The Red Door Incident

I never believed in ghosts until I started working as a night orderly at Saint Dymphna’s, a behavioral health facility tucked in the pine woods of northern Maine. The place had a reputation, but I figured it was just old buildings and overactive imaginations. My name is Lena, and I’m a medium, though I kept that to myself. The staff knew I was ‘sensitive’, but I downplayed it. The stories I could tell about the things that brushed past me in those halls… but the last night changed everything.

It was a Tuesday, unusually quiet. The residents—women in recovery—were calm, almost eerily so. The usual tension was absent. I was in the common room, watching the clock, when the charge nurse burst in. ‘Lena, we’re getting thirty transfers from the county facility tonight. We need to prep the east wing.’ My heart sank. East wing was old, drafty, and rumored to be the source of most of the weirdness. But I grabbed my keys and got to work.

By the time the buses arrived, it was dusk. The new arrivals were loud, angry, kicking at doors, shouting obscenities. Ten were assigned to my hall, and it was chaos. They refused to settle, demanded phones, threatened to leave. I tried to calm them, but my skin was crawling. There was a heaviness in the air, like a storm about to break. One girl, red-faced with fury, got in my face and screamed, ‘You think you can keep us here? You’re the prisoner, not us!’ Her eyes locked on mine, and for a flash, I saw something else behind them—a cold, abyssal blackness. I dismissed it as stress.

By five, we herded them into the common room for television. I stood by the door, watching the clock, when a cold draft swept through the room. The lights flickered. The TV static hissed. The girls went silent, staring at the screen. Then, all at once, they turned their heads to me—a synchronized motion that made my blood freeze. That red-faced girl stood up, her expression blank, and walked toward me. She didn’t blink. The others remained frozen.

She stopped inches from me. ‘You see us, don’t you?’ Her voice was flat, but layered with a thousand whispers. I tried to step back, but my body wouldn’t move. She smiled, and it was wrong—too wide, teeth too sharp. ‘We’ve been waiting.’ Then she lunged, and I felt a pressure, a tearing, as if my very soul was being ripped from its moorings. My vision went white, then red.

When I came to, I was on my hands and knees, my throat raw from screaming. The girls were huddled against the walls, some sobbing, others laughing hysterically. The red-faced girl was curled in a corner, shivering, looking terrified. She looked at me and whispered, ‘What happened? I don’t remember.’ But I knew. Something had used her as a doorway, and it was still inside me, a cold weight in my chest. For the next few days, I felt its presence, whispering from within, trying to take control. I fought it, but it was exhausting.

The third day, I was in the supply closet, and I saw myself in the mirror—but my reflection was wrong. It moved independently, grinning at me. It reached out and pressed a hand to the glass, leaving a red smear that wasn’t on my real hand. I stumbled back, and the mirror shattered. When the other staff came, they found me shaking, holding a shard, my palm bleeding. They thought I’d had a breakdown. They sent me home.

I never went back to Saint Dymphna’s. But the thing didn’t stay behind. It’s with me still, a passenger in my own skin. I can feel it rattling the cage when I’m weak, when I sleep. It whispers in the static of my TV, it flickers in the corner of my eye. Sometimes, when I pass a red door, I feel it pull, as if it wants to show me what’s on the other side. But I know if I open that door, it will be the last thing I do. So I keep my hand on the knob, frozen, every time, wondering if this time I’ll have the strength to walk away—or if the thing inside will finally take the keys.