If you’ve spent some time on urban legend forums, then you might have tried to test some crazy sounding things for yourself. If you’ve spent enough time on urban legend forums, you might have heard of the 16 floor game. And, if you’ve been an idiot like me, then you might have tried to test the 16 floor game for yourself. I pray for your sake, that you are not like me.
Everything I’m about to tell you, it all happened a little over a year ago. Don’t ask me why I’m only writing about it now. Why, if I feel so strongly, I didn’t try to warn people away from it earlier. I don’t know. Maybe it took me this long to come to terms with what happened, or maybe it took this long to eventually realize that I can’t forget what happened, or maybe I just need to get this off my chest in a place where the person I’m talking to won’t try to hide the look on their face like they think I’m fucking crazy. I don’t suppose it really matters all that much, just so long as I can warn even one person away from playing the 16 floor game.
Anyway, like I said, it was a little over a year ago. I had no job, no prospects, lived at my father’s house, and had been spending a stupid amount of my time looking at creepy stories on the internet. I spent full nights staying up and watching short horror films, youtubers playing spooky indie games, scrolling through forums and reading the same sort of stories you are reading now, not believing a word of it. All of that until I got into testing urban legends.
I assume that we all did Bloody Mary when we were kids, at least once, all to great cheek and excitement. Well, I must have done it a dozen times. I found out that testing these urban legends still apparently gave me that same adrenaline rush as a young adult. I think it gave me a sense of purpose too, broke me out of my monotony, gave me an escape from the staleness that my life had become at that point. I assume now that that’s why I jumped so headfirst into it all. My obsession started with reading a story online about a haunted forest only a half hour drive away. I figured, why the hell not. Not like I have anything better to do, (and not like I have anything all that great to lose). After I spent the night camping out there, filled with anxiety and adrenaline, moving for my pocketknife at every sound, only falling asleep with the light of day, I was hooked. I started looking up any urban legends that I could test. Tapped on mirrors, walked under ladders, went out to forests on the full moon. I even broke into some abandoned buildings a couple times, told my dad all about it after every outing. He didn’t seem all that interested, but also didn’t seem to mind me talking his ear off about it. I think he was just happy that I was finally getting out of the house again. This continued for a couple months, until I stumbled upon someone on one of the forums, talking about the 16 floor game.
I won’t name the person, (I don’t know if I have his real name anyway), but he said he heard about the game from his childhood friend; a friend who recently went missing. I didn’t believe him about his friend, but the 16 floor game stuck in my mind like a song I couldn’t quite remember the lyrics to. Every urban legend I had tested, so far, seemed to be made up, and I had no reason to think this urban legend would be any different, but despite assuring myself that it was probably made-up junk, I found myself taking rigorous notes on the game’s instructions and even reaching out to try and find out anything else about the game. Of course, the guy who posted about it wasn’t able to give me much information that wasn’t in his original post, except to tell me more about his “missing” friend. At this point, I still didn’t believe in the game. I was preparing to test the game for myself, but I had a strange sense of anxiety I couldn’t seem to fully shake. I should have taken that anxiety for the warning it was. I should have stopped all that damn nonsense and gone and gotten a job, or something. I should have done anything except do what I did.
In case you’ve gotten this far and haven’t heard of the 16 floor game before, the general concept is pretty simple. You can basically do it in any city, so long as that city has tall buildings and elevators. You start by going into an elevator from the first floor, then get off on the second floor. Walk down the stairs and go to a different building, then take the elevator in that building from the first floor to the third floor. Take the stairs down, go to a different building and do the same with the fourth floor. Keep doing this until you get off at the 16th floor of a building. This only works if you do not take an elevator to any floor except the next one in the sequence, and each elevator you take must be in a different building. Supposedly, if you do this all the way up to the 16th floor, then you will enter into a different dimension, although, after my experience, I’m pretty sure the 16th floor is a portal to hell. Once you have reached the 16th floor, (and please pay attention to this part if nothing else), the only way back is to go down an elevator from the 16th floor to the first floor, then to go to a different building and take the elevator from the 15th floor to the first floor, again being careful to not take any elevators in between. Continue to take an elevator from the 14th floor and so on, until you take an elevator from the second floor to the first. Only after you walk up the stairs to the second floor of that last building and take the elevator down to the first floor and exit, will you be back home.
