10/31/2025
“The Haunted Hard Hat”
Tony “Two Nails” Romano wasn’t scared of anything.
Not of heights, not of power tools, not even of his foreman, Big Sal, and that guy once chased a raccoon off the scaffolding with a nail gun.
It was Halloween night, and Tony was working late on the new apartment site downtown. The rest of the crew had gone home early to take their kids trick-or-treating, but Tony stayed behind because, as he put it, “Concrete don’t pour itself, pal.”
He whistled while he worked, the wind whistled back, and the half-finished building creaked in reply. The moon was big, orange, and looked like a traffic cone in the sky.
Then Tony heard a voice.
A faint whisper.
Right behind him.
“You forgot… your safety vest…”
He spun around, nobody there. Just his empty lunch box, an abandoned jackhammer, and a plastic skeleton someone from the crew had hung up for a joke earlier.
“Ha ha, very funny,” Tony muttered. “Whoever’s messin’ with me better clock back in, or I’m takin’ your donuts tomorrow.”
He went back to mixing cement. The whisper came again, louder this time.
“TONY… PUT ON… YOUR HARD HAT…”
And right then, his hard hat floated off the workbench and landed gently on his head.
Tony froze. “Okay. Either OSHA’s got ghosts now, or I need more sleep.”
He looked around and saw the skeleton from earlier was gone.
Then he heard the rattle of bones and the clatter of steel-toed boots. The skeleton was walking across the rebar holding a clipboard.
“You didn’t fill out your time sheet,” it said in a gravelly voice.
Tony blinked. “Oh great, even the undead care about paperwork.”
Trying to stay calm, he asked, “You union?”
The skeleton nodded. “Local 13 - Graveyard Shift.”
That’s when Tony decided he’d had enough of overtime. He dropped his trowel, grabbed his thermos, and sprinted off the site yelling,
“Sal can finish the concrete himself! I ain’t workin’ with nobody who’s already bone tired!”
The next morning, Big Sal found Tony’s hard hat on the workbench, still warm and next to it, a neatly filled-out time sheet signed:
"Skelly, Assistant Foreman, Local 13."
