Teenage Legend Trippers

(Picture I took of the old hospital)

I spent so many nights at Fort Vancouver, Officers Row, or the old Providence Academy trying to scare my friends and myself silly with stories of murdered army men and Indian burial grounds. The old barracks were good; with all those old oak trees and the huge, empty auditorium. Something must have happened there. I kept my eyes trained on the windows in all the old houses, looking for high-piled hairdos and petticoats and waiting for a ghostly scream. I knew, knew, that some shit had to have went down in the gazebo. Like a pinstripe-and-straw-hat clad bandleader getting his head bashed in with a trombone or something. The trees in this place were too old to not know tragedy. The old hospital was best because the hauntings were real. People other than fifteen-year-old kids hopped up on Rock Star talked about it being haunted. It had a gruesome past, that hospital. It had been overpopulated to the point that the open-air porches had to be glassed-in to hold more patients; these windows you could see glinting from the freeway.

“I heard the floors are slanted to gather the blood and puss run-off and it all goes through drain pipes and gathers in the basement,” one kid says through a haze of expelled smoke. “They had to haul it out in buckets,” he adds in an undertone, as if it were a secret family recipe. 

“I heard they used to keep the insane patients on the top floor in cages hung from the ceiling,” says another. 

“I heard that they patrol it 24/7 and no one is allowed in,” I say. 

“So there’s no offices in it or nothing? The rest of the houses ‘round here have offices and apartments ‘n stuff in them, even though they’re old as er older than this hospital.”

“Well, I heard that this hospital is so haunted that they just don’t do anything with it. They don’t even tear it down ‘cause they’re scared.” I’m pretty sure this isn’t true, but all I’m interested in is heightening the vibe. We’re gonna scream so loud tonight we’re horse tomorrow and can’t answer questions in math class without giggling conspiratorially.

“Well, let’s see for ourselves, then,” said a kid who had so far been silent. She was probably trying to make up for her past scaredy-pants-ness.

It didn’t take too long for our big, blundering gang to get busted by the security guard and told to leave. Oh, well. There was always tomorrow. It’s not like we had anything better to do.

“Hey, guys,” I said, grin creeping back across my face. “You know what I heard? I heard that that big abandoned building behind the Academy is haunted. I heard that you can hear the cries of a girl who used to go to school there late a night. I heard she feel down the stairs –NO! Jumped off that big smoke stack!” Sly grins creep back over everyone’s faces. We don’t care if it’s true. All we need is a locked and boarded-up door and some twenty years of creeping ivy and we were in business.

“I heard you can still hear her ghost ring the bell frantically,” another cigarette is lit up with a crackle and another can of Red Bull popped opened with a fizz. “As if she had grabbed the bell-pull to save herself from falling, but it slipped out of her hand at the last minute.”

“I heard she was pushed.”

I heard… Echoes off the street lamps. I heard…