Have you ever been to a haunted house?
One of those haunted houses that open in your town around the first of October. Some places use their old jail or defunct courthouse to create a local tourist attraction. Sometimes it’s a charity that uses the funds to supplement its budget.
You know the type. It’s filled with fake cotton spiderwebs, men in cheap masks, dim lighting, and the terrible loop of screams atop the cheap mood music. The lights will randomly turn off only to turn back on and reveal one of your favorite movie slashers standing only feet away.
Those are the ones.
My friends and I used to go to them every year since middle school, but I’ll never go again.
Some of them are real. Some of them you never walk away from.
During my senior year of high school, my group of friends decided that the local haunted houses were kind of played out for us. We wanted something fresh. Something that would scare us. Nothing we could find within a thirty-mile drive had done the trick.
Then Jimmy told us about Stanford Sanatorium. That’s right, a sanatorium. Not a sanitarium. This place had been used as a tuberculosis hospital back in the early nineteen hundreds. An outbreak of tuberculosis called “The White Plague” hit the area so they built a huge hospital to handle all of the chronic cases.
Sometime in the sixties, a new medication was created to treat TB that made sanitoriums obsolete. The building stood empty for a few decades after that. Sometime in the eighties, a business investor purchased the property and intended to convert it into a hotel, but plans fell through for some reason or another.
The sanatorium continued to fall into disrepair and eventually, the city took ownership. They converted it into a museum dedicated to the history of “The White Plague” and medical history from that period. It helped pay for the upkeep, but the budget was still razor-thin.
That’s when the city commissioner decided to offer “haunted” tours of the building. They proved to be a decent hit and eventually evolved into a nearly month-long haunted hospital tour during the Halloween season. It was only two hours away from us and it seemed perfect.
What could be scarier than a building where hundreds of people died, right?
Our parents were hesitant at first, but we wore them down. We would leave town early, take the tour before it was even dark, and then head home immediately. No big deal.
When we arrived, the building was staggering. Three stories of red brick. The front was covered in long walkways and hundreds of doors were visible. Each room was completely separated and opened up to the outdoors to provide better ventilation than architecture at the time would allow.
The structure seemed sturdy, but heavy cracks and thick vines ran up the sides of the building. All of the paint flaked and peeled from the doors. Some of the windows on the top floor were broken and left uncovered.
There were almost no cars in the parking lot. The sun still sat high in the sky. Who wanted to take a haunted hospital tour in the daylight?
I still wish we had never gone in.
Jimmy, Carlos, Stephen, and I jumped out of the car and followed the signs to the admission table. A woman wearing an old-fashioned nursing outfit sat at the desk and took five dollars from each of us and then slid a clipboard in front of us.
It was a liability release. We laughed and told her we were minors and were too young to sign. She smiled.
“We’ll need you to sign it anyway,” she said in a whispering tone. “You never know what could happen!”
We all laughed and signed the sheets of paper and handed them to her. At the time, we thought it was supposed to set the tone, but now I know she was serious. I wish we had never gone inside.
Our half-hour inside was kind of a bust. The tour was self-guided and you could go anywhere in any order you wanted. We opted to check out the patient rooms first, assuming there would be horrifying scenes, but we were quickly let down.
The rooms sat in ruins. A rusted bed frame with a shredded mattress. Bedpans, molding sheets, and splintering chairs scattered the floor. The only thing in those rooms worth signing a release for would have been the risk of tetanus.
“Man, this kind of blows,” Carlos said as we walked down the open-air corridor. “Want to head home? This seems like it wasn’t worth the trip.”
Stephen pulled a brochure for the place out of his back pocket. Unfolding it, he thumped the map with his middle finger excitedly. We all looked down.
“The rooms are only part of the tour,” he exclaimed. “In the basement, there is still an operating theater and morgue. We’ve gotta check that out before we go.”
We all shrugged and followed Stephen as he guided us toward the stairwell leading into the basement. I’m not sure how many flights we walked down, but it seemed like it took ages. What the rooms lacked in disturbing scenery, the way to the basement made up for it quickly.
Once we entered the basement, the smell of must and decay filled our noses. The sounds of dripping water echoed through the empty halls. We walked cautiously in the low light, expecting a jump scare or two, but one never came.
Somehow, the lack of intended horror made it worse.
Our footsteps echoed off the grime-covered tile walls and occasionally we would splash through a shallow puddle. None of us spoke. The ambiance of the subterranean levels had crept into our bones.
As we continued walking, we could see a brighter light ahead.
“Looks like we’re almost to the operating theatre,” Jimmy said as he looked at his pamphlet. “According to this, we can watch a… surgery in progress. Let’s check it out.”
We reached a wall of dirty windows and saw the first people on our entire tour. Two men in old-fashioned surgical scrubs spattered with gore stood over a body on the table. Their scalpels danced over the torso of the body as the person convulsed.
“We’re losing him!” one of the men shouted. “Get me more ether! We have to calm him down!”
The other doctor grabbed a bottle and a breathing mask but the man on the table smacked their hands and sprung to his feet. He darted toward the window and pressed his body against the glass. His open wound looked… so real. Flecks of blood smeared the window as his organs pulsed and pushed from the cavity.
“You’ve got to help me!” he panted. “Get me out of here! We have to escape!”
Without a word, the four of us darted away from the window and ran down the hall as quickly as we could. Pushing through a set of double doors, we entered another dimly lit room and began to pant. After a few moments, we began to chuckle.
“Holy shit!” Jimmy shouted. “That was wild! This was worth it. Do you guys… oh man. Look at the walls.”
We looked around to see dozens of quarter-sized metal doors lining the walls.
It was the morgue.
“Should we look inside?” Carlos asked as he approached one of the doors.
Before I could even respond, he tugged at the rusted handle and pulled it open. Leaning into the darkness to get a better look, he began to talk before a pair of ivory arms wrapped around him and pulled him inside.
We darted to the door and opened it, but no one was inside. It was no larger than a coffin and we couldn’t see a trap door. We searched the other coolers one by one, calling Carlos’ name but there was no sign of him.
“What the hell?” Jimmy said. “This has to be some kind of joke. He’s messing with us.”
Suddenly the room filled with the sound of hands thudding against the metal doors of the morgue coolers. In full panic, the three of us ran from the room and back to our car. On the way, we saw that the nurse and the admission table were gone.
We drove straight home and told our parents everything.
Carlos’ family called the police to report their son missing. After investigating, the detectives reported that when they made contact with the organization that ran the sanatorium, it wasn’t due to open for another week.
There was no staff there that day.
We never saw our friend again.