My sleepy rural county isn’t the most exciting place to be a police officer so I volunteered for the patrol at the old facility. Apparently, some local teens had been using the abandoned building as a place to drink beers, smoke weed and spray paint huge pictures of dicks on the walls.
In an effort to appease the grumpy neighbors who had the reported the juveniles my CO said we should post someone outside of the building for a few nights to scare off the delinquents.
I jumped on the opportunity. Nothing better than getting paid to sit in your car and play games on your phone.
I got bored fast – turns out most mobile games these days follow the freemium model.
I decided to get out of the car and stretch my legs.
I’d never actually been this close to the facility before. I’d heard the rumors; the town was full of them. One rumor said the building was used as a CIA blacksite to detain and torture terrorists. One was that the building housed a secret lab to pull precious metals from alternate dimensions. One rumor particularly bonkers rumor that was proliferated by the town conspiracy theorist said the clearly 70’s era piece of brutalist architecture was, in fact, ancient and had been constructed by a race of aliens.
In truth, all I really knew for sure was that the building was built by the government in the 1970’s and it was abandoned in the 90’s.
All this to say, I was curious about the building and I had a perfect excuse to freely wander its halls.
I found the busted window the kids had been using as an entry and pulled myself through.
The air in the facility was thick with dust and the smell of mildew. With most of the windows boarded up the interior was pitch black with the exception of a few columns of moonlight and the beam of my flashlight that cut through the nearby darkness but flung monstrous shadows into the distance.
I walked slowly down the corridor. My footsteps sent reverberations off the concrete floors and walls of the deserted structure. The place was eerie and I was about to turn back when I heard what sounded like the soft crunch of a boot on glass from further inside the building.
Quietly, I made my way further down the hallway towards the sound, hoping that what I had heard was nothing more than a mouse or a cat that had taken refuge in the long vacant facility.
The hair on my neck stood at attention as I turned each corner. Adrenaline coursed through my veins as I opened each door. Each time I found nothing.
Eventually, I found the room the teens had been using as their den. It seemed to have been a cafeteria back when the building was operational, but now was nothing more than a large dark room with rotting tables and drapes of cobwebs in every corner.
Smashed beer bottles littered the floor along with dozens of half-burned candles and candy wrappers. A box of chalk lay on the ground next to some sort of intricate design it had been used to draw. I didn’t pay it much mind.
Feeling better about being alone in the building I decided to head back to the squad car when I noticed a door that stood unique against any of the others I’d seen so far in my exploration. It was large, black, steel and chained shut.
I wandered over and tugged on the chains that had long rusted from years of neglect. I thought it strange, but wanted to get out of the building so I ignored it and headed back to the car.
I played a few more mobile games and scrolled for a bit on reddit, but I couldn’t get that door out of my head. What was in there? Why would one room be locked so securely while the rest of the building was essentially wide open? What was in there?
The thought ate away at me until I made the decision to go back in.
I popped the trunk of the car, took out the bolt cutters and headed back into the dark building.
After years of rusting in the damp building the chains broke easily and fell to the concrete floor with a thud that echoed through the empty corridors.
I pulled the heavy steel door open and revealed a staircase that descended deeper into the mysterious darkness below. A line of a white powder lay across the top step. I brushed my foot across it – salt maybe? I’m not sure.
With great trepidation I started down the staircase. The heavy door slammed behind me with a heavy thud that made me jump. As I descended the air became noticeably colder and a chill rushed up my spine. I could almost feel the weight of the building pressing down on me as I moved towards its hidden secret.
At the bottom of the staircase was a room. I washed the walls with the light of my flashlight. Just a plain square room with the yellow paint on the walls chipping off with age.
My heart skipped a beat when I noticed what was in the center of the room. A Skeleton. It was lying face down on the cement floor, a pair of shackles were fastened around each of its ankles.
I took a step towards the pile of bones to inspect it more closely when my flashlight flickered once, twice then, all of a sudden, I was plunged into darkness. A muttered curse escaped my lips as I feverishly slapped my flashlight with my palm trying to bring it back to life.
In the pitch black, I strained my ears and eyes trying to re-orient myself in the room when I felt a sudden awareness that I wasn’t alone. A subtle rustle and the soft echoes of thin breathing reached my ears. I fumbled for my radio intending to call for backup, but found, like my flashlight, the radio was dead as well.
Panic gripped me and I tried to steady my breathing, wanting to stay as still and as quiet as possible while I waited for my eyes to adjust.
