17 Frightening Stories Of Abandoned Hospitals And Asylums As Told By Urban Explorers And Security Guards

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Found on r/AskReddit.

1. Watchman at an abandoned mental hospital

I was the night watchman at an abandoned mental hospital turned state park for a summer in college. The only creepy thing that happened was one night I was with one of the state park police and we saw flashlights in one of the buildings. Kids constantly broke in and other people broke in to gut the old buildings of any copper they could find. So as I was saying one night we saw flashlights moving around so we went in. The officer pulled her gun and flashlight and in we went. We could her footsteps on the floor above us and we slowly and quietly went upstairs. We checked every room and found nothing. Then we heard footsteps above us again. This happened for a few floors until we were on the top floor below the roof. We heard footsteps up on the roof so we went up there. Still nothing. We never found anyone or any indication that anyone had been there. It was friggin creepy.

2. Exploring an insane asylum

When I was a teenager (20+ years ago) my friends and I trespassed on a condemned insane asylum called Eloise in Southeastern Michigan.

The worst thing wasn’t that it was at night with shitty flashlights, the dirty patient records scattered on the floor, the broken furniture, the torn up walls, the leaking water pipes, or the huge fungal bloom from the leaking water.

The worst part was finding a tunnel and following it to a place inside where power was still on. There was a light, an ominous looking double doors… and an active security camera.

It was like… why is this here? What’s going on?

Later on, I found out that the asylum and a nearby hospital were connected. However, the wikipedia page says it closed in 1984… but we were there several years after that.

I think I saved one of the patient records somewhere.

3. Exploring ruins

When I was in high school living in Seattle, ghost hunting (visiting abandoned places) was a frequent activity for us.

There is a place north of Seattle called 13 Steps to Hell. The story is that a satanic family once lived in a house where they had a cemetery deep in their backyard. These stones date back at least 100 years. The family built thirteen steps into the cemetery with two giant pointed pillars at the top. Supposedly – each step down would give you hallucinations, you would hear things, feel things, and on the final step you would see fire (hell).

The steps continue to be bulldozed because the current residents surrounding the area probably do not appreciate late night visitors. But the steps always seem to reappear – I’ve seen them.

Our first journey – it took us nearly four hours of driving and walking to find it. There are no clear directions anywhere online (at least at that time). We accidentally stumbled upon a path just as we were about to give up. It is about a mile hike deep into the woods. Along the overgrown trail you have a lot of barriers to duck under and over and there are random things everywhere; such as crashed cars in the middle of the woods, abandoned items as well.

After 30 minutes of hiking in the creepy darkness of this overgrown forest, we were going to head back when my friend pointed to me and said “SHIT, look where you are standing.” I looked down and I was unknowingly standing between the pillars and on the first step down to the cemetery.

At that point I was not going to walk down the steps – but I did explore the cemetery. My friends explored further down and started yelling and screaming – they told us stop scaring them – even though we were at least 200 feet away from them. We left promptly after they ran up and insisted we leave. Never talked about it again.

I went back 5 times after with friends who had heard and I was the only one who knew how to get there, so I gladly took them. Nothing creepy happened on those trips.

One year later, some friends asked me to take them. We went at midnight one evening and went there, looked around the cemetery – nothing out of the ordinary. I went down to the cemetery and rubbed one gravestone so I could read it. Some satanic symbol. We were standing in a circle debating how much longer we would stay when all of the sudden a 3 foot log comes flying at us and lands in the middle of the circle. We all look around and notice that no one from the group is missing – so it wasn’t any of our friends. Thirty seconds later all of this shit is flying at us. I look at them and just say “run!” We started running back through the overgrown trail with logs, branches, rocks, etc being thrown at us. I’ve never ran so fast in my life. At one point my friend looks back and sees two giant yellow eyes after us and all we heard were growling noises running after us. Ducking under fallen trees, running through sticker bushes and falling several times we run to the car get in and drive away as fast as possible.

None of us said a word to each other for at least an hour. And I have never been back since.

4. Schoolhouse-turned-residential housing

My mother in laws house is pretty creepy. Lived there for a little over a year when me and my wife were younger. Built in something like 1900, it was originally a schoolhouse, but turned residential sometime after WWII.

