Something Followed Us Down Every Hall: Stalked in an Abandoned Care Home

We should’ve turned around the second the front doors breathed out that damp, mildew smell—like something old exhaling from a deep sleep. But we didn’t. We were three idiots with torches and a dead SD card, convinced that if the building had a story, we could wring it out of the dark.

“Did you hear that?” Mick whispered, the beam of his torch skipping over peeling wallpaper and a wall of abandoned walkers, their rubber tips fossilized in dust. We all heard it. Footsteps. Not ours. Not the kind that crunch glass and drag through debris. Clean footsteps. Heel and toe. Boots on wood.

“Is there anybody here? If there’s somebody here, can you let us know, please? And we’ll leave,” Luke called, his voice folding down the corridor, swallowed by shadow, then—somewhere far and wrong—answered by the soft clink of a door handle being tested.

We had only been inside twenty minutes when the SD card in our second camera corrupted itself. That should’ve been omen enough. We headed back toward the entrance to steal the card from our trail cam, moving as a group because the corridors felt like they had opinions. Halfway down the main hall, the building made a decision: a door slammed in the distance, not our door, not a door near us—one with the kind of finality that shakes dust from ceilings. We froze. “That was the other side,” Boofy said. “And after it—listen—creaking.”

Somewhere past the nurses’ station, another door eased shut, slow as a thought concluding itself.

“Someone’s in here,” Mick said, not quite believing it because we had scoured the place, checked rooms with their curtains slumped and mold blooming like bruises, lifted mattresses with stained corners, peered behind reception where stairs folded down into a darkness so complete it felt like water. We’d called out. We’d introduced ourselves. We’d gotten nothing back except architecture and air.

We kept moving. The lift stood with its doors half-open, a metal mouth caught mid-sentence. A cassette player sat on a shelf under a fat growth of mold, the play button depressed, waiting for instructions that would never come. On a table, a framed photo of someone’s granddad stared at nothing. Boofy reached to pick it up, then didn’t. “Blur it,” Luke said softly. “If we show it. Blur the face.”

We lost our bearings around the dining hall—big space, too many doors, the kind of place you get turned around by the geometry. “We need to commit somewhere,” Luke said. “Pick a zone. Park it.”

We parked by a cluster of heavy fire doors, the kind you have to put your shoulder into. “We heard a door slam here,” Mick said. “That one?” He pushed the nearest door. It swung slow; fell back; thunked. Loud, but not the bang.

“Try the next,” Luke said.

We worked door by door like forensic idiots in a haunted maze, ruling out hinges and wind and the clumsy physics of dereliction. The loud bang we’d heard earlier hadn’t been any of these. It had been deliberate. It had had intent.

Then came the glass.

Two large panels lay face-down in a corridor we had just walked. As we doubled back to the trail cam, past where those panes lay like pale tombstones, the air carried the ruin of sound: crunching. Fast, close, the brittle crack of weight on glass. We stopped dead. “Did you hear that?” “Yeah.” “Yeah.” “Walking.”

We pivoted, torches cutting swaths of light across the floor, the walls, the space between doors. Nothing moved. But you can’t hide the truth from sound: someone had walked across that glass less than thirty seconds after we’d passed it. If it wasn’t one of us—and it wasn’t—then someone else was in the building, shadowing our route, picking up our trail like they’d been waiting.

“Hello?” Luke called. “We don’t want to frighten you. We don’t want to be frightened either. Just let us know where you are.”

Silence pressed back with the confidence of a thing that has lived inside silence long enough to own it.

We chose the east wing for an EVP session because its geometry felt contained. A music box on the floor. A REM-pod beading blue and red when touched. Balls set along the corridor like checkpoints. “If there’s anybody here who used to live in this care home,” Luke said, voice softening as if speaking to a roomful of old people waiting for pills, “can you approach us? Talk to us? Or interact with the devices?” The REM-pod chirped once, twice, then steadied. “If you’re a man, can you set it off?” Silence. “If you’re a woman?” A single blink. “You don’t have to set it off,” Luke added, “just knock.”

From behind Mick came a sound, small and clear: three knuckles against wood. He wheeled around so fast his torch skittered; the beam caught a smear of black on tile. “Did you just knock behind me?” he asked. “If so, can you do it again?” Nothing. Then a whisper, not word, not wind.

“Keep in mind, there’s a breeze,” Boofy said, the way men say practical things to keep panic in the shape of logic. He pushed a door. It resisted. “Heavy,” he said. “You’d need a proper push.”

We took photographs with flash, the kind that burn white squares into your retina and your memory. Snap. Corridor. Snap. The music box. Snap. The corner where the walls met at a bruise. “Lights ready,” Luke murmured, because when you’re blind for a second, the dark learns your name.

Then the steps again. Clearer this time. Ten steady footfalls, a measured pace, a decision moving toward us. Luke stood in the doorway and listened to his blood pound and to the building that had adopted our silence. “Did you hear that?” “Yes.” “It’s coming from down there.” “Come and join us,” Luke said to whatever was walking, and he meant it, and he regretted meaning it the second the movement stopped.

