Corridors a vignette by Mike Sugimoto

The last thing I wanted was to be in this building, a former psychiatric hospital. I walked the hallways I didn't need to walk -- it was, I told myself, curiosity. A morbid curiosity, perhaps, but a curiosity none the less. The big rooms opened like caverns underground, threatening to swallow anyone who might be condemned to spend time in this building. It was easy to see that this had been for psychiatric patients only; there was no mistaking the design features that had made it so. Every few feet, I saw cabinets with labels: Restraints. Periodically, a name to go with some of them: Restraints. For Juanita. And a place to use them, too, marked on a shelf in the cabinet: Restraints. For Juanita. Couch ties. So Juanita, I suppose, could watch television, tied to the couch, festering away, ignored and helped only in the strangest sense of the word.

I did not know that for a fact, of course. I had to assume how things were, how terrible the conditions must have been -- but I didn't know if there was any truth to the way I felt. Devoid of people, the hospital did not feel empty, yet I didn't know if it would seem less empty if had been full of patients and providers. As I wandered the halls, I held my light in my left hand -- as a police officer had taught me, the better to allow me to reach for my non-existent gun with my right -- less for illumination than for protection, a shield. If the light was on and shining, I thought at some level, the ghosts might not be able to get to me, and I would be safe from their judgement. How would they judge me, a member of the profession that had put them here in the first place and had ultimately seen them die here? That too was supposition -- I didn't know for sure whether anyone had actually died here or not -- but it felt too real to be false. I didn't really believe that nobody had ever died here despite or perhaps because of -- medical intervention. But I did believe that there were spirits watching me as I walked, judging me, asking me that eternal question: Why? Why was I sent here? Why did I die here? Why did it have to be me? Perhaps more importantly, why do you think you get to walk around here and not feel anything?

It might have been easier if I'd known what kind of patients they kept here. If it had been forensic patients, it might have been less unsettling but I didn't know. That was the problem with these old hospitals: too many unknowns, too many stories, too many ghosts. I thought back to the place where I had trained, to the hallway I would not venture down, even if it meant walking outside in the rain and the dark and the cold.

The hallway in question connected the clinical parts of the hospital to the teaching parts, most notably to the library, a place a young physician spent a lot of his time. It was a long, dark affair, very poorly lit with a single green sign marked exit glowing somewhere in the indeterminate middle. On the rare day the hall's lights were turned on, signs on the wall, beckoning through the gloom, revealed disturbing notices: Tissue Necrosis Laboratory, Infectious Hepatology, Osteogenic Cancer, Biomedical Communications. The last one wasn't too bad, but all along the hall, behind doors that I never in four years saw open, were things that even I as a healer did not want to see. Periodically, the series of depressing and scary signs would be interrupted by a stylized toadshade, the symbol of biohazardous material. It was not an unusual symbol in a hospital, but somehow in the darkness it felt more threatening -- more of a menace, actively seeking me out to do unspeakable harm. I didn't know what went on in that hallway, and I didn't want to know.

That particular hall held not ghosts but demons. The street might be a thoroughly frightening place, but you could at least run from your fears, even if only for a while. In a building, a hallway in the basement of a building -- you can't run, and the places you might hide in are even more full of the things you wanted to get away from. I knew how crazy and unreal it was for me to think this way -- I had held an irrational fear of hospitals and all things medical until I turned 11 or 12 -- but I couldn't get it out of my head. I never told any of my colleagues any of this, and only let a few friends know I had Issues with old medical buildings and equipment. It explained, perhaps, why I had such an affinity for new equipment over old: it was less contaminated with the spirit of the people it had failed to serve.

I wasn't really sure whether I believed in ghosts or not. I did know that I wasn't being haunted by any of them, but that I felt something was watching me in places like this former psychiatric hospital and at times of great mental stress. I always knew that the first patient I ever lost would always watch me as I banged on someone's chest, trying to get their heart going again, all the while asking me why I'd failed him and why I wasn't failing this particular one. It was something everyone felt at one point or another, and fortunately for me, I didn't lose a lot of people. But there were those I couldn't save, and, alone on the wards at night during rotations, I felt something following me around from time to time. I began to wear soft-soled shoes, the better to not make footsteps and to make sure that the noises I heard were not my own. It was worse in the corridors, which echoed and magnified sounds, focusing them like a camera lens. On dark, stormy nights -- and there were a lot of those, it seemed -- the sound of footsteps coming down the hall that bridged the two wings of the hospital could almost cause me to jump out of my skin.

