Whispers from the Abandoned Asylum
The first night I crossed the threshold, the air turned cold enough to steal warmth from my bones. The Abandoned Asylum loomed in the beam of my flashlight, a mausoleum of stairwells and chipped enamel, where every echo sounded like a cough from a century past. I came to listen, to write, to separate fact from rumor, but the building was in no mood to be measured. It spoke in low harmonies—soft breaths of wind through warped pipes, the distant rattle of a door that refused to stay closed, and then, unmistakably, a murmur that rose from the floorboards as if the earth itself were whispering secrets into my ear.
Inside, the corridor walls wore a pale bruise of dampness. The whispers braided through the air, circling my name with an almost affectionate familiarity. They did not shout. They nudged, coaxing me deeper into the labyrinth where the past sealed its own wounds with rust and plaster. Each room offered a different memory: a bedframe that looked asleep, a chair with one leg longer than the others, a sink that held the image of someone who had never learned to smile. I moved with the pace of a patient reader, counting the breaths I dared to take between the whispers.
“We never left,” the voices breathed in unison, though no mouth stirred. “We learned to speak in the quiet where doors remember how to weep.”
In the ward where laughter once roared behind closed doors, the air seemed to tilt and lean toward a single changing point—the room at the end of the hall that never appeared on any map. My steps slowed, and with them the whispers grew sharper, more insistent, like someone turning pages that should have remained blank. I found a small ledger tucked behind a loose tile, its cover worn to the color of old rain. The pages were filled with patient names, dates, and margins crowded with trembling notes. Some entries ended abruptly, as if the ink had bled away in fear. One line, written with a tremor that shook the page, read simply: We remember who we were when no one is watching.
Near the ledger lay a silver key, cold as a coin that has swallowed its own memory. It felt ceremonial, as though the building had prepared a ritual for me—a new name to haunt in a place where names were swallowed by the walls. I pocketed the key, aware that it would need a door of its own to unlock what I could not yet understand.
- A cracked mirror that showed not my reflection but a corridor behind me, as if the walls themselves were learning to watch.
- A faded photograph of a nurse with a smile that never reached her eyes, pressed between the pages of a diary that trembled when I touched it.
- A whispered instruction carved into the metal frame of a cot: listen to the quiet, and you will hear the truth you fear to hear.
The whispers gathered in a not-quite-crescendo as I turned toward the stairwell, where the air grew denser, as if smoke from a memory clogged the stomach of the building. I paused on the landing, listening to the chorus of unseen feet descend and the sighs of rooms that remembered every visitor they had ever housed. When I finally stepped back into the night, the asylum exhaled with relief, as though it had freed itself from the burden of a visitor who listened too closely. But the whispers did not vanish; they settled into the corners of my notebook, into the rhythm of my breath, and into a promise that I would return not to finish a story, but to become part of one.