Speaker 1: I don't remember the first time I watched an urban
exploration video. I don't think it started as a lightning
bolt moment. It just sort of crept in little by
little until it was the only thing I watched. Most
kits around me were obsessed with gaming videos and things
like prank channels, But me, I ended up on channels
where people walked through empty malls and long forgotten tunnels,
with water dripping down the walls and silence stretching for miles.
It fascinated me. These were places people had once depended on,
places that held stories without ever telling them directly. I
wondered what had happened to them, why they had left,
why no one had come back. Even at ten, I
found comfort in those silences. Something about those forgotten corners
of the world felt honest to me, raw, untouched by
the polished garbage the rest of the Internet churned out.
While my classmates were trading memes and game clips, I
was mapping out places I wanted to visit one day.
I'd dream about it at night, wondering endless concrete hallways,
no sound but my own breath and the scuff of
my shoes, flashlight beam jittering across crack tile. I wanted
to be there more than anywhere else. I didn't wait
long to try it for myself. There was a gas
station just off the interstate, a place that had shut
down five or six years earlier after a truck slammed
through its front windows. My friend Josh dared me to
go there after school one day. I told him I
had already planned to. That was a lie, but it worked.
We brought our bikes and ditched them behind the dumpsters.
The building looked small behind the road, but up close
it stretched deep. The windows were covered in faded boards,
and some one had spray painted something unreadable in green
across the siding. We stepped behind the counter and found
the freezer still half open. Inside were candy bars that
had sagged into themselves. The labels were faded, their insides bloated.
Being in one of these places felt amazing, more so
than I'd ever imagined. It felt like I was stepping
into a memory I was never supposed to be a
part of. It was one thing to walk through a
place and wonder who used to be there. It was
another to be a piece of them. I remember Josh
making a joke something stupid about ghosts. But I wasn't
really listening to what he had to say, and that
was the moment it clicked. I wasn't just breaking into places.
I was doing the closest thing to time traveling as possible,
stepping sideways into someone else's story. We left after that,
but I came back alone a few times. Never told
Josh I didn't need his or any one's company. A
couple years later, I'd find Grace and Vance. His videos
were really simple. He'd start with a quiet drone shot
over a deserted property, then ease in to narration. He
felt more like a documentary than a vlog. I'd never
seen him try to do that whole ghost story cliche
that most content creators seemed to try nowadays. His camera
did the talking. I found his channel late one night,
or watching a video about an abandoned power station in
the Balkans. YouTube AutoPlay kicked in and landed me on
Grayson's tour of a sunken hotel off the coast of Italy.
The whole thing was underwater at high tide, and he'd
gone at dusk, wading through flooded hallways with his camera
above the waterline, narrating it like it was a love letter.
I binged watched his entire catalog that week. He explored
old prisons in Iceland, war bunkers and Belgium, collap schools
in the deserts of Chile. He never acted like it
was braver than anyone else. He moved through every place
with respect. I wanted to do that, too, wanted to
be that. I started practicing with a phone camera in
empty parking garages, trying to mimic his pacing. I studied
his videos, replayed them over and over, tried to figure
out what he looked for. I followed every platform he
posted on, commented on everything, hoping one day he'd notice.
I didn't even feel like a fan of his. If
I'm being honest, he felt more of a teacher to me,
guiding me to a future I was destined to reach.
It was a Tuesday night. If I remember correctly, I
should have been working on a lab write up for chemistry,
but I'd already convinced myself it could wait. I had
my phone propped against a glass of water on my desk,
headphones in my lamp, the only thing keeping the room
from going black. I was scrolling through video suggestions in
that half focused trance I always seemed to fall into.
That was when I saw it. Grayson Vance abandoned a hospital.
As per usual, a simple title and thumbnail. Grayson's voice
came on almost immediately, wasted the same way with a
brief intro, a few quiet cuts of him walking the perimeter,
showing the outside before slipping inside. I felt my chest
tightened with excitement as I realized I recognized that place.