A few of my wife’s stories are pretty chilling. Standing in front of the house, to the left, there’s a shed/garage, and about 80-90 feet behind that a large barn. She claims every so often she would look to the top of the barn and notice a bright light, even though that area of the barn was cut off due to the access door being nailed shut ( there was a fire up there at some point ). Her mother went to investigate, found no signs of squatters, only a load of spiders and a raccoons nest.

Once, the large stereo in the living room kept turning on. Thinking it was the remote malfunctioning, she took the batteries out, but it still kept turning on. She claims after she unplugged the stereo, the display was still flickering on and off for 4-5 minutes.

There was also the time her mother’s music box got inexplicably wound and started playing at 2:30 am. She unwound it, wrapped it in a towel and shoved it in her drawer. Two weeks later, it happened again.

I once heard a woman scream “Get Out!” while feeding my son. He was fresh out of the hospital, we were on the bed watching TV, I had him on my chest and my back to the wall, the bedroom door was shut. All of a sudden, I hear a woman scream, “GET OUT!” I placed my son in his crib and ran downstairs, thinking her aunt, whom we were living with at the time, was in some sort of trouble. I get downstairs to find all the lights off, her aunt asleep in her bed, and no-goddamn-body else there.

Also regularly heard children running, though my son at the time wasn’t old enough to walk. One time in particular, heard what sounded like a LARGE group of children coming up the stairs, laughing hysterically at something.

5. An old jail tour

My two friends and I visited an old jail (a local company did regular tours.) The jail used to regularly keep women and children there, and there were a lot of deaths, especially in the winter. During our tour, my friends and I went inside one of the cells just as the tour group moved along to the next section of the jail. We were making stupid jokes, but the vibe was super creepy. We finally decided to catch up… except we were locked in. Nobody was there to do it (the group had moved on before we all entered completely) and the doors were NOT self-locking. Someone would have had to push the bolt across from the outside. We couldn’t get out. We ended up having to shout for help to have someone come and set us free.

Almost ten years later, none of us have an idea what happened…

6. In a funeral home

I used to pick up dead bodies for a funeral home. One stormy night, I was in one of the coolers putting a guy on the shelf. In a matter of a couple seconds, the following happened:

– The guy on the next shelf up shifted and his hand fell down in my face.

– The doorstop slipped and the cooler door closed behind me.

– The power went out and the lights went off.

All purely coincidental, but I still puked in my pants.

7. Abandoned nun’s home

My dad worked at a mental hospital that used to be connected to an abandoned nun’s home by underground passage. He says that one night he was walking down there when he saw a praying nun. He walked by her and said hello. She did not acknowledge him.

My dad does not believe in ghosts, but he says there was a nun down there that night.

8. This is an incredible story

I wasn’t able to sleep, so I figured I’d try for a night time job at this sleep clinic as a security guard. They offered the job and I accepted straight away, filled in a couple of forms, and that was that. It seemed perfect: if I was going to be awake anyway, I might as well get paid for it.

I got into the swing of things right away. It wasn’t difficult: my duties consisted mainly of walking through the softly carpeted halls every hour or so, checking that the security doors were locked, and helping myself to as many free cups of coffee as I could. There were always two nurses on call in case of a medical emergency, but they mostly slept through their shifts so I barely saw them.

My contact with the patients was limited. There seemed to be perhaps fifteen or twenty of them, with some there for extended periods and others coming and going on an almost daily basis. I only ever saw them when they were asleep. It was strange seeing them like that, robbed of all context. They could have been bankers or beggars for all I knew.

In the staff room, watching over the half-drunk remnants of other people’s coffee and dog-eared magazines was a bank of CCTV monitors wired up to the patient’s rooms, so that the staff could keep an eye on them whenever they needed to. I spent most of my time there when I wasn’t patrolling the corridors. It was oddly relaxing to watch all these strangers sleeping peacefully in their beds throughout the night, stirring gently every so often as they dreamed their unknown dreams. It gave me great comfort to watch them all lying there, dead to the world with me as their silent custodian.

Then there were the sleepwalkers. The clinic had a policy of leaving them to their own devices as much as possible, provided they weren’t in any immediate danger (which they never were: the windows were bolted and made of toughened glass, and all external doors were kept securely locked). I used to come across them often in the halls and corridors, strange lost souls acting out their own private, intangible dream roles, murmuring to themselves while they performed odd and unintelligible actions.

