Night Frequency: Halloween Special

The rain had started long before they reached Weston and showed no intention of stopping. It was not a cinematic storm, nor one of those violent downpours from horror movies. It was worse. A thin, constant, sticky rain that turned the road into a long strip of tired gray.

Mason drove with one hand on the wheel and the other holding his phone.

“Listen to me. If this works, we’re not just uploading the livestream. We cut a documentary, short clips, TikToks, reaction videos… this place could give us content for months.”

“You sound like a digital organ trafficker,” Zoe muttered from the back seat.

Ivy laughed without taking her eyes off her screen. She had spent the last ten minutes filming herself reflected in the fogged-up window.

“You literally think about metrics in your sleep,” she added with a grin.

“Because metrics pay rent,” Mason shot back.

Caleb never looked up from his tablet.

“Technically, this place already has a pretty well-documented history of audio anomalies.”

Zoe let out a heavy sigh.

“Please, Caleb, don’t start yet with your military frequencies and government-sponsored ghosts.”

“I didn’t say ghosts. I said anomalies.”

“In your language, that’s the same thing,” Zoe replied, exhausted.

Mason smiled.

“That’s why I invited him.”

“No. You invited him because he has two million followers who watch videos titled ‘The CIA Hid Demons Inside a Toaster’ and believe them.”

“It was a microwave,” Caleb corrected with absolute seriousness.

Ivy burst out laughing as she snapped another selfie.

The GPS announced their arrival just as the building emerged through the rain.

For a few seconds, nobody spoke.

The Trans-Allegheny Lunatic Asylum rose from the darkness like a sick old city, all endless windows and wet stone, its towers half-hidden behind low fog.

It looked too large to contain anything human inside.

“Holy shit…” Ivy murmured, finally lowering her phone.

It was probably the most sincere reaction of the night.

Mason smiled almost immediately.

“Okay. This is going to pull disgusting numbers.”

The main entrance was lit by yellow floodlights. There were still cars parked outside, a maintenance van, and lights glowing in several windows. Somehow that made the place even stranger. It was not abandoned. It still functioned in some minimal, bureaucratic way, as if the building refused to die completely.

A woman in a green raincoat waited for them beneath the porch.

“The podcast group?”

Mason stepped out of the car first, already wearing his presenter smile.

“I hope we’re late for the ritual murders.”

The woman did not smile back.

“You’re the third paranormal investigation team this month.”

“And probably the best-looking one,” Mason added.

She glanced over his shoulder toward the others without answering.

Ivy laughed.

Zoe gave the faintest smile.

Caleb, meanwhile, kept staring at the building, especially the windows, as though he were counting them.

The woman introduced herself as Dana while leading them inside.

The sound of her footsteps echoed strangely through the corridors, as though the building took too long to return the sound.

From the outside, the asylum had looked like a gigantic ruin; inside, it still carried the impersonal cleanliness of a historical building open to visitors. Even so, something in the air felt wrong. Maybe the size of the place. Or the absolute silence.

They passed several heavy metal doors before reaching an old group therapy room converted into a space for overnight events.

“All right, this will be your base,” Dana said. “You have electricity here and partial reception. Partial means partial. There are areas where you won’t get signal even if you pray to God.”

“Perfect for a livestream,” Zoe muttered.

Mason was already inspecting the room with a producer’s eye.

“Not bad. It’s got atmosphere.”

“That’s usually what people say right before regretting everything in horror movies,” Zoe added.

Ivy barely listened. She was slowly filming the ceiling with her phone.

“Oh, this looks incredible… it’s like Silent Hill with state funding.”

Dana ignored the comments.

“There are restricted areas. Doors marked in red stay closed. Don’t use the old elevators. And if you hear fire alarms, they’re probably false alarms. The system’s old.”

“‘Probably’?” Zoe asked, arching an eyebrow.

“Welcome to West Virginia.”

Caleb continued scanning the place with excessive focus.

“Is the tunnel thing true?”

