A ghost story.

 I was at Waverly Hills Sanatorium in 2014 around Yule. It was °7F and it had ice stormed the previous night. I had been walking by myself on the 4th floor and it was extremely cold. There were no windows to cover the draft of the frozen breeze that was cutting through the old tuberculosis hospital. The moonlight that particular evening crept into each open hole of the cavernous building, igniting whole wings in a solemn blue while I strolled its grounds. 

    Each disintegrating wall feature could be seen as-well-as ominous architectural silhouettes along the 4th floor. It had been so illuminated that evening, that one could traverse through the black without the use of a flashlight witnessing most of the skeletal remains of the building while passing each of the former patient rooms. 

    As I was making my way down the 4th floor, I decided that I wanted to explore the 2nd floor area and began heading to the direction of a stairwell at the opposite end of the hall. About a quarter of the way through the corridor, I began to hear what sounds like splashing behind me as I continue my walk. By the fifth splash, the sound had become imperatively close to my ears as if I was about to be cold soaked from a downpour by an old rusted pipe bursting from the previous night's storm. 

    The splashing had begun to intensify with each step hitting concrete inching ever so closer. When turning around, I had found nine sets of wet foot prints—bare, trailing behind me. At that point, I became perturbed having to continue my venture forward along that corridor. The wet splashing continued adding more foot prints behind me. The sloshing then ceased, and in the distance on the other end of the building.. the sounds of dripping gutter-fall could be heard from the opposite side of the building becoming faintly deafened. Continuing my walk more hastily, the sloshing footsteps continued to follow while enclosing sounds of water approached again.  

    Making my way to the basement I located my old friend Anthony. I had met him three years prior while working at Waverly Hills Haunted House during the Fall season. Anthony worked as a security guard, and, was also a tour guide. Anthony was watching the cameras that night while I roamed the building. I had told him what had just occurred, so Anthony went and rolled the cameras back to check the last twenty minutes of footage to see if anything had been captured while live recording. There was nothing that we found on the footage indicating anything coming to or from the 4th floor, or any other area of the hospital. Anthony was so intrigued by what I had told him that he wanted to go back up with me to check it out: 

    "With my luck, they'll be gone by the time we go back up there." I told him, as he armed me with a flashlight and a walkie-talkie while we went through the tunnel heading up to the fourth floor. 

    When returning to the corridor in question, we could hear sounds of dripping water echoing down the hall as we ascended the stairwell. Entering the fourth floor zone, the water abruptly fell silent and we both looked at each other. December's frigid air was the only thing heard eerily moving through the halls in that stale foreboding hell. Anthony had told me to take the inner hall of the building on the right side of the wing, and to look out for anything "off" while he took the outer hall on the left side where the splashing originally occurred. I made my way through the inner shadows flashing my light into each of the former patient rooms while dreading having to check the notorious surgery area. In my search I had found no source of water up to that point. Anthony's voice blares across out of the walkie-talkie: 

     "Dude you gotta come here! Um, you need to see this..." 

  Meeting up in the outer hallway, Anthony had his flashlight shining on the ground. The bare footprints were there: Five small toes, all with an arch, all with a heel, all of them frozen in black ice— a path of them were walking up the ceiling, while the rest, were the ones that followed me now lining the entire hallway and leading toward the fifth floor. Anthony told me a few months later that it took three days to melt them that winter. Out of the multiple strange occurrences that I have had in that building: I have to say that particular night was one of the weirdest that I had ever encountered in the years I had been in that old sanatarium.