Kindred Soul

Nothing is permanent. People leave their mark by making art, creating buildings that are made to last, leaving imprints of themselves. Everything gets washed from the memories of man, anyways, left only for the history books. The only thing that holds on to the remains of memories are the walls of ancient buildings on the brink of disappearing, and the ground they stand on.

The basement of the hospital is hauntingly beautiful in its eerie emptiness; of course, there are people coming and going, but at night, hardly anyone is down here. Just a few lingering nurses and pharmacy workers, an occasional wandering someone or other who’s late in leaving from their 9-5, a random doctor or surgeon. Transient shift workers who come and go like the days of the week. In the safety of their work place, in the comfort given to them by badges and scrubs, they don’t think anything of what lurks in the shadows.

The history of this hospital is old; it has just as many horror stories as it does success stories. But it’s not the good things that are remembered about this hospital. It’s the bad ones, the ones that left this hospital in a place where it’s in the process of being abandoned, left to be overtaken by the elements. There’s nothing left for these walls to hear or see, no more stories for them to record. The employees have found other jobs; what they’re doing now is finishing the process of emptying the hospital, helping the transition of patients to other hospitals, and taking everything needed to follow them in their own transition. 

The only way to get to the basement is by staff elevators. The staff elevators and one staircase. The staircase is old and decrepit, almost hidden away in a corner of the hospital. The only people who know about the staircase are the employees; patients and their families were always directed to the public elevators, the ones that don’t have access to the basement. It was very rare that a patient’s family member got lost and used a staff elevator, making their way to the basement; they always were redirected to where they needed to go.

It’s curious, though. Sometimes there will be someone who finds a way to get to the basement and will never find the way back up to the main floor. Getting lost exploring, then getting sucked in by the graffiti that had suddenly popped up in recent months – dark graffiti on corners made to distract from where people are. Before realizing the shadows move across the walls.

This is the story about Kindred Soul Hospital. Pretty ironic, isn’t it? Kindred Soul, the haunted hospital, on the way to be abandoned, full of spirits and demons, the benevolent and malevolent. There are many, many horrors that have happened here. Countless lives have been lost. Some from negligent care, some from suicide, medical malpractices, natural causes. The list goes on. Some of those lost souls have turned dark, thriving on haunting. A few don’t know they have passed, caught here for some unknown reason. One or two are stuck here in hopes to find a way into the afterlife. But what’s most haunting are the darkest ones who trap the living and the dead. 

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Wandering these hallowed halls alone is frowned upon, now more than ever. In the past few months, stories have made their way throughout the hospital, from unit to unit, about people who have … disappeared. Just enough to create fear amongst the employees. Even though there’s nowhere to technically disappear in the basement, somehow it’s happened. But nobody knows how.

The police have come through to search and ask questions. Quietly, of course, as nobody wanted to spread fear and panic to the patients. Just one or two officers on each floor, going from unit to unit, conducting their investigation. All the employees whose jobs were in the basement were questioned; they were immediate suspects, due to their proximity to the disappearances. But the police came up with absolutely nothing.

What’s strange are the reports that have come from the questioning. Reports of seeing shadows move out of the corner of the eye, more active at night. Just a flit across the wall or almost like someone walking down the hall. Nobody is there, except the person experiencing it. Enough stories were reported, though, that this theory cannot be discredited.

Video cameras have been set up. Security has set up patrols. Guards go to entrances of every room in use in the basement; they check the empty rooms once per shift. They’ve also instated a rule that all employees must use the buddy system. The hospital board has even tried to get maintenance to fix the lights that have gone out, the ones that have started to flicker, and ones that started to fade. But every time a light gets fixed, it gets broken or goes out, flickers and fades again. There are even stretches where several lights are completely out.

Walking down these hallowed halls, where darkness reigns free, feeling as though someone is watching; that tingly sensation that raises the hairs on arms. Nobody is down here. A light flickers down the hall, the zapping of the flow surge the only noise in the hall. Everything seems normal, after all.

The basement is a labyrinth of tunnels underneath the building, a dank, confusing mess of a maze where new employees have a tendency of losing their way. But with time, everyone knows where they are in the basement in relative to what wing is above them. Of course, there are placards with directional information at the end of each tunnel, as well as every 200 feet or so. 

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Those who have wandered here without knowledge of where they were going, people who were not staff, have almost always gotten lost. Some tunnels do look the same and often get people turned about. That’s a given. But people who have wandered down here more recently, they never knew about the buddy system that’s in place. They’re the ones who have been more at risk.

