The Elevator



In a dilapidated office building somewhere in Connecticut is one of the few elevators in the Western world that has a button labeled ’13′ amongst its choices of floors. If you enter after midnight, crawling through the loosely boarded up window on the South side of the building, you will find the elevator doors standing open, with soft fluorescent lighting and music spilling from it, even though nothing else in the whole of the building seems to have power.

You can, if you choose, pick through the debris of raucous teenage parties and office meetings past. The path seems to be mostly cleared through the broken, dirty, stained and vintage office furniture and burned out joints, cigarettes and crushed beer cans, all the way to the light in the door.

All of the buttons work in the elevator, and will take you to its designated floor–despite the creaking of the cables–though there seems to be a layer of grime on their plastic covers. All but the button labeled ’13′, which seems to glow brightly.

No one’s quite sure if that one goes to the thirteenth floor. But there’s a story about a group of high school teenagers who had a party after their prom there, in the early nineties. A dare was made, and four of them piled into the rickety elevator, taking it to the thirteenth floor.

When they came back down again, they were pale and shaking, but all of them swore they’d seen nothing more than a normal office floor, covered in dust and shadows. Two of them died in an accident on the car ride home that night.

Another, three weeks later, took a bottle of pills from the medicine cabinet, climbed into a hot bath, slit her wrists and dropped her hair dryer into the water with her. The fourth disappeared from the face of the planet two months later. None of them said anything of what they’d seen on the thirteenth level of the building, and when asked, would only ascertain (loudly, if necessary) that nothing had happened.

But you can, if you so choose, crawl in through the window and see for yourself.