Creepypasta: Nightmare Fuel

109: An Empty Prison

An Empty Prison by M59Gar

A single day added onto my sentence meant the difference between a normal jail and the unending nightmare of Pembina Prison. I was supposed to get 364 days. That was the deal. But the judge didn't like my 'attitude,' whatever the hell that meant, so he made it 365. Boom. One year was the minimum for prison. My lawyer made a stink and a half, but it didn't do any good. It's not his fault. In fact, he's the one who is going to release this statement to the press, or leak it online if the Guardian Corrections Group (GCG) tries to get an injunction on us. People have to know what happened at Pembina Prison.

I'm going to put it right out there and tell you that it was haunted. You think I'm joking, nuts, or lying, but you have no idea. Haunted prisons aren't anything like you imagine. Those places that advertise themselves and give people tours are sick jokes compared to the real thing. It got so bad that you can actually look up GCG's official filings for Chapter 11. That shit put them out of business on their very first prison, and right there on the briefs, using an early statute of North Dakota law from 1857 to file an insurance claim, it says: 'Site of Pembina Prison confirmed by Governor's Office and two Notary Publics witnessing in person to be afflicted by the supernatural such that continued business is impossible.' It wasn't the first time the Prison was closed for that reason, either, but leeches kept buying it and reopening it hoping to make a buck off the common man.

And I was shoved into that hellhole without knowing the history even a single bit.

Don't get me wrong. The building itself wasn't so bad, especially for something straight out of 1853. It was a big stone cube that was squat, heavy, and cramped, but way less sealed off than modern prisons. We could see a lot of the cells around us, there was only one main hallway per floor, and we were close enough to pass things between the bars and have some real human interaction. It could have been worse.

There were five floors and capacity for five hundred prisoners. When I first got there, I had a bunch of cellmates, and I heard there were two thousand guys locked up, and I believed it—but that soon changed.

I didn't talk to anyone for the first three weeks. I'd never been to real prison before, and I was messed up over it. I didn't want to accept that I would be in that place and stuck with three other guys in my cell for an entire year. The whole prison seemed full of feral men; the bottom floor would start screaming and hollering and panicking in the middle of the night all at once. We were on the top floor, but we could hear their screams echoing through that open old layout like they were right there with us. I just thought the prisoners on the bottom floor were all nuts until the guards weren't there to wake us up the first day of my fourth week.

When I woke up in my corner without some asshole guard banging on the bars of our cell, I finally had to talk. I asked one of my cellmates, Donte, what was going on, and I'll never forget the fear in his voice as he said something that should have made us all incredibly happy: "The guards are all gone, man."

The prisoners were talking quietly between the cells and loudly between the floors through various whispers and shouts, but the most we could figure out was that something on the first floor had made them all quit in protest. Sure, must have been the crazies screaming like that during the night, right? Except none of us could get any word from the bottom floor. It was dead silent down there. The guys on the second called out for hours; someone was down there, they said, because they could hear shuffling footsteps walking around at random every so often, but whoever it was never said a single word.