A couple of months ago, an intern came down to the basement. She was new, and she had no clue about the basement, how the shadows like to taunt and tease until they swallow you whole. The girl wandered around alone, seeing shadows move in the corner of her eye, feeling as though someone was watching her. It felt as though someone was down there with her, following her, breathing down her neck. But nobody was there.

She almost felt like she was wandering in circles, getting confused, almost sure she had seen that graffiti at the corner, the one of a skeleton – fitting, considering the morgue was right down the hall. At least, that’s what the sign said. Hoping she would find a medical examiner, she slowly made her way down to the morgue. The lights were out; the medical examiner was gone for the night. Just her luck that he was gone when she was lost. She was hoping that he would help her to where she needed to go.

But something in the morgue caught her eye. An almost human shape, like a shadow, darted across the wall at super human speed, darker than the lightless nothing in the room that swallowed the pale square of light from the window in the door. It must have been her imagination, though; that’s what she told herself after she jumped and let out a small cry.

Her story ended when she disappeared into the darkness at the end of the hall, just past the door to the ancient staircase. Almost like it was planned that way. Some sort of supernatural power. Something along those lines, anyways.

Her body showed up days later in the morgue. The medical examiner talked to the people upstairs; it turned out that she hadn’t shown up for her shifts the last few days, and the family reported her missing. But the medical examiner couldn’t tell anyone how the poor girl died. There was nothing peculiar or out of the ordinary. She was just dead. Just a body. The only peculiar thing about it was that her body just turned up and that there was no evidence of foul play.

The rumors that followed about her death went from dying of fright to an overdose. Nobody knew anything about what happened. But the only rumor that was close to the truth was the one where she died of fear. After all, this basement is full of the creepies. It’s the closest they will ever get to the truth. They don’t want the actual truth, anyways. 

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The family of the intern who died claimed the body. Her mother didn’t know what to do with herself; she was too overwhelmed with grief to look her daughter in the face. As for her father, his stoic façade was just that – a façade. His emotions were clearly visible in his eyes, and his lips were white. It was harder for them to hear how their child died – from unknown causes. Although, the mother was so distraught, she wasn’t in the room when the medical examiner spoke to the father about their daughter. She fell apart when the father told her what happened; she could no longer hold herself together.

The family planned for a funeral later in the week. There was a memorial service the night her family claimed her body. Hundreds of people, many of whom her parents had no clue how much their daughter meant to them, came to light candles and mourn with them. They sang songs of sorrow, supported each other with kind words, and shared in their grief; but they also shared the stories of how wonderful and amazing she was, how touched they were by having her in their lives. The amount of love gave the family some comfort in their time of need. They wanted her to be remembered as she was in life, not as she was in death. This was how they knew that her memory lived on.

Here in the hospital, her memory will live on in an entirely different way. The positive memories will not flourish here. After all, this isn’t where the good comes to flourish. The spirits here are one with the darkness that resides in this basement. They are the ones who chased away the hospital staff. They are the ones who have taken over. And she has become one of them. How unfortunate for the parents, always thinking that their daughter is in a better place, when her soul is stuck here, in the dark bowels of an abandoned hospital, swallowed whole by something darker than she could have ever imagined; something darker than her family could have imagined, something they would have never thought she would ever be part, even in the afterlife. 

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After the intern died, the buddy system rule became a mandate. Groups of threes and fours now come and go at irregular hours when shifts change. People still don’t know how the intern died, and that scared people almost more than being alone down here does. The last person who saw the intern, a nurse on the fifth floor, felt so guilty that she put in her resignation.

The police have combed the security footage, but found nothing in regards to how she died. They saw her walk down the hall to the morgue, but saw nothing out of the ordinary. But what was weird was that the camera down the hall had broken right before the intern disappeared. She had walked out of view from the first video camera, but the footage from the second camera was either erased or damaged when the camera broke.

Nobody comes down to the basement alone after dark. It’s rare that anyone does during the day, either. If someone is alone in the basement, a group will usually allow the person to join them.

Of course, it only takes a few days for someone to break the mandate. Not everyone likes being told what to do, do they? Mostly, people break mandate during the day, when it’s less creepy, when there’s less… activity, if you will. Because people think there is more “supernatural activity” at night. Only the rare courageous person walks alone in the dark labyrinthine network that is the basement. Using flashlights and phones, they find their way to their destinations, be it an exit, elevator, storeroom, pharmacy, or morgue, so that they can find their way with little or no fear of mysteriously disappearing.