Dana sighed with professional exhaustion.

“Yes. There are tunnels. Yes, there were patients. Yes, people died here. Yes, the internet exaggerates ninety percent of the stories.”

“And the other ten?” Caleb asked immediately.

She looked at him for a few seconds.

“The other ten percent is why you people keep coming here.”

Mason grinned.

“That’s going straight into the teaser.”

Dana placed a radio on the table beside a flashlight and a sheet of emergency numbers.

“One last thing,” she said, pointing at the radio. “The night staff leaves at ten thirty. If something real happens, you use this to contact us. After that, you’re alone here until six in the morning. The doors stay locked.”

Ivy stopped recording for the first time.

“Wait. Alone alone?”

“Alone.”

Dana looked at each of them in turn.

“You still have time to cancel. Most teams don’t make it through the night. Some leave after two hours.”

Zoe crossed her arms.

“Because they’re scared, or because this is an old building full of drafts and suggestible people?”

Dana gave a slight shrug.

“Depends who you ask.”

Before leaving, she paused by the door.

“Try not to split up too much.”

“That sounded way worse than you intended,” Zoe replied.

Dana opened her mouth as if she were about to add something else, but in the end she simply shook her head.

“Good night.”

The metal door slammed shut with a heavy clang that echoed through the hallway for several seconds.

Then Mason imitated the deep voice of a horror trailer narrator.

“Try not to split up too much…”

Ivy immediately started laughing.

“I swear these people take classes on how to sound creepy.”

“…but the gift shop opens at nine,” Zoe added.

Caleb kept staring at the door Dana had disappeared through.

“She was genuinely worried.”

“Of course she was,” Zoe said. “If we die in here they shut the place down.”

Caleb slowly shook his head.

“That’s not what I mean. She sounded more like someone locking other people inside a place she doesn’t like herself.”

They all glanced at each other, and a brief silence settled over the room. Small. Uncomfortable.

They got to work, and little by little the old therapy room stopped looking abandoned and started looking familiar: an internet set. Cables. Battery packs. Small suspended microphones. Coffee thermoses.

The contrast with the building around them felt almost ridiculous.

“I need something behind you guys,” Ivy said, staring at the monitor. “Right now it looks like a finance podcast about depressed cryptocurrency traders.”

“You want a rusty wheelchair or a Victorian corpse?” Zoe asked.

“Both would get engagement.”

Caleb was arranging small digital recorders across the table.

“Laugh all you want. EVPs work better with multiple recording sources.”

“Caleb, we’ve been here twenty minutes and you’ve already said EVP four times.”

“Because you’re all culturally asleep.”

Mason dropped into a chair and tested the microphone.

“Check, check… welcome to the Halloween special of Night Frequency…”

Three brutal knocks exploded against the door.

Everyone jumped.

The sound was so sudden and violent that Ivy let out a strangled yelp while the camera shook in her hands.

For a moment nobody moved.

Then came two more knocks, even faster.

“Mason! Open the damn door already!”

Mason exhaled in nervous laughter.

“Jesus… Jesus… It’s Matt. He was driving in from Pittsburgh.”

Mason opened the door.

Matt appeared soaked from the rain, breathing hard, a backpack hanging from one shoulder. He was the kind of person who entered a room already talking. Tall, messy, carrying the restless energy of someone physically incapable of staying quiet for long.

“Do you know how impossible this place is to find at night?” He dropped the backpack onto the floor. “The GPS literally sent me into a forest.”

“You arrived just in time to give Ivy a heart attack.”

“Free content.”

Matt looked around with a widening grin.

“Holy shit… this place really is creepy.”

For the first time since they arrived, Mason seemed uncertain for a second.

Because Matt was not looking at the room.

He was staring at the dark hallway behind them.

As though he had seen movement there just before coming in.

Mason sat back down in front of the microphone. The scare had left behind a strange energy in the room, a small tension everyone tried to bury by talking louder than normal. Outside, the building continued creaking now and then. Old pipes. Expanding metal. Or maybe simply a place too large settling into the night.

