🕸️ Short Horror Stories 🕸️

Disembodied Whispers

In 1985, the old army hospital built in the late 1890s was part of our Sandy Hook lab. During that time we were conducting bluefish research in that building and staff members working the night shift would record fish swim times each hour to ground truth video recordings documenting swimming behavior.

I had only been working at the lab a couple of months when I was asked to participate in this research. My office was on the first floor and the door to enter the research aquarium was in the basement. Connecting these two areas was a set of stairs to the basement, but to get there meant passing a large staircase to the second floor.

I started hearing what I thought was whispered voices coming from upstairs – not every time I passed the large staircase, and not always clearly. I ignored it, thinking that I maybe imagined it. By midnight, I had decided to just stay in the basement aquarium room and sleep on the old hospital couch rather than walk through the building and past the large staircase.

Since I was new and wanted to keep my job, I continued sleeping in the basement whenever I had to work the night shift, about once every six weeks. That was until the lab building burned down in September of 1985. Scary thing was, an arsonist had lit the fire on the night I was supposed to work.

I fortunately had switched my shift to another night. After the fire, when a coworker and I were scavenging equipment from the lab ruins, I remember thinking to myself, "Finally, the building will be quiet."