The 5 Spookiest Secrets at Sunset Hill Stoneware

Like just about anywhere else, Sunset Hill Stoneware has plenty of spooky secrets that hide away in the dark corners of our shop and offices. There aren’t any wandering spirits or ghouls living in our buildings, to our knowledge. But, we’ve questioned it before. Just in time for Halloween, we have a compilation of all the spooky secrets at Sunset Hill Stoneware.

Doors Closing and Opening by Themselves

Our corporate offices are in a separate building on the other side of Neenah from our shop. While it looks like a normal office building, it used to hold a lot of other businesses before ours. Some of the other businesses included a hair salon, a dentist’s office, a doctor’s office and domestic abuse crisis center. Now, it’s just us. However, there are plenty of things the other businesses left behind that are more than a little spooky.

One of the most noticeable is that our office doors like to open and close on their own. It doesn’t always happen, but when it does it’s pretty noticeable. If someone leaves their door cracked open, it’ll sometimes slam shut. We’ve also had our doors crack themselves open during meetings, as if some ghost were trying to interrupt us with an important question or a delivery.

In truth, the simplest explanation is that there’s sometimes a draft whenever our front or side doors are open. But what’s to say it isn’t a particularly disruptive ghost? We see no reason why it wouldn’t be.

Footprints in the Basement

Yes, we have a basement. We used to use it as a repository for extra custom coffee mugs, though there are only a few left now. While it’s pretty standard as far as basements go, there is one key feature that makes it more unsettling.

On the concrete floor in the center of our basement storage area, there is a set of footprints. We’re not talking about shoe prints, either. There is a set of human footprints, complete with five toes, permanently imprinted on the floor. These weren’t left behind in the concrete, but rather stained on top of it, like someone had stepped in ink and then took a barefoot walk through our basement. We’ve tried to clean it up before, but without much success. The whole thing leaves us more unnerved than a trip through one of our local haunted houses, even the Burial Chamber.

Whether the footprints were the results of some comedic misstep from the 1970s or the only remnants of a barefoot potter trapped in the basement, they’re permanently downstairs. No matter what happened to cause the footprints to appear, they’ll always pose more questions for us than answers.

Secret Compartments in the Bathrooms

Back when our office used to be a lot of separate office suites, one of the occupying businesses was a clinic. Even though the doctor’s office is long gone, there are still a few reminders of what this place used to be that make it all the more unsettling.

If you go into a few of the older bathrooms and turn on the dim orange lights, you might find a few wooden compartments tucked away in the walls. Were these nooks and crannies secret spots where ghouls and vampires could hide extra supplies of blood? Or perhaps they left a secret door after the clinic closed? Certainly it wasn’t a slot in the wall where people could submit samples for a urinalysis in private. Impossible.

As SHS has continued to grow, we’ve remodeled our offices a few different times. After we destroyed some of the older, crypt-like bathrooms, only a few of these secret compartments still remain. Should you ever be lucky enough to visit our closed facility, keep your eyes peeled for the few that still exist.

The Lights in the Shop

Since Sunset Hill Stoneware’s production facility is a newer building, it’s probably not as likely to have any ghostly guests. However, that doesn’t mean it’s not prone to spookiness. Like most things, the shop is a much creepier sight after the sun goes down.

If you’re driving on I-41 late at night after visiting businesses like Essity or Pierce, you might notice our shop’s lights on long after business hours, casting shadows through the gnarled, bare tree branches along the highway. While you might not notice them on in the wee hours of the morning, they’ll be shining into the night all through the early evening.

Is it our cleaning crew coming in to make sure our shop is spotless? Of course not. Is it the mad scientists up late and working on new glaze colors? Yes. There’s no better time for experimentation than at nine o’clock at night on a Thursday. Next time you look through our Glaze Gallery and picture what your artwork or logo would look like in each color on a mug, remember those mad scientists. Hear their cackling laughter ringing through the night as you choose our newest glazes like Rustic Rose or Blarney Stone and feel a chill rush down your spine.

Monitors Turning Themselves On and Off

At both our shop and our corporate headquarters, we’ve noticed a strange phenomenon that happens when we least expect it. Without explanation, our computer monitors sometimes turn themselves off. The second we try to fix it ourselves, the monitors will turn back on again. This mysterious phenomenon has our tech support team–who, incidentally, is also our president Chris–baffled beyond belief.

However, we have a theory. We think that the same ghost responsible for closing and opening our office doors may be messing with our computers, too. Should anyone find the rambunctious revenant responsible for all these pranks, we encourage them to call 800-509-4662 with tips, or to get a quote for your own spooky set of stoneware.