We moved on. The trail led us to a tent pitched in the day room, a sun-bleached triangle that shouldn’t have been there, defiant in its domesticity. “Hello,” Mick called, gentle, like approaching a sleeping dog. The tent breathed back nothing. The room had the gravity of a place that remembered people without remembering their names.

The laughter came as Boofy’s stomach growled. He was two rooms away. Mick swore reflexively. In the second his swearing cut the air, another sound stitched itself to the end of it: a whimper. The tiniest, human, desperate sound, the kind that happens when somebody is trying not to cry and fails. “Did you hear that?” “Yeah.” “It came from your side.” “I heard it,” Luke said. Boofy didn’t. Which meant the building had chosen its audience.

We tried kindness as strategy. It felt wrong and right at the same time. “Come and get your meds,” Luke called softly, a nurse’s cadence in a man who’d never been one. “It’s tea time. Come and collect your tray.” The REM-pod blinked in slow agreement, then stopped, as if decision had been considered and dismissed.

“Is that you? Were you crying?” Mick asked the air, and the building did what old buildings do when asked to confess: it offered noises in the wrong places. A rasp. A scrape. The ceiling whispering to itself.

We took a break at the entrance where the night pressed against the glass and the air tasted like rain, not because we were tired, but because we needed to reset the story. “There’s nobody here,” Boofy said, half convinced, half trying to convince us. The trail cam’s SD card slid out with a stubborn little click, warm like it had been holding secrets.

On the way back in, the doors performed for us. A bang. Far. Another. Closer. Then the soft pump of a handle being tested. We set up again under the staircase. “If you want us to leave this area, can you let go?” Luke asked the unseen hands on the REM-pod. The lights steadied, then flared. “Okay,” he said. “We’ll move.”

By the time we hit the west corridor, the building had learned us. It anticipated our pauses, answered our calls with bangs we couldn’t triangulate, breathed down our necks when we were busy pretending to be brave. In the walls, something shifted—like a change in occupancy, like a tenant moving between rooms.

“This place is huge,” Mick said, not because he needed to say it but because language sometimes holds panic at the door.

We decided to do a quiet sit, no gadgets, just senses. The care home loved our decision. It invited us to fail. In the silence came a woman’s voice—thin, too soft to be wind, too shaped to be accident. “Did you hear that?” “Yes.” “Could be outside.” “Could be,” Luke said, but the outside was a geography that felt farther than physics allowed.

“Show yourself,” Mick said, and climbed halfway up the stairs, body angled like a dare. At the top, nothing waited. At the bottom, footsteps gathered themselves on a different floor.

Two hours passed. We collected small indignities and half-answers: footsteps without crunch, doors slamming in rooms we hadn’t entered, a laugh or a cry stitched to the tail of a swear. We agreed to leave, because leaving felt like the kindest thing we could do to our nerves. The building begged to differ. It threw one last sound at us—a bang with the confidence of intention—and then watched us fail to decide if we were being hunted by a prankster or by grief itself.

Outside, we tasted air that didn’t belong to other people’s last days. We talked about military barracks and poltergeist activity like boys picking new dares. But as the night settled into our clothes, the care home did something so small and so devastating that it erased the difference between haunted and hunted.

Back at the car, the trail cam playback showed the entrance—our tripod, the ghost of our breath, the light from our torches tattooing patterns on the glass. At 10:23 p.m., when we were deep in the east wing, a silhouette crossed the foyer—not ours, not tall enough for any of us, moving with a fragile impatience. The figure paused at the front doors. The handle dipped. The doors didn’t open. The figure turned its head toward the east corridor—the way we had gone—and then, like choosing the lesser of two kinds of loneliness, retreated toward the day room.

“There,” Luke said, and no one argued, because it wasn’t the existence of the shape that mattered. It was the way it looked when it faced the corridor, as if the building had leaned in to check whether it still recognized our names.

We didn’t put the rest in the video. We didn’t have the footage. But we had the sounds. And we had our mistakes.

Later, after we had slept like men who put too many doors between themselves and guilt, we went back to the footage to count footsteps. Ten. Always ten. Ten like a nurse doing rounds. Ten like the walk from bed to bathroom and back. Ten like a habit that had become a haunt.

We learned something about derelict places that night. They don’t die when the lights go off and the residents leave. They hold the shape of routines until someone widens the air with new rules. The care home watched us. Not with eyes—eyes are for bodies—but with the choreography of its memory, the way it offered doors and denied them, the way it tuned the floor to boots that weren’t ours.

If you ask us what stalked us in that abandoned care home, we’ll tell you the truth we earned: it wasn’t a person. Or if it was, the person wasn’t a person anymore. It was repetition. It was grief that learned the layout and refused to submit to demolition. It was a hand testing a handle because that’s what hands do when they don’t know they’re done.

The last thing we heard, on the way out, was the small sound at the edge of language—the whimper, half-cry, half-laugh, the way somebody might sound if they were embarrassed to need help and finally asked anyway.

“Come and get your tray,” Luke had said earlier, because he didn’t know what else to offer. If we had been braver, we might’ve said what the building actually needed to hear: You can go.

We didn’t. And so the care home watched us leave, counted our footsteps, and practiced the slam of a door we didn’t open—because even empty, it was still doing rounds.