By: Elona Scheeres
nineteenth century exterior is covered in ivy, lacing around its many pillars. Its ornate
details are crumbled, its former beauty has been stripped away. The building stands as
a shell of the place it once was. As you approach the structure, the thick stench of
something rotting overwhelms you, clouding your senses. You start to run towards the
large doors, hoping the scent doesn’t follow you inside. As you pull the heavy doors
open you are greeted by a sight far worse than the smell you were escaping.
The cruelty of time has left the inside of the hospital far worse than the outside.
Wallpaper is peeling from the walls it used to cling to, revealing the rotting wooden
structure it once hid. Wheelchairs and papers are strewn across the lobby, shredded as
if a pack of angry beasts had infiltrated the building. Scratch marks on the wallpaper
that remains seem to back this theory up. A damp smell fills your nostrils, almost like the
end of a thunderstorm, except the rotten smell returns, intertwining with the dampness.
Almost as strong as the smells, an inescapable sense of loss and grief fill your
soul. You feel as if some great calamity has happened here. You’re pulled out of your
head as you hear someone shriek from down the hall leading towards the patient rooms
you don’t have the courage to turn back to face your pursuer. When you burst through
the front doors you initially came through, the rotten smell hits you like a brick wall and
suddenly your view of the path in front of you fades. Everything around you goes black.
You sit up in bed, startled. You grapple with what you just experienced. Was that
a dream or perhaps a memory? Maybe a mix of both? Whatever it is, you don’t waste
any time thinking about it. You guide yourself through the pitch darkness and to the
hallway autonomously, as if you’re still in a dream.
You aimlessly wander through the rotting halls. As you pass each room you hear
the screams and pleas of the fallen, those who had been labeled insane. This building
held dozens of lost souls that were trapped here, not by their own will. Their voices and
whispers clung to your memory like a moth to a flame. Being trapped in this hellish
dimension for over a century has done nothing but drive the last ounce of mortality from
your soul, making you as desperate for freedom as those disembodied souls. Those
you called your family were nothing but screaming voices in the depths of the
psychiatric ward, long forgotten by the outside world.
You wander into the hospital’s lobby and the memories of two hundred years
come rushing back. This room was different from the others. Its energy flows like an
energetic and joyous river, crashing over deteriorating wheelchairs and stretchers and
weaving its way through the room, however you can’t help but feel a dark and sorrowful
energy that clings itself to the room.
with papers. The very papers your mortal body had been holding one hundred and
seven years ago.
To your surprise, the front doors slowly open. They creak with the same kind of
heaviness the souls in the hospital bear. The door’s hinges wore old with age, and guilt.
You aren’t afraid, rather, you’re instead curious why a mortal would come to such a
haunted place. As the door finally opens, you see the face of a young woman. Her face
is pale and young. She glows with the unfamiliar essence of life. She steps into the
room with wide eyes, seemingly surprised at the room’s deteriorating status. You wait in
the corner, hoping she doesn’t notice you. The woman pulls out a mechanical object
with a bright light on the end. As she shines it around the room she stops at the tattered
and bloody wall. She kneels over the remains of your last moments. As you watch, all
the memories of long ago come rushing back, seemingly drowning you in them.
You see a flash and suddenly the torn up wall and the woman disappeared, but
what replaced it was even worse. Two patients were holding you against the wall while
another stabbed your side. They yelled and screamed as you watched, unable to stop
your own fate. Once the patients felt the job was complete, they dropped your mangled
body and then slashed the wall as a warning to anyone else who may cross their path.
You watch as they walk away contently while the color fades from your face. You clutch
a letter from your fiancé to your chest, praying he was safe. As you drew your last
breath, your arm went limp and the letter gently dropped into the pile of papers.
present. The woman is still digging around in the pile of papers when she picks up your
letter. In a moment of brashness, you lunge forward towards her and shriek. The woman
drops the paper, turns around, and meets you with a similar scream. She uses her
device to send a blinding flash of light directly into your eyes, which only earns her
another scream. You sit on your knees several feet away from her with tears in your
eyes.
“What do you want from me?” the woman yells out, then waits for an answer.
Through the tears you managed to choke out a few words.
“I want to know if my son, Jeremy, survived.” you say quietly.
The woman’s face turns a shade whiter than I thought was possible. Then to your
surprise, her face softens.
“That’s what’s holding you here in this horrid place? The guilt and feeling of not
knowing your loved one’s fate?” she asks.
I slowly nodded, not entirely sure I am following.