I only give out the instructions here to the 16 floor game so that you can understand the series of events that happened next. If you really are enough of a moron to play this game, like I was, at least you won’t be able to say I hid the truth from you. My father always said the best protection was good instruction, at least, regarding alcohol and guns. I hope the same holds true here.
It was a warm Saturday morning when I set out to play the game. I had all the essentials packed and ready to go, extra food and water, my pocketknife, a flashlight and my lighter, and of course my phone and wallet. I had booked a room for myself to stay the night in the city. I guess I thought I was damn clever to book one on the 16th floor of the hotel. I planned on working my way up to the 16th floor that afternoon, staying the night there, then, if the game turned out to actually work, working my way back down the next morning. It was late morning when I finally left the house to go to the city.
“Alright Dad! I’m heading into the city for the night! I’ll probably be back tomorrow afternoon sometime!”
“OK! Call me if you need anything! Alright champ?!” he yelled back from what I presume was the couch.
“Will do!” I quickly yelled back as I was going out the door.
My father’s house is pretty far out in the country, so it was going to take me a little over an hour to drive to the city. I didn’t mind too much though. My car might have been old and dingy, but driving gave me a chance to listen to a couple of the various horror podcasts I enjoyed at the time. By all accounts, it should have been a lovely day for a drive. It was warm and bright, the scenery was green, birds were out. The only things around me were the straight open road, the forests and fields, the rattling of my engine, and the sounds of familiar voices talking about supernatural conspiracies. But the more I drove, the harder it became to ignore that growing knot in my stomach. By the time I reached the city, the clear sky and warmth of an early summer day felt hot and oppressive. I chalked all of it up to me letting the creep factor of my podcasts get the better of me; it wouldn’t have been the first time.
“Why should I be so worked up about this?”
“I’ve definitely done scarier things before.”
“The anxiety is part of the fun, right?”
“None of its real anyway.”
By the time I parked my car and got out into the streets around other people, I managed to think away some of my uneasiness. It’s not that I liked people, (at that time I really didn’t think I did), but even if you don’t like people, it’s amazing how comforting just the presence of other people can be. Still, I couldn’t entirely get rid of that wriggling tangle in my guts.
The parking lot was only a few blocks away from the hotel where I was staying that night, but I didn’t bother going to the hotel yet; I would get there eventually anyway. Instead, since it was early afternoon and I hadn’t eaten yet, I figured I would grab some food and take a short walk around to scout out buildings for me to use in the 16 floor game. I went to the city food court, grabbed myself a taco, put my earpods in and listened to a creature feature podcast as I spent the next twenty minutes walking about and planning my route for the game.
There seemed to be plenty of buildings to choose from, most of them not too far from each other. I reasoned it probably wouldn’t take too long for me to get up to floor 16. I would be in my hotel room by three o’clock, maybe four if I was slow. Nearly any publicly accessible building would work for my first step into the game, but I had decided that the mall elevator would probably be a good choice.
As I came in front of the first elevator, I stopped my podcast and just stood there for a few seconds. I could feel the knot in my stomach becoming stronger again. When the elevator came down and opened its doors, I took a deep breath as I waited for it to be emptied, then I stepped in. The glass pane of the elevator gave a strange bit of comfort as I quickly pressed the button for the second floor. It couldn’t have been more than a few seconds, but as my heart raced, it felt as if the elevator took forever just to get off the ground, me painfully self-conscious the entire time of the man who had entered after me. Every breath I took sounded unreasonably loud in my ears, and I could feel the cool dampness of my bag against the sweat of my back. At that point, I wasn’t sure how much of it was because of nerves and how much was because of plain old heat, but either way, I was unreasonably worried the man in the elevator next to me would notice.
After the elevator came to a stop, I wiped my forehead with the back of my arm as I and the man next to me exited onto the second floor. I watched him walk off as I stood there for a second, waiting for the elevator to close its doors and leave. Only after I heard doors gently shut did I start making my way to the escalator, looking over my shoulder to make sure no one had noticed and was secretly judging me for going back down to the first floor just after taking the elevator up. Of course, no one was, and before I knew it, I was back on the first floor of the mall.
