The Playful Girl Spirit

The Playful Girl Spirit
by
� chibilunacat

Night had fallen once again, it had fallen every where, it was rather warm out
still, the whole thing was like your parents tucking you into your bed and turning
out the the lights, all but the little cartoon character night light, the one that made the shadows loom larger than life, but kept you from thinking about how
monsterlike the tree branches were that scraped against your window. Night
had even fallen on the places that no longer had windows, or even blankets on
the beds, but where people forever slept. In paticular night had fallen over our favorite haunt, a place where the moon had to be our nightlight, a place where people once rested in beds, trying to get well, but not everyone gets well, and not everyone sleeps through the night.

We had lived in the area for about five or six years before we ever found out
about the place's existence, funny thing was it was only about five miles away;
really funny how much five is coming up in the story, though that will come up
again in a minute. My younger brother had brought some friends home, they were usually a noisy bunch but tolerable, I was about eighteen or nineteen and he was fifteen or sixteen. My mom got talking about spiritual acivity in graveyards, in paticular a graveyard known as Hell's Gates, heck I don't think anyone knows its
real name, but thats when it happened.

One of my brothers friends mentioned a place she had been to, a place where
there was a lot of so called "spiritual activity" it was an old T.B. Hospital, part
ofit, a small part, had been burnt down, and it had closed sometime in the
seventies, but a lot of people still went there, mostly to write on the walls. I knew right away it was a place I was going to become aquainted with. Sure enough I
was.

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We pulled up to the second drive entrance, I peered curiously at the place through
the passener window behind the drivers seat, I had a flashlight in my hand, and a cheap swiss army knife that would probably fold under pressure if you know what
I mean. I only had the knife because my mom was afraid there might be some bums or crackheads in the place. The old white building was nestled between the restitution center and the impound lot, so we had to be careful no cops saw us to
run us off.

My moms tires crunched along the gravel as we drove with our headlights off,
past the right of the building, I could see the windows were mostly still intact on
this side, most people had never ventured quite that far into the building. My excitement had me shaking, we passed an old wheel-chair ramp and entrance, it
was long covered with ivy, and a bunch of dumpsters had been lined up covering what the rest of this side looked like.

The building wasn't overly large really, maybe about the size of a wal-mart but
with rooms dividing it, this includes the burnt part on the left and the upstairs.
We parked our car behind my brothers friend's and got out, Spring was around
the corner, but it was still cool enough for a jacket, I shivered again, and followed suit as we aproached the buildings rear entrance, just left of center, it came back farther than the rest of the building, it had been an old supply entrance, where they wheeled the food and medical supplies in. In total, that first trip, there was five of us; two of my brothers friends, my brother himself, my mother, and me. I was the only one who had never made at least one trip out to this place before.

I came in last flipping my flashlight beam around everywhere, exploring the room
we had entered, there was old crumbled pieces of wall and stuff crowding the room, we walked to a staircase, where an old door was pulled back, spray painted
messages floating in the beam of our lights, so and so was here, stay out, some
ones name in fancy letters. We walked into the next area, there was nothing on the right but a room with a couple old things, on the left was a big open closet type thing, a folded rusty wheel chair was on top some junk on the shelf along the top, then there was a small room with an old examination table/bed and some old machine, and a lot of junk on the floor, this room had a strong urine smell coming from it, and there was a tiny bathroom in the side of this, with just a toilet and
sink. We never explored these rooms that first trip of mine.

We went through another room, one that reminded me of offices at school except
you didn't go into a room to get to the registration counter, it was right in the hall, and there was an office behind it. On the floor was littered with old papers, some
old reciepts from buying medical supplies, and a register of employees, my mom
still has those somewhere. In the area we were standing in it was like an intersection, you could go right to where the bruned part was (remember we
came in from the back), but you could detour it and go in the old doctors offices,
or right towards where patient rooms and old bathrooms were, straight led to a
front area that I am not sure exactly what had been used for, other than the set of
a movie one time. Hidden right across from the registration desk was a staircase,
a wall panel pulled back to reveal it, and this is where we headed.

