I’ve always been alternately frightened by and fascinated with the unknown, and this manifests itself in weird and unexpected ways. I’m terrified of the dark, for instance, but I love going on late-night walks in the hopes that something extraordinary might happen. There’s nothing I’m more afraid of than psychological thrillers and flicks that flirt with the paranormal, but I’m willing to brave the fear for the momentary rush of adrenaline I get while watching the movie before the scariness of what I’ve seen hits me. I hate being alone in abandoned streets or fields, but the thought of finding something new, a hidden gem of a chance encounter, excites me. It’s strange, but I guess I’m inexplicably both drawn to and repelled by what I don’t know―and while that curiosity has been paramount at many different points in my life, one specific kind of “chance encounter” put my catlike propensity for nosiness to the test.

From kindergarten to fourth grade, I attended a school that was housed in the old intensive care unit of a local hospital. It was a tall, imposing building, made of run-down bricks and filled with musty air. It contained its own public secrets: It was connected via underground tunnel to the ER unit of the neighboring main hospital building, and sometimes classes were allowed to take brief tours of the winding concrete maze that was largely dormant beneath the floors and fields of the school grounds. Oftentimes the building itself was eerie, strange, and unfamiliar, like most old buildings. Like a graying professor, though, it was dignified in its age, and even with all its strangeness it managed to exude an air that balanced precariously on the line between stately and intimidating.

My school only occupied the first three floors of the building and a couple of rooms in the creepy basement, and most of my time was spent above ground (except for when we had to brave the frail and creaky metal staircase to get to the art class in the basement). No one knew what exactly was on the other (vacant) floors, and most of the other students―even the ninth graders, the oldest kids in the school!―were too afraid to even dare to climb up the vinyl-lined staircase or take the rickety elevator up to what lay beyond the third floor. In between classes, I was usually too busy wrestling my way through the swarms of other kids to think too much about what lurked above and below the floors of my school―but during recess or after school? That was a whole ’nother ball game.

The floors of the building that weren’t occupied by my school were, when viewed from the field outside, completely dark. As far as we knew, nobody went up there and nobody came down―it was completely uncharted territory. Because we, the student body, had no solid facts or evidence to base our expectations off of, we gleaned our beliefs from the strange things we could see from a safe distance. None of us ever seriously considered going INTO the upper floors―that’d be a death wish for sure―but we were all drawn together, across clique boundaries and grade levels, by the mystery of the goings-on of that area, shrouded under the constant cover of darkness even in broad daylight. Left to our own devices, we formed our own superstitions: There was someone living up there. There was a student who traveled up by elevator once long ago and never came back down for her music class. Someone got lost at the top floor―the 12th―and is still looking for their way out. Some of the theories freaked me and the rest of my class out, and that, of course, just added fuel to the mysterious fire. Sometimes, when my classmates would gather beneath the big tree in the field after study hall, the wind would blow a gentle breeze by one of the windows of the upper floors―and then someone would scream and shout that they swore they’d seen someone―or someTHING―move behind the wispy, decaying curtains. We were all unmistakably entranced by the not-knowingness of the school building―and yet we couldn’t gather the motivation and the courage to investigate the truth for ourselves. All we could do was watch―and listen―as we pieced together our own version of the mystery from the older students.

After four long years of overhearing swirling rumors and whispered warnings, I’d had enough. It was the end of fourth grade, and the school had decided not to renew its lease with the hospital―instead, the school was moving across the city, too far away for me to attend any longer. Overall I was OK with the change of scenery, but there was one thing I felt obligated to do before I bid the place farewell forever: figure out what was really “up there.”

One day during recess I gathered three friends―Lisa, Emily, and Jessi―in front of the doors of the elevator, where we vowed to set out to settle the rumors once and for all. We were going up.

Second floor. Third floor. Fourth floor. There was nowhere to go but higher. Fifth floor. Sixth. Seventh. Eighth. Ninth. We were in too deep to back out now, and we giggled nervously in an attempt to ward away our mounting sense of dread. Tenth. Eleventh.

Twelfth.

Ding! Once the elevator doors opened and the literal dust settled (seriously, it was like nobody had been up there since the building was first constructed 35 years ago), we laid our eyes upon a virtual time capsule. Medical books from decades ago were strewn across the floor and stacked on top of desks and chairs; rusty shelves were lined with diagrams and papers from years gone by. Thin beams of sunlight weaved their way through the frail, delicate old curtains and highlighted the dust hovering suspended in the air. It made everything seem surreal, as if the four of us were hanging in a singular moment in time, perpetually, forever.

It was peaceful. It was lovely. And, in a way, it was lonely, too.

This was a forgotten place, but it held its own stories and infinities. I wondered about the people who had moved through here―what their jobs had been like and what they’d been reading, who they’d met and what they’d accomplished, and how they’d impacted this place. They haunted the building with their pasts, their bygone actions, their unknown conversations. I wanted to know the history of the place, how it had come to be, but I knew nothing. There were some secrets that could never be discovered. There were some things that were destined to be trapped forever in the past. It was unnerving to me to realize, suddenly, that one day I and everyone else I knew would be like this place: forgotten, faded, but full of multitudes.

When we returned to class, we boasted about our adventure with exaggerated bravado and easy self-assurance. But in reality, I was far less certain of anything than I’d been before I’d dared to reach past the third floor. I’d solved one mystery only to unlock a million others about myself and the world, and the real sleuthing had only just begun.

—By Victoria C., 18, Alberta, Canada