The Refrigerated Air

Marcus had always been drawn to old buildings, their creaking floors and peeling paint whispering secrets of the past. When he took a janitorial job at the Harlan County Training Institute, he figured it would be a quiet, solitary gig. The institute, a sprawling brick monstrosity built in 1908, had served as a medical college, then a high school, and now a middle school. But even after decades of different uses, the building felt stubbornly stuck in its earliest, strangest days.

The first incident occurred in the auditorium. The building’s grand stage, once used for anatomy lectures and later for school plays, had a narrow staircase leading from the wings down to the main floor. Marcus was locking up for the night, the only light coming from a single bulb at the top of the stairs. As he turned to flick it off, a basketball—one of the dusty, deflated ones from the gym—tumbled down the steps, bouncing eerily with each thud. He froze, his hand on the switch. There was no one else there. The ball rolled to a stop at his feet. He backed away, heart pounding, and didn’t look back until he was outside.

Weeks passed, and the incidents grew more intimate. One evening, while sweeping the stage floor, he heard a soft, breathy ‘goodbye’ float through the empty auditorium. It was a child’s voice, sad and resigned. He spun around, but the room was empty. The dust motes danced in the slanted light like unsettled spirits. He tried to convince himself it was a draft, a trick of the old building, but the voice had been too clear, too close to his ear.

Then there was the humming. He was in the storage closet by the stage, hanging a broom on its hook, when a melody—a lullaby, he thought—began to hum directly into his left ear. The sound was icy and close, as if someone were standing inches away, breathing down his neck. He whipped around, but the closet was empty. The humming stopped as suddenly as it had started, leaving a ringing silence.

Christmas brought the strangest event yet. Marcus, alone in the building to do inventory, had just finished placing a festive banner on the main entrance door. He stepped back to admire it, then turned to collect his tools. A moment later, he heard a sharp ripping sound. When he looked back, the banner lay crumpled on the floor, but the tape that had held it was still affixed to the door, shaped as if it had been physically peeled off by an invisible hand. The tape was intact, not torn—it had been contorted, twisted, as if something had gripped it and wrenched it away. Marcus felt a cold sweat trickle down his spine.

But the most unsettling experience came in the band room. He was vacuuming the deep pile carpet, the machine’s drone filling the room, when he brushed his arm against something that felt like an ice block. A jolt of cold shot through his entire body, so intense it seemed to freeze the air in his lungs. He yanked his arm away, but the cold lingered, as if a piece of his skin had been left behind. The room was warm, the radiator hissing, yet that spot on his arm remained numb for hours.

He began to research the building’s history, hoping to find a rational explanation. What he uncovered chilled him more than any ghost. In 1921, a twelve-year-old girl named Edith had died within these walls. She had been a student at the medical college’s training school, a prodigy in anatomy cadaver dissection. Rumors swirled that she had taken her own life over a failed romance with a much older professor. But the records were sketchy, vague, as if someone had tried to erase her entirely. The autopsy report, buried in a county archive, listed the cause of death as ‘exposure to cold,’ a bizarre entry for a girl found in a locked laboratory on a mild spring day.

Edith, Marcus learned, had been obsessed with preserving specimens. She had become enamored with the idea of creating a perfect, eternal state through refrigeration. Some whispered that she had experimented on herself, using liquid nitrogen and ice baths to test her theories. The night she died, she had locked herself in the walk-in freezer that once stood in what was now the band room. She had deliberately turned the temperature down to its lowest setting, and by the time they found her, she was frozen solid, her lips blue, her eyes wide with a strange, triumphant smile.

Now, as Marcus vacuumed the carpet, he understood. The cold that brushed his arm wasn’t a ghost’s touch—it was Edith’s eternal reach, her desperate attempt to share her icy immortality. She was trapped in this building, forever trying to freeze the fleeting warmth of life. The hums, the whispers, the ‘goodbye’—they were all her, lost and longing, seeking someone who would stay with her in that frozen state.

Tonight, as Marcus finishes his shift, he feels a familiar chill on the back of his neck. He doesn’t turn around. He knows that if he does, he’ll see the faint outline of a girl in an old-fashioned dress, her skin pale and her eyes pleading. He knows that one day, she’ll succeed, and he’ll become another of her frozen companions, forever humming lullabies in the empty halls of the Institute.

He rushes out, but the cold follows him, a persistent, suffocating frost that clings to his bones. And as he drives away, he can still hear that soft, sad voice, whispering ‘goodbye’ in his ear, as if she knows something he doesn’t.

Winter has arrived early this year, and Marcus fears it will never end.