About 10 years ago I served a few years in the Army. I ended up being Military Police (MP) while I was in. The first few years I spent in I trained up for deployment to Afghanistan, spent a year there and came back. After 3 years of being in, it was finally time to do the law enforcement part of my job. I figured after all of the crap I’d been through the last few years this would be easy. I couldn’t have been more wrong.
Deployment was rough, but having to go into peoples houses and deal with them during their worst moments was a hard thing to do 5 to 6 times a week. You also had to deal with all of the normal duties of being a soldier on top of being an MP. I didn’t sleep well during this time. Everything was as good as it could have been until I got a call from dispatch.
They sent me to an address that I wasn’t familiar with. I had to pull out my map of the installation to even find it. It made sense that I had never heard of it, because it was on a small access road on the outskirts of the installation. It was near the majority of the utility buildings. This wasn’t an emergency call so I wasn’t able to run code (lights and sirens). Dispatch had said that someone had reported suspicious activity at the location. I ended up calling dispatch and asked if they could elaborate on suspicious activity, but the caller didn’t say anything else and had hung up.
I made my way over to the building and figured that it was just some kids messing around trying to send the MP’s on a wild goose chase. I would rather be on this type of call rather than an car accident, domestic, or noise complaint. This would at least keep me off the rotation of calls for a little while.
It took me a few minutes to work my way over to that side of post. I had also taken a few minutes to have a cigarette before I made my way that way. Always good to calm the nerves before dealing with other people. When I pulled up the building it didn’t look like anything was going on in there. I let dispatch know I had arrived and they noted the time. I positioned my vehicle so that the lights were pointing directly at the building.
It was a 3 story building that looked like it was made out of the same material as a parking garage would be made out of. My plan was to do a walking patrol around the perimeter of the building. If I didn’t see anything suspicious I would then request backup from dispatch so that I could clear the building. That probably wasn’t going to happen tonight though. A unit had just returned from deployment and there were a ton of calls tonight. Dispatch would probably tell me I was on my own so I’d head inside and clear the building to make sure no-one was inside goofing around, or worse, hurt.
I walked around the building and when I was on the backside of the building I thought I could see a light coming from one of the 3rd floor windows. It kind of looked like the light of a cell phone. I made a mental note of it and radioed dispatch letting them know I needed backup to clear the building. They let me know all patrols were tied up and that I needed to check it out on my own. I acknowledged and went back to my vehicle to grab a second set of batteries just in case my flashlight died. This was going to take a while.
After grabbing the batteries I checked to make sure I had everything just in case something did go wrong while I was in there. I made my way to the front door and to my surprise the door was unlocked. That alone would have warranted me to clear the building. I flicked on my flashlight and walked into the building. Surprisingly the building was in really good shape for what I assumed to be an abandoned building. It looked like people were still working in here on a daily basis. The way I was going to clear this since I was doing this solo was start from the bottom and work my way up. Luckily this building didn’t have a basement, so I only had to worry about 3 floors.
I turned right as I walked into the building and began clearing it. Nothing seemed out of the ordinary as I worked my way around the 1st floor. I could hear movement from somewhere upstairs though. I came around the corner and saw the front door again and the staircase that was in front of it. It was time to work my way up to the second floor.
As I made my way up the stairs, I could hear more movement as it echoed off the walls of the staircase. I yelled “MP’s please come down right now”. I always follow the mantra of ask, tell, make. Most of the time the problem can be handled with your words rather than your fists. You don’t want to get into fist fights when you have to do this 5 to 6 times a week. The movement upstairs continued so I yelled again “MP’S come down now!”. The movement upstairs stopped and the only thing I could hear was the sound of my heart beating from walking up the stairs. I said “MP’s please come down here so we can talk”. I listened for a minute but didn’t hear anything.
Instead of going all the way up to the 3rd floor where I assumed they were, I continued on with the protocol. This floor definitely had a different feeling to it. It was less taken care of and it didn’t seem like someone had been up here in a while. I couldn’t shake the feeling that I was being watched. I also found it weird that I hadn’t heard my radio since I walked into here. So to put my mind at ease I tried to do a radio check with dispatch. “Dispatch this is 5-Romeo radio check over”. I didn’t hear anything back. “Dispatch this is 5-Romeo radio check over”. Again I didn’t hear a thing. I figured maybe there was something messing with the reception of my radio so I tried anyone. “Any unit this is 5-Romeo radio check over”. No luck again. I pulled out my cell phone and tried to call my buddy on shift. I couldn’t get it to ring at all. I checked to see if I had service and it showed 5 bars. I tried to text him instead and it said the message couldn’t be delivered.
I’m in panic mode at this point. I’ve never had something like this happen to me before. It would make sense if I didn’t have service in the building. I figured maybe if I turn everything off and on again it might work. So I turned off the radio and then my phone. I waited a little bit and then tried turning them back on again. The radio didn’t make a sound and my cell wouldn’t turn on anymore. It didn’t make any sense, so I made the choice right there to head back outside and try to see if I could reach out in my vehicle. I went back to the staircase and pretty much ran down them to head back outside. there was no way I was coming back in here without backup.
My heart sank when I got to the bottom of the stairs. The place the door was supposed to be was no longer there. I turned left and right freaking out. I didn’t know what to do and I couldn’t call out for any help. There was no way I could break out of here either, it was basically a giant concrete coffin. One that I had come into willingly. Without much other options, I looked back up the stairs and figured I would try to make my way to the room I had seen the light in. Maybe someone was in there that could make sense of this. I had cleared the 2nd floor already so that only left the 3rd floor. When I was heading up the stairs I heard running around again. This time the footsteps sounded heavier and sounded like there were more of them.
I didn’t bother saying anything this time and just cautiously walked up to the third floor. If I thought the 2nd floor looked rough, then this floor looked like it hadn’t been touched in decades. There were cobwebs everywhere and trash littered the floors. Every couple of steps I would feel something touch my legs or my back, causing me to spin around every few steps. I felt like I was losing my mind at this point and just wanted to find some answers to this impossible situation.
This hallway made no sense to me, there were no doors except one at the very end of the hallway. What was the point of a floor that just had 1 door in it? The hallway was probably 20 feet long and felt like it took me an hour to get to the end if it. I made it to the door and grabbed for the doorknob. I was surprised when I couldn’t open it. I knocked on the door and the door opened up slowly. I pushed the door open and saw the light I had seen earlier. It was a flashlight on the floor. Next to it lay an MP that was unconscious. I walked a few feet forward and I felt something hit me in the back up the head. Everything went black and I woke up in the back of an ambulance.
A few days went by and I had finally recovered. My team leader asked what had happened that night and I tried to explain it to him. He then told me what he says actually happened. he said He had heard be call out that I was entering the building. He heard the ridiculous amounts of radio checks that I did and thought maybe I was messing around. That was until my buddy called him saying that I had called and sent him this text. “I’m stuck in this building. Come help me now”. That’s when it no longer seemed like a joke. They had 2 patrols head over to the building and check on me. They saw a light in the 3rd floor window and went up to check it out.
They found me passed out on the floor with my flashlight next to me. They called an ambulance and had me transported to the hospital. they said I had carbon monoxide poisoning. Apparently the building had a gas leak. the guys that came and got me had to spend a few days in the hospital as well.
I don’t know how much of it was in my head or how much of it really happened, but that was the day I decided I wasn’t going to reenlist.