As soon as we pulled into the broken-up parking lot and I saw how grand and forgotten Smoky Mountain Sanatorium really was, my stomach started to roll. It always did that when I was nervous, but usually not on investigations. However, this one felt different; like something here was warning me not to go inside.

From its history to its appearance, this was nothing like our usual locations. This one was foreboding, making me wish I had sat this one out and stayed home and watched one of my ghost shows on TV, instead.

Being eighteen, the youngest on the team, as well as one of only two girls, I was like the runt, being picked on by the rest of the litter. I knew they only did it out of love. Nonetheless, I knew I'd be the brunt of most of the jokes tonight, especially since I'd already told them I was not going anywhere alone; no solo investigating, no going to check on cameras by myself, no going to the bathroom without my trusty sidekick, Tanya. I always felt safer in numbers but, tonight, I doubt even that would help calm my nerves.

"What's the matter, Amber?" Nick asked, smiling at me from the other side of the van. "Scared?"

I pulled my eyes away from the black windows of the insane asylum and looked at him, watching how he jerked his head to the side to keep his bangs out of his eyes, which annoyed the crap out of me. "Yes."

"Well, you should be. We all should be. This place has some crazy history, no pun intended, so we need to be on guard." He pulled the rest of the tripods out and nodded toward the cases still in the back of the van. "Can you grab those?"

"Sure."

It was three o'clock on Saturday, and the hot July sun beat down on the six of us as we carried our equipment in. Crossing the parking lot, I felt like I was being watched, our every move noted. As I walked up the front steps, not watching where I was going, I tripped over a loose cable, unable to take my eyes off the Gothic-looking facade. From the broken windows to the gargoyles that randomly stood guard around the rooftop, this place was spooky, even in the daytime.

As we entered the asylum, the first thing I noticed was how cool it felt, almost as if a slight breeze was swirling around the entryway, brushing up against my skin in an eerie greeting. The second thing I noticed was the smell, which was musty and consisted of dust and decay. The walls were falling away, with debris scattered around on the cracked tile floors. Everything was exactly as I'd pictured it—dead, grey, and forsaken. Aside from how it looked, the way it felt was much worse.

"Okay, let's set up the central location here," Alex said as he sat one of the equipment cases down on an old table that sat in the middle of the large entryway. "It looks like this is where other teams have set up their command area, too."

Alex, the leader of our little group, was a friend of the family, or at least he used to be, when they all had time to maintain it. Over the years, he stopped coming around, but they still talked, sometimes. When I saw him at our local library, setting up for a paranormal seminar in the community room, I asked if I could sit in, since I loved that stuff, watching it on TV every Wednesday and Saturday night.

I’d always had strange dreams and sometimes saw things out of the corner of my eye, but had always dismissed it as me being paranoid. Even when I had a vivid dream about my grandmother, who had died when I was really little, I assumed I’d ate too many banana peppers before bed, that night. Nonetheless, it seemed to pique my interest, causing me to turn into a para-geek. My DVR was proof, filled with all things ghostly.

Alex seemed excited for me to sit in on his seminar, especially since only a handful of people showed up, and that was the beginning of my paranormal adventures. If only I’d have known the outcome of that decision….

Once we got everything inside and ready to set up, we gathered our cameras, EMF detectors, and a couple of voice recorders so we could do a quick walk-thru of the hospital, seeing where we wanted to set our cameras up. It was also a good time, since it was still daylight, to make sure there were no looters or actual real people in the building. The living had always scared me more than ghosts, at least up until this investigation.

"Why don't you, Nick, and Erik go to the top floor,” Alex said, “while the rest of us check out this floor and head to the basement?"

"Sounds like a plan," Nick said, smiling at me. "I'll be one of the first ones to see Amber run."

"I'm not gonna run," I retorted. "And if I do, I'd advise you to do the same. I don't normally run for the heck of it, so if I suddenly take off, there's got to be a pretty good reason."

"I'll remember that," he replied with a smile as we headed toward the stairs.

I walked up between Nick and Erik, not liking being first or last. Our footsteps echoed through the stairwell as we went up, piercing the quietness. Nick yelled out a greeting as we neared the top, causing me to jump and smack the back of his leg.