One night I was walking down one of the usual corridors, the faint sounds of snoring echoing through the air like waves rising and falling on a beach, when I came across one of the usual sleepwalkers. A middle aged man, swollen and red-faced, wearing powder-blue pyjamas and and incongruous pink dressing gown that flapped open as he walked. He seemed utterly oblivious to the world around him.

As I approached, however, he stopped dead in his tracks and turned to face the wall, standing as motionless as a statue with his face only millimetres away from the pastel-shaded brickwork. A dry, papery voice emanated from him as I passed.

You’re going to do a terrible thing.

I stopped myself, and gazed bemused at the thinning hair on the back of his round head.

“I’m sorry?”

You’re going to do a terrible thing, he repeated, in that same thousand-year-old voice.

“Are you talking to me?”

There’s no-one else here.

That was true. But usually the sleepwalkers are too wrapped up in their own nocturnal preoccupations to register other people, let alone speak directly to them. This was something of a novelty. My curiosity was piqued.

“What do you mean?”

You’re going to do a terrible, terrible thing, and there will be no-one to blame but yourself.

“Well that’s cheery. You should probably go back to bed.”

The man gave a little chuckle. It sounded phlegmy and unpleasant, like dark bubbles popping in tar.

What do you think you’re doing here?

It was my turn to laugh. “I work here. Looking after you guys.”

You really think you can just walk into a job like that off the street? In a medical facility, of all places?

There was no way he could have known about that. The back of his head was as implacable as ever.

It’s not very plausible, is it? In fact, when you think about it, nothing about this place really adds up. You haven’t really thought this through.

I just stood there staring, with the nameless muzak simpering on in the background. Perhaps I was hallucinating again.

“I have to go,” I mumbled, unsure of what else to do. My palms pricked with sweat. I walked on down the corridor, breathing an inward sigh of relief. Strange. The sleepwalkers were usually placid and uncommunicative, locked in their own private little worlds. This man had been downright confrontational.

I walked down to the staff room, my head a fog of speculation and confusion. I was surprised to see one of the nurses seated at the table, a fresh cup of mud-brown coffee steaming in front of her.

She had her back to me. “The patients are lively tonight,” I said.

You can’t hide from things forever.

It was that exact same voice echoing through the softly furnished room.

Sooner or later you’ll have to face reality, and the longer you leave it the worse it will be.

It felt as though an electric shock had jangled through my body. I ran round the table to face her, but when I did I found that her eyes were closed and she wore the sanguine expression of someone lost in a deep and dreamless sleep.

Just then the bank of TV screens on the wall behind me fizzed and crackled, lighting up the cramped little room with a brief flare like a flash of lightning from behind a dark cloud. I turned to face them, and found only static bleeding into the room from each and every screen.

But one by one a picture flicked into life on each of the monitors, each showing a different scene in grainy black and white. It took me a moment to resolve the overexposed images into recognizable shapes and figures. In each screen the camera gave a first-person perspective of someone moving jerkily through an unidentifiable scene, sometimes a hallway or corridor, sometimes a busy city street.

All at once every screen exploded into action, a flurry of manic movement lurching drunkenly this way and that. In this chaos of motion I could see people wide-eyed and panic-stricken, their mouths open in silent screams, staring into the camera with horror in their eyes and fleeing in abject terror. Here and there a hand could be seen on screen, the hand of the faceless protagonist, and on each screen the unmistakeable flash of a large knife cut through the hazy images.

My stomach lurched as my eyes flicked from screen to screen, finding one scene of random carnage after another. The blade swung and stabbed and slashed, biting into flesh with sickening regularity. Black gouts of blood welled from every wound as the unknown assailant ploughed his way through victim after victim. Somehow the grainy low-resolution images lent a further reality to these grim and brutal vignettes, and I felt each and every thrust of the knife with a visceral twist in my own guts.

My eyes settled for a second on one particular screen, a confusing tumult of greys and blacks that resolved into a stark scene of bloody violence in a dingy vestibule as I fixed my attention on it. As I watched, the camera lurched past a battered door with a grimy stained-glass window set into it. For an instant, a reflected blur of the protagonist was caught in that window, and the camera froze and then panned in on the image. It was a face. The reflection of a face.

