Mabel Tan didn’t believe in haunted rooms, but she started to dislike Room 713 before the end of her first night with Wei Jun.
The assignment was printed on a loose slip of paper instead of appearing in the system like every other bed change. No one wanted to explain why the room no longer had a regular night nurse. The senior staff only gave her the chart, avoided her gaze, and said that Wei Jun had been stable for weeks: Coma patient. Male. Early thirties. Stable. He survived a road accident. No agitation expected. Routine observation.
Everything was routine, except for the empty chair beside his bed.
It had already been pulled close when she entered, angled inward as if someone had just leaned forward to listen.
Wei Jun lay still beneath the dim ceiling light. His face was pale, his lashes unmoving. One hand rested outside the blanket. Mabel checked the lines, the monitor, and the IV pump. Everything was working properly and appeared ordinary.
Then she looked at the chair again.
The wood gave a small creak.
It wasn’t a loud sound. Just the quiet sound of weight settling into place.
Mabel told herself it was the old wood, the poor balance, the air conditioning, or anything else.
Still, when she wrote the first observation note, she did not sit down.
The Chair at 2:13
The first hours passed as hospital nights always do—slowly, and then not. An old man in Room 705 needed help going to the bathroom. A woman in Room 709 cried in her sleep. Someone in the recovery room vomited into a plastic tray. Mabel moved through the softly lit, disinfectant-scented corridor, thankful for work that kept her from thinking about 713.
At 2:13 a.m., the temperature in the ward dropped.
Not everywhere, though.
Only near Wei Jun’s room.
She felt it before she saw it: a thin, cold sensation slipping through her uniform. The hallway outside of 713 had grown eerily quiet. There were no monitor chirps. No shoe squeaks. Even the air conditioning seemed to pause, as if the building were listening.
Mabel stepped inside.
The monitor screen flickered once.
Wei Jun did not move.
But the chair beside him creaked again.
Not the light sound of wood shifting.
Something heavier.
This time, the sound was longer. Slow. deliberate. It was like someone shifting into a more comfortable position after waiting a long time.
Her throat tightened. She checked the windows. Closed. The vent. Steady. As she bent toward the patient to adjust his blanket, a smell touched the air—wet cloth, iron, and something old, like a locked room opened after years.
She froze.
The cold deepened until her fingers hurt.
Then, very softly, from beside the bed, a woman’s voice said, “He didn’t come back.”
Mabel spun around.
The chair was empty.
The temperature rose immediately, leaving only the hum of machines and the faint sound of her breathing. When she rushed out to the station, no one else had noticed anything.
By 2:14 a.m., the ward sounded normal again.
The Overloaded Lift
The next night, Mabel tried to switch assignments. The charge nurse smiled thinly and told her that it had already been entered.
“Entered where?” Mabel asked.
The woman only said, “Don’t stay in there longer than you need to.”
At 1:50 a.m., Mabel took the service elevator alone to collect blood forms from the lower floor.
The doors opened, and she stepped inside.
She pressed B2.
The alarm rang immediately.
OVERLOAD.
Mabel frowned.
She looked down.
Clipboard. Phone. Nothing else.
She stepped back out into the corridor.
The alarm stopped.
Silence returned at once.
Mabel stood there for a moment, staring at the empty elevator interior. Then, as if something might have been left behind, she leaned forward slightly and checked the corners, the ceiling, and the control panel.
Nothing.
She exhaled slowly and stepped back inside.
The alarm rang again.
OVERLOAD.
This time, it continued for a longer period of time.
Mabel pressed the buttons again: B2.
The display did not respond.
The sound continued—
Then, abruptly, it stopped.
Not resolved.
Not acknowledged.
It was just cut off.
The doors closed.
The elevator began to move.
Mabel felt it first in her stomach—the descent was too smooth and steady, as if the elevator were gliding instead of descending.
She watched the panel.
It did not show B2.
It didn’t show any floor.
The numbers remained blank.
The Floor That Should Not Exist
The elevator slowed.
It stopped.
The doors opened.
