Great thread. Love the stories so far. 
I’ll share one from my teen years. This will probably be long because I have a habit of painting gigantic verbal pictures.
During the mid-80s, my father and I lived in a three-storey townhouse in Concord, ON, with another family whom we’d known for years. (We’d even lived with them once before) There was myself and my dad, plus Rob and his mother. Four total, with three of us taking up the three bedrooms on the top floor and the mother downstairs. It worked out quite well.
Now, being in my early-to-middling teens, and Rob being three years older than me, plus my own friends who were my age, we all loved to go exploring around the area. At the time, much of the land on Dufferin north of Steeles was still undeveloped – even our townhouse division was still only a few years old, and they were building yet more at that point.
At one point, one of my friends, Ken, and myself, we were exploring some land just north and east of our place. It was largely open and unkempt field, but there was a three storey, fairly large place in from the road a ways whose purpose was clearly not residential, but which we couldn’t suss out. In behind and off a ways from this place, well out of earshot, was an old abandoned place. It was large and quite shabby, and rumour had it that is used to be an insane asylum. We’d heard that the (smaller) place we passed to get there that we didn’t know what it was for was the new asylum, but its comparatively diminuitive size and design didn’t lend itself to medical uses. Still, with nothing else to go on we went with it.
Now, I don’t know what it is with kids and abandoned places, but we just had to check it out. It was daylight, though overcast, so while we could titilate ourselves with stories of the place closing down due to mental patients escaping the psycho ward and slashing throats in their attempts to escape, we had the comfort of daylight to run back to if the shadows reached out too far.
The place was completely dilapidated. It was sturdy enough – all concrete and brick – but windows had been smashed out, paint was flaking everywhere, and the dust and debris of eons covered every surface and leftover stick of industrial revolution-era furniture. It was perfect!
We explored the upper floors with its empty rooms, the muted light of the day streaming in through cracked and broken windows and illuminating streamers of dust motes that were kicked up by our footsteps. The configuration certainly lent credence to the medical nature of the building’s rumoured purpose. Neat, but ultimately boring. The main floor, though darker and slightly more mysterious, was slightly more interesting, with different types of rooms to peek in and check out, some of them windowless and dark.
It was the basement that intrigued us the most. With the only windows being high up in some of the rooms where the floor peeked above ground level, the light down there was scant and mostly came indirectly from reflections on the walls opposite the rooms whose doors were open to let whatever light they could. That let mysterious shadows reach out and envelop certain areas – particular one area wherein there was no light, just six very small rooms – cells, really. No doubt where they locked up the real crazies that tried to kill the doctors and nurses. We dared one another to go in to that area which was almost black as pitch, with only the faintest indirect light able to cast the merest tantalizing hints of walls or shapes. But neither of us dared. Not without reenforcements.
Thus it was some weeks later that we hatched a plan. There were to be four of us, myself, Rob, Ken, and another of our friends, Adrian. I was the small but adventurous one. Ken, a budding weightlifter, liked stirring stuff up. Adrian was the same way, though without the weightlifting, and with slightly more criminal tendencies. Rob, the oldest among us and therefore the coolest among us in the manner of a cool older brother, was the budding movie director. He had an unholy obsession with horror movies in particular – loved slasher and splatter flicks, and was a devout subscriber to Fangoria magazine. By association, we all came to have an appreciation for them, too.
For illumination, Rob knew how to make a torch out of a shirt wrapped around a stout stick and marinated in kerosene. That’s right, a torch. We were doing this old school. And we were going to do this at night, the four of us, heading back to the abandoned insane asylum armed only with a fiery stick and nerves of steel. If steel could be made of yarn.
And so we did. We made our way in through a set of double doors and got in just far enough that the light from outside began to flee and we could no longer find our way by sight alone. Then we lit the torch, and the shadows retreated for a good ten foot radius at least. Just the same, we stuck very close together without actually touching – we were men, after all. Proper man-space distance must still be observed even when one’s life is threatened by whatever lurks in the shadows beyond our illuminated sphere.
Our destination was, of course, the lower level. We explored around the basement level (as best we could taking small, shuffling steps so as to maintain our compact, defensive cluster formation) and managed to suitably scare the willies out of one another, a sensation that only increased the deeper we went.
We approached the end of the northern wing of the building, which appeared to have been a cafeteria or staff room of some sort, what with all the cupboards and sink and spots where major appliances must once have stood. It wasn’t that large – maybe twenty feet long by thirty across, and a set of stairs led up on the other side of the room.
We were just about to head to it when we heard something from behind us. We froze, and slowly glanced at one another. Did we disturb something on our way past? Building settling maybe? We shrugged and cautiously made our way forward, now getting a little freaked out – well, moreso than we had already made ourselves.
Halfway to the stairs was another noise behind us. A loud noise. A pot being dropped and clattering on the linoleum. Once again, we froze, temporarily paralized with fear. That definitely wasn’t caused by us. This sound was at least ten or twenty feet behind us. We looked to one another again, now knowing that it wasn’t our imagination, and it wasn’t the building settling.
We weren’t alone. Someone else was there with us.
In a classic movie moment, we all turned around as if in slow motion, hoping against hope that it was the wind – on a windless night, in an enclosed space far from any open windows or doors, granted, but anything seemed possible when the alternative was almost certainly a gruesome, bloody, disarticulated death. But it wasn’t the wind. As we completed our 180, we saw, at the edge of the torchlight, a ground-level cupboard open with an accompanying squeak of rusty hinges, and a figure began to emerge.
Our brains scrambled to link our present scenario with anything familiar, and although we never voiced our findings – we all knew that expository dialog was foolish and always led to your untimely demise – we had all evidently come to the same conclusion, likely because it was the only logical one our particular group could come to:
JESUS CHRIST, IT’S A ZOMBIE!
Yep. Had to be. The insane undead had come back to rend us limb from limb and feast on warm gobbets of our still-quivering flesh, and that was just not on the agenda – not while we had a fiery stick, or at the very least a pair of legs that were still attached (for the moment) and capable of rapid movement. We let out a simultaneous quartet of surprisingly shrill screams and bolted for the stairs, at the top of which, rather conveniently, were a set of doors that led to the outside world. After smashing into them in a panicked attempt to ram them open, we discovered that, rather inconveniently, the door handles were wrapped several times over with heavy chain.
Crap.
We pushed and shoved and finally managed to push the door open just enough for us to squeeze out through an opening probably not more than three quarters of a foot wide. Adrenaline is awesome stuff that seems to transmute bone to jelly when in a state of shrieking panic. And with that, we made it outside.
Or rather, most of us did. Ken, Adrian and myself made it out, but Rob wasn’t there. Shit. Shit shit shit. He must have continued up the stairs to the second floor when we first discovered the doors were chained shut and didn’t wait to see if we could do something about it. We pounded on the door and hollered after him, screaming at him to get out, GET OUT OF THERE! We knew the zombie couldn’t get us – they could get up to a shamble at best, and they were just no good at squeezing through tight spaces without losing limbs.
There was no response. We imagined him huddled in a corner, sobbing quietly as panic gripped him by the throat – but if he was smart he’d find another way out, hopefully without being ambushed by any more undead.
After several frantic minutes of trying to get through to Rob, he appeared round the corner, having apparently come out the way we had first entered. We made sure he still had all of his extremities, and then left the scene, having survived the perilous encounter.
Now, in retrospect, it was probably just some homeless guy disturbed by our interloping on his cozy abode, but we barely got more than a glimpse of the shabby figure before we turned tail and ran, and we never went back to investigate from that point on, so really … we’ll just never know for sure.
