By the time base camp was established, Madison had transformed the corner office into mission control. Three laptops running different camera feeds. Audio mixer with levels dancing in the green.
She placed static cameras with an artist's eye for composition. One aimed directly at the rows of meat hooks, framing them so they looked like they were reaching down toward the lens. Another pointed down a long hallway that terminated in absolute darkness. A third covered the main entrance, catching anyone or anything that might try to leave.
"Got power?" Chloe appeared beside Madison, holding her EMF reader.
"Battery banks should give us six hours. I'm not trusting anything electrical in this place."
Smart woman.
Jake finished setting up his cameras on the second floor and came clattering down the metal stairs. His phone was out, filming himself.
"Alright, Seekers," he said to his phone. "It's time for the first sweep. We're heading to the main processing floor to see if we can stir up whatever's lingering in this place of tragedy."
"Jake." Madison didn't look up from her laptop. "You said 'place of tragedy' twice in five minutes. Expand your vocabulary."
"You're not my real mom."
"Thank god for that."
They moved out in a loose formation. Chloe on point with her equipment. Jake filming. Bree walking slowly, her hands held out in front of her like she was trying to sense vibrations in the air. Madison bringing up the rear with her main camera.
Watching from this weird observer perspective, I could see what they couldn't. The building was just a building. Cold because it had no heat. Dark because it had no power. Creepy because abandoned industrial spaces are inherently unsettling to human psychology.
There was nothing here.
Not yet.
Chloe's K-II meter started flashing near an electrical panel. She held it up for Jake's camera.
"We're getting a major spike. Could indicate spiritual activity."
"It's a breaker box." Madison's voice came from off-camera. "It's supposed to have an electromagnetic field. That's literally what electricity is."
"I know that." Chloe's jaw tightened. "I'm just documenting all readings for later analysis."
They moved on.
Jake pulled out a spirit box, a device that scanned through radio frequencies at high speed. Static hissed from its speaker. White noise occasionally broken by fragments of words as it passed through active stations.
"Is there anyone here with us?"
More static.
"What is your name?"
The box crackled. A woman's voice, distorted by interference: "...kill..."
They all stopped.
"...seven..."
Jake's hand shook slightly as he held the spirit box.
"...hungry..."
Then back to static.
"Holy shit." Jake's voice was barely a whisper. "Did you get that?"
"I got it." Madison's camera had never wavered.
"That was a full intelligent response. 'Kill seven hungry.' What does that mean?"
"It means you scanned past a talk radio station." Madison lowered her camera. "It's random words, Jake. That's how the spirit box works. It picks up fragments and we pattern-match them into something meaningful."
But her voice had lost some of its certainty.
They kept moving. Sweeping their equipment across empty space. Recording readings that would mean nothing. Asking questions that went unanswered except for the echo of their own voices bouncing off concrete and steel.
Present-day me watched this whole performance with grim irony. They were playing with toys in the dark, trying to coax whispers from static. Meanwhile something vast and hungry watched from just beyond their perception. A predator with infinite patience.
The thought made my non-existent skin crawl.
An hour of this yielded nothing but static and goosebumps. They regrouped at base camp, the energy fizzling out of them. Shoulders slumped. The ghost hunt had devolved into the quiet reality of babysitting expensive equipment in a cold, dark building.
Jake broke out a bag of chips from his backpack. Doritos, cool ranch flavor.
"Anyone want?"
Madison actually took one. A peace offering after spending the last hour shooting down his spirit box evidence.
They talked about normal things. Chloe complained about her statistics midterm. Jake brought up a movie he'd seen. Bree mentioned a new coffee shop near campus that did oat milk lattes.
For maybe ten minutes, they stopped being the Spectral Seekers. They were just college kids hanging out in a creepy place on a dare. The kind of thing that would be a funny story later. Remember that time we spent all night in that old factory and absolutely nothing happened?
Past-me leaned against a support pillar, watching them. A small smile on my face. Relief written in every line of my body language.
This was exactly what I'd expected. What I'd hoped for. A boring night that would end with us packing up equipment and going home to our normal lives.
The memory lingered on this moment. The absolute calm. The mundane reality of ghost hunting between the edited highlights. The building was just architecture. The darkness was just an absence of light.
Nothing more.
Then Chloe checked her watch.
"Alright." She stood up, brushing chip crumbs from her jeans. "It's 12:47. Official witching hour. Time for the provocation session."
The temperature in the room seemed to drop another five degrees.
"Everyone kill your flashlights. We're going to the kill floor."
Madison's face went pale in the laptop screen's glow.
"Chloe, maybe we should—"
"We should document a proper provocation attempt. That's what we came here for." Chloe's voice carried that edge of someone who'd talked themselves into something and refused to back down. "We're going to see if we can get a reaction."
The perspective shifted to one of Madison's static cameras. High angle, wide shot, night vision painting everything in shades of green and black. The five of us looked small in the vast processing floor. Tiny figures in an ocean of darkness.
We formed a circle in the center of the room. Right beneath the densest cluster of meat hooks. They hung above us like a canopy of rust and old blood.
Flashlights clicked off one by one.
The darkness was absolute. The camera's night vision could barely penetrate it. We were just shapes, outlines, ghosts ourselves.
And suddenly, I was in 'First Person Mode'.
Chloe's voice. Her lavalier mic picked it up crystal clear. The audio feed showed her words as perfect waveforms on Madison's laptop screen.
"My name is Chloe."
Her voice echoed through the cavernous space. Bouncing off concrete. Absorbed by rust.
"We know you're here. We are not afraid of you."
Lie. Complete lie. I could hear the tremor underneath her words.
"If there is any entity in this place..."
The meat hooks began to sway.
"...we demand that you show yourself."