I looked to another monitor: a street scene, streaked with blood in the gutters and bodies strewn about the sidewalk. The chrome of a parked car threw an image back the camera, which instantly halted and zoomed in on it. The same face, stark and washed-out by the low-quality film.

My eyes darted from one screen to another, and in each the same thing happened: the movement ceased, and the monitor filled with a single image taken from some small reflection in a puddle or a pane of glass. Soon every one of the bank of monitors was displaying the same thing from a multitude of different angles – a single face, the features all but erased in a blurry white mass, but still recognizably and irrevocably mine.

As soon as I came to this realization the screens all instantly snapped to black. The nameless muzak tinkled on in the background as I struggled to take in what I had seen.

Nothing seemed to make sense anymore. The sleep clinic had been my own private cocoon, like a warm and comfortable womb which had taken me in and shielded me from the storms of insomnia, but now… Even the walls around me and the soft carpet under my feet seemed as unreal and intangible as a dream. I had never felt more lost. Adrift in a sea of doubt, uncertainty and overwhelming confusion.

The sun was starting to rise. My shift would soon be over, and it would be time to leave. To venture out into the real world again. As if in a trance I moved over to the area of the staff room that served as a makeshift kitchen for preparing snacks and ready meals. I opened a drawer, and found what I was looking for: a long, sharp kitchen knife, shiny and barely used. It felt reassuringly cool in my hand – solid and substantial, a silver slash of reality that could cut through the fog of insubstantiality that surrounded me. It fitted snugly into my pocket, and without another thought I slipped out into the dawn of a brand new day.

Now I’m back in the sleep clinic again. It’s hard to imagine ever leaving. I still don’t sleep, but that’s okay – I get the feeling there are some terrible nightmares awaiting me on the other side of sleep, on the other side of these welcoming walls, so I’m happy to stay here and just wait them out. I pad silently down the softly-furnished corridors throughout the long hours of the night, that tuneless muzak tinkling away in the background like a babbling brook, safeguarding the slumbering patients from whatever terrors their dreams may hold for them. The voice comes back every now and again, but it’s easier for me to ignore it now. After all, I know what’s real and what’s not. And it’s getting easier for me to hold on to that now. Easier by the hour.

9. Exploring an abandoned manufacturing plant

Broke into an abandoned manufacturing plant in highschool with a friend. The first floor was aisles with large shelves on either side, about six foot aisles, and you could only see between the aisles through slits in the shelves, so your view of everything was really limited.

At the end of the aisles there was a staircase that went up to a second floor. The floor was mostly rotted through so moving around up there was dangerous, but we were small and 17, so we checked it out anyway. We found a bunch of old rusted out tools and the like but nothing too interesting.

We were up there probably 20 minutes when my buddy yelled over to me that he saw something move downstairs. We assumed we were busted so we snuck back to the staircase. We didn’t see anything moving around downstairs after a couple minutes, so we went down.

When we reached the bottom, we saw someone/thing sprint at the other end of the aisles to the north most aisle, where the window we broke in from was. We moved towards the south end slowly, watching for movement. Eventually we saw something move on the stair side of the north most aisle and we bolted for it, got out, got in the car, drove away.

Still have no idea what the fuck it was. You’d think a person would have some sort of light.

10. At a mental hospital

A friend of mine was diagnosed with cystic fibrosis and was so upset over it that she made a suicide attempt. She landed in the mental health wing of the big hospital, and I went to visit her one evening. Had a hell of a time finding the right place and felt like I’d walked through miles of increasingly decrepit hospital before I found the right wing. Went through a set of double doors and found myself staring down a dimly lit hallway with an incredibly creepy, weathered-looking old lady in a housecoat standing right in the middle of it.

I walked down the hallway nervously, not taking my eyes off of the old woman. She didn’t take her eyes off me, either. I flinched as I walked by her, but she didn’t move. Ten feet beyond her was the doorway to the waiting room of the ward I was looking for. I breathed a sigh of relief as I reached the doors, then glanced over my shoulder to see if the woman had moved.

She was right behind me, staring into my face. I don’t know how she managed to silently cover that ten feet just as fast as I had moved, but she did.

11. Lived in a haunted house

Hopefully this doesn’t get buried. When I was in school we lived in a town called Byron, CA. We lived in a house that I believe was haunted. The room that was in the back of the house I shared with my brother and we had a dog and a cat that WOULD NOT under any circumstance enter that room. On occasion there would be glass marbles that would come rolling down the hallway (wood floors) when nobody would be in our bedroom.