“I was just saying hi,” he said, laughing as we walked out onto the second floor. “It’s called politeness. Maybe you should use it sometimes.”

Nick was about ten years older than I was, and pretty easy on the eyes, but he annoyed the crap out of me. It was rare that his cuteness outweighed his annoyance, so our friendship had remained stagnant, which seemed fine with both of us. Erik, on the other hand, was only twenty-three and was like a raging river that I wanted to dive into and let carry me away. I kept my feelings to myself, though, not wanting to mess up the dynamic of our team, especially since he had a girlfriend. They were constantly breaking up and getting back together, though, so maybe someday....

"Did you hear that?" Nick asked, interrupting my thoughts.

"Yeah, it sounded like it came from one of those rooms down there," Erik replied, pointing down the hall.

I didn't hear anything, but I didn't admit it, not wanting them to know I wasn't paying attention. From here on out, I was going to have to focus on the task at hand and gather preliminary data, in case we needed it later.

I pulled my bag around and dug my own voice recorder out, hitting the record button and tagging the time of day and where we were. When I turned my K2 meter on, I was surprised it didn't light up, since I'd felt weird since we'd walked into this place.

I turned around to realize I was standing in the middle of one of the upstairs rooms alone. "Hey!" I yelled, hurrying out of the room to catch up with the guys. "Don't leave me by myself at this place."

"Sorry, we thought you were right behind us," Nick said, looking at Erik with an odd expression. "Didn't it sound like she was right behind us?"

He nodded, looking from me to Nick. “Yeah, I thought the same thing.”

"That was strange. I could've sworn...." He let it go, not bringing it up again, but making sure we all stayed together.

We'd walked into a few rooms before Erik's Mel Meter came to life, buzzing loudly, which instantly gave me the chills. "I've got something here." He looked around, trying to find the source of the EMF hit. "I can't imagine what would cause this. It's measuring four milligauss. No... five. It keeps going up." We stood silently, waiting to see if something was about to happen, but nothing did.

"What's it at now?" Nick asked.

"It's almost up to six. That's ridiculous," Erik said.

I held my recorder out in front of me. "Is there someone here with us?" It felt weird asking that in the daytime, since it was usually the middle of the night when activity started.

"Make yourself known." No sooner Nick got those three words out, the door slammed shut behind us, causing me to drop my K2.

"Shit!" Erik yelled, even though his voice cracked and it barely came out above a whisper.

It was at times like this when I would normally run, yet there was nowhere to run, since the door was what I wanted to run from, yet had to go through it to get away. "What do you think caused that?" I asked, hoping someone would explain it away.

"Could've been a draft or something, since the windows are broken," Nick said as he walked towards the door, obviously not as disturbed by it as I was. "Let's see if it'll do it again, maybe if a gust blows through."

"Man, I didn’t feel any wind come through," Erik mentioned.

"Me, neither," I sadly agreed. As much as I wanted activity to happen, I wanted it to happen from a distance, not right here in the same room.

"It doesn't take much of a gust to close a door; just enough to cause suction."

He opened the door, using one finger to try to get it to swing closed again, but it didn't. We stayed in that room for ten more minutes with no more activity from the wind, our meters, or the door, so we moved on, making a note to come back to this room later.

I followed Erik and Nick out while Nick told us about some of the history of the sanatorium as we walked down the shadowed hallway.

"Eleanor Cosgrove," he said, his voice echoing through rooms. "She was a patient here in the mid-forties, admitted for schizophrenia. As with many of the patients back then, lobotomies were rather common, and Eleanor ended up getting one. However, hers didn't go so well." A noise behind us caused us to stop and turn around. "Did you hear that?" We both nodded, Erik pointing down the hall where we'd just come from. "It sounded like knocking."

"Yeah, three. I heard three distinct knocks," I whispered as I listened for more.

Within a matter of seconds, three more knocks were heard, louder this time. Nick pointed toward the area of the hallway they came from, and within seconds, three more knocks came, but closer. Nick took a few steps toward the sounds, tiptoeing so his shoes wouldn't make any noise on the decrepit tile floor.

"What could that be?" Erik wondered out loud.

We'd never had a door slam and heard knocks within the first thirty minutes of a simple walk-thru. "I... have no... idea." I stepped closer to Erik, my arm brushing up against his.

