Last Call at Northgate Mall

Dead malls are their own kind of haunted. Not the horror-movie kind, just the sad kind -- all that hope for the future frozen mid-sentence. Northgate closed in 2009, and it has sat since then behind plywood and chain link, a whole indoor town gone quiet. I do urbex mostly for the photography, and a friend who knew a way in through an unsecured loading dock offered to take me. We went on a full-moon night so the skylights would give us light without flashlights giving us away.

Inside it was extraordinary. The main concourse ran off into the dark in both directions, storefronts gaping, mannequins toppled, a fountain full of black leaves. Escalators frozen like sculpture. The moon came down through the big skylights in cold blue columns, and dust hung in them, and it was so beautiful I almost forgot to be nervous.

We worked our way toward the food court, which sits under the biggest skylight. That is where the light was best and where I most wanted to shoot. We came around the corner past a shuttered pretzel stand, and I raised my camera, and then I lowered it, because there was a woman standing at one of the registers.

She was in a uniform. One of those polo-and-visor setups that fast food places used to make people wear, faded, a color I could not name in the moonlight. She was behind the counter of a stand that had no sign left, standing at the register with her hands resting on it, facing out toward the empty seating like she was waiting for the lunch rush. She was very still. My friend saw her the same second I did and grabbed my arm.

I want to be fair about what I actually saw. It was dark. It was a mall that had been sealed for over a decade. A person could, in theory, have gotten in the same way we did. But she was not lit by the moon the way we were. That is the detail I keep circling. We cast blue light and hard shadows. She did not. She was evenly gray, all over, like an old photograph standing up, and the register in front of her had a small green glow to it, the glow of a machine that is on, in a building with no power.