I knew those gates, the vines climbing the outer brick wall,
the sign half swallowed by overgrowth. I paused the video,
dragged the time bar back, and looked again. Then I
opened a tab and searched for images of old Florence
Hill Hospital. It matched. My mom would always drive past
it when I was younger. The place had been locked
up for decades, bordered tight and fenced off, though rumors
always floated around about kids getting in through a loose fence.
MO said he was used as a psych word. Some
claimed it was a treatment scent of a violent to fenders.
But regardless, Grayson was inside. He moved through it, slowly,
panning across doorways and peeling walls. The audio picked up
the creak of his boots on the tile, the quiet
drip of water hitting metals somewhere in the distance. I
couldn't believe it. He was only thirty minutes from where
I lived. Grayson reached the hallway. One of the walls
had collapsed inward, but he edged around it, ducking under
reebarre and dry wall to step into a room that
looked like an old kitchen or freezer storage. A row
of broken industrial shelves leaned against the wall behind them,
half hidden by a stack of topple boxes with something
metallic embedded in the floor. He adjusted the focus, stepped closer,
and knelt beside it. A hatch bolted down on one side,
though the rust made it impossible to tell if it
was still sealed properly. The camerangle dipped as he brushed
dirt away with his sleeve. Then his voice came through again.
What do we have here, he said, huh could be
some runoff tunnel or a different section of the hospital.
He tapped it once with a knuckle. Tell you what, guys,
If this video hits a thousand likes within twenty four hours,
I'll come back and go down there. He stood up.
The video cut a few seconds later, replaced by his
usual closing title card. I paused the screen, open the
comment section, then scrolled back to the like counter one
point two K. I refreshed the page. No new video.
I checked his Twitter, No new announcements. Where was the video?
I kept thinking about how close it was. How many
years I'd spent watching videos of buildings in countries I'd
never afford to visit, and now the biggest one of
all might be sitting right outside my town waiting for
someone to explore it. I was almost mad at myself
for not thinking to go there. But if Grayson was
taking his sweet time, maybe I could go first, maybe
even catch him there in the middle of filming. The
thoughts started as a fantasy, but it didn't stay one
for long. Just a few minutes later, I had dug
out my dad's old camcorder from the top of the closet.
The battery was swollen, but it had a backup pack
from a second and I used once for a film project.
I charged them both and tested the mic in my room.
The flashlight needed fresh batteries, too, so I biked to
the gas station near the highway and picked up a
six pack. I wrote a note and left it on
the fridge so my mum wouldn't be worried. Something about
group study. Every few minutes, I would imagine running into
Grayson down there. What I would say, How I'd play
it cool, maybe help him film, maybe even scare him
a little and record his reaction. He'd laugh, we'd talk gear,
He'd realize I was serious about this stuff, that I
wasn't just another fan trying to leach off of his name.
I packed everything into my school bag and zipped it tight.
Before I left the house, I stood in front of
my mirror, held the camera up to my eye, and
practiced an intro. The words felt weird in my mouth,
but I got through it. This could be the start
of everything I'd ever dreamed of. The sun was starting
to set when I got there. It hung behind a
screen of clouds, turning the sky into the color of
copper tarnish. I left my bike stashed beneath a clutter
of dog woods across the road and crossed the gravel
shoulder on foot. The outer gate had collapsed inward, its
posts bend and the chains slack enough to dug beneath
the hospital loomed ahead. The windows had been busted out,
while remained of the glass clung to the frames in
jagged patterns, catching the last light and reflecting it. I
pulled out the camcorder and switched it on the battery,
held steady the light on the side to life, casting
a small circle ahead of me. I hit record and
held it at chest level. All right, I said, I'm
standing just outside Florence Hill Hospital. I'm here to see
if I can find the spark Grace and Vance filmed
in his latest video. There's supposed to be a hatch
in the basement or storage wing. He said he'd go
down next time BN. I figured, I wait. The intro
came out stiff, but it felt good. I stepped inside
through a doorway where both doors had been torn off.