As with most fears, there was no rational explanation for the way I felt. It was just... paranoia, perhaps, or maybe it was superstition. Whatever it was, it was pervasive, and I didn't know how to escape it. Maybe no one ever did. I had friends -- close friends, since we would never admit this to strangers -- who said they felt the same way. Some attributed it to the negative psychic energy that came from lost spirits, but most people just looked at it like it was yet another myth for a hospital that already had many. Viewed in that light, it wasn't hard to understand why people felt things roaming the hospital hallways.

The myths almost always revolved around patients who had died, usually under particularly tragic circumstances -- lost love, generally, but occasionally suicide that a keen staffer could not prevent, or a long, painful, lingering illness that tore families apart. Sometimes the suffering was by the doctors or the staff; more often, it was the patient who suffered. In that suffering, they could not find the release they need; their spirits thus condemned to wander the halls of the hospital where they had died, haunting, perhaps even taunting, the professionals who had in their mind failed them. Most hospitals more than twenty years old had at least one decent ghost story, and any hospital older than fifty years had even more. My favorites always seemed to involve romances between staffers that didn't work out, with one dying in front of the other, with the lost partner condemned to roam the halls of the hospital in search of the other half. But those spirits -- they were not the ones that followed me or that watched me as I went from room to room, checking patients and doing my job. They were not the ones that rode with me in the back of a helicopter as a neonate infant lay on the cot, trying with all its might to die on me. They weren't the ones that made me turn around and look behind me in a long hallway, even though I knew full well nobody was there.

Those ghosts understood. They knew what the score was, and didn't want anything to do with me specifically -- their interest was in the hospital itself. The occupants, though interesting, were irrelevant. But the spirits of the ones lost inside the hospital, the patients who died and would not otherwise be in a room in the facility... they sat in judgement of you. They perched in corners, on top of lights, under tables and beds. A haunting? More like an infestation of spiritual energy. Repeated clicking came from one of the patient rooms, snapping me back to the present reality: I was stuck inside an old mental hospital, and it was making noise.

It probably didn't help matters much that the air was stale -- you could taste it, almost. It was warm, with the smell of air that had been kept in once place too long, had been breathed by too many people. It might have been an olfactory manifestation of the spirits that I believed roamed the building asking questions; it might have been the heating system. Between the environmental controls in a building that was more or less hermetically sealed and my own overactive imagination, reality took on a supporting role, working to concoct the sort of nightmare that was somehow more terrifying and disturbing than those featuring werewolves and dragons. This was not a nightmare -- this was absolutely real. And I knew I would not soon forget the way the building felt.

In a way, it got better once I went downstairs. The walls were a pale blue -- powder blue, I suppose -- and the air was clean and cool. There was a distant thrum of machinery. The halls echoed, but not in that menacing way that the ones on the ward did: this was a good echo, the sound waves bouncing off concrete on all four sides. Paradoxically, it was definitely much less threatening down in the basement of this building; the reverse was usually true. The rooms in the basement, when opened, were just as cavernous and just as engulfing as the ones upstairs. Upstairs, they had windows; in the basement, we had dark. The warm, damp darkness fled the rooms once the doors were opened, invoking more demons and more spirits, but this time closer to home. There was something organic about the air in those rooms -- it seemed almost alive as it enveloped me. I rapidly closed the door and went back out into the safety of the hall.

I looked at my watch; the sun would be setting soon. It had been a dark day already, and I knew that without sunlight, the hospital with the stale air and the oppressive rooms would become a much more threatening place. And the sun went down -- I saw the clouds above go from dark to darker, to almost black. And so it was that the hospital became a very scary place indeed, despite the fluorescent lights and my large flashlight. My footsteps echoing down the bridge hallway sounded even louder and more hollow than before, and I believed that if I was being observed closely my first time through, it would be much worse this time.

I am a scientist -- or I'm supposed to be. I don't believe in ghosts, spirits, or things that go bump in the night. Despite all that, I am still afraid in those dark hospital hallways. Of what, I don't know. But it feels dangerous.

This semi-fictional story is based on my experiences at Glendale Geriatric Psychiatric Hospital in Victoria, British Columbia. The facility is closed now, but remains a favorite place for movies to film (which was why I was there), despite the very spooky feeling. The "hallway I would not venture down" is real too. You can find it at Vancouver General Hospital, connecting the Laurel and Heather pavillions. And no, I still won't walk down there... even when the lights are on.

Dedicated to Maggie, who didn't laugh at me, and to S.A., who taught me about monsters.

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