Where do I even start? This is Lena Thompson. I'm an urban explorer and blogger for all the new people who might not know. For all you long time fans however, I just want to thank you all so much for the support you've given me and this blog over the past three years.

  I know you guys have been mad at me for not posting for a few weeks so I apologize. I was in the hospital. I was hurt really bad. It's okay now but I think it best if I give you the bad news upfront. As of now my career in urban exploration is on an indefinite hiatus. I don't know when I'll be back but I need to spend some time with my family now. I'm not really in a good head space at the moment. And for those of you you have been gossiping behind the scenes and said it had something to do with the incident from a month and a half ago at the old Ravensbeak Mental Asylum. Well I can say now that y'all were right. So let me start from the beginning.

  Me and my team arrived that day around 4:45 PM. It was just starting to get dark classic golden hour lighting for photos and video. There was me, obviously, holding the main camera rig, Jamal with the drone and backup lights, and Cora, who handles research and usually gets freaked out before any of us. We parked just off the main road and hiked the rest of the way through tall grass and thorny brush until the silhouette of Ravensbeak came into view.

  I’ll be honest. When I first saw the place, something in me hesitated. I’ve been to dozens of abandoned places, some downright cursed-looking, but this was...fucking different. It wasn’t just the look of it. It was the silence. No birds. No bugs. Just dead air pressing on us from all sides. I remember joking that it felt like the building was holding its breath.

  Ravensbeak Mental Asylum had been closed since the early '80s after a fire destroyed one of the treatment wings. The official line was that faulty wiring caused the fire. But if you dig deeper and we always do. You’ll find stories about disappearances, about patients being treated like lab rats, and about one doctor in particular. Eliza Crane.

  Cora had dug up a few handwritten letters from a former nurse who claimed Crane was obsessed with something called "transitional therapy". Some twisted mix of hypnosis and dream deprivation. Apparently, patients would come out of her sessions different. Quieter. Sometimes they stopped talking altogether. The last letter said Crane had started doing the sessions on herself.

  We started rolling as soon as we stepped through the front entrance. The air inside smelled like mildew, rust, and something sweeter. Something I couldn’t quite place. The floors were damp. Paint peeled in long, curling strips from the walls like shedding skin. Most of the furniture had been removed or looted, but the patient records room was mostly intact. That's where we set up base camp.

  Jamal flew the drone through the upper wings while Cora and I sifted through the files. Some of the documents had patient photos stapled to them—blank eyes, slack faces, hollow stares. One folder was thicker than the rest. It was labeled: Patient 831

  It didn’t list a name, just a single sentence written in red pen:

  “Subject shows full compliance. Dreamwall intact.”

  I should have stopped then. I should’ve told everyone to pack up and get out. But I didn’t. Because something in me wanted to know more. I told myself it was for the content. For the blog. But the truth is, I was drawn to that file. To Crane. To whatever she'd done here.

  I didn't know it yet, but this place wasn't abandoned.

  It was waiting.

  The file on Patient 831 didn’t make sense. No diagnosis. No medical notes. Just a series of phrases written like mantras.

  “The body is a gate.”

  “Sleep is a crutch.”

  “Dreamwall intact.”

  Some were typed, but others looked hand-scrawled in a shaky, almost desperate script.

  Cora gave me this look. Half nervous, half annoyed. “This is garbage,” she muttered, flipping through a few more folders. But she wasn’t wrong to be freaked. That room was colder than the rest of the building, like actual cold breath running along your spine.

  Then Jamal’s voice crackled through the walkie:

  “Lena, you gotta see this. West wing. Fourth floor.”

  We grabbed the gear and followed the drone’s signal up a rotting staircase. The place was crumbling. Ceiling tiles sagged with water damage, paint was bubbled and blackened from old fire damage, and broken wheelchairs sat like waiting ghosts in the corners.

  When we reached the fourth floor, Jamal met us by a locked door marked THERAPY. The drone sat on the floor beside him, still recording. “You’re not gonna believe what’s in there,” he said, and pulled a small crowbar from his bag.

  The lock gave way after a few good pries.

  Inside... the room was untouched.