One day we walked into the barn that we had and there was a four point tire iron that was bent into the shape of a swastika and was standing straight up. We found a hole that was approximately 4 feet deep and 5 feet by five feet across. Stacked up next to the hole was a few bags of lime. We had a fenced off yard that had a couple weeping willows growing inside of it. (yard perimeter was about 40 x 40 yards.) More often than not the trees would be moving like there was a strong wind blowing through, however, none of the other trees in the area would be moving and you wouldn’t feel the wind if you were outside the fence line. My mom had a cigarette case that she would always keep two packs of cigs and her lighter in. Every so often she would find the case in obscure places. One time it was the silverware drawer, one time it was in the barbecue pit.

Finally when we decided to move my mom hung up a picture that had a few religious scenes depicted in it. The main focus was the face of Jesus, There was the three wise men crossing the desert, The coming of the Messiah, etc. She hung it up the day that we started staying at my Grandma’s house and were still in the process of moving stuff out of the house and into storage. We came back the next day and found scratched in a few places on the picture. There was a puncture right under Christ’s right eye and just general damage to the picture itself. We changed the locks when we moved in, all the doors were locked, none of the windows were broken, and nothing else was missing or disturbed.

12. Explored an abandoned mental hospital to film a movie

I broke into an abandoned mental hospital to film a movie with some of my friends. It wasn’t a ghostly presence that made it creepy, just the atmosphere. Old rusted-out cribs. Stains on the wall. Asbestos falling down like snow. The place had a documented history of patient abuse and overcrowding. In the sixties, you could get thrown in a state facility relatively easily. Many of my friends are being treated for mental health conditions, and it really freaked me out that had some of them been born forty years previously, they may have been subjected to the same conditions.

13. Lived with ghosts

I grew up Christian and was still religious during the time my family and I lived in a home with what I believed to be multiple spirits. Since then I have become an agnostic atheist, but have been unable to revisit the home and debunk or further investigate. I was in middle school.

At the time, there were, at least, three separate facets that I noticed. In the kitchen of the home there was a sort of warm presence if I was alone and listened very carefully. Once, I heard a beautiful melody of bells-I looked at maps later to see if there was a church nearby that could account for it, but found nothing closer than 5 miles, and we lived in a heavily wooded area.

In the main body of the house (the first floor) there was something that felt somewhat mischievous in that weird, almost malicious but not quite way that a small child has. That one liked to hide things-once it was my mother’s engagement ring, which she finally got fed up and told it off over, and the ring reappeared on her chest of drawers later that day, where she had checked and looked a dozen times already. While slightly annoying, it wasn’t threatening.

And then there was the thing in my bathroom, which was directly adjacent to my shared bedroom with my sister. I always had a bad feeling in there-it was this old bathroom, with carpet (weird, right??) and a clawfoot cast-iron tub. I always felt like I was being watched, whether I was bathing, making my daily ablutions, or using the toilet. Sometimes I’d talk to whatever it was, hoping to lay down the law, and it seemed to listen, although the uneasy feeling didn’t abate.

One night, I was terrified for some reason, and pushed myself back as far as I could against the wall and hid under the covers. That seemed to help, but I had no idea what it was doing if I did that, I realized, and so I pushed up the courage to crawl out from under the blanket and confront the thing face-to-face.

Standing in the doorway to my bedroom was a small boy in greyscale color with ugly purple traces. He stood there, staring at me, and I blinked; suddenly, he was gone, and in his place was a pulsing mass of the same colors, green and grey and purple like a violent thunderstorm rolling in place and menacing me.

That was all I could do. I shoved myself further back against the wall until it hurt and then curled up under the blankets again in terror. Eventually, I fell asleep.

On separate occasions, when my youngest brother was very young and recovering respiratory infections caused by our previous residence (which had black mold), my mother and stepfather’s bedroom was directly under mine. She said she’d hear footsteps from our room to his, and he’d stop coughing. She’d race up the stairs, my stepfather listening for returning footsteps, and find nobody in my brothers’ room-just them, sleeping peacefully.

I’ve been convinced for a long time that something bad happened there, and that the other spirits in the house were keeping the bad one at bay.