The corridor outside was wrong. It wasn’t just unfamiliar—it was worse than that.
It looked exactly like the hospital. Same cream walls. Same flooring. Same fluorescent lights.
But thinner.
It was quieter, too.
It’s like a place that had been left behind.
There was no signage.
No voices.
No movement.
Just a strip of weak light stretched into the distance.
Mabel pressed the close button.
The doors began to slide shut—
—then jolted back open.
It was as if something unseen had put a hand between them.
She froze.
She pressed the button again.
The same resistance.
Again.
Again.
Each time, the doors met something she could not see.
The elevator remained open.
Waiting.
Then, the floor indicator flickered.
M.
Morgue.
The doors closed.
This time—
—nothing stopped them.
The Patient in the Morgue
The doors opened to reveal the bright, silent, and overly clean morgue corridor.
Just outside stood a man in a hospital gown, facing away from her.
First, Mabel felt relief. Real, physical relief. Another patient. Another staff error. Something explainable.
“Sir,” she said, stepping out, “you can’t be here.”
The man turned slowly.
He was thin and middle-aged, and he was barefoot. His skin had the dull yellow cast of someone who hadn’t seen daylight in a long time. His expression was calm, almost polite.
“I took the wrong elevator,” he said.
Mabel reached for her phone. “What ward are you from?”
He smiled with dry lips. “You should ask where I’m from.”
Something on his wrist caught the light.
A tag.
Not an admission band.
It was a toe tag, the paper stiff and white, looped around his wrist instead.
Mabel stared at the printed date.
It was three days earlier.
Her mouth went dry. She looked up.
The man’s face had changed.
Not quickly. Not like a jump in a film. It was worse than that. His features seemed to loosen gradually, his skin sinking, one eye clouding, and his lips drawing back as if the flesh beneath remembered a different shape. He lifted his arm and pointed past her into the elevator.
“Don’t leave them waiting,” he said.
Mabel turned.
The elevator behind her was full.
Not with people she could see clearly, but with indistinct shapes pressed together in the harsh light—shoulders, bowed heads, hospital gowns, and uniforms from another era. There was also one motionless figure seated as if on an invisible chair.
She woke up on the floor, surrounded by staff and with ammonia stinging her nose.
What the Cameras Missed
Occupational Health called it stress. Dehydration. Overwork. Low blood sugar.
CCTV footage showed her stepping out of the elevator alone, speaking to empty air, and collapsing before the morgue doors.
There was no second patient. There was no crowd in the elevator. No one else.
Mabel watched the recording twice in a back office while the administrative clerk stood beside her, pretending not to be afraid.
In the video, the service elevator doors opened. Mabel looked forward and smiled at nothing. Then, her expression changed. She took a step backward as if something inside the elevator had frightened her and fell.
“That’s all,” the clerk said.
“No,” Mabel whispered. “There was someone there.”
The woman closed the laptop. “Then don’t say that too loudly.”
Later, an elderly cleaner named Hafiz found Mabel smoking outside the loading bay. She had quit two years ago. He leaned on his mop handle and stared at the ambulance entrance.
“My grandmother used to say,” he said, “that if you stay too close to the dead for too long, your luck begins to change.”
Mabel laughed once, bitterly and thinly. “This is a hospital.”
“Yes,” he said. “That’s why some places are worse.”
He told her that the hill beneath the hospital had once held wartime detention sheds. Prisoners were processed, counted, and left there. Records were lost. Bodies were moved, or left where they were. The buildings changed. The function did not change.
“Some places,” Hafiz said, “learn a habit and keep it.”
That night, when Mabel returned to the nurses’ station, the computer screen saver in room 713 turned on by itself.
The patient name field flickered.
For one second, under Wei Jun’s bed number, it showed “TAN MABEL.”
Status: Admitted.
Then it changed back.
The Hospital After Midnight
After that, the entire hospital seemed wrong.
Not every hour, though. Not all at once. Just in slips and flashes—enough to make her doubt her own eyes. A porter pushing an empty bed would pass beneath bright lights and cast two shadows instead of one. A visitor at the vending machine would blink and, for half a second, become a man in torn khakis with a shaved head and bruised wrists. Reflections lingered behind people by a fraction of a second.
