The Hollow Mart

Three years ago, when I was a junior in high school, my cousin Derek and our friend Maya dared me to sneak into the old Meridian Mall on Route 9. It had been abandoned since the late ’90s after a string of strange incidents and a fatal robbery that left a security guard dead. The place was a local legend, and we were bored on a hot August night, looking for a thrill.

We slipped through a broken loading dock door, our flashlights cutting through the thick, dusty air. The food court was a graveyard of overturned tables and faded logos. Derek laughed, trying to mask his nerves, and kicked a stray cup. Maya kept close to me, her hand gripping my sleeve. We’d been inside for maybe fifteen minutes, exploring the old department store, when we heard it—a low, mournful moan that echoed through the empty corridors. We froze, hearts pounding. Then a scream, sharp and terrified, rang out from somewhere above us. We grabbed each other, ready to bolt, but then came the gunshots—three rapid pops, so loud they seemed to shake the walls.

We tore out of there, stumbling over debris, and burst through the loading dock into the night. I called 911, my hands shaking, and within minutes two squad cars arrived. The officers searched the mall, but found nothing—no blood, no shell casings, no signs of anyone. They wrote us off as kids pulling a prank and cited us for trespassing. As they led us to their cars, one of them muttered that we were lucky it wasn’t worse, that the place had a bad history. We thought it was just a story until we started digging.

The Meridian Mall opened in 1985. In ’89, a night security guard named Earl Watkins was murdered during a botched robbery. The killer was never caught. What we found in old news archives chilled us more than any ghost story: over the years, several people had reported hearing screams and gunshots in the mall after hours, but police always found nothing. The pattern was always the same—a scream, gunfire, and silence. We realized that what we heard wasn’t random; it was a reenactment, a loop of that final violent night playing out for anyone who dared listen.

Weeks later, I couldn’t shake the feeling that something had followed us out. I started waking at 3:33 AM, the same time the mall’s recorded surveillance clock had stopped on the night of the murder. In the corner of my bedroom, I’d see a faint silhouette, tall and still, watching me. It would vanish when I turned on the light. My friends dismissed it as paranoia, but Maya admitted she’d been having nightmares—of a man in a security uniform, his face a hollow void, calling her name. Derek stopped answering our calls altogether.

The last time I saw Derek was a month after our break-in. He was driving home late on Route 9 when he swerved to avoid a deer, crashed into the mall’s parking lot fence, and was killed. At his funeral, Maya whispered to me that she’d seen the security guard in the back of the crowd, his cap tilted low, a faint smile on his lips. We never spoke of it again, but I still drive past the mall on certain nights. The windows are boarded, the signs faded, but sometimes, if the wind is just right, I hear that same scream, and then the gunshots, and I know—something in there is still waiting for its next set of trespassers.