The Fourth Floor Nobody Signed For

The county let a small group of us into the old Ridgeway hospital before the demolition crews came. It had been shut since the nineties, and the paperwork we signed covered floors one through three. Nobody mentioned four, and when I asked the caretaker about it he just said the wiring up there was bad and left it at that.

I have done a fair amount of urbex over the years, so a dead hospital did not rattle me at first. The lower floors were what you would expect. Peeling paint the color of old teeth. Gurneys shoved into corners. A nurses' station with a rotary phone still bolted to the desk. We took our pictures and kept our voices low, more out of habit than fear.

The elevator was supposed to be dead. All the breakers were pulled. But around two in the afternoon it groaned to life on its own, and the brass arrow above the doors swung slowly up to four and stopped there. We all stood in that hallway watching it, and nobody said the obvious thing, which was that a machine with no power should not be able to do that.

I went up. I know how that sounds. But I told myself there was a rational answer waiting at the top, and I wanted to be the one who found it. The stairwell door on four was propped open with a folded metal chair, which bothered me, because we were the only people in the building and none of us had gone up there.

The fourth floor was colder than the rest by a good ten degrees. My breath showed. The rooms up there had not been cleared like the others -- there were charts still hanging on the ends of the beds, clipboards yellowed and curling. I picked one up and the name at the top was written in fountain pen, dated 1947. That was decades before the wing I was standing in had even been built. I checked three more. Same handwriting. Different names. All from the forties.