  I mean untouched. No dust. No decay. The lights didn’t work, but the furniture was perfectly arranged—old leather chair, patient cot, bookshelf, desk. A metronome still sat ticking on the edge of the desk.

  Tick. Tick. Tick.

  The sound wasn’t mechanical. It was…wet. Like something breathing in time with the ticks.

  And in the center of the room, like a shrine, was an audio reel recorder. On it was a tape labeled:

  “Crane Session 54.”

  We didn’t play it. Not yet. The room made our skin crawl. Jamal was visibly sweating even though it was freezing, and Cora looked ready to bolt. But I told them to give me ten minutes to record B-roll, then we’d pack up and leave.

  That was the second mistake.

  Stolen from its original source, this story is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

  The first was stepping inside the asylum in the first place.

  After the ten minutes were up, I did something really stupid.

  I know. i know. Looking back I should of left right then and there. But fuck it. I was a content creator and I wasn't gonna let the entire shoot be a waste of time. Content is content.

  So…we played the tape.

  I didn’t want to. My gut was screaming don’t do it, and Cora outright said it felt like opening a door we wouldn’t be able to shut again. But I overrode her. I told them we needed to know. That it was just a recording. Just audio. So what was there to be worried about?

  We were so stupid.

  We sat in the therapy room, floorboards groaning under us, the camera set up on a tripod. Jamal rewound the reel and hit play.

  At first it was just static. Then came the voice.

  Dr. Eliza Crane spoke in this calm, icy tone, like someone narrating a bedtime story under threat of violence.

  “Session fifty-four. Subject 831 is fully immersed. Initiating descent.”

  There was silence.

  Then came the sound.

  It was like breathing, but from far away. Faint at first, then closer. Wrong. Not through the mic. Not on the tape. It was in the room. Behind us. Around us. A rhythmic inhale and exhale, low and wet, like a lung dragging across old wood.

  Cora started crying.

  Jamal ripped the tape out of the player, and the breathing stopped—but not entirely. I swear, even now, I still hear it sometimes when my house is too quiet.

  We bailed from the therapy room and made our way back toward base camp, but everything was off. Hallways that had been there an hour ago didn’t exist anymore. Doors were in the wrong places. It was like the whole layout of the asylum had shifted.

  Cora pointed out something that chilled me to my core: all the clocks in the building had stopped at exactly 3:17 AM. Every one of them.

  That’s when the dreams started.

  The first night after we got back to the motel, I had a nightmare that I was strapped into a chair. Couldn’t move. Couldn’t scream. Dr. Crane stood over me, whispering those mantras again.

  “The body is a gate.”

  “Sleep is a crutch.”

  “Dreamwall intact.”

  Behind her, shadows twitched and writhed, like something waiting to be born. I woke up screaming. My wrists had red marks on them like restraints.

  Cora had the same dream.

  Jamal stopped answering our texts the next day. When we went to his room, we found the door wide open. His bed hadn’t been slept in. His drone was gone.

  So was he.

  That was the last time I saw him in person.

  We called the police, filed reports, the works. But he just…vanished.

  Cora blamed me. Said I dragged us in too deep. She wasn’t wrong. Two days later, she caught a flight home and blocked me on everything.

  I went back. Alone.

  I know. I know. But I had to. I needed to understand what happened. Why Ravensbeak was still awake?

  I brought a body cam, a journal, and a backup battery. No crew this time. Just me. I told myself I’d only be there for an hour.

  I was there for three days.

  Or at least, that’s what the log on my camera said.

  But I swear, to me, it felt like one long night.

  I’m not sure how to explain what happened in that building. Most of it doesn’t even feel real. I have the footage, I guess. But even watching it back feels like watching someone else’s death dream.

  The second time I entered Ravensbeak, it was like it knew me. It had learned my rhythms, my footsteps, the sound of my breath. The rooms shifted behind my back. Whole staircases disappeared. My body cam kept glitching, the timecode jumping backwards and forward like the asylum couldn’t make up its mind if I’d already been there or not.

  The halls were darker than I remembered. I used a headlamp, but sometimes it would flicker and I’d catch glimpses of people. No, things. Standing just out of reach. Blurred outlines in patient gowns, their mouths stitched shut, eyes wide with some unspoken horror.

