It was supposed to be an easy way to get a few extra credits. It wasn’t supposed to end like this. I sit typing this from a psychiatric ward, where I’m currently undergoing treatment as a result of the trauma I’ve just recently experienced. No one is believing me. They’re saying I’m making it up, but I know what I saw. What I felt.
A few of my friends and I (for sake of anonymity, I’ll refer to myself as Lena) were struggling in one of our classes and needed to get some extra credit at a very high-end school called the Agatha Gray University. We heard that our college was doing a partnership with a laboratory nearby that was hosting a sleep experiment to study how the mind reacts to certain stimuli whilst asleep. It was an easy handful of credits, and if I could sleep while working towards graduation, why not? I signed up with my friends and we headed off the next week.
There were six of us total. We were all to share a hallway of rooms that would be our bedrooms, and from there the scientists conducting said experiment would study us with cameras and interviews and whatever scientists use to concoct a study. We were given food and sleep aid to help us fall asleep at night. I didn’t question it much at all at first, but I truly wish I had.
The first night was normal. Nothing weird and I can’t really remember my dreams from then. The sleep aid worked almost immediately — I’d take it and then pass right out. The second night, however, was strange.
I could hear one of my friends (we’ll call her Dan) screaming and crying from her bedroom, like she was having a nightmare. It will me up from down the hall, but the doors were locked in case any of us sleepwalked. I found that a bit odd, as we made sure to let the staff know none of us did, but they locked them anyway as an extra precaution.
The screaming and crying died down after about an hour of staff running back and forth to make sure she was okay. She didn’t leave her room the next morning, but the staff told us not to worry. She was probably just sleeping during the day because she didn’t get to at night.
I didn’t think much of it until another one of my friends (we’ll call him Evan) approached me after lunch.
“I was in the room next to hers,” he said, crossing his arms. “Did you hear what she was screaming about?”
I shook my head. “No. What was going on? They said it was just a nightmare — normal part of the experiment.”
Evan ducked his head and lowered his voice. “She was yelling at them to… to stop. But I don’t know what they were doing. Did you read the website before signing up? What exactly are they doing here?”
I scoffed. This was typical of Evan: to complain and get skeptical way too early. I brushed it off and told him it was probably just another part of her night terror. He told me I was being ridiculous and needed to keep an eye out, as we “didn’t know these people or their practices.” Whatever that meant. We went back to our rooms that night and the study conducted as normal. This time, there was no screaming from Dan.
Dan was nowhere to be found the next morning either, and neither was Evan. I figured the sleep aid might’ve just knocked him out a little harder and that he was sleeping in. The rest of us (four in total) were discussing the experiment: how we were excited to see the results, the dreams we’ve had, etc. Despite the past few days of weirdness, everything had been going pretty smoothly and I was looking forward to getting this extra credit.
Almost out of the blue, though, my friend Joan started to vomit. Like guttural, intense vomiting. It was disgusting. It must’ve been something she ate during the day or night, because it was ruled as food poisoning. Instead of sending her home, the staff sent her back to her room and told her to rest. We didn’t see her for the rest of the night, or the next morning.
Now, there were only three of us left. We were getting a little skeptical, but tried to keep it on the down-low. The staff was with us at breakfast and lunch so we had to keep quiet about our concerns. None of our friends had made an appearance since they had vanished back into their rooms. It was obvious then that the remainder of us wondered when it would be our turn. None of us said anything, but the mutual fear and confusion was there. Something definitely was not right.
The next morning, another one of my friends was missing and confined to their bedroom because of stomach cramps. I tried to confront the staff and they told me that sometimes the sleep aid has negative affects on the patients, and that we shouldn’t worry. At this point, there were only two of us left, and by the next day, it’d just be me.
When no one was looking, I snuck off “to the bathroom” and went to knock on each of my friends doors. No response. I used a hairpin from my pocket to pry open Dan’s door, and what I found inside was nothing I could’ve ever prepared myself for.
On the ground was an upside-down pentagram lined with various white candles, all burnt out and dripping with wax. The scariest part? Her body was still in there, lying on the floor in the center of the circle. I slammed the door shut and moved on to my other friends’ rooms, only to find the exact same scenario — which left one observation: I was next.
I didn’t have a phone and I was sure the doors of the laboratory were locked, so I had to wait until I could sneak out at night. I didn’t take the sleep aid. I pushed the pill under my tongue and held it there until the staff left and the cameras turned on. I had no way to disable them, so I waited a few hours and did what anyone probably would’ve done in that situation: I ran.
I ran faster than I ever did in my life, and I’m not an athletic person. I remembered the way we came in, and by some miracle the door was unlocked. We weren’t too far from civilization, so I was able to phone the police from a nearby restaurant and was taken into questioning.
They did not believe me. They investigated the laboratory and claimed they found no evidence of foul play or malpractice (or sacrifices). They said their deaths were caused by the drugs in the sleep aid, but the scientists weren’t being held responsible for their deaths as the drug was provided to them by the government.
As I write this, I’m sitting in a psychiatric hospital. The things I have witnessed will forever scar me, and none of my doctors believe me. I’ve been here six months, and wasn’t able to attend any of my friends’ funerals. I want to get them all justice, but no one believes a word I say. The worst part? Those scientists — if you can call them that — are still out there, walking free.