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Monday, June 16, 2025

Asylum Secrets

Dilapidated Window

They shouldn’t have gone.

It started as a dare, the kind of thing teenagers do when boredom and bravado mix on cool autumn nights. Five friends—Jess, Malik, Chloe, Ryan, and Ethan—stood before the rusted gates of Greystone Asylum, long abandoned and heavy with legend. The facility had closed in the 1970s under mysterious circumstances: staff vanished, patients died, and rumours of unethical experiments swirled for decades.

“First one to leave is a coward,” Ryan said, flashing his phone’s flashlight toward the looming, vine-choked structure.

“No splitting up,” Jess added. “That’s how people die in horror movies.”

“Agreed,” Chloe said, clinging to Malik’s arm. “We go in together. We leave together.”

They stepped inside.

The air was stale with mildew and old secrets. Graffiti stained the cracked walls, and broken glass crunched under their feet. Doors hung from hinges. Medical beds sat rusted and rotting. Their flashlights barely pierced the darkness as they moved deeper into the asylum’s bowels.

They set up in the main hall—once the patient gathering area. It still had remnants of a mural: faded blue sky, flowers, and smiling children. The innocence of the artwork made the place feel even more wrong.

Ethan pulled out a Bluetooth speaker and started playing creepy ambient sounds. “To set the mood,” he said with a grin.

But the mood was already set.

A distant clang echoed through the building.

“What was that?” Chloe whispered.

“Old pipes,” Malik said, though his voice lacked conviction.

Another sound followed: a dragging noise, like something being pulled across the floor. Then, a soft whisper. Jess spun around, flashlight scanning the dark.

“Hello?” she called. “If this is a joke—”

Something skittered in the shadows above them.

“Nope,” Ryan said. “Nope nope nope.”

“Stay together!” Jess barked. “It’s probably raccoons. Or... something explainable.”

But Ethan was already edging toward a hallway that led to the old surgical wing. “We should check it out. I heard that’s where they experimented on people.”

“I don’t think that’s a good idea—” Malik began, but Ethan was gone.

They followed, reluctantly, and soon found themselves in a narrow corridor lined with cracked tiles and rust-stained sinks. Medical diagrams curled on the floor. One door was marked Operating Theatre 3. It was ajar.

They pushed it open.

The room was cold. Too cold. Their breath steamed in the air. In the middle stood an operating table under a shattered surgical light. A leather restraint hung loose from one side, worn and frayed.

“Guys,” Ethan said, pointing. “Look.”

Carved into the wall with what looked like fingernails were the words:

“MAKE THEM STOP.”

Behind them, the door slammed shut.

Screams erupted as they pounded and clawed at the door, but it wouldn’t budge. Then the lights flickered—despite the building having no power.

And something walked into the room.

It looked like a man once—tall, gaunt, dressed in shredded hospital garb—but its skin was grey and stretched, as if melted and reformed. Its eyes were hollow, dark pits. When it moved, it jerked in broken, unnatural ways.

“Doctor Morrow,” the thing croaked.

Chloe screamed. Ethan froze. The others backed against the wall.

“Doctor Morrow hurt us,” it said. “Now... we hurt back.”

The lights went out completely.

In the darkness came whispers—hundreds of them—layered and overlapping: help me… where am I… make it stop…

Flashlights flicked on. The figure was gone.

But Chloe was missing.

They turned in circles, yelling her name. No answer. Then her scream echoed from somewhere below.

They ran, reckless, down rusted staircases, past rooms marked Isolation and Shock Therapy. They found Chloe in a padded cell, curled up and sobbing.

“He showed me,” she whispered. “What they did. Electroshock, cold water tubs, cages... They kept patients here like animals. Doctor Morrow... he didn’t treat them. He tortured them.”

“We need to get out of here,” Malik said.

But the asylum had other plans.

Doors slammed behind them. Walls seemed to shift. Hallways they’d just come from now led somewhere else. The building twisted like a maze, a living thing that fed on fear.

They heard Ethan scream, and when they found him, he was standing catatonic in front of a mirror smeared with blood. His reflection grinned back at him, though he himself was not smiling.

“Ethan,” Jess said. “We need to leave. Now.”

But Ethan turned slowly to face her.

And his eyes were no longer his own.


Only two made it out by sunrise: Jess and Malik.

They burst through a window on the first floor as the sun lit up the decaying walls. Behind them, the asylum groaned, as if disappointed.

They never spoke of what happened inside. The others were never found. But sometimes, Jess dreams of Chloe’s voice whispering from behind walls, or Ethan staring from a cracked mirror.

Greystone Asylum still stands.

Waiting.

Source: Some or all of the content was generated using an AI language model

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