14. While out delivering pizza

Wasn’t at a haunted house or anything, but it happened while I was delivering pizzas.

I have no belief in the paranormal nor any spirituality for that matter. Anyways, I was delivering pizzas because I work for a pizza chain. It was about 9:00 at night with almost a full moon out, it was dark but I could still see a good 20 feet in any direction. So I bring the pizza to the door everything goes normally and I start to head back to my car. At about that time I hear a noise like the plastic wheels of a big wheel or something of that nature going down the road a good fifty feet from me. My first thought was “Why would a parent let their child play outside this late?”

As I look over all I see is a faint orange light above where I hear this noise. Not thinking too much of it, I get in my car and back out of the driveway, as my headlights reach where the light is I see the scariest thing I have ever seen in my life. There is like this midget thing just staring off into the woods. The best way I can describe it is it was like it was made of scribbles. Like a moving drawing of sorts but the lines were really jumpy and weren’t contained. I had my headlights on this thing for about 5 seconds before it notices me. As soon as it notices my car, it makes an all out sprint to where I’m sitting. I sat there frozen as this thing sprints at me, It gets about a foot to my car and then disappears. As soon as it disappeared my car died and my headlights cut out. I sat there for a good thirty seconds with my heart racing just waiting for something to happen, my headlights came on after about a minute and I didn’t see anything there. I turned my car back on and noped the fuck out of there. This is the first time I’ve told this story and still have absolutely no idea what it was. I am a firm skeptic but this baffles me

15. Creepy, creepy moments

The phone connected to nothing
My mom and dad moved in to a small house, old, 1940/50’s something. Back in those days they had 1 phone in a house and it was usually in a central location so they had a thing called a Phone Niche, a small shelf or pedestal built into the hall or wall near the center of the house somewhere.

Anyway my mom, dad and my older sister (I was not yet born) moved in to this old creepy house and it had one of those and on it sat an old fashion antique phone. The phone itself wasn’t actually connected to anything. You could pick up the entire unit and carry it around so there was no phantom connection under the phone or anything but every once in a while if you picked it up you could hear a dial tone. My mom swore to my dad, if that fucking phone ever rang, they were moving out.

Creepy Rackley house
This is why me and my sister called it for the fact that our landlords were Mr and Miss Rackley. Mr Rackley was a nice old man, Miss Rackley was a vindictive witch who hated people being in “her” house. I don’t recall the specific reason that Mr Rackley was renting it out but IIRC it had something to do with medical bills they needed money to pay for. You see, Miss Rackley was pretty sick. I don’t remember with what.

Anyway, at some point after moving in Miss Rackley bit the dust and Mr Rackley continued to live in his apartment and let us rent the house. That’s when shit started getting crazy.

My mom would be laying in bed when she’d hear someone open the deadbolt on the front door, walk in through the house, and sit in bed with her. She’d turn over expecting to see my dad back from work and only see nothing. No one, she’d get up and the front door would be wide open.

So someone was unlocking the door, walking through the house and sitting next to her in bed, yet no one was there. This happened a few times.

My mom started having dreams of walking into the kitchen and seeing Miss Rackley. She’d be covered in blood and she’d point at my mom and scream at the top of her lungs GET OUT!!!*

Now I was a very little guy at the time but I saw a few things like things standing at the end of my bed and my sisters saw the same thing from time to time but being little we didn’t understand that we were seeing something only that there was something there and it scared the crap out of us.

One morning I woke up from a fairly uneventful night, walked into the back yard to find the entire back yard absolutely covered in bones. I don’t mean there was a few bones back there, I mean the entire back yard was fucking blanketed in cow bones, cat bones, dog bones. I don’t think we saw any human bones but I don’t think my parents checked too hard.

Before this I had uncovered 1 cow skull once while digging in the garden. Never saw this amount of skeletal remains before in my life and at 32 I haven’t seen it since with the possible exception of that crazy church made out of bones in France or something.

Needless to say, we moved… but things didn’t get better.

The House on Villa
Fresno CA, if you want to look it up. This house, to me, was amazing. We moved in and the previous owner had left not only an awesome fat cat named Lucky but the garage had a box full of HeMan toys including the entire Castle GreySkull play set! FUCKING SCORE!

