The Last Sycamore

The Marwick State Asylum for the Indigent sat on a windswept hill above the town of Gray’s Landing, a place where the sycamore trees along the river had been stripped bare by decades of acid rain. The building, a hulking red-brick monolith erected in 1923, was meant to replace the condemned poorhouse that had stood on the same land since the 1860s. But the new walls were just a veneer over the same old rot. When the asylum finally closed in 1987, the state washed its hands of it, leaving behind a mountain of paperwork, a few abandoned gurneys, and a history of misery that clung to the plaster like damp.

Our team, the Gray’s Landing Paranormal Society, had been granted access for a long-awaited investigation. We arrived on a gray October afternoon, the sky a uniform slate, the air heavy with the smell of wet leaves and something else—a faint, sweet odor, like overripe fruit, that seemed to emanate from the building itself. Our technical director, Maya, noted it immediately. ‘That’s not decay,’ she said, pressing a hand to the metal door. ‘It’s more like… fermentation.’

The building was vast. Four floors, a basement, and an attic that ran the entire length of the roof. We set up our base camp in the old admissions office, its green linoleum floor cracked and peeling. The walls were covered in a patina of grime, and the windows were so filthy that the light barely penetrated. The energy was palpable, as everyone had promised. It was like walking into a held breath. You could feel the weight of expectation, the sense of being watched from every angle. But it wasn’t the queasy, heart-pounding feeling of fear. It was a cold, patient observation, as if we were the intruders in a place that had never truly been abandoned.

Our plan was to do a systematic sweep, starting with the basement and working our way up. I was on point with Liam, our audio specialist. As we descended the stairs, the temperature dropped sharply. My breath condensed. The air was thick with the smell of wet soil and something metallic. The basement was a warren of small, windowless rooms, each with a heavy wooden door, each with a small, barred window. It was used for solitary confinement, but the records we’d unearthed showed that ‘solitary’ often meant indefinite. The walls were lined with padded cells, their stuffing leaking out like gray intestines.

We entered the third room on the left. Inside, the stillness was absolute. Liam’s recorder was the only sound, a soft hiss of tape. He was about to speak when we both heard it: a faint, rhythmic scratch, as if something was being dragged across the floor above us. The sound moved from one corner of the room to the other, then stopped. Liam’s eyes widened. ‘That wasn’t us,’ he whispered.

We went upstairs to investigate. The second floor held patient dormitories, long rows of iron beds, their mattresses stained with old moisture. The smell was stronger here, the sweet rot more pronounced. It seemed to come from the end of the hall, where a single door stood ajar. We approached it slowly. Behind it was a small room, perhaps a nurse’s station, with a desk and a wall of pigeonholes for patient files. The bottom drawer of the desk was slightly open. Inside, we found a leather-bound journal, its pages yellowed and brittle.

It belonged to a Dr. Elias Thorne, who had been the facility’s superintendent from 1954 until his death in 1971. The entries were mostly clinical notes, but as we flipped through, we found a recurring theme: ‘The tree knows,’ he had written in a cramped, hurried script. ‘It has always known. We must cultivate it, or it will keep taking them.’ The last entry, dated the day before his death, read: ‘The roots have reached my study. I can hear them moving. It is not too late, but soon—’

We looked up, and at the far end of the hall, we saw a figure. It was the silhouette of a tall, gaunt woman, with long hair that hung past her waist. She stood perfectly still, arms at her sides. ‘Who’s there?’ I called. The figure did not respond. It simply faded, like a wisp of smoke caught in a draft, leaving behind only the changed quality of the air. Maya, who had joined us, felt a sudden heat wave, as if a furnace had been turned on. ‘It’s coming from the attic,’ she said.

The attic stairs were narrow and creaked under our weight. The attic was a single large room, dimly lit by one bare bulb swaying slightly, though there was no wind. The floor was layered with dust and debris, but in the center, there was a patch of perfectly clean, polished wood. And there, growing up through an old vent, was a great, gnarled sycamore tree. It was huge, its branchy limbs pressing against the roof, its roots burrowing into the floorboards. It was alive, but sickly. Its bark was covered in weeping sores that oozed a thick, amber resin. The sweet, sickly smell was overwhelmingly here—it was the tree.

Beneath the tree, the wooden floor had been worn smooth by something pacing. There were strange, linear gouges in the wood, as if something had been dragged back and forth countless times. On one of the walls, someone had scratched a message in a language none of us recognized. As we stood there, transfixed, the tree seemed to shift slightly. The sound was like old bones grinding together. A low moan began to emanate from its trunk, a sound that was almost vocal.

We backed away, but Liam was frozen, his eyes wide. ‘I can hear them,’ he said, his voice trembling. ‘All of them. They’re inside the tree.’ We grabbed him, pulling him back down the stairs. As we reached the second floor, we heard a deafening crack, as if a branch had snapped, and the entire building seemed to shudder.

We didn’t wait. We grabbed our equipment and fled into the cold, gray afternoon. As we stumbled down the front steps, we all looked back. In the attic window, we saw a face—the gaunt woman—pressed against the glass. But there was something else. Behind her, the massive limbs of the sycamore were slowly curling, as if they were reaching out, enveloping the window in a final, grasping embrace.

We were safe outside, but the feeling of being watched only intensified. That night, we received the first of the calls. Doctor Thorne’s journal had ended with a name: ‘Maura.’ We found no record of a patient named Maura, but in the asylum’s death certificate files, we found a single entry, dated 1963, describing the death of a young woman who had been found ‘entangled in the roots of the sycamore outside the attic vent.’ She had been there for weeks before anyone noticed. Now, she was there again, and the tree was finally coming for the rest of us.

The calls were silent, but we could hear breathing on the other end. And static, and an occasional word: ‘Come back.’ Some of us have returned since then, driven by a strange compulsion. But none of them have reported anything. They simply stopped communicating. The last thing we received from Maya was a single photograph, sent at 3 AM. It shows the attic, and the sycamore, its limbs now grown through the broken vent, its bark glistening with a fresh, dark sap. In the bark, if you look closely, you can see the shape of a face—not the woman’s, but something older, more patient. And you can see a hand, reaching out from the trunk, palm up, as if inviting us back to stay.