“Ready?”

Ivy raised a thumb from behind the camera.

“Going live in three… two… one…”

The red recording light switched on.

Everyone smiled automatically. That learned internet reflex.

Mason leaned his arms onto the table.

“Good evening, everyone. Welcome to the Halloween special of Night Frequency.

Tonight, we are broadcasting live from the Trans-Allegheny Lunatic Asylum in West Virginia, considered by many one of the most haunted locations in the United States.”

“It’s almost eleven at night,” he continued. “The staff has just left the building and, until six in the morning, we are completely alone in here.”

“Which already sounds objectively stupid,” Zoe added.

“Mason, you would sell your own mother for engagement,” Ivy said.

“Only if the CPM was good,” he replied.

“The building originally opened in 1864 and eventually housed thousands of patients beyond its intended capacity,” Caleb cut in. “There are records of extreme treatments, prolonged isolation, and—”

“And an obscene amount of internet conspiracy theories,” Zoe interrupted.

“The tunnels are real.”

“Every large building has tunnels, Caleb.”

While they argued, Ivy kept glancing distractedly at the monitor, still smiling.

Then her expression tightened slightly.

“Uh… Mason.”

“What?”

She stared at the screen for another few seconds.

“Nothing. I thought I saw someone moving in the background.”

Everyone automatically looked toward the dark hallway behind them.

Empty.

Matt raised a hand from beside the wall.

“It’s me. The sexy ghost of the third floor.”

The laughter returned immediately.

But Ivy kept staring at the monitor for another second before finally looking away.

Matt walked past her and noticed her expression.

“Hey. You okay?”

Ivy took a moment before answering.

“Yeah.”

She was a terrible liar.

“What did you see?”

She hesitated. She did not want to say it out loud because it sounded stupid even inside her own head.

“I thought there was someone standing in the hallway. It didn’t look like a reflection.”

Matt gave a small laugh.

“Your brain does weird things in places like this.”

Ivy swallowed hard without taking her eyes off the monitor.

“I saw a face.”

Matt stopped smiling completely.

Ivy looked back toward the real hallway. Empty. Then back to the monitor. Empty again.

And still she had that horrible feeling that something had been standing there only seconds ago. Not a quick shadow. Someone still.

Watching them.

And there had been something worse than the face itself.

For that brief instant before disappearing from the frame, the person had seemed to smile at her.

Ivy glanced sideways at the livestream chat. Messages were racing upward.

THIS PLACE IS HUGE

nah this is fake as hell

THE GIRL LOOKS TERRIFIED

bro behind them??

did anyone else see that???

A chill ran through her.

She read the message again.

bro behind them??

Slowly, she lifted her eyes toward the hallway.

Empty.

She discreetly turned the chat monitor toward Matt.

Matt read the comment and gave a faint smile.

“Well… now you definitely can’t say it out loud,” he whispered.

“Shut up.”

“Caleb, tell them the third-floor story. The nurse one,” Mason said.

“The official version or the one erased from public records in 1987?”

Zoe dropped her head back dramatically.

“My God. I came to a podcast hosted by an engagement addict and a man who thinks filing cabinets are conspiring against him personally.”

Matt laughed from the back of the room, but Ivy did not. She kept staring at the laptop screen, distracted, fingers motionless on the table.

Mason was the first to notice.

“What now?”

Ivy slowly looked up.

“There’s something I never told you.”

Mason smiled automatically.

“Please tell me it’s a family curse. We need narrative.”

“I’m serious.”

The tone in her voice made Mason’s smile fade slightly.

“When you suggested coming here, I started researching the place. My grandfather’s family is from West Virginia. I wanted to see if there was any weird connection.”

Caleb was already staring at her with complete focus.

“And there was.”

Ivy nodded slowly.

“I had an ancestor who worked here. A doctor. I found old digitized records. The surname matches, and there were photographs.”