Mabel stopped trusting glass.
She stopped trusting silence even more.
At 2:13 a.m., the building grew thick with presence. The corridors, which were usually half empty, felt occupied wall to wall. It did not feel empty. It felt like space was being made. Not noisy. Never noisy. That was the worst of it. They gathered with the quiet patience of people waiting for their numbers to be called.
The Ones Who Began to Notice
Soon, they noticed her.
At first, they only looked.
Not curiously. Not confused.
It was as if they had already seen her.
A little girl in an old-fashioned cotton dress stood at the end of the pediatric hall, hands folded, and watched Mabel without blinking. An elderly man with a drainage tube in his side stood outside a locked theater and nodded as she passed. Figures appeared in the elevator reflections before they appeared in the elevators themselves.
Then, they began to move closer.
Not all at once. Not together.
One at a time.
Like patients being called.
One stood beside her at a hand-washing sink, visible only in the steel mirror.
Another crossed the ICU threshold, though the sensor never opened.
One bent over Wei Jun’s bed and smoothed the blanket with transparent fingers.
By the fourth night, Mabel realized something worse:
The dead were becoming easier to see than the living.
The living slowly and quietly began to feel out of place.
Staff faces blurred when they spoke. Their voices sounded far away. Meanwhile, the silent figures in the corridors grew sharper by the hour, their eyes bright with need.
Room 713 and the Waiting Ones
Mabel should have resigned.
She opened the resignation form, stared at her name at the top, and then closed it without submitting it.
Instead, she looked for records.
Old newspapers. Hospital redevelopment notices. Archive photos. War maps that had been scanned poorly into PDF files. The images looked flat on the screen, but something about them felt damp, as if the paper had never fully dried. She found enough to give the rumor shape. The hospital grounds had indeed been expanded over a former prisoner holding site from the occupation years. Temporary sheds. Processing pens. Quarantine rows. Men and women were packed into waiting areas before being transported for interrogation, treatment, or disappearance.
Holding. Counting. Reassignment.
The words did not read like history.
They read like instructions.
The same words appeared again and again.
That was when the pattern inside the hospital became clear.
They were not haunting it like owners.
They did not move like something lost.
They moved like they were assigned to be there.
The Door That Should Not Exist
The spirits in the corridors did not rage. They waited in line. They sat. They waited outside of sealed rooms, dark theaters, and elevators that moved too slowly between floors. They behaved like patients because the building had taught them to.
Wei Jun, lying between sleep and death in Room 713, had become a door.
Mabel fully understood this one night when she entered his room and found the chair occupied.
Not by a shadow this time.
It was a woman with wet hair and a face marked by old impact bruising. Her clothes were road-dark and clung to her skin. She sat with one hand in her lap and the other resting lightly on the bedrail. She watched Wei Jun.
Mabel thought at once that it was the same woman from the accident.
The one he had left behind.
The woman looked at Mabel and spoke in a tired, level voice.
“Now, he hears the road every night,” she said. “But… I am not the only one here.”
Then she lifted her chin toward the doorway.
The hall beyond was full of waiting figures.
The Ones Who Refused
First, Mabel tried priests. Then, she tried a temple medium. Then, she tried a bomoh recommended by one of the kitchen staff. Next, she tried a man who called himself a spiritual engineer and charged her before listening to her.
None of them would continue once they learned which hospital it was.
One never returned from the restroom after seeing the elevator display change floors by itself.
Another stood outside room 713, closed his eyes, and said, “No, this place is already arranged.”
Madam Ong was the last one and finally explained the difference.
“A haunting is one house, one death, one wound,” she said. “This is administration.”
She was small, stern, and smelled faintly of sandalwood and mothballs. She asked for the oldest floor plans, a basin of clean water, rice, joss paper, salt, thread, and the names of every wing built over the original ground. Madam Ong refused to enter before midnight and told Mabel that the ritual would not clear everyone.
