My Experience at the Youth Club Hall

I was 21 when I took a caretaker's job at a youth club hall in Cornwall, cleaning up after the Friday night discos once all the kids had gone home. It sounded simple enough at the time. Sweep the floor, stack the chairs, wipe down the toilets, lock the doors, and head home. But there was something about that building after midnight that never felt empty, no matter how still it looked. The silence had a weight to it. Every week I stayed later than everyone else, and every week it felt more as though I was leaving people behind who had never really gone.

At first I told myself it was tiredness, nerves, the old hall making old sounds. I tried to laugh it off, the same way anyone would. But the longer I worked there, the more I began to feel that something in that place was stuck in its own grief, and that somehow I had stepped into it. What frightened me most was not just what I saw or heard, but how personal it began to feel, as if the haunting had noticed I was the one always left behind at the end of the night.

Even now, years later, I can still remember the smell of damp floorboards, stale smoke, and cold air coming through the corridor, and I can still feel the dread that used to build in me as the last record ended and the hall went quiet. There are things from that time I still cannot explain, and I do not think that place ever truly let me leave it.