Zoe crossed her arms.

“What time period?”

“Late nineteenth century. Early twentieth.”

Caleb was already searching through something on his tablet.

“Name.”

“Ira Whitmore.”

The silence lasted barely a second.

Then Caleb slowly lifted his eyes from the screen. For the first time since arriving, he looked genuinely disturbed.

“That’s impossible.”

“I’m not joking.”

Caleb slowly turned the tablet toward them.

On the screen was an old photograph of the asylum staff. Blurry. Yellowed. A line of men in dark suits standing in front of the building.

And one of them had exactly the same smile Ivy had seen on the monitor.

Ivy looked at the photograph for barely a second before freezing completely.

The expression drained from her face.

“That man…”

Nobody spoke.

Ivy slowly raised a hand toward the screen.

“That’s the person I just saw in the hallway.”

The atmosphere changed instantly, in that uncomfortable way conversations do when they stop being fun and nobody knows how to react anymore.

“I’m serious. I swear I’d never seen this damn photo before.”

Caleb zoomed in with his fingers. The man stood in the second row. Thin. Dark suit. Calm expression. And a small, discreet, almost kind smile.

The same smile.

“It was him.”

For the first time since the livestream started, none of them seemed interested in the chat, the views, or the metrics anymore.

The room suddenly felt much larger.

Then Matt’s coffee thermos tipped over by itself.

The metallic noise echoed through the room as it rolled across the floor toward the darkness at the back.

Everyone jumped.

“Well, great,” Mason said, trying to calm his own nerves. “Now we’ve got a Starbucks-sponsored ghost.”

Matt remained perfectly still, staring at the thermos as it kept rolling.

“I didn’t touch that. I haven’t touched it since I took it out of my backpack.”

“That wasn’t a normal fall,” Caleb muttered.

“Oh, come on, don’t start,” Zoe said, though her voice no longer sounded confident.

Ivy kept staring into the darkness at the back of the room. The thermos had not tipped sideways; she had seen it launch forward.

Then she felt something icy brush against her arm.

She jumped violently and screamed, the sound echoing through the entire room.

“Jesus Christ!”

Everyone turned toward her instantly.

“What now?” Mason asked.

Ivy grabbed her arm with her other hand. She was breathing fast, as though she could not get enough air.

“Something touched me. Right here.”

“We’re all nervous, it’s cold, we’re suggestible—” Zoe started.

But Ivy shook her head violently, eyes wide.

“No. It wasn’t that.”

She pulled her hand away from her arm and they all saw the skin beginning to change color.

First it turned pale.

Then a strange bluish whiteness spread outward from the exact spot where she had been touched, as though the cold were moving beneath her skin.

Ivy gasped and rubbed at her forearm, but it did nothing.

“It’s freezing,” she whispered.

The skin was hardening beneath her fingers. It was not just cold. It was a slow, unnatural stiffness, as though the arm were dying from the inside out.

They stood there speechless while the livestream continued.

On the laptop screen, the chat began moving at an impossible speed.

GET OUT

GET OUT

GET OUT

GET OUT

Zoe was the first to react, jumping to her feet.

“We’re leaving.”

“Yes,” Matt said. “Right now.”

He began throwing equipment together in panic.

Mason looked at Ivy’s arm, then at the phones still recording, then at the door.

For once, he made no calculations.

“Shut the stream down.”

Ivy slowly shook her head, eyes fixed on the screen.

“I can’t.”

“What do you mean you can’t?” Caleb asked.

Ivy swallowed hard. Her fingers barely obeyed her anymore.

“My arm…” she said, voice breaking. “I can barely feel it.”

Zoe, Caleb, and Matt moved toward her to help.

Mason tried to move too, but couldn’t.

Something cold had wrapped itself around his leg.

It was not a brush against him. Not a draft.

It was gripping him.

From the livestream laptop, delayed by one second, Dana’s distorted voice echoed through the speakers.

“Try not to split up too much.”