A letter I found in an abandoned hospital.
submitted 12 days ago * by FlexibleNormality
Hi NoSleep. My friend (who is in the know about such things) recently told me about an incident that happened at a formerly abandoned hospital in rural West Virginia. I’ve got a budding career going in investigating these sorts of things (not that I get paid or anything, but let’s call it a career because it sounds impressive), and so I went to check it out.
After a few hours’ winding drive through the mountains from my native Washington, DC, I found the place. I parked a few miles away and huffed and puffed my way up to the Mountainside Springs Community Hospital. There were a few guards watching the place (armed, and wearing gas masks, strangely enough), but I slipped through (I’m making this my career for a reason. I’ve got skills.), and I managed to get a look.
The place looked like it had been the site of a hastily-cleaned blood bath—stains on the floor, splatter on the walls. Everywhere. A few days old at the most. I peeked through the window of a certain door and had to take a moment. Piles of bloodstained SWAT gear, doctors’ scrubs (I assume), shoes. Everything was mangled and torn and I may have seen a body part. I had to breathe through my mouth but I could still taste the smell. I pulled my shirt up over my nose and mouth and I got through it. For you, NoSleep. You’re welcome. And if I breathed a little faster and harder than usual, we’ll blame it on the altitude.
Past a broken door, in a room with two ancient hospital beds and the poorly cleaned up remnants of 3-4 bodies (hard to tell exactly), I found this note. It’s splattered with blood and a dark blue liquid. I took it with me and transcribed it. Now I’m sharing it with you.
**
Dear Rhoda,
They won’t let us make phone calls and I don’t know when we’ll be able to leave, so I’m writing you a letter and I’ll see if they let me send it. Even if they don’t, I just need something to do. I think I told you David and I were taking Luke on a vacation in the mountains. Well, that David and I were going on a vacation in the mountains and we were leaving Luke with his friend from summer camp and his family.
Our vacation was amazing, but it seems like years ago now, even though we only just picked up Luke this morning. He was going on and on about the caves they went to see and how he wanted to make a house in one and live in it and keep the blind fish for pets. He was so happy to see Daddy and Papa that he bit me on the shoulder, and I called him my Little Monster, just like always. My sweet baby, I don’t -- [A sharp jag of pen cuts the sentence off here.]
I need to tell you what happened next, but I can’t even believe it myself. Maybe whatever they’re pumping into me is making me hallucinate. It makes the veins in my arm glow blue where it’s attached, so I think I must be hallucinating. I’ll tell you anyway, just so maybe we can laugh about it later. God I hope so.
We were driving back home. God, was it only a few hours ago? Luke was finally quiet and asleep in the back seat. We were coming up on a tunnel and I saw a car parked on the side of the road. I just got a flash of it up close before we entered the tunnel, but I saw then that it had crashed into the guardrail. And God, there was blood and a body. I was looking back out the tunnel and telling David to turn around so we could try to help and call 911, but then he was screaming and I turned around and there were two more cars stopped in the road inside the tunnel and a woman just standing in the middle of it, naked and covered in blood and so pale. I looked at her and I heard screaming in my head and David jerked the wheel and we hit one of the other cars.
I don’t remember the impact, but when I looked up, David was slumped over the steering wheel and his head was bleeding. My God, I thought he was dead. There was so much blood. I tried to unbuckle my seatbelt but my left hand wasn’t working. I didn’t feel anything at the time, but I looked down and my whole left arm was just dangling halfway down my forearm. I didn’t want to look behind me, but I had to. Luke was on the floor, wedged between the front and back seats, and I couldn’t see anything but blood. I couldn’t tell if he was breathing. My family, Rhoda. Oh God.
I looked out into the tunnel then, hoping to find someone who could help. I wish to God I hadn’t but what else could I have done? The woman I saw just before we crashed was standing next to the car, just outside my window. I screamed, and the screaming in my head joined in again. Her eyes were blank and black, and her face was pale and hard, like she was wearing a mask or had grown smooth stone slabs under her skin. I don’t know. She was naked and white and her hair was black and hanging in long matted tangles around her horrible face. Her fingernails were long and yellow and raking gently on the glass. She was staring at me blankly, her face covered in blood. And I. I don’t know why, but I lowered the window. I don’t understand. I was terrified and I didn’t know I was doing it until I was doing it, but I let her in.
Her mouth opened so wide and her teeth were all sharp and red with blood. Her breath smelled like rotting disease and I must have imagined all this but it seems so real. Even now I can smell her breath on me. She leaned in toward me and I couldn’t move, couldn’t even breathe. I wanted to grab Luke and run away but I couldn’t move. Rhoda, I couldn’t save myself, and I couldn’t protect them. The screaming in my head was so loud, so many voices. Hallucination, right? It must have been.
Then it all stopped with a bang and suddenly I couldn’t see her, just the tunnel where she had been, and I gasped for breath and blacked out. And when I could see anything again, there was a man in body armor and a gas mask running toward the car with a gun in his hands and I could move again. There were more men with body armor and gas masks and guns and then I woke up in this hospital.
Rhoda, David and Luke are alive! Luke hasn’t woken up, though. I have to believe he will. They are each in a hospital bed and David will barely talk to me and Luke hasn’t woken up, but they are both alive. My arm is set in a splint and all of our cuts and bruises have been carefully patched up. They’ve got these weird glowing IVs attached to all three of us, and the doctors, who won’t utter a single word, wear gas masks like the men in the tunnel. I don’t understand it. David won’t tell me if I’m imagining the glow or if he sees it too, and I can’t talk about what happened in the tunnel. Not out loud. I’ll let him read this and he can tell me I’m crazy.
I don’t know if --
Rhoda, Luke just woke up. David jumped out of bed and wrapped him up in a hug the second he opened his eyes but I am stuck here writing this because I can’t move again. Luke is so happy to see Papa that he’s biting him. He’s so pale and his eyes are black the screaming
**
It cuts off here, and there’s a line of pen dragged across the paper from the last word. There was an IV next to the desk where I found this note. The needle looked like it was ripped out, and the bag was full of the same blue liquid that is splattered on the note (along with all the blood). The liquid wasn’t glowing, so take from that what you will.
On the back of the note, in the same pen used to write the front, there’s a second note in a large, childish scrawl. I’ve transcribed it the best I can.
**
Daddy and Papa wont wake up, so I bit and bit them. There was a scary man so I bit him too. Im going to live in the cave and eat fish [I think. Hard to make out]. Im hungry. Ill eat and grow up big and strang in the cave. Tell Daddy and Papa Im in the cave when they wake up. Love, Luke
**
So there you go. That note was all I found before a guard spotted me and I had to get the hell out. I went back a few hours later but they’d already increased security and looked like they had someone investigating the spot where I slipped through before. I might try again tomorrow, but I don’t know how much more I can find out about this story.
I’ve had a few other adventures I want to share with you guys, since I know you’re all into creepy stuff like this, but they’ll take me some time to write up. I will tell you that I’m staying in a motel room in West Virginia, and that the guy running the front desk was probably the creepiest thing I’ve seen in a while though, ha!
Anyway, that’s all I’m going to say for now. I think I’m getting a migraine—the light from my laptop is really bothering me. And I’m incredibly hungry and feeling kind of anemic. Which is weird now that I think about it, since I stopped for dinner after my jaunt in the abandoned hospital (don’t worry, I washed my hands). Anyone know where to get a steak at 1 AM in rural West Virginia? If they deliver even better.