The floor inside had walked from years of neglect. Dust
and leaves had gathered into piles along the edges, and
most of the tiles had cracked. The air hit me
at once, wet, stagnant, and full of mildew. It clung
to the inside of my nose and sat heavy in
the back of my throat. Graffiti covered the walls in
bursts of neon and black marker. A lot of it
was nonsense tags, cartoonish faces, crude jokes, but a few
names repeated across different wings. I used those to orient
myself checking Grayson's video game following where the camera panneda
crossed doorways or the way light had come in through
broken window panes. I stopped every few minutes to get
my bearings and film another few seconds of commentary, though
my voice kept slipping into whispers without meaning to the
deeper I moved, the darker it got. Most of the
corridors were blocked by fallen ceiling panels or crossed furniture,
but the root from the video matched just enough for
me to follow it. After fifteen minutes, I started to
recognize the pattern of damage from his footage, the water
marks and the ceiling. I was close the hallway at
the end of the service wing, curved slightly to the
left and kept going until I hit a dead end.
I had to double back and rewatch part of the
video again. Grayson had veered off behind a broken freezer
unit next to a side door labeled storage three C.
I retraced my steps and found it. This time, the
freezer door had rusted off its hinges, and now leaned
sideways into the wall behind it, past the tangle of
old shelving and a disassembled mop sinc sat the hatch.
It already stood open, which fuelled me with excitement. The
hatch itself was round, heavy looking, with a series of
bolts plunged into one side and scorch marks fanned out
across the floor. I angled the camera toward it and whispered,
this is it. This is the hatch from the video.
Grayson is probably down there as we speak. The hatch
is even still open. I reached forward and brushed my
fingers across the handle. It was worn from the heat
trapped in the room. Let's do this. I pointed my
flashlight down. The beams struggled to touch the floor. Only
part of it was visible through the narrow gap in
the concrete, just enough to show a ladder mounted to
the far wall, stretching into shadows. The rungs were metal
and bolted into place, though half of them looked eaten
by rust. Several bolts had sheered away from the surrounding concrete.
One side of the ladder swayed freely when I tapped
it with my foot. I stared at it for a while.
The camcorder was still recording. I brought it up and
whispered to the mic, this thing is barely holding on.
If it snaps, I'm screwed. I turned the flashlight between
my teeth and lowered myself down. The metal flakes beneath
my hands. Each rung felt slick and uncertain. The bolts
moaned with even the slightest shift of weight. A few
crumbled around the edges when I grabbed them. My fingers
burned from holding on so tightly. Half way down, I
paused to a just the camera angle, but I nearly
slipped doing it, so I just let it dangle on
its strap instead. I could hear my breath echoing off
the walls. When I reached the floor, my boots hit
uneven concrete. The walls on either side stretched into opposite directions.
The flashlight beam bounced off metal shelving and fragments of
painted wall. I took a slow breath and turned slowly.
I was in the room was enormous concrete stretched beneath
me in long, uneven slabs. Some sections had sunken, leaving
shallow dips filled with stagnant water, rusted shelving units leaned
against the brick walls, their contents either collapsed or covered
in sheets of decomposing plastic. A gurney rested upside down
near the center, one of his wheels spinning slowly before
locking in place with a soft metallic click. I whispered
into the camera. Bigger than I expected. Definitely not a
storage closet. Let's see where Grayson is. My light followed
a long pipe overhead, thick with corrosion and patched with
what looked like duct tape and rubber fittings. Below it,
the moisture had pulled into a discolored stain, slick and
pulsing with slow drops. Each one landed with a clip
at the far wall. Something caught my attention. I walked
toward it slowly. My boots sent wet crunches into the dark,
echoing back against the walls. The beam of my light
lit up the last stretch of space with the concrete
gave way to alder brick. The transition was uneven, almost
as though the building had been expanded downward after the
original structure had already been built. The wallpaper here peeled
away in thick, soft curls behind it. Water stained plaster
gave way to a painted mural. Blue clouds, yellow suns,
animals drawn in past those shapes. A lion with cartoon
eyes stood next to a duck wearing a nurse's cap.
A giraffe was curled into a bed with a thermometer
in its mouth. I scanned across the floor in front
of it. The dust of the floor was scattered around,
revealing footprints and what looked to be drag marks. Grayson
was definitely here. I moved through the corridor as quietly
as I could. The walls here narrowed, there were fewer
open rooms. The hall turned left and then again to
the right, forming a horseshoe path around a closed off
surgery wing. At least that's what the faded lettering said
and the signs overhead. I kept imagining. I would turn
a corner and seemed crouched over a tripod. Eventually I'd
find his camera in a break room. It sat on
a metal cart near a vending machine. The camera's glass
had been cracked, but it still functioned. The logo blinked once,
then faded. I could still navigate the video menu. I
leaned closer and whispered into my own camcorder, barely containing myself.
It's his. Let's see what I can find on it.
He probably got spooked by some rat and dropped it.
Poor guy. I smiled at the lens. My fingers hovered
over the playback button before I was able to hit play,
and alert popped up, letting me know the battery was low.
Navigating the menu was slow, the button stuck. A couple
of video files sat in the memory. I selected the
most recent one and hit play. The footage opened with
Grayson already exploring the basement, but the screen was entirely black.
I thought maybe the file had corrupted, but the audio continued.
A wet, slithering sound dragged across the speakers, something heavy
scraping against concrete, then something else. Shallow breathing metal clattered
in the background, followed by a wet cough, then gurgling.
It sounded close to the mic. I leaned in. I
moved to rewind. I was curious as to what had happened,
but the display blinked once, then shut off. The battery
died in my hands. I could have left then and there,
maybe even should have, but I didn't. Grayson was down
here somewhere. Maybe something has spooked him into hiding. But
I just imagined myself doing something that scared even the
most popular urban explorers. I saw an opportunity. This was
my one and only chance to be a part of it.
So I walked. Dust turned to grime. Drawings on the
wall transitioned to a pale green beneath the layers of
peeling white. I passed a rusted wheelchair with two broken
foot rests and a dried smear along the cushion. Beyond that,
a row of cracked observation windows stared out into padded cells.
The batting had been torn open, foam exposed. Some of
it was darkened with rot. I stepped carefully, trying to
keep my breathing. Even the camera picked up everything. I
made sure of it. The hallway ahead sloped slightly to
the left, its walls warped from years of water damage.
I moved slow, careful. Where I stepped, my boots sank
into patches of soggy paper that had melted into the tile.
The beam of my flashlight shook across chipped paint and
empty door frames. I turned the corner. That was when
I saw him. A figure stood at the far end
of the corridor, motionless back to me, feet spread apart,
shoulders squared. He didn't move. I froze the light from
my flashlight sat on his back. He was too far
away to make out detail, but his silhouette was visible enough.
My first thought, without hesitation, was that it was Grayson.
I whispered into my camera. I think I just found him.
The figure remained completely still. I switched off the flashlight,
swallowed the tightness in my throat, and crouched behind an
overturned gurney. The glow from my camera screen cast a
dull blue over my hands. I angled it toward my face.
All right, I whispered, I'm getting the scare and camera.
He probably has no clue I'm even down here. I
stood slowly, careful not to let my shoes drag. I
inched forward, heart hammering in my ribs. The silence stretched,
my mouth had gone dry. I kept one hand steady
on the camcorder, the other clenched in my chest. I
crept behind him, close enough now to make out the
seams on his jacket. Then I jumped yo. The figure
whipped round faster than anything I had ever seen. I
caught a glimpse of the bandages, thick strips, yellowed with
age and grime, wrapped tightly across his head. Only his
eyes were visible, and bursting from blood vessels that had
ruptured beneath the lids. Before I could step back, he
slammed into me. His forehead cracked against my cheek bone
with a thud. I hit the floor. My camera had
tumbled across the tile, pouncing into a pile of torn insulation.