"Hello?" Nick called out, causing me to about jump out of my skin again.

“Stop doing that,” I whispered as loud as I could, causing him to shush me.

“Is someone there?” Three more knocks came, even closer than the last. "Hell, they're coming from right in front of me." He took a step back, which surprised me. Out of all the people in the group, Nick and Alex were always the ones to go toward the activity, not back away from it. "I think...." He started shaking his head as he continued to walk backwards toward us. "I think we need to go."

Three loud knocks—bangs—came from all around us, sending chills down my spine with each one. In the past year, I'd been investigating, I'd never heard a noise as loud as that, and didn't care if I ever heard another one. I'm sure a knock wouldn't hurt me, but whatever was causing it might, so I grabbed Erik's arm and proceeded to pull him toward the door that led to the exit. I didn't turn back to see if Nick was behind us, but once we got into the stairwell, I heard him yelling.

"Run!" he yelled two or three times in a row.

"I am!" I replied, moving so fast that I was barely touching the steps.

When we busted through the door to the main floor, we found the area empty. I didn't stop until my feet were planted firmly on the parking lot outside. Once Erik and Nick joined me, they were both laughing, Nick doubling over with his hands on his knees.

"That was great," he said, smiling from ear to ear. "We've definitely got to set cameras up in that area and cover that floor." He stood upright, still slightly out of breath, his smile fading. "I did feel something up there, though, right before we ran." He shivered. "And I didn't like how it felt." He looked up at one of the windows, causing us to follow his gaze. "Whatever's up there, it doesn't feel too friendly." He looked back at us. "Whoever it is, they don't want us here." The smile returned to his face. "So we should be in for a fun night."

"Yeah, maybe we'll get up close and personal with Eeeleanooor," Erik teased, dragging out her name so it sounded much scarier than it should.

"What happened to her, anyway?" I asked Nick. "You never did finish telling us about her."

He sat down on one of the steps before finishing his story. "Well, like I said, she became one of the many victims of the doctors and they botched up her lobotomy. The articles I read said that instead of fixing her, which they thought a lobotomy would do, it was like they took away the only good left in her brain. She had no morals or empathy, and didn't seem to feel pain, physical or mental. Instead of curing her of her mental illness, they turned her into a psycho. She ended up killing eleven other patients, as well as a doctor and a nurse, before a fellow patient was able to get the ax from her and kill her. Cracked her skull right in two, they said."

"An ax? How did she get an ax?" I asked.

"Well, that was something that was under investigation. Apparently, a worker had accidentally left it in one of the corridors behind a door after he'd done some work inside and Eleanor found it. The sick part is that when they found her, she was covered with the skin of those she'd killed." As he said it, my stomach churned. "Said she'd taken their fingers and slipped them on over her own, as well as tried to cover her arms and chest with their skin." He shook his head and made a face.

"And this is why I like to go over the history before an investigation, not during." I looked up at the sky. "Sweet Jesus." They may have thought I was just rambling, but I wasn't—I was really praying.

"She's dead, Amber," Nick said. "I don't think we have to worry about her now."

"If not, then why did you tell us to run?” I asked. “I've never seen you run from activity, so I'm sure you had to feel something or see something that made you do it." He looked away, and as he stared across the parking lot, I tried to read his face, but the rest of the team interrupted, leaving me wondering exactly what had scared Nick, since I didn't think the bangs, alone, had done it.

"There is something in that basement," Alex said. "We got some readings that were off the charts, and Tanya swears up and down she saw a lady down there.

"I did," she reiterated with a shiver. "Scared the shit outta me." She shook her head. "I can't wait to see what tonight holds." We all looked at each other, obviously wondering the same thing.

"Yeah, we had some crazy shit happen upstairs, too," Nick said.

"Well, let's go get the cameras set up so we can get this show on the road," Mark, the oldest of the group, ordered. "I'm ready to do a little ghost hunting." He clapped his hands together, causing me to jump, yet again. "Man, you're a bit on edge, huh, Amber?" he teased as he smacked me on the back. "I don't blame ya. If I had to guess, I'd say this is gonna be one helluva night."

"Yeah," I reluctantly agreed, following everyone back inside. "One heck of a night."