The Cistern Choir

In the autumn of 2014, my partner Lena and I were the last active members of the Cascade County Paranormal Society. After a string of failed investigations, we were desperate for a breakthrough. So when our old friend Marcus, a sensitive with a history of childhood near-death experiences, offered his services, we jumped at the chance. Our destination was the abandoned Bramblewick Sanatorium, a crumbling tuberculosis hospital perched on a hillside overlooking a fog-choked valley. The place had a reputation for whispers in the walls and cold spots in the morgue, but we weren’t prepared for what awaited us.

We set up our equipment in the sunken courtyard at the center of the main building, where a decaying fountain stood like a skeletal monument. The only light came from our flashlights, splitting the dense darkness. We began an EVP session, asking generic questions about the spirits that were said to linger there. For nearly an hour, we got nothing but static and the occasional creak of settling timbers. Frustration gnawed at me, and I decided to single out a name that had come up in the old hospital records: a nurse named Elsie Vance, who had disappeared in 1932 under mysterious circumstances. I called out her name, my voice echoing off the wet stone walls.

‘Elsie Vance, are you with us tonight? If you are, give us a sign.’

Silence. Lena adjusted the recorder, and Marcus closed his eyes, swaying slightly. Then, a sound emerged from the darkness: a low, rhythmic dripping, like water falling into a deep well. We all froze. The dripping was coming from the fountain, though we had seen it bone-dry. As we listened, the dripping began to synchronize into a pattern, a sort of heartbeat. Marcus gasped, his face pale. ‘She’s here,’ he whispered. ‘And she’s not alone.’

The dripping began to take on a melodic quality, rising and falling like a distant chant. We aimed our recorders toward the fountain, and when we played back the audio, we heard something that made my blood run cold: dozens of voices, layered on top of each other, singing in a language none of us recognized. But it wasn’t the song itself that terrified us; it was the emotion behind it—a profound, ancient grief that seemed to seep into our bones. Lena’s hand trembled as she clutched the recorder. ‘What is this?’ she asked, her voice barely a whisper.

Marcus stumbled backward, his eyes wide. ‘They’re not spirits,’ he said, his voice cracking. ‘They’re something else. Something that’s been here longer than the hospital. They’re drawn to the suffering, to the death. They feed on it.’ As he spoke, the singing grew louder, and we noticed that our equipment was starting to fail. The lights flickered, the meters on our EMF detectors spun wildly, and the air grew thick and cold, as if we were breathing underwater. I looked at Lena, and I could see the same terror reflected in her eyes that I felt in my chest.

We tried to communicate, to ask the voices to identify themselves, but they only responded with more singing, more weeping. Then, without warning, Marcus fell to his knees, clutching his head. ‘They’re showing me something,’ he said, his voice distorted, as if he were speaking through a throat full of phlegm. ‘They’re showing me the cistern. Under the hospital. They’re all down there. They’ve been down there for decades. The patients who died, the staff who vanished, even the ones who were buried in the unmarked graves. They’re all there, trapped in the dark, singing to keep each other company.’

We decided to investigate the cistern. The entrance was a rusted iron grate in the old maintenance shed, hidden behind overgrown ivy. We pried it open and descended a narrow ladder into a vast, echoing chamber. The smell hit us first: damp earth and rot, but underneath it, something else—a sweetness, like rotting flowers. Our flashlights revealed a shallow pool of black water that stretched into the darkness. The singing was louder here, but it wasn’t just in the air; it seemed to be coming from the water itself, as if the water were alive with voices. I knelt at the edge and dipped my hand in, and the water was cold, impossibly cold, and thick like syrup.

As I pulled my hand back, the water rippled, and for a moment, I saw faces in the blackness—pale, bloated, their mouths open in silent screams. Lena let out a choked sob, and Marcus began to convulse, his eyes rolling back in his head. I grabbed his shoulders and shook him, trying to bring him back, but he spoke in a voice that was not his own: a chorus of whispers, both old and young, male and female, all speaking in unison. ‘You should not have come. You should not have listened. Now you must stay and sing with us.’

We fled. We scrambled up the ladder, leaving all our equipment behind. We didn’t stop running until we were in the car, the engine roaring as we sped away from Bramblewick. But even then, we could hear the singing, faint but persistent, coming from the back seat, from the radio, from inside our own heads. We didn’t speak for the entire drive home. When we finally stopped, we looked at each other with haunted eyes. We never returned to Bramblewick. We never spoke of what we witnessed. But sometimes, in the quiet hours of the night, when I’m alone and the house is still, I hear it again: the singing, rising from the darkness, inviting me to join the choir of the lost.