But the courageous ones don’t know what I do. They don’t know that the light does nothing to banish the taunting shadows; it just makes them adapt. The human figures of the shadows play just outside the cone of light from phone flashlights or screens. Shadow people is what they are called, how they’re known. Almost like the shadow of whomever walks down the hallway, but with a mind of their own; and they dance. Oh, do they dance.

The shadow people dance to taunt, tease. They lure people into the darkest depths of the shadows and darkness of the basement of the hospital. Almost predatory in their hunt, the shadow people of the Kindred Soul Hospital are cunning, deviant. Seemingly more human than the staff of the hospital.

We all know how reckless courageous people can be. And the shadow people are just waiting for the next recklessly courageous person to make a mindless mistake; wander alone in the basement without light, cut off from the group. Sometimes curious, sometimes just stupid, other times reckless. But these people are the prey for the predatory shadows. 

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Another intern disappeared a few weeks ago. He came down to the basement from the second floor to pick up medications from the pharmacy for a patient. Not waiting for a buddy, he went downstairs, doing what he thought was right – time is of the essence when it comes to patients. He wasn’t doing anything wrong… except for breaking mandate. That’s fine. Except that people disappear and sometimes come back dead. What’s strange is that this intern knew about the intern before who was found in the morgue. Yet, he still decided to go into the basement alone.

Once again, the intern was reported missing. Staff tried to get in contact with him, but when nobody could get ahold of the intern, they knew immediately what happened. Again, the police were called in; the police and security set up patrols to find him. Security footage was scoured, every minute and second dissected. Just like with the last intern, this one was seen on one camera, but the next one had gone offline or broke, so nobody was certain how he disappeared.

Patrols were instructed to search empty rooms. But this time, they were told to check every corner, behind and around everything stashed away in these rooms. What they didn’t know the last time was that the girl was in a dark corner of the old pharmacy; but hopefully, this time, the intern would be found before he turned up dead, or worse – never to turn up again.

But there is little hope in a hospital alive with the supernatural. I have come to think the soul of Kindred Soul Hospital isn’t its staff, the people who run it, the volunteers, or the patients. It’s the spirits that reside in the basement, which is now so overrun with the deviancy of the malevolent that nobody is allowed to be down here alone anymore.

However, I digress. When the second intern disappeared, it was even more of a big deal – two interns disappearing in less than three months is unheard of. Except at Kindred Soul Hospital. However, nobody has really figured out the mystery in the basement. They just know the basement has a habit of making people disappear, however unrealistic it may be.

Like the first intern, the second was found within a few days’ time. But unlike her, he was found very much alive, walking up and down the hallway of the morgue – except he was stark raving mad. He was muttering about being followed and stalked, being hunted by things he had no words for. With a crazed look on his face, he could barely speak about what happened to him, let alone remember what really happened.

Within hours, he was transported to the nearest psychiatric hospital, for they feared psychosis. A very viable diagnosis; between the marks on his arms, the unsettled seeming mind, and the fact that he had no idea who he was anymore, it was in the best interest of everyone. In the end, his health was what mattered.

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What do people want the most? If they had everything in life they wanted – a stable job, a family, a roof over their heads – what would they want? Between the steady people in their lives and the transient moments that will never be remembered, what they desire most is to be safe, protected by the unstable security they’ve cocooned themselves in.

That sense of security and safety vanishes the moment someone steps off an elevator into the labyrinthine maze of hallways in the basement of the hospital. Taunting, teasing, hunting shadows come to life and have the ability to wear down even the most mentally and physically strong person. Even though there is strength in numbers, oftentimes it’s hard to remember that when in the depths of the haunting hallways of the basement. In any case, it goes both ways; the shadow people and other malevolent spirits have more strength with larger numbers, just as normal people do.

The disappearance of people, then, isn’t such a mystery. The more people that disappear, the more shadow people appear. There is no coincidence. Strength in numbers. That is the constant struggle between the living and the supernatural. Both want the numbers to lend strength to their groups. The struggle is who will win.

Supernatural forces may work alone, but it doesn’t change the fact that numbers help feed into the fear in the minds of people. Fear is a powerful tool, just as it an emotion. The shadow people thrive on the fear induced on the people they taunt. Shadow people and the other supernatural forces that reside in the basement. It’s what they do. 