The second elevator I took was in a nearby department store. The third was located in the local museum. By the time I exited the elevator to the fifth floor, I had gotten over my secret worry that people were judging me for riding elevators up just to then take stairs down, and I had started listening to my podcast again, so I didn’t get too bored. Although now I think I was, on some level, using it as a way to distract myself from the vague sense of anxiety which seemed to underlie everything.
By the time I had gotten up to the ninth floor of the eighth building, I was just sick of the stairs. I wasn’t in terrible shape, but cardio was never my strong suit and by that point they were really becoming a pain. Until then, I had been making good time and was keeping up a decent walking pace, but I started to slow down after that. It was past four o’clock by the time I made it to the 15th floor. It had taken me nearly ten minutes just to walk down the stairs in the last building and I was honestly getting pretty tired by this point. All the stairs, the anxiety, and the heat of the afternoon, left me nearly exhausted by the time I left the building, but I was also relieved that I had finished what was hopefully my last set of stairs for the day. All I had to do now was find and check into my hotel for the evening, take one more elevator up, and I could finally crash for the day. Even if this game did in fact take me to a different dimension, I would be happy as long as I could lay down somewhere on that 16th floor.
It wasn’t long before I found myself turning a corner and arriving at what my phone told me was my destination. As I stood in front of the building, it seemed taller than I had expected. The building was a thin concrete rectangle, painted a light beige, littered with windows reflecting the late afternoon sun. It was a few stories taller than any of the buildings next to it, but short when I compared it to some of the buildings a couple streets down. Even as I stood in front of the hotel, it seemed to still blend into the background, completely unremarkable. The only thing seeming to tell me that this was a hotel, other than the map on my phone, were a few dirty letters above the entrance.
The foyer of the hotel, much to my disappointment, was not any cooler than the street outside, but, I remember, it did seem welcoming in a way I was not expecting from the outside of the building. It was not a large room, with the only light, besides from the afternoon sun, being a few lights hanging from the ceiling which bounced their yellow glow across the burgundy walls. The room was furnished with some old oil paintings, a large central receptionist desk, and a couple of tan leather couches off to the side, which were currently occupied by an old couple fiddling with their bags. At the desk was an overweight blonde woman wearing a faded yellow button up who put out her cigarette and gave me a wide smile as I approached her.
“Hello sweety, is there anything I can help you with?” the receptionist asked with a surprisingly soft voice for a middle-aged smoker.
“Um, yeah. I’d uh like to check in for room 1603. It should be under Jonathan.”
“Alright. Can I see some identification?”
I handed over my driver’s license and after typing on her computer for a few seconds, she handed it back along with the keycard for my room.
“The elevator is just that way honey. I hope you enjoy your stay.” she said as she pointed to my right where a short hallway turned a corner.
I thanked her and moved toward the hallway, trying not to overhear the old couple on the leather couches, whose quiet discussion seemed to quickly be turning into an argument.
Turning the corner of the hallway, I saw at the end the metal doors of the elevator which would take me up to the 16th floor, and near it, on the left wall, the door to what an old sign indicated as the stairs.
Everything seemed suddenly quiet as I stood there staring at those elevator doors. I could still hear the old couple arguing, but they seemed somehow muted. Everything except my rising heartrate seemed somehow muted. Even the air seemed to be suffocating me with its heat and stillness. I don’t know how long I stood there for, silently, subconsciously assuring myself that the 16 floor game wasn’t real, but eventually, I walked forward and pressed the elevator button.
The doors to the elevator opened up and I stepped in and pressed the plastic button labeled “16”. As the button lit up and the doors of the elevator closed and I felt the elevator begin to move, I could feel the anxiety turn to a mix of dread and excitement, a simultaneous sinking feeling and rising feeling in my chest. My mind raced a million miles per second as the elevator took me to the 16th floor. I realized only then that in all the descriptions of the 16 floor game, I never received any information on what would actually happen on the 16th floor. I only read that I would apparently enter a different dimension, that when those doors open, if apparently it were caught on a security camera, the elevator would appear to be empty. On my way up in that elevator, my mind was entirely occupied by trying to imagine what I would possibly see when those doors opened while also vehemently denying the possibility that I might see anything out of the ordinary at all. Suddenly, I felt the elevator come to a stop and I heard a small *ding*.