Jordin stopped walking. The traces of alarm that had outlined her face were gone, replaced by indignation. "You didn't say anything about needing to bring recording equipment. How was I supposed to know to do that? I told you I want to do this exactly the way real paranormal investigators do it!"
Her voice had escalated to a shout by the end, and as if in response, a trio of creaking sounds echoed from a room somewhere above us, followed by the building's weight-bearing supports letting out a groan that sounded like a long, slow moan of pain.
Jordin's complexion blanched snow-white, like a child who'd been naughty and got caught. I looked around, searching for the source of the sounds. When it died down, I continued the conversation as if nothing had happened.
"I didn't think recording devices would be needed," I explained. "You never said you wanted to gather evidence. You're paying me for a first-hand experience."
Her eyes still examining the ceiling for the source of the creaks and moans, Jordin replied, "But gathering evidence is part of the experience, isn't it?"
I grudgingly bobbed my head in an affirmative, and the two of us began walking again, shining our flashlights all around and talking quietly. "Jordin, you need to understand what gathering evidence means before you commit to it. Imagine long, often boring hours of wandering through haunted places, well into the early hours of the morning, shooting video and recording audio of what more often than not turns out to be absolutely nothing, all in the hopes that some small out-of-the-ordinary thing might be captured on tape."
"I can do that," she replied, indignant.
I wasn't finished. "The problem is, if something paranormal is captured on tape, at least fifty percent of the time, you don't know it at the time that it's recorded. Gathering evidence means that all of the recordings you make have to later be reviewed, and it's a very tedious process. We're talking about staring at hours upon hours of video footage that never moves or changes angles, and listening to endless hours of audio, usually trying to pick out the tiniest of unnatural sounds from static and silence. It's a huge commitment that's usually unrewarding, and would probably cause your schoolwork to suffer."
"I'll do it," Jordin volunteered. "I'll review all the recordings by myself. My course load is light this semester anyway."
I sighed, wondering if she truly had any inkling where these early steps might lead her. But her countenance was not one of impulsiveness. She appeared resolute, her shoulders set.
She really wants this, I thought. She wants it bad. And again I wondered what was behind that need.
"Teach me everything, Maia," she said. "Everything. That's what I'm paying you for."
"All right ..." I said, steadying myself. I allowed my senses to reflexively become alert, listening, feeling for anything and everything that might be out of the ordinary. My words came in whispers, as if to keep from disturbing the silence, but mostly out of reverence and respect to those who'd died here. This wasn't some museum or roadside attraction. It was a mass graveyard.
"First lesson," I said as we walked carefully through the black hallways. "True hauntings are nothing like what you see in the movies or on TV. There's no CGI effects, no creepy soundtrack, and actually seeing a genuine apparition with your eyes is the rarest of occurrences."
"Hmm" was Jordin's only reply.
"Second lesson. There are three classifications of hauntings. Residual, intelligent, and poltergeist."
"That movie freaked me out," Jordin admitted.
I shook my head, frustrated at how quickly she fell back into a pop-culture frame of reference. "It was an escapist flick that had no basis in reality. Poltergeist hauntings are typically subconscious manifestations of intense emotional trauma in the living. They're almost always caused by the living, inadvertently, and usually have very little-if anything-to do with the dead. But they can be very dangerous."
Jordin was openly surprised. "Have you ever seen a poltergeist?"
"Four times," I told her. "It's uncommon, but less so because most people mistake it for a ghost."
"And the other two kinds of hauntings?"
"Those occur more frequently. Residual hauntings are the most common type of all, but they're the hardest to classify, because no one really knows what they are. They're like recordings of past events, playing themselves out over and over again. The `ghosts' in these instances are usually full apparitions, but they're unaware of the presence of the living. There's no intention or responsiveness about them.
"If you've ever heard someone describe a ghost that doesn't know it's dead, the residual haunt is what they're referring to. Some people don't even consider these haunts to be spirits at all, but some kind of mental or spiritual imprint left behind after death. It's as if the traumatic event that lead to their death caused some leftover part of them to become unstuck in time, and the act of that death-or sometimes even just mundane acts from the dead person's life-becomes an echo, playing on a loop that we can perceive. They're not dangerous, but they are fascinating to witness, and they rarely have any idea that we're here."
"So there's probably a lot of residual ghosts here at Waverly, because of how they died?"
"Without a doubt," I replied. "But the most unpredictable type of haunting, the third classification, is the intelligent haunt. This is what most people think of when they think of a ghost: a disembodied soul who's completely aware of their surroundings, their memories ... and any living people they come in contact with. Why they linger is a huge mystery. It's unknown if they're stuck in one location-almost always the place where they died-or they're simply unwilling to leave. But they come in every temperament and variety, just like the living: they can be playful and harmless, or they can be wicked and vengeful. They're the most erratic type of haunting, and accordingly, the most hazardous to your health. But they're the most sought-after type for paranormal investigators, because anything with intelligence can find a way to communicate, and with communication comes the possibility of collecting real evidence."
