Let's Not Meet~ Reddit Horror Stories

The Office In The Middle Of Nowhere

When I was 19 I worked for a company that allocated labour to rural areas of Australia. Basically what you did was tell them when you were available, and they'd send you to a remote farm for a few weeks where you'd do whatever they needed done. It was hard work and long hours, but good pay and good fun if you got in with a nice group of workers.

When this occurred, I was working on a large property (I was told it covered roughly the same landmass as the state of Maryland USA) about 9 hours from Sydney city, and the property itself was about 40 minutes from the nearest town. In short, it was the middle of nowhere.

I was working at the farm clearing bushland with 3 other guys my age from the city, our boss was a guy called Jeremy who owned the farm and supervised us while helping out with the work. He was pretty laid back, and was generally really good to us. This summer in particular was very hot, and the work was hard, so one day when the temperature hit about 38 degrees Celsius (about 100 Fahrenheit) Jeremy decided to give us the afternoon off.

He said he knew of a water hole on the farm about a 25 minute drive north, I was keen for a swim but the other guys just wanted to relax for the arvo, so him and I hopped in one of the work trucks and started heading across the property. It was mostly wide, empty expanses with a few clumps of scattered bushland. Jeremy wasn't much of a talker, so we drove more or less in silence. After about 20 minutes however, he suddenly perked up and jabbed me in the ribs;

"do you see that over there... beneath the two dead trees?"

I should mention here that if you're not familiar with inland areas, particularly those in Australia, they are brown or red, and mostly flat and bland, meaning any bright colours stick out like a sore thumb, so you can imagine our surprise when we could see a large blue angular structure far off in the distance. We steered in it's direction, and as we got closer we realised it was a huge blue shipping container just sitting in the middle of nowhere. Jeremy was perplexed, I asked him if he knew what it was but he obviously didn't. He said he hadn't seen it when he drove through the same area about 5 weeks before, and he wanted to go and see what it was.

Initially we pulled to a stop about 100 meters away from it. At this stage I had a really bad feeling, the whole thing wasn't right, its hard to explain, but if you can imagine seeing such a foreign object in the middle of a huge barren expanse, it had to be something weird. Jeremy however wanted to investigate, which I understood, given it was his property, but in truth I was really anxious.

As we got closer, things got even more bizarre. There was a big diesel generator behind it thumping away, and a CCTV camera on each side, all motion activated so they buzzed from side to side, following us as we moved around. I tried to reason with Jeremy, something along the lines of "with all this security, someone obviously doesn't want us here, lets just go". He brushed me off however, reminding me it was his farm and whoever had put this here was trespassing, so he wanted to go inside.

Despite all the surveillance, there was only a small padlock on the huge door. We had some bolt-cutters in his toolbox, and after a bit of a struggle, we broke the lock and went inside.

The first thing I noticed was the rush of cold air as we got in, the place was air-conditioned, which I must admit was quite pleasant on such a hot day. We searched around for a light switch, but I could already see this was some sort of I.T set up, there were flashing LEDs all around the place and the sort of hum you hear when a hard drive is working hard. When we finally switched on the lights, we could see a sophisticated (albeit somewhat cluttered) office set up. There were hard drives the size of bar fridges and other computer equipment lining the walls, sometimes piled 2 or 3 high, and plastic storage boxes scatter around the far wall, and several desks with computer monitors arranged in the middle, complete with rolling office chairs.

At this stage I felt like I was in one of those nonsensical dreams, this made absolutely no sense. We wandered to the middle and sat down at the desks to see if the computers could give us any idea of what the hell was going on here. My heart was racing and I just wanted to bolt, we had been seen by the CCTV, so if anyone was monitoring they already knew we were here. Jeremy on the other was adamant we had to get to the bottom of this, so I put on a brave face and started looking through the computer. This went on for a while, but in short neither of us had a very high grasp of technology outside of Facebook and Microsoft Word. The best I can describe it from my lay position is that it was endless lists of "computer talk", it was like the old Napster or Limewire download screens looked like, just constantly picking up and receiving data then recording it on several windows.

I gave up on the computers and walked cautiously over the far end of the container to the big pile of storage boxes. By then I was pretty sure no-one else was there as there was nowhere to hide really, but I was still incredibly on edge. I decided, against my better judgment to see what was inside all these boxes. My brief sift through this box still makes me feel sick to the stomach.

It didn't take long for me to realise that the this box was full of posters, DVDs and photos, all of hard core child pornography. One thing that still gets to me is that it was all neatly ordered in to folders and smaller boxes... These people were organised. I immediately recoiled, jumped up and ran over to Jeremy. I could hardly string a sentence together, I said something to the effect of "mate, get out, child sex, go, get the fuck up!". I dragged him out, composed myself and managed to explain what I saw.

We jumped back in to the truck and sped back to the house. The farm had no mobile phone reception, and we hadn't bought the satellite phone so we had to get back to the landline to call the police. Once we called them they still had to make it all the way to the farm from the nearest police station, which was in a town about a half hour from the town closest to the farm (as I mentioned, very remote). We waited, talking frantically about what we'd seen, until the cops arrived almost an hour later. They arrived with 2 four wheel drives, and we jumped in and led them back. This is where it gets worse...

By the time we got back, the container door was open and there was fire inside. We had only two small extinguishers in the cars, and these did very little. The fire department took an hour to get there, by which stage most of the damage was already done. An arson report by the federal police found almost no evidence of the computer equipment described, and only traces of paper and cardboard. This means that whoever ran it, knew we were there and had time to come and remove most of it and get away. There were various ways to get off the property and the landmass was huge, so there was no real way to tail them. Since the police hadn't taken us all too seriously in the first instance, probably due to our poor explanation on the phone, aerial surveillance was also impossible by the time we had pieced it all together.

I took a keen interest in following it up, but with no real evidence of who might be responsible, the investigation went cold. I've kept in contact with Jeremy, and the shipping container is still sitting there on the farm, as its too expensive to move.

I'll never forget what I saw in those boxes.