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.

At the end of the hall was the visitor log, a heavy ledger on a wooden stand. I flipped through it out of reflex. The last real entry was from 1998, a maintenance man signing out. But below that, in fresh ink that had not even fully dried, someone had written my name. My full name, the one almost nobody uses, and next to it the time -- 2:11 PM. My watch said 2:11.

I did not scream. I want that on the record. I put the clipboard down very carefully, the way you set down something you do not want to wake, and I walked back to the stairwell. The metal chair that had propped the door was gone. I had stepped over it on the way in.

Downstairs my friends asked what took so long. I said the wiring really was bad up there and we should go. On the drive home one of them scrolled back through her photos and stopped on a shot of the third-floor hallway, one she had taken while I was upstairs. In the window at the far end, four floors of empty building behind it, there is a pale shape that looks a great deal like a person watching the parking lot. She swears the hall was empty. I believe her.

I have the ledger photo still. People tell me it must be a prank, that someone got up there ahead of us and wrote my name to spook the new guy. Maybe. But the ink was wet, and the demolition took the whole building down a month later, and I have never told anyone which hospital it was, and I am not going to start now.