There’s a hospital on the edge of town, one that’s been abandoned for years. The windows are shattered, and the building is crawling with vines and decay, but it wasn’t always like that. It once held a quiet, unspoken reputation in the town. People went in for treatment, sometimes never to return. The whispers surrounding the hospital have grown darker over time, fueled by the rumors of a patient who never left.
Her name was Emily Cole.
Emily was admitted to the hospital in 1973, after a breakdown that was never fully understood. Friends and family said she had always been a quiet, reserved girl, never drawing attention to herself. But something inside her snapped one night, and she was taken to the hospital under the guise of treatment. No one saw the true horror that would follow.
The hospital itself was old, its walls holding decades of secrets and unspeakable acts. Doctors and nurses were known to be overworked and underpaid, and the staff’s ethics were… questionable, to say the least. There were stories of cruel treatments, of patients becoming more like prisoners, their minds shattered by the methods used to “cure” them. But Emily was different. She didn’t scream like the others. She didn’t resist. She simply… disappeared into herself, lost to the madness.
Days turned into weeks, and soon, Emily was being kept in the high-security ward—those who had tried to harm themselves or others. It was a room with a view, but the view was one that could only torment a soul. The window overlooked the hospital’s roof, high enough that one could see the town beneath it, so far away. Too far to reach, but close enough to make someone long for the ground below.
It was there that Emily made her choice.
The night of the incident, the nurses on duty were tired, distracted. The quiet of the ward was unsettling, like the calm before a storm. Emily stood by her window, staring out into the night, her face pale, her eyes vacant. Then, in an act of complete surrender, she climbed onto the windowsill and stepped into the dark, her body falling silently from the ledge.
The authorities ruled it a suicide. A tragic end to a quiet life. But those who worked at the hospital knew something was wrong. Emily’s body was never recovered. It was as though the ground had swallowed her whole, leaving behind nothing but the echo of her final leap.
But she wasn’t gone. She couldn’t be.
It wasn’t long after her death that strange occurrences began to happen in the hospital. Late at night, when the wind howled through the broken windows, a soft, haunting whisper would drift through the halls. Nurses on night shifts would report feeling as though someone was watching them, or worse, standing just behind them, breath cold on their necks. The floors would creak with footsteps that didn’t belong to anyone alive.
And then there were the windows.
Those who worked in the hospital would often return to find the high-security ward’s window wide open, the curtains swaying as if someone had just climbed through. But no one could ever explain why it was always that same window—always the one Emily had fallen from.
As the years passed, the stories grew. People in the town would hear of the strange happenings, the flickering lights, the moving shadows. But the most chilling tale came from a janitor who worked in the abandoned building after it had been shut down. He was cleaning the upper floor, near the old ward, when he saw her.
There, standing just inside the window, was a figure. Pale, with long dark hair that obscured her face, and eyes that glowed faintly in the dim light. It was Emily.
He ran. But when the authorities arrived, the window was locked, and there was no trace of her. Just the soft, hollow sound of footsteps echoing in the empty halls.
Now, the hospital remains abandoned, a monument to the forgotten. Locals avoid the place, unwilling to go near it, too afraid of what might be lingering inside. But still, on cold nights, when the moon is high and the winds howl, you can hear her. The whispers that rise from the hospital, the soft padding of footsteps that never cease.
And if you’re foolish enough to stand outside, to look up at the high-security ward where she fell… you might see her. Her face, pale and broken, watching you from the window. Waiting.
Emily never truly left. And she’s still out there. Watching. Waiting. For the next person who dares to look too long at the place she once leapt from.