The Incubator Ward

I’d spent six years moving through the underbelly of state corrections, shuffled between intake units, juvenile lockups, and halfway houses. When they offered me a transfer to the old Pemberton Children’s Hospital annex, I took it without thinking. The building had been repurposed as a group home for boys aged 14 to 18, and the pay was decent. I should have known better.

Pemberton had been a tuberculosis sanatorium for kids in the 1920s, then converted to a general pediatric hospital in the ’50s, then shuttered in the ’80s. The annex where we worked was the old incubator ward—a long, single-story structure with a row of small rooms that had once held premature infants in glass cases. The state had turned those rooms into dormitories, each holding two bunks, a desk, and a scuffed dresser. The walls were painted a shade of beige that seemed to absorb light. The air always smelled of bleach and stale wind.

On my first night, the night shift supervisor, a weathered man named Roarke, gave me the tour. He paused at the far end of the main corridor, where a heavy metal door led to the old ‘isolation’ wing. ‘We keep that locked,’ he said. ‘It’s not in use. But sometimes you’ll hear things back there. Don’t investigate. Just call maintenance.’ He laughed as if he’d made a joke, but his eyes were serious. ‘You’ll also find the boys are restless. They say the building is haunted.’ He told me that on Halloween three years ago, a resident had hung himself in the supply closet. The suicide was written off as a tragic accident, but the boys came up with their own theories. I didn’t dismiss them.

My shift ran from 11 p.m. to 7 a.m. The boys—eight of them, ranging from 14 to 17—were all asleep by midnight, under heavy sedatives if needed. The night was quiet except for the hum of the ventilation system and the occasional creak of the building settling. Around 2 a.m., I decided to do a walkthrough. I carried a flashlight, though the hallways were dimly lit by low-wattage bulbs. As I passed Room 4, I heard a faint crying. The boys were not allowed to leave their rooms after lights out, and crying wasn’t uncommon, but this sounded different—younger, thinner, almost like a kitten. I opened the door slowly. The two boys in that room were dead asleep, one snoring, the other with his arm thrown over his face. The crying stopped when I stepped inside. I chalked it up to the wind.

A few nights later, I was sitting in the staff office—a small room with a window overlooking the courtyard—when the phone rang. It was 1:10 a.m. The line crackled. ‘Room 6 has a leak,’ said a voice I didn’t recognize. I asked who was calling, but the line went dead. I walked to Room 6. The boy there, a lanky kid with acne, was awake, sitting upright on his bunk. He looked at me, his eyes wide. ‘There’s something under my bed,’ he whispered. ‘It’s been humming all night.’ I knelt and shone the flashlight under the bed. Nothing but dust and a pair of sneakers. The humming, faint but real, seemed to come from the wall behind the headboard. I pressed my ear to the plaster. It was like a low, steady generator, but with a rhythm that mimicked a heartbeat. The boy, whose name was Marcus, said, ‘It does that every night since I got here. The other kids hear it too. But they say not to tell anyone.’ I told him to try to sleep, but I stayed in the room until the humming stopped at dawn.

The next evening, during our staff briefing, I mentioned the incident to Roarke. He grew pale. ‘That room is where the incubators were,’ he said. ‘I don’t know any more than that.’ But one of the newer counselors, a young woman named Dana, pulled me aside. She had worked at a nursing home before. ‘There’s a pattern,’ she said. ‘The boys who stay in Room 6 leave earlier than expected. They say they can’t sleep because of the ‘baby train’—the sound of wheels rolling down the hall.’ She told me that a former resident, a boy named Elijah, had drawn a picture of a row of glass boxes with tiny faces pressed against them, and he’d put it on the wall of his room. When staff removed it, he had a breakdown.

On the first night of the next week, I was doing my rounds when I saw something out of the corner of my eye. A flicker at the end of the hall, near the locked door. I walked toward it, my heart thumping. The door was slightly ajar. I knew it was supposed to be locked. I pushed it open. The corridor beyond was darker, and the air was cold, carrying the smell of antiseptic and old metal. I clicked on my flashlight. The light swept over lines of empty glass cases—dozens of them, each about two feet long, mounted on wheels, with vents and tubes. Some had stained mattresses inside. I stepped closer. One of the cases had a small, crumpled blanket. And then I heard it: the sound of tiny, pattering footsteps, like a child running, but high-pitched and frantic, coming from the far end of the room. I froze. The sound stopped. Then a voice, a child’s voice, soft and clear, said, ‘Can you see me?’

I didn’t run. I couldn’t. I stood there, paralyzed, as the footsteps grew louder, closer. The beam of my flashlight flickered, and in the darkness beyond the cases, I saw a shape—a small, hunched figure, no taller than my waist, with too-long arms and a face that seemed to be made of shadow. It was crying, not in fear, but in a kind of desperate, mechanical sobbing, like a toy playing a loop. I backed away slowly, and the moment I crossed the threshold, the door slammed shut by itself. I spent the rest of the night in the office, the lights on, the door locked. The next day, I filed a maintenance request to have the wing sealed, but the supervisor told me it was always kept locked.

The boys started to avoid me. They knew I’d seen something. Marcus, the kid from Room 6, came up to me in the common area. ‘You’re like them,’ he said, ‘the ones who hear it. They get sent away.’ I asked him what he meant. He looked around nervously. ‘There was a man here before you. He tried to help. He opened that door. They found him in the basement with a broken neck. They said he fell.’ I felt a cold sweat break out across my back. I wanted to quit right then, but something held me back. A morbid curiosity, or maybe a duty of care.

One night, I woke to the sound of metal wheels on linoleum. I was in the staff sleeping room—a converted closet with a cot. The sound was coming from the hallway. I crept to the door and peered through the crack. A procession of glass cases, empty and dark, was being pushed down the hall by small, shadowy figures. They moved in perfect silence, their feet making no sound, but the wheels creaked. They stopped in front of Room 6. The figures lifted the cases onto their shoulders—the cases were not children, they were grotesque, filled with a thick, dark liquid that sloshed—and then they all turned in my direction. They had no faces, just smooth, pale ovals. The one at the front extended a hand, beckoning me. I closed the door and pressed my back against it, my breath coming in ragged gasps. The sound of the wheels began again, fading down the hall.

At dawn, I found the door to the isolation wing open again. This time, I didn’t investigate. I wrote my resignation letter and left it on the supervisor’s desk. I drove away from Pemberton with the sun in my eyes, telling myself that I was done. But I couldn’t shake the image of those faceless figures, and the child’s voice that had asked, ‘Can you see me?’ In the weeks that followed, I had dreams of being inside one of those glass cases, my hands pressed against the cold sides, looking out at a row of other cases, each with a child inside, all of them crying in that same mechanical way.

It’s been two years. I still have the nightmares. And every time I’m in a hospital or a place with fluorescent lights, I get a phantom sensation of being watched. I never went back to the group home. I never learned what happened to Marcus or the other boys. But sometimes, late at night, I hear the sound of wheels on a hard floor, even though I live in a house on a carpeted street. And I know that the incubator ward is not done with me. The children it once held are still there, waiting. And they want me to see them—to truly see them—and never be able to unsee.