"Okay. So, three types of hauntings,"Jordin repeated. "Got it. Anything else?"
"Well, there is a fourth type, actually ... but we won't be going near any of those."
She stopped short. "What is it? Tell me."
"Demonic," I replied, matter-of-fact. "Not all investigators consider those cases to be hauntings, since no humans are involved. But like I said, it doesn't matter, because we're steering clear of known demonic haunts."
Jordin shivered. "You're sure there's nothing like that here?"
I nodded, confident. "Countless investigators have spent hundreds of hours in this place, and no one has ever reported an encounter with anything terribly threatening."
She didn't look reassured.
We stationed ourselves in a central hallway on the notorious fifth floor, where the highest rate of paranormal activity was regularly reported, and where I had once seen and heard some very strange things myself. The walls around us were again tagged with layers of multicolor graffiti, courtesy of locals and visitors who felt the need to leave their own mark on the place.
But it was the dead who had left the most of themselves here. The fifth floor was the ward where patients were sent when the disease affected their minds, the place where the mentally disturbed lived and died.
Tonight, instead of actively searching for activity, we waited for it to come to us. I sat cross-legged on the floor with my Advanced Psychology textbook, studying for my first exam of the semester by flashlight. I was only half listening as Jordin prattled on.
As much as I wanted Jordin to feel like she'd gotten her money's worth on this trip, there were limits to my patience. To my dismay, she seemed incapable of maintaining silence for very long. And I began contemplating the fact that despite her grandiose wealth, even Jordin Cole might not have enough money to get me to go on another of these trips. It was the first small feeling of encouragement I'd felt since we'd arrived.
"We've been here for six hours," said Jordin.
"Mm-hmm," I said absently, snuggling deeper into my sleeping bag to stave off the freezing cold.
"This place is creepy as all get-out," she said, rubbing her arms nervously. "I still feel sick to my stomach."
"You mentioned that."
"It smells funny, too."
"Yep," I replied with a sigh.
Jordin glanced over, watching me study as if I were oblivious to our bizarre surroundings. A tinge of impatience seemed to strike her. "So is anything else going to happen, or what?"
I looked up at last. "Whatever's in this place, it doesn't operate on our timetable."
She frowned, her shoulders slumping. "I didn't think it would be so ... dull."
I grinned. "Welcome to paranormal investigation. Hours of tedium, punctuated with seconds of skin-peeling terror. Just how it is."
I watched Jordin in amusement an hour later as her eyes tried very hard to close themselves. She wasn't used to staying up all night and it showed.
But I had my reasons for requiring that we stay awake at least until four a.m., which was still forty-five minutes away.
Then, from the darkness down the long hall to our right, came a voice.
"Jordin!" I hissed, throwing my sleeping bag open.
"Hm?" came Jordin's groggy voice.
"Get up!" I whispered.
Her eyes blinked wide, and she saw that I was already standing. She quickly grabbed her flashlight and joined me.
"What is it?"
"Shh!" I whispered.
In the distance, the sound of a muffled cough could be heard.
I instinctively ran toward the sound, trying hard to keep my feet from clomping on the cement floors. I was fifty feet down the hall before I thought to look back and see ifJordin was following. To her credit, she was right on my heels.
We slowed to a stop as we heard the sound again, and I threw a warning hand injordin's face. Both of us fell completely silent while the coughing went on for almost a full minute, as if someone in some distant room was having an asthma attack. It was still far away, somewhere down at the farthest end of the facility. I wasn't even sure it was on this floor, but we had to go after it.
I'd never heard coughing at Waverly Hills before. I'd heard voices, seen shadow people, picked up on lots of strange smells, and experienced a dozen or so other odd occurrences. But this was new.
It made sense, though. Waverly Hills was a sanatorium for tuberculosis patients, and fits of coughing were one of the most prevalent symptoms.
My heart pulsed hard, my face felt flushed, and sweat prickled at my scalp beneath my thick black hair, even in this bitter cold. The rush had me.
Who had spoken? Who was coughing? Was it really a ghost? Was it something else?
Was I about to come face-to-face with a disembodied soul? Would I be able to interact with it, touch it, and communicate?
Could it tell me what it's like on the other side of the veil? Could it explain what happens when you die?
The sound grew as we neared the end of the hallway, more than three hundred feet from where we'd started. It had to be coming from one of the patient rooms on either side of us, or the last room straight ahead at the end of the hall.
There was a scream. It was muffled, but it was there, and it was close to us.
We ran the last few feet and I pointed into the room on our left.
"Put a light in there!" I whispered. I did the same to the room next door.
On the left was an old elevator, closed up and not functioning.
As soon as our flashlights illuminated the rooms, the coughing and screaming stopped. All fell silent.
I shined my light throughout the large, empty room, checking every corner, every wall, the ceiling and floor. Nothing.
I ran over to the room Jordin was in and repeated the procedure. There was nothing.
"You're absolutely certain we're the only people in here?" she said, raising her voice to full volume now that the commotion had passed.