My sisters weren’t so lucky. By this time it was 3 of us, My older sister me and then my younger sister. I had my own room being the only boy and my sisters had shared a room at the back of the house. My older sister kept waking everyone up in the middle of the night screaming. She said there was someone in her room. She kept seeing a shadow of someone standing over her bed. Then she’d see lights racing around on the wall and hear something stomping around in the attic.

I was a little older by now and skeptical as all hell about everything supernatural so I insisted the lights she saw were merely headlights of people driving down the street. The shadow of the man on the wall was nothing but shadow of the tree outside and the thumping in the attic was probably just her imagination. To back up my claims I pointed to my little sister who also slept in the same room and never once experienced anything. Of course she was very young and might not have noticed.

So one night as an experiment we traded beds. I slept in my older sisters bed and she slept in mine. The only thing you hear in my room was my Hamster running on his wheel.

So there I was, in my sisters bed, listening and watching. Nothing. I fucking knew it! She was making it all up I thought. Then it started. A shadow moved on the wall and I heard something stirring just above my head in the attic. I layed there very still thinking I must have imagined it when I heard it again. It was a very deliberate foot step. Then, slowly one after another Klop, Klop, Klop! across the ceiling. Something or someone was definitely up there doing something! I gave up my vigil and ran screaming into my parents room, waking them up and telling them someone was in the attic. Of course my parents didn’t give a shit and thought I was just being a typical scaredy cat kid. I went back to my room and me and my sister waited out the night.

Days went on and my sister went back to her room. Shit continued to happen and no one did a thing. Finally one day the family was out doing something and we came back home. Just above the front door there was a small vent and inside the vent was a kittens head kinda pressed up against the vent. The kitten was obviously VERY scared and wanted the FUCK out. HOW a kitten got up there is anyones guess.

So my dad has the brilliant idea of giving me a lighter for light and sending me up the portal into the attic…. in my sisters closet. I protested but was overruled as I was a kid and up I went. Dad hoisted me up and I sat with my knees on the upper shelf in my sisters closet with just the upper half of my body in the attic. My only light source, the lighter wasn’t doing much but there was light coming from the vents in various parts of the attic so I could see. I saw…nothing. Of course I didn’t DARE turn around and face the part of the attic that extended over my sisters room. All I did was look straight ahead towards where the little kitten sat scared and curled up in a ball.

I looked around to my sides a bit and saw an old wood burning stove, the kind you’d see in a really old house, a few boxes of god knows what and ahead of me about 8 or 9 feet, the kitten. I tried my damnedest to make the kitten come to me. It very slowly came crawling towards me and without thinking I nabbed the kitten and turned around to climb out of the fucking closet when I came face to face with this. I don’t know if it was a mask or what. It was back about 2 yards or so surrounded by darkness as there weren’t any vents in that part of the attic or something. It was entirely motionless. Didn’t move, didn’t blink didn’t do anything. It made no sound. Nothing.

I straightened my body and me, and kitten, fell out of the closet to the ground and just above my head I heard a lot crash as if something had just pounced on my previous location. I looked behind me, eyes wide in fear, and the porthole to the attic had been closed.

I ran the FUCK out of the house with the kitten and didn’t return for 2 weeks, staying at my grandmothers apartment with my sisters. I had succeeded in at least convincing them that something was up there. Finally being forced to come home eventually I didn’t ever go back into my sisters room. How they slept in there, I’ll never know.

Finally months later my mom and my sisters go out to the store. We’re gone for a while and my dad is left at home drinking beer and cleaning his pistol, fucking awesome combination as, while he was cleaning the thing it discharged into the attic. There was a screeching sound of some sort and something broke through the attic porthole in my sisters room and raced down the hole and out the open front door. Scaring the shit out of my now shitfaced dad.

My mom, my sisters and I came home that night after shopping to find all the neighbors in their front yards staring at our house with their mouths gaping open. My dad in the front yard with his pistol in hand. Apparently we had JUST missed it. I heard the story from my dad and our next door neighbor at the same time. My dad told his version of events and the neighbor told his. He was watering his lawn when he saw this thing emerge from our front door and run and break neck speed, on 4 legs, down the street and disappeared.

Now it’s entirely possible that my parents were in on this, they fabricated the whole thing including the neighbors involvement to make it appear genuine just to put our minds at ease that there was no monster in the attic any more as my dad had apparently shot it on accident. But man were they committed to the lie, as there was a gunshot hole in the ceiling in the living room and the piece of wood that covered the attic hole in my sisters closet was broken in half leaving splintery wood everywhere.