“What is your name?” she asks.
you’ve heard it spoken, but you know it. You purse your lips together to try to remember
the motions of how to say it.
“J-jane. Jane Locket.” you say.
You smile to yourself. You are proud you haven’t forgotten the name that those
trapped in this building had long erased from what was left of their memory.
“So, Jane.” The woman stops hesitantly. “How did you die?”
You draw in a breath, then look up at the torn wall that is across from us.
“I was the receptionist at this psychiatric ward. One day a group of criminals
broke in and ran through the hospital’s halls breaking and throwing things as they went.
When they reached the lobby they-”
You are cut short by a sharp pain in your side followed by a burning sensation.
You’d think a hundred years without a mortal body would take away your wounds, but
this was not the case.
“I see. And, Jeremy?” The woman was clearly unphased by your winces of pain.
family, I always feared what became of him-” your voice cuts off as you start to sob.
The pain in your side only grows stronger as you speak.
“So you’re uneasy and in turn unable to reach the afterlife because you never
knew what happened to your beloved?” the woman asks.
Still clutching your side, you nod.
“Would it help if I tried to help you find what became of him?” the woman asks.
“Y-you can do that?” you ask.
The stranger smiles. “Yes, I believe I can.”
For the first time in over a century, you feel your cheeks lift and the warmth of a
smile fills your face. You have hope you may finally be able to escape the screams and
faceless whispers for good.
The woman pulls a notebook, pen, and a strange glowing device out of
seemingly nowhere and starts to jot something down.
You nod in agreement. “What year was your son born and what is his full name?”
she asks.
“1909, Jeremy Benett Locket.” you respond.
The woman nods, then starts furiously tapping seemingly at random on the
strange glowing device. After a few minutes she looks up at you with wide eyes. You
can’t tell if she is terrified or in awe. The woman motions you to her side and holds up
the glowing device close to your face. At first you are startled by the bright light, but as
your eyes adjust, you can make out a familiar face. It was your son, though he
appeared older, he still had the same shining blue eyes. The woman must have noticed
your look of amazement.
“Is this him?” she asks.
You nod. This is the first time you have seen your son since your life was taken
from you.
“W-what did he become? Was he happy?” you ask.
caption below reads “Jeremy Locket, 1941”
“It seems like he did just fine, and actually, in fact-” The woman began swiping on
the device till she seemed satisfied and shows you the device once again.
“See this family tree? There’s Jeremy at the top, then there is his daughter
Margaret who was born in 1937, her son Charles who was born in 1960, his son Jason
born in 1985, and me, born in 2005 almost a 100 hundred years after Jeremy.” she
says, smiling through tears.
You start to cry, overwhelmed by emotions. Your son was safe, he had lived a
good life surrounded by family, the one thing taken from him early in his life, his long,
wonderful life. The woman smiles and looks at you with a newfound fascination. Right
before she was about to speak, you hear a distant chorus. Happy laughter and cheering
swarmed around you, lifting you off your feet. A pillar of light shines down on you and
you are bathed in a warm, tingling sensation. You look down at the hospital one last
time as you ascend out of the building and towards the heavens and instead of being
filled with the normal sense of grief that has filled your soul for so long, a sense of hope
overwhelms you. You smile, because you know you are finally going to see your son.
initial heart it’s very first draft started with. I originally started with two perspectives in
draft #1, however I had to combine them somehow. I wanted to weave the same details
and the storylines from draft #1 into the other drafts, so after a lot of tweaking and late
nights, I managed to combine both perspectives to create draft #2.
However one of the things that did change between drafts was the reason our
ghost was trapped in the hospital. Originally the ghost was trapped due to her worrying
what happened to her fiancé, however I realized that didn’t make a whole lot of sense in
this particular situation, so I changed the reason she was trapped to her worrying about
her young son and what he became. This in turn led to a much more satisfying ending
as we discover both characters in our story are related and it made the ending all the
more emotional.
Another change I made between drafts was a suggestion made by Isla, one of
my peer reviewers. She recommended that I change the reason surrounding the ghost’s
death. Originally the ghost was going to have been murdered by patients in the psych
ward, but I later changed the circumstance around her death to murderous robbers for
one very specific reason. It played into the harmful stereotype that those put in
psychiatric hospitals were dangerous or insane, which was usually far from the truth. I
appreciate Isla’s honestly, otherwise I may not have picked up on that.
Overall this story took nearly two months from start to finish, though I would say it
was worth it. This is my favorite piece of writing I have ever written and I hope to publish
it and/or submit it to writing competitions.
