Lines in the Floor

                Spooks have always interested me.  I used to draw little Halloween books when I was four or five.  So I guess the whole story begins when I was ten.  My brother was a Boy Scout, but I was still too young, but I went on some camp outs and stuff.  One in particular sticks in my mind.  It was at the “farm” that the Church we met at owned.  The whole troop was gathered around the main fire circle.  There was a circle shaped bench around the fire where everyone sat.  Though most of the time the fires were too hot to sit on the bench.  The Scout Master, George Goodrich, took out a book of ghost stories and started to read.  I was transfixed to my lumber seat in fear of the werewolf who was a mad killer at night, but a normal person during the day.  I jumped at every shadow on the way back to my tent that freezing November night.

                So that was me eight years ago.  Now I am bigger and braver than I was, but still pretty scared.  I have never been to a haunted house-like the ones done by the community where the high school students dress up in gruesome costumes and jump out at people.  I worked in the concession stand at one though.  If my house was dark, I would still turn on all of the lights.  I would run up the stairs to the protection of my bedroom so whatever was chasing me up the stairs wouldn’t get me.

                So that was me two weeks ago.  Now I have almost seen it all.  I haven't seen a ghost or anything, if they do really exist, but I have seen just about everything else.  The whole atmosphere in this town is like no other.  Athens is home to the thirteenth most haunted place in the nation, Hanning Cemetery, one of the five that form a pentagram.  Also, Athens is home to one of the largest mental institutions in the country.  It is presently called The Ridges.

                October 10, 1997 was a Friday in Athens.  The guys and I from next door were looking for something to do, and so we went to the October-feast on East Green.  It was sort of lame, but we saw some people that we knew, and we hung out for a while.  Deciding to stick around for the haunted hayride.  It really wasn’t much of a hayride, just a Chevy S-10 with some hay in the truck bed.  I pilled into the truck bed with Justin, Eric, and Levi from next door.  The hay was poking us and we had to wait itchingly for the storyteller to come back from his extended bathroom break.  The lederhosen-clad man came back.  He made some comment about toilet paper, and then we were off.  I nestled myself down into the hay to keep warm since I was only wearing a collared tee shirt.  We were going dancing later, and I didn’t want to be too hot.  The truck bounced along the cobblestone streets of Athens, with German music playing from a compact Sony stereo.  The storyteller assured us that the lively Polka was the most frightening experience that we were going to have.  Our destination was The Ridges.  Patients stopped being held there in the mid eighties, but much of the building has not changed in eighty years, if not longer.  The truck crossed over the Hocking and started up the hill, and our tension rose.  I was having a good time, though I was quite cold.  The wind whipped at my bare arms and head as I tried to sink lower into the warmth of the hay.  Levi kicked me in my shin, and I thanked him for wearing his work boots.

                Tall halogen lamps illuminated our path as we approached “spook central”.  Ahead I could see the end of the comforting brightness, and we were bathed in the cool night of October.  The first stop on out trek was the cemetery.  We were flanked by hundreds of graves, like jagged rows of teeth crying out in the darkness.  All but five of the stones bore no names, only numbers.  Not identification numbers, or Social Security numbers, these people were numbered in the order that they died.  We rolled past the bone yard and onto the top of a hill.  There the truck’s engine shut off, and the headlights winked out.  Our Germanic yarn spinner started weaving a tale of an elderly patient who escaped from her cell, back when The Ridges was called The Athens Lunatic Asylum.  She was missing for six weeks, and no trace of her had been found despite what was described as a thorough search of the grounds and building.  Some construction workers found her though.  At least they found her body.  The County Coroner said that she had been dead for at least five weeks.  She had lain in an unused section of the building, which had supposedly been searched, for more than a month.  That is not even the most gruesome or macabre fact.  The woman’s decaying body stained the concrete, leaving a complete outline on the floor.  Her whole body can be seen on the floor, even her short haircut is obvious.  This sight can still be seen to day, the storyteller told us.  I didn’t know whether to believe his story or not.  I wondered if it could really happen, or if it had not been cleaned up.  It can still be seen today, I’m telling you, because I have seen it.

                The trip back down the hill was uneventful, though I was glad to be away from that place.  I was looking over my shoulder all the way back onto campus.  Next we walked uptown since the night was still young.  Justin told some scary stories of things that he had seen exploring in the woods at his home.  The temperature was not improving, and as we walked up Jefferson Hill, I jumped and swung my arms to get warmed up.  The city seemed darker, now that I knew one of its secrets.  I wonder how many others it has to tell.  Our group of four trudged over to the Greenery to do some dancing.  We went into the filthy building, and climbed the filthy stairs and proceeded to execute our precision moves on the crammed dance floor.  The Greenery truly has its own character.  The atmosphere and ambiance is absolutely incredible.  We met some girls that I knew there and we danced.  For hours.  I picked up one of the chicks that I didn’t know, and I walked her back to her South Green residence hall.  I felt warmer on the way back to my room than I had all night.  The only problem was that I had to walk across the entire campus at three in the morning, all by myself.  I only saw two other people on my way to the Convo-they were studying for their dentistry exam.  Needless to say, I wished I were back in my bed many times that night.  All of my fears bubbled and frothed in my mind, boiling over, I had to get inside.  My fears were invested in every shadow, in every bush, and in every sound that I heard, I had to get inside.  I thought of every scary thing that I had ever seen.  The movie Scream, the night terrors that I had fourteen years ago, and a story that someone told me once: A girl went into her room in the middle of the night, and did not want to wake her roommate-so she did not turn on the light.  The girl got what she needed and left the room.  When she returned the next morning, she found her roommate murdered in her bed, and “aren’t you glad that you didn’t turn on the light” was written on the mirror in blood.  Of course I had heard three different variations of the same story, but it was enough to scare me.  Finally I reached the Convocation Center.  My key clacked in the lock every time it hit a tumbler, and then I was inside.  I had had enough frights for the night, and I slept wondering if any ghosts had followed me home from The Ridges.  Expecting to see one at any time, I got into bed and slept a restless sleep in my maroon sheets that were still coarse from their newness.  Fresh ERA detergent filled my nostrils as I slipped into sleep.