16. Spookiest things came from when it was still operating

There is this abandoned mental hospital in my town called Prudhoe hospital which is sort of the scary place kids go to show bravado. It’s surrounded by woods so obviously you hear lots about it.

You hear lots of stories from people after it was abandoned but the spookiest things come from when it was still in service.

My Mam worked at an auxiliary nurse there for years and she said at night the crippled kids who couldn’t move due to severe diseases and birth defects would somehow get out of there cribs and into the middle of the floor on the wards. Whatever was doing this would also go around and remove blankets from all the patients and again pile them in the centre of the room.

Eventually security was hired believing it was someone getting into the hospital at night and doing all these things to scare people or to just be trouble.

However even with security they never found out who was doing these things at night.

17. Chased by an ambulance

One fall afternoon a buddy of mine and I decided to visit a massive abandoned mental hospital to take some photos. We’re talking 11 wards of two floors and a basement all connected from ward to ward. In total it must be 200-300 linear yards of winding connecting hallways on each floor. You get in and see open cell after cell after cell, peeling paint and graffiti all over the walls. We check the basement, walk through the majority of the wards and are now at ward 8.

We got there early in the afternoon maybe around 2 or 3 because we were too pansy to go at night. Mind you, we’ve heard there are cult gatherings and people have been known to stumble across the occasional hobo on their visits, so we came equipped with a couple of kershaw’s, praying not to get in some fucking knife fight. But, shit, its better to have one than not right? So. Ward 8.

We’re in a connecting hallway with a couple of wired off windows that can see outside, and my buddy says “Yo, yo get away from the window.” We look outside and theres an ambulance, no lights on, creeping slowly around the hospital. He must’ve been going at about 5 miles per hour, so we thought dammit, if theres an ambulance, there must be a cop somewhere (bad logic, I know, but we we’re just worried about being busted for trespassing). The ambulance disappears from our line of sight from the windows, and must’ve driven around all of the other wards at the same pace because a minute or so later, we see the ambulance pass right alongside the hallway we were standing in. Still fucking creeping. Thank god, the ambulance drives away, so we think, okay shit that was just a scare, there’s no cops around, let’s just keep on going.

We slowly advance for another 3 or so minutes and come across a huge lobby, probably the cafeteria and start taking a couple shots of the collapsed ceiling. We walk a bit further into the cafeteria and are by the windows again. The see the ambulance again! Creeping, just like last time, along the perimeter of the building. We hide from the windows hoping that we weren’t seen as the cafeteria is full of windows to the exterior. This time, we start to shit ourselves a little bit more.

He disappears from our line of view again, and of course, comes accross the other side of the building, circling it just like last time, 5 mph, just like last time. This time, however, he doesn’t go leave the complex, he drives up to ward 11, the last ward and parks in a cove with no exit that was right out of our line of sight. We hear the door open and close, and another door open and close. We were able to tell that there was only one person in the ambulance from the first time we sighted it. What the fuck is going on?? Was this guy here to shoot up? seemed like a bad place for a trip. Was he here for some sort of drug deal? Or was he back to “play” with us because he saw us on his last ride around?

We stay put, and at this point, we’re maybe 50 yards from ward 11 and 100-200 yards from the exit that we came in from. We know of no other exits except for the ones at each end. Trying to be as quiet as possible, we begin to hear footsteps on the floor above us. seconds later the footsteps turn into running. Towards us! NOPE, we both instantly go for our knives and begin to book the fuck out of there. The fastest 200 yard dash I will do to this day.

We finally reach the exit. We’re safe goddammit we’re safe. We continue to book it a ways out of the hospital till we’re on the path that gets us back to our car. On the way back to the little lot with my buddies car we see there’s a truck, one of those Jeep Wrangler types parked right next to my buddies car. We get maybe 50 yards away from it when he turns the car on and starts driving down the road towards us. In the car is another middle-aged man, looked real real sketchy. He drives past and thats the last we saw of both of them.

I never got a shot of the ambulance as I was too scared to go near the windows and that my flash would go off, but I did get a shot of the Wrangler in the parking lot.

.sguHhgU@ :mih wolloF .golataC thguohT ta recudorP a si leahciM

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