All inside the building were the sounds of residents passed, the sounds of wheel chairs forever rolling down corridors, children laughing, food cooking, most frequently the smell of brownies, and the sounds of coughing. Closest to us, a
most curious girl, she seemed happy with us being there, and she giggled quite frequently, and followed us from room to room. She brushed past us several times
in the hall upstairs, where we stopped to make our mark on the wall, much like everyone else before us able to find the hidden passage.

The only other room we went to during that first visit of mine was the room
known most commonly among fellow tresspassers as the Bolt Room. At one point
I think it had been some multipurpose room, where patients gathered for games,
or the kids gathered for lessons, or at paticularly bad times it was used as an overflow room, for the extra patients. Everyone brave enough to weave through the long shadowy, haunted corridors got a big bolt from this room. It was near the middle of the place but do to blocked passages here and there you had to go the round about way to get there, through i do believe it may have had entrance doors
on the side of it, from a small courtyard or breezeway or something. Would you believe I still have that bolt?

It seemed to take forever to get to the places we went, a trip that would take us
only about fifteen minutes in the future, we just stoped to ooooh and ahhh everywhere, and read the graffiti. That trip never took me to "the gateway to hell"(norelation to the "Hell's Gates cemetary) or to "the doorway to no where.
" No, those places were in the future from then, and in my past now. That trip brought me in to contact with the girl, Amy was her name, and showed me and energy not foud often in modern socitey, an old energy, a spiritual energy, strong
and free. Its freedom comes in shadows, and outlets through the endless laughter, coughing, cooking, and games of children long forgoten but not really gone, best expressed in one little girl, of about five years, who loves to play hide and seek,
and watch people from the windows as they approach the hospital, and she loves
to call their names. My Mom started bringing tape recorders on our visits, and sometimes as many as ten people would go at once, but never less than four. We would sit silently sometimes, recording the messages of those who's bodies faded away before them. Many new rooms were found, and many spirits revealed there names and a little about themselves, some, the ones we allowed, would even visit
our homes sometimes, heck, they still do. Many messages have been recorded,
some asking for help, some saying their names, some calling our names, and
always her laughter.

One place we learned to stay away from though was the basement, down there
was filled with negative energies, filled with the insane cries of those driven mad
in the later states of tuberculosis. Down there was here the worshipers of evil built their "gateway to hell" and conjured their demons. We explored once, and never really went down there again. Some things are best left alone.

One place we came to favor was the small upstairs part where an old matressless
bed sat against one wall. We would sit on that bed and look down the hall and
listen to the endless parade of footsteps. Alot of the younger spirits presented themselves here, it was one of Amy's favorite places, they loved to read all the
names and messages scrawled on the walls here. In one room beside where the
bed sat was a door that people said led to no where. There had been a rooftop area to sit in chairs on there before, but it had long crumbled where that paticular door was, and lay on the floor of the first floor. The rooftop area that remained intact, though unstable, had an old reclining chair pulled out onto it, and various articles of trash thrown by people with less appreciation for old buildings.

The room I found the most curious of all, the room I always held in awe was the
one at the very front of the hospital, from the front it was located on the right, but entering the building from behind as we always did, it was on the left. It didn't
look much different than the other rooms, except maybe smaller, and there wasn't
any trash in it, and none of the windows were broken out. There was only one thing in the tiny room, and that was an old school desk, the kind where you slide behind the table top into the chair thats wooden with a metal area closed in underneath for your books and things. It had been set diaganoly with the back towards they door and facing the windows, as though someone endlessly sat in the desk, staring out to a place they could never go, a world where there were trees to climb and creeks to skip rocks in.

