping in shifts, huddled together, too scared to talk. The landlord wouldn’t return our calls. When we tried to leave, our car wouldn’t start, and the road out of town was blocked by a fallen tree that hadn’t been there the day before.

Weeks passed, and we grew thin and pale. We started seeing the figure more often, not just at the mill, but in our peripheral vision, in the corner of a room, in the reflection of a window. It never spoke, but we could hear its thoughts, a low, pressing whisper in our minds: ‘Third shift, third shift, never ends.’

One night, Marcus broke. He ran into the mill, screaming that he was going to finish it. We chased after him, and that’s when we saw the lockers were all open now, and each one contained a tarnished brass pocket watch, all ticking at different times. And in the center of the room, where the figure usually stood, there was a hole in the floor, a circular shaft descending into absolute blackness, with a rusty ladder bolted to the wall. From below came the sound of grinding gears and the steady clank of machinery.

I looked at my watch. It said 3:33 AM. And for the first time, I noticed that the chalk message had changed. It now read: ‘Third Shift Ends at ‘6’ – but the ‘6’ was crossed out, and in its place was a hastily drawn, black, dripping ‘never.’

We pulled Marcus back, and we ran. We didn’t stop running until we reached the interstate, hitchhiking to a bus station two counties away. We never returned, never spoke of it, but I still see the figure in my dreams, its long fingers pointing toward an unseen time clock, and I feel the weight of an endless shift, a job that never lets you go. And I know, with a certainty that chills me, that the mill is still waiting for its third shift workers to return, and that one day, my name will be chalked on that locker.