  At one point I found the drone. Jamal’s. Just sitting there, perfectly intact in the middle of a hallway we’d never entered. I picked it up. It was still warm.

  I found my way back to the therapy room, or…something like it. It wasn’t the same. The furniture was gone, and in its place was a single metal chair in the center of the room, bolted to the floor. A reel to reel player spun endlessly on a loop, though the tape had long since run out.

  And in the corner…she stood.

  Dr. Eliza Crane.

  Not a ghost. Not a woman. Something in between. Her eyes were pale, almost silver. Her lab coat was soaked through like she’d just stepped out of a flood. Her skin was translucent, and beneath it, you could see the veins, black like tar. And she smiled at me.

  "You've come so far, Lena," she said, as if we were old friends. "Most only dream of me. You, though...you came back awake."

  I couldn’t move. I don’t even remember choosing to sit in the chair. I just remember the cold of the metal. And then her hand on my forehead. And then...

  The screaming.

  Not from me. From the walls. The building itself. They bent and buckled, like the asylum was rejecting her, trying to spit her out. The floor cracked beneath us, revealing darkness that didn’t have a bottom. Faces pressed up from underneath. Not bodies. Just faces, frozen in silent agony.

  She leaned in close. Whispered into my ear:

  "Sleep is where we belong now. Don’t you want to be part of the dream that doesn’t end?"

  She tried to pull me in. I could feel it. A warm numbness creeping up my limbs, my thoughts unraveling like ribbon. But I remembered something. Jamal’s voice on the walkie. Cora crying. That static on the tape.

  I bit down hard on my tongue. Blood hit the back of my throat and the pain snapped me out of it just long enough to move. I slammed my fist into the reel to reel and it shattered like glass. The sound stopped.

  So did she.

  Looking back I think that one act saved my life.

  Crane let out a sound. Part screech, part sob and her body dissolved into strands of light that were swallowed by the darkness under the floor. The whole room began to collapse inward like it was being erased.

  I ran. I don’t remember how I got out. I remember the cold. The pounding in my ears. I woke up two days later in the hospital, dehydrated, bruised, and thirty-seven miles from the asylum. No one knows how I got there. I don’t either.

  The footage was still intact. Jamal’s drone, too. But I’ll never release it.

  I’ve posted a lot of insane places over the years. Abandoned hospitals, burned out churches, deep mine ghost towns. But Ravensbeak…that place isn’t abandoned.

  It’s haunted as fuck. Maybe Crane is gone for good. But what about the other ghost? Her legion of countless victims? What happened to Patient 831?

  I no longer have the energy to care at this point. My dad is talking to lawyers about some possible trespassing and legal stuff that some people connected with the property are talking to him about. And my mom hasn't stop praying for me with her rosary beads. Meanwhile my brother and sister have always come to my hospital bed to make sure I was alright. At the end of the day I'm still thier baby sister.

  (Sighs)

  (Long emotional pause)

  So that’s why I’m done. For now. Maybe forever. I don't know. I don't care. I'm tired. Okay?

  I feel like my life is so fucked right now. But I'm so glad to be alive.

  No more eating the safe bland hospital food. I finally got home and got to eat my mom's cooking again. Everyone else in my family came to wish me well so I'm content for now.

  Still. At night when I go to sleep I get some residual nightmares. And they're scary as hell. I don't want to go into details. I now sleep with the light on at all times. The dark scares me. I hope my dad doesn't complain about the electricity bill.

  My heart is uneasy. So many unanswered questions.

  Jamal is still missing. No on has seen him. I've talked to all his people. No one has anything on where he went. Gone. Without a trace. As for Cora I still see that she is still posting on her own blog but I think our friendship is definitely over. At this point I don't blame her.

  I need to be around people who love me. People who are real.

  And if you ever find yourself near Grayridge County, and you see a sign that says Ravensbeak Asylum?

  Turn the fuck around. Don’t go near it. Don’t dream about it. Don’t even speak its name aloud.

  Because somewhere, I think she’s still there.

  Still listening.

  Still waiting for someone else to sit in that chair.