When a printer turns itself on and spits out documents late at night, there are only two reasonable explanations: a very crazy technical glitch or a ghost.

A lawyer called the help desk assuming it was either a ghost or someone messing with her intentionally.

She even collected the mysterious and puzzling printouts for weeks, carefully saving them as evidence. Security got involved.

The lesson ended up being that technology can look and sound quite terrifying when you don’t know what’s happening behind the scenes.

In this case, it may have made the caller almost wish it were a ghost.

Read the full story below.

The printer was “haunted.” Sure, Jan.

So 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 get 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.

It was all very intense.

The ticket had three exclamation marks and the word “intentional” underlined. I am not joking.

I show up 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 9pm, and the cleaning crew finds printed pages on the floor every Thursday morning. Has been happening for six weeks.

She thinks there’s more to it than a malfunctioning printer.

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

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.

Maybe Margaret has a point.

I check the print queue history and sure enough, there are jobs completing around 11pm 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.

But there is an explanation.

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.

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.

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.

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I think she wanted a villain. I get it, Margaret. I really do.

She probably already had someone in mind. What did Reddit think?

One sentence horror story.

I agree.

LOL.

Perfect.

If you enjoyed this story, check out this post about a woman who received a work email from a place she never even applied.

The issues are just this hard to explain/track.

Yup.

Who would Batman be without the Joker? This is probably how Margaret felt without her haunted printer.