Earlier this week, we asked readers to share their most frightening tales of technology terror and support horror. And via both comments and Twitter (using the hashtag #ITTalesofTerror), in poured stories that raised goosebumps from those of us who have worked in IT at one point or another.

After reading through them, we’ve picked out some reader favorites and a few of our own. Some of us at Ars were inspired to recount further tales of horror from our own IT careers—including one of mine that I’ve saved for last; it should cause a shudder of recognition from our more veteran readers and a bit of schadenfreude from those too young to remember five-and-a-quarter-inch floppy disks.

The chamber of horrors

Many readers had short tales of terror about mishaps in the closed spaces where we hide our network infrastructure. Eli Jacobowitz (@creepdr on Twitter) shared a short, shocking scenario by tweet: “Raccoons in the network closet (not kidding).” David Mohundro shared another story of a somewhat more smelly infrastructure invasion that brings new meaning to “data scrubbing”: “I saw our IT guys lugging shop vacs through the lower parking deck one day. There was a sewage backup into the server room.”

Another scary server room story via Twitter comes from Peter S. Kastner: “Alone Halloween night 1967 night shift at Cornell's datacenter. Water deluge thru roof on mainframe in storm. Pull plug!”

A somewhat less traumatic tale of almost-disaster in the server room comes from roadflare16:

It was my first week at my first IT job. A few coworkers got up all of a sudden and quickly started heading for the server room. I asked what was going on, and their response was "there's a fire in the server room, come help!" When we got there, the halon fire suppression system hadn't gone off, and we couldn't smell smoke, so we carefully opened the door to look inside. Nothing. Everything was working fine. In fact, almost the exact opposite happened. After checking the situation out, the main A/C unit had failed, which kicked on the backup A/C unit, which hadn't been tested in months. It had frozen over in the short time it was alive, and when the ice buildup began to melt it flooded the false floor where a smoke detector was, shorted it out, prompting the system to think there was a fire. Interesting first week.

But what has to be the most rattling tale of data center disasters comes from tiltedj—a story of a disaster recovery test that turned into a disaster itself:

Our first air-cooled Cray system pulled air from under the floor with a single giant squirrel-cage fan in the bottom of each rack and pushed it up through all the boards and out the top. This of course required installing a couple dozen new Liebert air handlers to push enough cold air under the floor. The raised floor was self-supporting, essentially just a thin metal framework that required most of the tiles to be in place to remain structurally intact. One day we had a COOP exercise and tested the "big red button" on the wall to EPO the facility. The Cray shut off immediately, including all of its fans. The Lieberts were never wired in and did not. We heard the screeching as the fans spun down, mixed with a rumbling as without anywhere for all that air to go it popped out all the floor tiles instead. Then there was the horrible metal crunching as the entire floor collapsed and dropped all the racks.

If you prefer your server room stories with a supernatural twist, however, Arsian bushrat0011899 has a tale that wins hands-down—an unexpected visitor to the server room claiming demonic forces were at work:

Not anywhere enough moons ago, a child came into our office with a broken netbook. Simple enough problem, he just needed to connect to the guest Wi-Fi, done in seconds. Our guest network is a filtered tunnel straight to the WAN, no local peer connections allowed. He came back the next day, he failed trying to roll his own netbook back from Windows 8 to 7, he had this half Windows 8 half 7 abomination that could only run half of the system tools, it was a miracle it didn't blue-screen-of-death the instant it was turned on. I refreshed Windows 8 and he was on his way again. The next day we notice a sudden, near complete drop in network performance, LAN and WAN, ping times in the seconds, downlink in the Kb range, completely down. The server was fine, the APs were fine, the switches too, nothing was faulty but we gave a restart to everything we could just in case. After some investigation I found the source of our lost performance, our main backbone link to our core router was unplugged and we were relying on a tiny backup link for emergencies. I walk down the hall to the core, unlock the door and see this child. I still have no idea how he got in there. He had disconnected our gigabit link and plugged it into his netbook. On this $100 netbook were 8 individual bitcoin miners, all hashing away, he looked up at me crying, saying the devil had possessed his netbook and that if he didn't get a faster internet connection he'd take this kid's soul. After performing an exorcism on his netbook to disable remote access and purge it of malware it started acting normally. He left and I never saw him again. I started telling this story to the other support guys, none of them believed that this kid could get in our server room, it can't be locked from the inside either. So I went to pull the security camera footage. All the cameras were down for the 3 days he was there.

The mystery machine

For those of you who need more evidence to prove that someone really is out to get us all, there’s this story from Pehr:

I once was involved in the decommissioning of a few server halls in what had been a NOC. It was mostly mundane stuff; disconnecting, removing and throwing away equipment nobody cared about. There was just one odd thing in the server hall. In a corner stood a truly ancient server. It was home built, with a wooden chassis of all things, and connected directly to a core router using an Ethernet-to-Token-Ring bridge. Unlike the rest of the equipment in the room it had no serial number, and therefore no known owner. So, one late Friday evening I simply unplugged that machine, turned it off and put it into the pile of trash. After all, we were supposed to clear everything out of the server hall a few days later, and the core router was going down soon anyway. After that I drove home. At 3 am in the morning somebody started banging and ringing on the door to my apartment. As I lived in a "lively" neighborhood I didn't think too much about it. I did think more about it about 30 minutes later when the police had fetched a locksmith and greeted me in my own bedroom, hands on guns. The policemen told me, in no uncertain terms, that they KNEW I had disconnected some equipment, and they wanted that equipment back online right now. I was informed that answering "No" to the request would result in a trip to jail for an indefinite time. So, I ended up going back to work at 4 AM, digging through a container to find that ancient computer and plugging it in again. The police thanked me, told me that I could remove it in a week and gave me a lift back home. They claimed not to know anything about the server, only that they had been told by somebody "higher up" to get it up and running again as soon as possible. To this day I do not know what the server did, or how they figured out I had disconnected it within a few hours. Perhaps it was part of an important operation. Perhaps it contained the porn collection of the police chief. Nobody else in the office knew anything of the server. A few days later I found it had been turned off remotely, and when I decommissioned the server I took the hard disk out. In youthful curiosity I tried to see what it contained. I found that the hard disk had been wiped.

Another mystery—although one not so sinister—was uncovered at what seemed to be a haunted bank branch. But the case was solved by Arsel, as he explains below: