little-carolinsky:little-carolinsky:spookybuttons:beckaboi:deadmomjokes:owl-librarian:#you just made
little-carolinsky:little-carolinsky:spookybuttons:beckaboi:deadmomjokes:owl-librarian:#you just made it a higher stakes game of hide and seekHaving gone to this University, and having personally played hide and seek in the Harris Fine Arts Center, I guarantee you that NOBODY finds hiders unless they, too, are familiar with the bowels of the HFAC. Once you get down to the practice-room levels, time stops completely and you could walk up the back stair and end up in 1967. The halls change at least 8 times an hour, there’s no way you’re getting back out the same way you came in. When the lights start going off at 10 the whole bottom 3 floors descend into some subsection of the fey realm. I once hid up on the balcony stage access fire-escape thing of a lower-level theater, and 3 faculty walked by under me and not a one of them noticed the hulking, wheezing asthmatic lurking above them, half dangling off a rickety metal ladder that probably wasn’t supposed to be climbed. A fellow hider friend came and found me, and we sat up there for 30 minutes listening to some distant clicking sound before we realized nobody was actually going to find us. We had no cell service, and no internet to reach anyone. We got lost trying to get back out, and once we resurfaced, everyone else was gone, the building was empty, and we just went home to eat ice cream. Nobody knew where we had disappeared to, and nobody bothered to check if we were there before leaving. For all I know, they just assumed we had been lost to the gaping maw of the HFAC basement and when they saw us at church on Sunday it was probably like they’d seen a ghost. None of us ever mentioned it again.Basically what I’m saying is Campus Police had no hope of finding them in the first place and probably lost an officer or two if they actually conducted a real search, because nobody except Senior art majors or veteran custodians actually knows how to navigate that building and make it out in the same dimension they entered from. Not at 11pm anyway.This is better than any horror story and it’s all fucking real apparentlymy college is purposefully labyrinthic because they were built so students could use them as a way to escape the militaryso not only they’re full of twists, turns and dead ends - the maps on the corridors are mirrored at best, plain wrong at worst not only that but the walls are - also purposefully - thick enough that they block any sort of phone signal whatsoever. more than once I caught myself looking out the balcony to the sweet outside, after walking in circles for what felt like days, seeking an exit. of course, you CANNOT ever find your damn classroom. not unless you flock together with other students, strength in numbers, oddly protected by being in a group. otherwise? don’t even try.I’ve lost count of the amount of times a professor emailed us the room number and I spent fifteen minutes walking circles on the buildings, then shrugged it off and went to have a chat with the resident flock of pigeonscoo, they say, and coo, I say back. all the walls look the same. if you take a wrong turn you find rusty metal gates untouched for ages, strange grafittis, paitings of animals you cannot name, the smell of formoldehyde and sounds unrecognizable yet threatening. your upperclassmen will tell you, with deep rings under their eyes, to “not drink from the water fountains under no circumstances” at some point I’m pretty sure I ran across a very artistically rendered family tree of spongebob and the smurfetteit spanned three generationsand after two years getting intimate with that building, one day a freshman stopped me to ask about a classroom and that was when I realized - I realized I never did learn how to navigate the placeno. instead I walked the kid all the way to the entrance, and then I let muscle memory guide me to where the lab was. no hesitating - should I stop to think about it, I would never find the way forward, and never find the way back. labs can only ever be reached through the chasing of a memory of being there once, and the pursuit of that particular faint smell of rat. you don’t know the building, not really - you can only ever get you to point B if you start at point A, nowhere else. the building grants you the mercy of a single safe path.and though I have long since moved elsewhere, sometimes, at night, when things are dark and worry gnaws at me, when I feel threatened, I think about that place. I think about wing K, room seven, where the organs are kept, and I know that should I ever need to, I could delve into those halls to never, ever be found. most times, being lost is scary. but there’s a longing there. a longing to walk into those walls and just… disappear(safe and at home)(and become another haunting of those walls)i don’t know the buildings at allbut I think maybe, just maybe, they might know meOh hey I found the horror story I asked forHey past me what the fuck did you just read -- source link