“Some are trapped,” said Madam Ong. “Some are attached. Some do not trust release. After too long, waiting becomes identity.”
At 2:13 a.m., they began.
Madam Ong walked the corridor outside of room 713 with a brass bell in one hand and a strip of red thread in the other. She called softly for the forgotten to step forward. Salt lines were poured at each junction. Joss ash darkened the basin water. The air grew so cold that Mabel’s teeth hurt.
Then, the doors along the ward began to open by themselves.
Patients slept through it. The machines held steady. But the corridor filled.
Not charging. They weren’t screaming.
They came forward the way the sick come forward when they believe their turn has finally come.
The Release Route
What happened next did not feel violent. It felt procedural.
Madam Ong stood in the elevator lobby and called out names from the old records that Mabel had pieced together. Where names were missing, she called out roles: porter, daughter, orderly, prisoner, driver, and child. One by one, the figures crossed the salt lines and disappeared like breath on a windowpane.
The service elevator opened to a brightness that no electrical bulb in the hospital could match.
For a moment, Mabel saw them clearly: starving men in work clothes, nurses from another era, patients in outdated gowns, a boy wearing one shoe, the barefoot morgue attendant, and the little girl from pediatrics. Their faces were not peaceful. Peace would have been too neat. They were merely less burdened, as if a weight had finally shifted from one shoulder.
They entered the light in silence.
The overload alarm never sounded.
Then the brightness thinned.
The corridor emptied.
The temperature rose.
Mabel turned toward Room 713, already knowing.
The chair was still occupied.
The road woman sat where she always sat, her damp hair falling across her cheek. Her gaze was fixed on Wei Jun.
Behind her, reflected in the dark window, Mabel saw a second figure standing near the bed—a soldier in a worn uniform with a hollow chest and a calm face. He placed one hand on Wei Jun’s shoulder, neither cruelly nor kindly, but with the familiarity of a claim.
Madam Ong stopped beside her.
“I told you,” she said. “Some choose to stay.”
“The woman?”
“She is waiting for him.”
“And the other one?”
Madam Ong’s face hardened. “That one was waiting long before your patient arrived.”
Wei Jun’s monitor gave a slow, steady beep.
Not failing. Not improving.
Just continuing.
The Last Occupied Chair
Mabel requested a transfer after the ritual. The administration approved it too quickly. She later discovered that her employee file showed six months assigned to 713, even though she had only worked there nine nights.
No one corrected it.
Weeks passed. The hospital felt lighter, though it was never clean. Certain corridors no longer pressed against her skin. The service elevator behaved like a machine again. Staff began sitting near Room 713, even though it had once seemed impossible.
But the room was never truly empty.
Sometimes Mabel visited on purpose. Other times, she told herself she was only passing by.
Wei Jun remained unconscious, his face pale and his body still, as if he had taken the wrong road somewhere inside himself and could not yet turn back.
The chair beside him was always in the same place.
Most nights, it looked empty.
Not all nights, though.
Once, near dawn, Mabel stood outside the half-open door and saw the Road Woman seated there with her hands folded, as patient as rain. She did not look angry. Nor did she look merciful. She only looked certain.
On another night, Mabel saw a uniformed man standing at the window behind her reflection. One of his hands was pressed against the glass as if he were listening to the ground beneath the hospital.
Then, they were both gone.
Mabel never entered after 2:13 a.m. again.
A Hospital that Keeps Track
Years later, new nurses still traded stories about the hospital in hushed tones at the station. They said it was fine now. Much better than before.
The hospital had not emptied.
It had only learned to hide it better.
Only one room was still obvious after midnight. Only one chair still creaked when no one was touching it.
Sometimes, if a nurse checked on Wei Jun during the darkest part of the shift, they would find that the chart had been turned to the next page.
as if someone beside the bed had been keeping watch.
and keeping count.
Related Stories
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Long before Mabel stood beside her brother’s hospital bed, she had already heard the dead wait in silence.
When Ryan jokes about a rider lost on a rain-soaked hill road, Mabel is forced to face a different haunting—one that follows him home and keeps crawling.