"There's no way to be a hundred percent sure! It's a huge building situated on a massive plot of land. It wouldn't be that hard for someone to sneak in, even under controlled conditions."
She let out a long sigh.
I kept talking. "But if the sound we heard was coming from someone alive ... then where did they go?"
Jordin looked around the room anew, her spirits rising. "The sounds were definitely coming from somewhere down here. Had to be in one of these two rooms," she agreed.
I nodded. "I don't think it could have gotten past us."
Jordin was grinning all of a sudden, no doubt feeling the rush of having experienced something genuinely unexplainable. "So what are you thinking? Residual haunt? That thing you said where a place stores a recording of something that somebody did while they were alive?"
I walked outside and examined the doorpost. It was marked as room number 502.
Of course. I should have remembered....
"I know this room," I explained. "The story goes that one of the nurses working here hung herself in room 502. She was pregnant but either she lost the baby or aborted it, because it was found at the bottom of the elevator shaft not long after the nurse was found dangling from the rafters."
Jordin looked around the room again and rubbed her arms, feeling a palpable chill.
I felt like nothing more than a glorified tour guide as we made our way down to the slanted tunnel nicknamed the Body Chute. I suggested the stop after we left room 502, explaining its history to Jordin.
The hospital administrators decided that with so many people dying daily of tuberculosis under the facility's roof, it could be detrimental to morale to see bodies constantly being taken away through one of the main exits. So the tunnel was put to use, allowing the bodies to be removed via a railcar.
A popular urban legend suggested that when the number of bodies grew to be too overwhelming, the hospital staff decided to forgo the railcar and just let the bodies tumble down through the tunnel. I had studied the history of the place enough to know that this was just a spooky story told to unnerve people into thinking that many of the ghosts of Waverly Hills were victims of this mistreatment and were still here to take revenge.
We stared down into the corridor to the point where the light was swallowed by darkness, stretching into infinity. Jordin grabbed a small piece of broken-off brick from the floor and sent it sliding and rolling down the tunnel. We heard it much longer than we could see it as it rattled on and on against the cement floor.
A new voice called out in the distance, a man's voice.
Jordin and I froze again, listening hard to get our bearings on the new sound. We couldn't make out what the voice was saying, but as we listened, it spoke again.
"Is that you?" the muffled voice echoed down the hallway behind us.
Jordin let out a nervous laugh, pumping her fists in triumph. "This is un-stinkin'-believable!" she whispered.
I shushed her, listening hard. The voice was speaking again.
"Caroline?" the feeble, worried man's voice called out. "Honey, is that you?"
"Yeah! Yeah, it's me!" called jordin in reply, still exuberant and celebrating that the whole place had suddenly come alive. "This is Caroline!"
I grabbed Jordin by the front of her shirt and shoved her up against one of the heavily graffitied walls just outside the Body Chute. Jordin was on some kind of endorphin high, but as she opened her mouth to protest, I cut her off.
"Stop it!" I hissed. "Do not provoke an intelligent haunt. Don't taunt them, don't play with them. Don't ever!"
"I thought you said it was a residual!" she asserted.
"The first one was," I said slowly. "This one reacted to us. It called out after you threw the rock into the tunnel. It's intelligent."
I let go of her shirt, and for a moment I wondered why I'd reacted so strongly, almost violently. Then I remembered that haunted locations like this could get to you sometimes, transferring emotions from those who'd died here into you. Plus, Jordin had
all but insulted the poor soul who'd died here, and that sort of thing just didn't sit well with me.
Jordin frowned as she straightened her shirt back out, trying to process something. "But ... your parents provoked spirits sometimes on their TV show. I've been watching it a lot lately. It was their way of trying to get the ghosts to do something, communicate in some way."
"Yes, they provoke sometimes," I grudgingly admitted. "I don't like it. It's disrespectful."
"But if it-"
"Don't ever forget," I whispered, "we are trespassing on their turf. We are the ones who don't belong here. We're here to observe only."
Jordin looked around in frustration and raised hervoice. "But if we can't interact with them, then what's the point?"
"Interact all you want. But treat them with respect. And the point of this, since you asked, is to prove they exist."
I couldn't understand why Jordin's brow was still wrinkled. "What if that's not enough?" she asked.
I had no answer.
The male voice did not call out to us again all night.
When four a.m. arrived and the activity seemed to be settling down for the night, I declared that we were done, and we began rolling up our sleeping bags. While Jordin had originally insisted on our staying the entire night, the last hour's excitement had wiped her out and she put up no arguments at the mention of getting a pair of hotel rooms before we flew home.
Once we were back in the rental car and out on the highway again, she turned to me and said, "So where are we going next?"
I'd been afraid of this. Paranormal investigation is a field in which closure is a very rare commodity. The nature of how it works-positioning oneself to observe highly random paranormal events-all but prevents you from ever feeling like the job is complete. Usually you wound up feeling instead like you stopped only from exhaustion, and often right when things were just getting interesting.
That lack of closure made it a very addictive activity, particularly for newcomers. It was a difficult business to walk away from, which had made it all the harder for me to return.
Nightmare Page 5