                The weekend, Monday and Tuesday passed with no event.  I only had one class on Wednesday, so Justin and I decided to go up to The Ridges in the daytime.  At one o’clock we went up there with pencils and paper, planning to rub some gravestones to prove to our roommates that the graves in the cemetery were really numbered.  We dug around in the cemetery for a while, looking at graves.  The day became increasingly warm in the sun and I rolled up my shirtsleeves.  Justin thought that he saw something in the woods behind the graveyard.  More graves.  There were overgrown stones in the woods.  It was a striking discovery.  We rubbed some grave numbers, finding the number one stone.  It was in a circle with other stones.  The highest number we found was five hundred and twenty one.  The next thing that we wanted to see was the main building.  Justin and I walked around the whole thing.  Then we went to building nineteen, where the dead woman was supposed to have been.  We entered the building looking for some evidence of the woman’s outline.  The whole interior looked new, so we didn’t think that the outline still existed.  We went up to the top story of the office building and found nothing.  There was a double fire door against one wall, an elevator, and a ladder to the roof.  The space at the top of the stairs seemed to be a large landing more than a room.  Curiosity overcame me and I opened the door, expecting to see more offices.  Nope, a hallway lined with cells greeted me.  A muted, base exclamation slipped from my lips and flowed down the hallway.  Sliding around the corners, and filling the air with its slickness.  We had to go in.  The floors were dirty, and exposed electrical wiring hung from the ceiling, the halls were like a gutted animal.  Cells were bare and small-they had just enough room to lie down in.  The air was stale and old, it was not dusty, because of the lack of visitors.  The bars on the windows were rusting and the paint was flaking off.  Most of the paint in the rooms was flaking too.  On the windowsills, words and numbers were carved into the sandstone.  Most of what was intelligible was religious: judgment day, savior, and evil.  I have been told that one of the sills reads “Welcome to Hell”.  However most of what is carved make no sense.  Those people were completely insane.  We explored for a while, not finding much, so we turned back.  On the way back to the Convo, we talked excitedly of our new adventure, saying that we would come back next week to look around some more.

                The next week rolled around and we did go back.  Justin and I both brought flashlights since much of the interior of the building was dark.  We retraced our steps that we took on our first visit, and then went onto a different route.  Our pursuit for adventure became bolder, and we started to open doors that we would never had opened the week before.  One door lead to an infirmary with kitchen like cabinets on the wall with the window, and a stainless steel drug refrigerator on the opposite side of the room.  Everything looked like it had been empty for years.  The part of the Hospital that we were in then looked as if it had been renovated in the sixties or seventies.  Colors were oranges and greens.  We could see that the infirmary room itself had been used as a cell before because of the hewn window ledge.  We opened another door that bore the same heavy bolts that the first door did.  It lead to more cells, and a stairway up.  Justin was interested as to what was up higher, since we did not know exactly where we were in the building.  We followed the old stairway upwards, thinking of the generations of people that have been using these stairs for more than one hundred years.  At the top of the circular stairway, there was a black fire door.  Its window had been broken and glass and other rubble lay on the floor.  The ragged bricks in the walls seemed to amplify the darkness that swept around us from the stairs that continued to spiral higher.  Our flashlights cut through the gloom leaving whirlpools of lightlessness behind them.  Justin stepped up to the door and tried the knob.  Locked.  He looked through the window and his breath caught.  Justin could only point through the window.  I took a look.  The outline of a woman’s body could be seen on the floor.  I paused for a moment before I looked back to Justin in excitement.  He reached his arm through the small window to see if he could reach the doorknob.  He turned it and the door opened.  We entered the room and looked around.  The doors on the cells were much older than the ones on the floor below.    They were made out of wood and were very heavy.  Old construction materials littered the floor, but we went to the focal point of the room.  Justin took out the camera that he brought along just incase we saw anything.  He snapped a few pictures, before he asked me to take a picture of him kneeling by the outline.  I did, and he took one with me in the picture.  Justin and I figured that we had seen enough for one day, and we made our way back down the stairway.  My heart began to slow its pace as I calmed down.  We retraced our steps through the cellblock and out of the building.  I was glad to get back to the Convo and tell my roommates what we had seen.  They didn’t believe that we had really seen the outline, but when Justin and I develop the pictures they will.