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The intern who was found alive, though in the throes of psychosis, was put on medical leave for the interim of his mental rehabilitation. Human resources of Kindred Soul sent his information to other hospitals in the area, for they wanted him to have the option to be able to start work at the hospital of his choice, or decide to start somewhere else: this way, he wouldn’t be out of work when he was ready to return. His parents became recluse, keeping mostly to themselves. In time, his mother was also put in a psychiatric hospital; she could no longer hold herself together. With his wife and son in the position they were in, the father ended up taking his own life. Son and mother would have nobody to come home to but each other. The son would forever feel guilty for thinking his father’s suicide was his fault, and the mother would never be the same ever again. And all of this was caused by the supernatural beings in the Kindred Soul Hospital. 

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These dark spirits haunt me. They’ve stalked and taunted me to the brink of my sanity, right on the precipice. Pushed me to the point of nearly falling, then pulled me back. They own me because they’ve prevented me from going insane. Down the path to insanity, then saved… by the same hands. How can I turn my back on those who have saved me, even though they were the ones who pushed me to the brink of my sanity?

I know what people think. It’s wrong for me to align with darkness, with evil. But I can’t just turn on my back to the ones who saved me, even though they were the ones who nearly destroyed me. I don’t deny the evil darkness that I am surrounded by. But I can’t turn my back on those who pulled me back just as much as any normal person can’t fathom sticking around with a source of evil. Like I said, the shadows own me.

We are what people fear the most. Darkness come to life. Reincarnated evil. Our group, though few, have haunted Kindred Soul almost since the doors opened. Of course, hospitals are one of the most favored places for supernatural beings to haunt. Hospitals, psychiatric hospitals, homes where dark things happened in their pasts, sometimes churches. We are drawn to people’s fear, to evil, to any and all things that call to us. We are all the things that go bump in the night. And our story at Kindred Soul won’t end, even though its life has. I am Legion. We are many. We will forever spread fear and create chaos in here until the end of time.

We are many. We’ve scared the hospital staff and taunted enough patients and volunteers that it was decided to leave the building to us. The official statement, however, was the old building was now falling apart, too worn to be able to use properly anymore. Officially, they would never tell the populace about what had happened within these hallowed halls.

The living had their chance to finish their story within this building. Their stories linger here, but will be marred forever by the darkness that taint these walls. Our stories will be the ones to leave their mark here. 

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We have free reign. This is our home now. The darkness that is us has spread to every corner of the building. Kindred Soul Hospital is no more. What is left is an empty shell of something that is remembered by the community, but altogether left alone because of the stories told about it.

Groups of people have come in to ease their curiosity, to see if the rumors are true. They come to see us. We taunt them, give them an idea of what happened. We dance at the edge of their eyesight, telling them the story we want them to know. We dictate the narrative; this is our story. We tell people what we want them to know, not what they want to know from us. After all, this is our turf. Our mark on the hospital, the community, and the people is what we want to be remembered by.

One group came in one day. They made their way to the basement, saw what the last thing our victims saw. People broke off from this group in twos, spread out to be able to cover more ground. They wanted to see what they could find, to be able to record their findings. We gave them a show they would never forget. Their cameras caught us on tape, because we wanted them to. They saw us with their own eyes, because we wanted them to see us in all our haunted glory.

One of them went off by themselves. What a wonderful opportunity for us. He made it all the way to the morgue, just like everyone else who disappeared when this building was a hospital. But he was alone, and he didn’t know how strong we are, how we hunger for fresh souls to join our group.

We lured him into the room, taunted and haunted him to the brink of his sanity, just like what happened to me. We drove him to the point where he was begging us to either take him into our numbers or just let him go crazy. That was all we needed to take him. He became ours.

We stopped his heart to release his soul, watching the light in his eyes go out. Before it drifted away, we caught his soul and tainted it with our darkness. We waited until he became one of us. Cackling with delight, we went back to our hunt for the group of which he was part of before his unfortunate passing.

Before long, his group was ready to leave. Nobody could find him. That is, until we gently led them to the morgue. But they didn’t know what we were doing. We were just trying to get them to follow us.

Flashlights blazed on before they opened the door to the morgue. They didn’t get in very far before someone screamed. They found the body of their friend, laying in the middle of the room, right where we left him. Except, this time, he had bled from his eyes. There was no question that he was dead. However, just like every other person who died here, there was no reason for him to be dead. He died no natural death. His death was supernatural… given to him by my hand. 

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Almost nobody has come to visit us since. After the unexplained death of a paranormal investigator, stories spread like wildfire. We have been left alone. We watched as they put a fence around our building, marked with large “No Trespassing” signs every few hundred feet. Whatever the signs may say, we encourage trespassing… to the trespasser’s discretion. We warn the trespasser, though, that he may not making it out…alive.