Perhaps we disturbed the energy in that room, or maybe we never should have entered it, but we moved the desk, and it was almost like disturbing the balance. Where before you could sit in the desk and watch the imagination of children long past at its greatest peak, where the night brightened to day that never ended, it was always afernoon sun and there is a beautiful breeze and there are boys and girls joining hands in a circle and playing ring around the rosies, but instead of "ashes, ashes, we all fall down" they all fade away, and the night is back. Now that the chair was moved to face the wall everything changed, instead of a childs dreams it became a collosal nightmare of everything they had seen and feared. I sat behind the desk, now facing the wall and wathced the walls begin to pulse back and forth, like a heart beat, blood began spraying up the walls in a hap-hazard pattern, like a tube feeding or draining blood had come loose and began whipping around with the force of the fluid moving through it lost control. The walls darkened from dirty white to pitch black, sounds of choking and screaming filled the halls, feet ever running in the night, and panic so thick in the air it could be sliced, served and devoured, before the visions could get worse I yanked myself out of the seat. I remember realizing how wrong it had been to move that desk from its gaze at the windows, a mistake we could not have forseen.

Well, I don't even think we got to experience the magic and strangeness of that
place for a year when its destruction was at hand. Someone had finally sold the
land and they decided to tear down the building and build another strip mall, in its place. When we found out we made our visits more frequent, and said our goodbyes. We took photograhs in the dark, and wrote more messages on the walls, walls that had once stood a lot prouder with its new coats of paint, and busy corridors, now they stayed empty, save the drawings and scriblings of passers by.

Crazy as it may seem we took that desk home with us, and it sat in our front room for awhile where people sat in it and played video games, where it could face a new kind of window, and experience new visions. Some years down the road we were hard up for money and sold it at a yardsale. Hopefully now it doesn't sit abandoned, with only the memory of dreams of sick children who may never get well.

We finally got brave and went to the T. B. Hospital during the daytime, knowing
we could get caught for tresspassing. We took our cameras and shot endless photos of the old place, inside and out, some cops passed, and saw us, but never stopped and questioned. I remember it was the only time I had ever walked right in through the front door, it was a feeling I will never forget, a feeling of finality, like once you walked through that door there was no going back. Even though that was a completely irrational thought, I mean hundreds of doctors and nurses must have walked through that dor, and visitors, and never had to stay in their deathbeds there. Regardless of that I still felt weird, after all the nights of creeping in through the delivery door and poking around in the dark, using the flashlight to
pick out the holes in the floor, and now i stood here in the broad daylight, having walked brazonly thourgh the front door no less! It was almost like tapping death on the back and hiding before he could turn around, and then confronting him face to face, it was weird.

I remember walking along, steping over the political signs of "so and so for governor" or president, or "pro-life" signs made out of card board and on cheap metal stands that looked like they were made out of wire hangers you get your uniforms on; some of the signs were red, some were blue, as different from each other as coming in the back or coming through the front. They littered the whole front foyer and then there was just old drink cans, and candy wrappers. It was
weird looking at the place in the daylight, but the energy of the place remained the same. So I wasn't entirely out of place, especially because I had always felt really
at home here.

Through that whole last tour of the place I could feel Amys presence, I could hear
her laugh, and giggle. For awhile she would hide somewhere near us and see if
we could figure out where she was, some of the other kids were with her. She lingered around but for the last part of our farewell visit she took turns holding
our hands, it was sad for her and us, even though we weren't losing her, just her home, the only place she was familiar with, and where all her friends were. It made me think of how one night we had went home from one of our visits and listened to our tape recorder, there, plain as day on the tape was Amy saying "I love you!" it was a very enlightining thing because it was the clearest and loudest message we had ever gotten on tape, we still have that tape and pull it out for skeptics who don't believe our story. I guess what it also proves is that even after death the energy of a child can exceed the energy of an adult!

We lost our homily haunt and the "haunts" lost a home, the structure of it. Now
they are out of place among the things that stand there now, and they never much
feel like playing games, but they carry on anyway. Stuck in a place they can't leave for sentiment, in a place that left them. Though the walls have fallen down their energy remains, and I just bet that sometimes, in the quiet you can hear wheel chairs rolling down a hall, footsteps of hurying nurses, smell brownies baking, and hear a child laugh. She still plays hide and seek. It is gone, but I still visit, quite frequently, I still sit in the desk and look out the window, or at the wall, I listen to the children sing.... "Ring around the rosies, Pocket full of posies, Ashes, Ashes....." and it all fades away, and the night falls around, and I snuggle under the covers, and turn out the light.

Terra Mae
9/10/01