My flashlight clattered near my hand. I gasped and rolled,
grabbing for the light. When I found it, I twisted
the switch until it clicked back on. He stood only
a few feet away, swaying slightly, the folds of his
straight jacket heavy with sweat and filth. The straps wound
tight across his chest, soaked through. His face was covered
in bandages that had melted away around the mouth, exposing
jagged teeth and gums coated in black rot. Dark puss
clung to his lips and dripped into the collar of
his chair. His breath wheezed through clenched teeth. The sound
reminded me of water caught in a clogged drain. I
launched myself upright and ran my boots slipped on the
slick floor. I nearly lost my footing at the first
corner behind me, I heard him or it scream, wet shrill,
cracked in the middle, and then the crash of his
body slamming into metal. He was chasing me. Gurney shattered
as he ran through them. I heard wheels spinning, furniture
scraping across the floor, something heavy hitting the wall. He
made no effort to move around anything, just slammed through them,
tearing it and himself apart in the process. Every corner turned,
I expected him to cut me off. I heard him gag,
thin cough, then dragging another breath through mucus and bile.
His body slammed against the corner I had just cleared,
and he recovered fast. Another screech, this one higher, almost animal.
I barrowed through a doorway and nearly tripped over a table,
flipped on its side, and vaulted it behind me. I
heard his body hit the edge and roll across it.
The screech of nails or teeth or something sharp dragging
over the surface, followed by a thump, then more footsteps.
I glanced over my shoulder just once bent forward face.
Slack drewel mixed with black fluid trailing behind him in globs.
His shoulders rocked with each step, but his legs kept moving.
Foam lined his jaw. Now I ran harder. Upperhead lights
spilled in from the sh after above the hatch the ladder.
I was almost there. It still dangled from its rusted bolts,
swaying slightly. The top half clung to the concrete wall,
the bottom half hung loose. The screws along the right
side bent nearly to the point of snapping. I jumped.
My hands caught a rung near my chest, and I
hauled myself upward, my boots slamming against the wall. As
I found a foothold, the metal rattled under my weight.
The rung shifted beneath my palms, slipping half an inch
before catching again Below me, I heard him. His feet
slapped the tile. Then something heavier his full body, probably
thrown itself forward. A choking gargle echoed upward, long and strained.
When I glanced down, I saw him burst through the corridor,
head tangled across his face, the bandages flaring outward as
his jaws widened, his arms still bound in the jacket
thrashed at his sides. He shouldn't have been able to climb.
I thought I was safe, but he jumped. His head
snapped upward, mouth opening wide. He sank his teeth into
the rung just below my foot. His jaw clenched. Then
his legs kicked off the floor, and he began to swing.
He glanped on tight, using his molars, and cracked in
sizors to hold himself steady. His feet scraped against the wall,
searching for traction. Somehow impossibly, he started to pull himself
higher by his mouth. The ladder shook hard. I screamed
and climbed faster. My knees struck the wrungs. My shoulders
scraped the edge of the hatch. I could hear the
metal wrenching below, one of the supports, snapping with a
sharp twang. I looked down once more. He was inches
from my boots. Lips peeled back, blood leaking from his
gums where metal had cut into his jaw. His eyes
rolled upward, wide and straining. I swung my foot out
and kicked hard. The ladder gave the top bolt snapped free.
The structure lurched to the side. He fell I pulled
myself through the hatch as the ladder tore away, crashing
down into the dark. The impact echoed to the shaft,
shaking the walls beneath it. I heard a wet, snapping
sound and something low and guttural, a moan maybe, or
a final breath. I didn't stay to find out. I
ran until I couldn't feel my legs. The hospital doors
passed in a blur. The light outside had shifted to
blue just before dawn. The air stung my lungs as
I pushed past the crumbling fence, falling to my knees
in the weeds before crawling through the gap and stumbling
on to the road. I made it half way down
the road before my legs finally gave out completely. I
collapsed on to a patch of gravel beside a rusted
mar marker and lay there until my heart stopped hammering.
At some point I reached the bus stop near the
edge of town. I sat on the bench, hand shaking,
shirt soaked through with sweat. I thought about calling someone.
I thought about telling the police, leading them to the hatch.
I even pulled out my phone and started the dial.
Then I stopped. They'd ask why I was there, why
I didn't call earlier, why I didn't stop when I
first heard something they'd touched the hospital. It would all
come back to me. Whether that thing in the strait
jacket was human or not, I killed it, and so
I just went back home. Grayson never posted again. His
channel remained untouched. Comments slowed over time, then stopped completely.
People moved on. New explorers took his place, and I
never when urban exploring again