No matter how creepy something seems on the surface, there’s usually a good explanation for it.

So, what would you think if a coworker insisted their office printer was printing pages on its own late at night and was convinced someone was secretly accessing the office? Would you expect to uncover a mystery villain? Or assume there was a much simpler explanation?

In the following story, a help desk technician finds himself in this situation. Here’s how it all played out.

The printer was “haunted.” Sure, Jan.

I work help desk at a mid-sized law firm, and if you’ve ever supported lawyers, you already know where this is going.

Last Tuesday, I got a ticket from one of the senior partners – let’s call her Margaret – saying her printer is “possessed” and printing random pages on its own in the middle of the night.

Security is now involved, apparently, because Margaret is convinced someone is accessing the office after hours to mess with her specifically. The ticket had three exclamation marks and the word “intentional” underlined. I am not joking.

When he arrived, Margaret was there waiting for him.

I show up on Wednesday morning fully expecting to find some mundane driver issue or a stuck print queue. Margaret meets me at the door of her office like she’s been waiting.

She walks me through the whole thing – she stays late, goes home around 9 pm, and the cleaning crew finds printed pages on the floor every Thursday morning. Has been happening for six weeks.

She saved every single page in a manila folder as “evidence.”

At first, it was pretty creepy.

The pages are all partial prints – half a document, a few lines, then blank. I take a look at the printer itself and immediately notice it’s one of the older network models we haven’t replaced yet, sitting right next to the window that faces the parking garage.

I check the print queue history, and sure enough, there are jobs completing around 11 pm every Wednesday. I pull the job details, and the sender ID is a laptop that was decommissioned eight months ago.

I actually had to sit with that information for a second because that’s a little creepy on the surface. Turns out the previous associate who used that laptop had set up a recurring print job for weekly case summaries before he left the firm.

Margaret looked disappointed.

The laptop got wiped and reassigned, but the print server still had the scheduled task saved under the old machine name, and some update we pushed in the fall apparently reactivated legacy scheduled jobs across the board.

It took me maybe 25 minutes to delete the task and clear the old machine entry from the print server. Margaret stared at me for a long moment after I explained it and then said, “So it wasn’t intentional.” Not a question. Just a statement.

She closed the manila folder, put it in her desk drawer, and said “thank you” like I had personally disappointed her by solving it. I think she wanted a villain. I get it, Margaret. I really do.

Too funny! It seems like she was very underwhelmed.

Let’s check out if the people over at Reddit have ever encountered something similar.

This is funny.

This person loves stories like this.

Here’s someone who uses the word “haunted” sometimes.

It sure does!

Luckily, it was an easy fix, but she sure seemed disappointed.

If you liked that post, check out this post about a woman who tracked down a contractor who tried to vanish without a trace.