This is really more of an observation one might make while half-baked, rather than a properly half-baked idea.
While standing in a hallway of an office building near an elevator, I have often noticed a very slight and brief "reeling" sensation just before the elevator door opens, or just after it closes. The timing seems to correspond to when the elevator car decelerates to a stop or first starts accelerating. The effect is only present within a few feet of the shaft, and only observed from large cable-lifted elevators in tall buildings.
The usual causes for unexpected observations were eliminated by performing all applicable items on the traditional observer improvement checklist, such as changing the bong[1,2]-water, cleaning out the copper worm and thumper keg on the moonshine still, removing the excess lean from the cup [3], scraping all the residue out of the crack-pipe, not huffing aether, either luminiferous or diethyl, before observations, and so on.
The item-list turned out to be empty, and the effect remained.
The obvious over-unitarian explanation would be that large accelerated or moving masses produce a gravity-like force on nearby objects by an aether-drag effect, something stronger than the General Relativity
"gravitomagnetic" force.
Some more conventional explanation are:
1. The elevator shaft compresses or expands vertically under the cable tension at its top, shaking all the floors slightly.
2. The observer missed some of the above checklist items, or has developed Evil pSychotic Powers (ESP) from watching too many trashy over-unitarian bulb-flicks on youtube.
This suggests experiments, measuring with accelerometers, optical interferometers, or even a Wilbert Smith "force field detector" [4] near an operating elevator or other large moving object to see if
unexpected forces appear, and if they vary with speed or acceleration.
Large marine diesel engines might be good sources for generating such mass-dragging effects. Some of these are building-sized, with piston masses of a few tons moving through a several meter stroke a few times per second.
References:
1: Misner, CW, Thorne, KS, and Wheeler, JA Gravitation (W.H. Freeman: San Francisco, 1973, p. 55)
2:
http://www.drbongs.com/3:
http://gotthedrank.ytmnd.com/4:
http://amasci.com/freenrg/bindet.html