Slowly something emerged from the darkness. A silhouette blacker than the darkness around it became visible. Someone or something was standing in the corner of the room.
“Who’s There?” I shouted into the blackness my voice echoing of the walls.
I reached for my service weapon only to find it was missing. My holster was empty. Had I been disarmed? My panic intensified.
A soft shuffling behind me caused me to whip around in that direction, “Who’s there?” I called again.
Two pin-pricks of yellow light peered at me from the far side of the room near the base of the staircase where I entered.
I stared in fear as the two pin-pricks of light flickered out then re-appeared seconds later a few feet to my right. Another shuffling sound came from behind me and I spun around again and shouted, “This is the police, who is there!?”
I stood in the inky blackness, completely blind, too scared to even breathe when I felt the warm breath of someone standing directly in front of me. I swung my fist out but found only air.
Then yet another sound from behind me, it was the loud grating of the steel door being pushed open. What little light there was on the ground floor of the building filtered in through the now open door and provided just enough light for me to find the staircase.
I bolted.
I ran up the stairs through the steel door and out to my car in under a minute. I sat in the driver’s seat of my car, shaking like a leaf in the wind when I made the decision to call in backup. I don’t care if I would get in trouble for losing my gun or if I would get bullied relentlessly for calling in backup on what was probably a bunch of teenagers.
I grabbed my radio when it sprung to life in my hand, “James, are you alright? Additional officers are being dispatched to your location! Stay put!”
What? How would they have known what just happened? I didn’t call for backup?
“Back-up?” I questioned the radio.
“Yes, James, we’ve heard nothing but screams from your radio for the last ten minutes. Its still coming through now. Are you not hearing that?”, The dispatcher asked me.
“No,” I replied, “I don’t hear anything. I haven’t even used my radio. Can you patch it through on my end? Maybe there’s a glitch or we’re catching up another signal”
“Sure,” The radio crackled back, “you’re not going to like it”
The speakers in my squad car exploded into the blood curdling screams of a woman crying for help. Her voice strained and cracked in places, the kind of screams someone could only make if they were fighting for their life.
“OK, OK ENOUGH!” I shouted into the radio. The screaming stopped for a moment before the radio crackled to life again.
“You know what, if you’re saying everything is alright on your end then I actually have a different address for you to check out you can leave that dump you’ve been sitting at all night. We’re getting a crazy number of calls all of a sudden.”
The dispatcher sent me an address and asked me to follow up once I’d arrived.
I took one last look at the building before I pulled out of the empty parking lot. As I was rolling up my window about to drive off, I heard, faintly and distant, just loud enough to make me question if it was a figment of my own imagination, the same woman’s scream that had apparently been broadcast through my radio.
My stomach turned into knots. I knew that building was empty. I knew there was no one left in there. Something deep in the dark labyrinth of hallways was trying to lure me in.
With a shudder I drove off.
More strange things happened that night. In a town of roughly 400, our small precinct received 12 suicide calls and when we arrived at the addresses given, no one there claimed to have made a call.
We received multiple calls of fires that also turned out to be hoaxes.
I personally responded to several calls of home intrusion only for a search of the homes to turn up nothing. One man claimed to have cornered an intruder in his hallway closet only for it to be empty when I arrived to open the door.
That night a small four-seat Cessna 182 was flying directly overhead of our town when all of a sudden it vanished. It disappeared off of radar, no crash was reported and a two-week search after the fact turned up nothing.
The most disturbing thing that started happening was the body parts. Every now and then a random foot or finger or hand would show up. There were usually called in to us after the neighborhood dogs would cheerily drop them off on their family’s doorstep. Always a hand, finger or foot, nothing more.
Unexplained things were happening in my own home as well. I’d come home from work and lay down on the couch exhausted. I’d be toeing the line on the barrier between awake and asleep when I’d hear my front door open and footsteps walk past me and down the hall. Thinking it was my girlfriend I’d call out to her, only to realize she wasn’t expected home from work for another few hours.
People started to move out and no one moved in.
Within a year the population was cut in half. Another year and it was cut in half again.
I left during the 3rd year. Everyone else who was left did too. Eminent Domain. The government owns the land now. We were told it was for a military base, but the last rumor I heard was the construction was centered on that old government facility I wandered through some many years ago.
I loved my time in that little town, although I don’t have much to remember it by. I just can’t help but worry that what happened there was my fault. What was it that I unleashed and what if it spreads?