Four teenagers dare each other to spend the night in an abandoned sanatorium beneath the Copper Tower, only to find the ruin is not as empty as it should be.
The sanatorium crouched at the edge of the forest, its roofline barely visible through the trees. Once, so the stories went, wealthy patients had come here from all over Europe. Then, sometime in the 1980s, the gates closed for good. Since then, moss had swallowed the walls, graffiti had bloomed across the concrete, and the whole place had settled into a silence so complete it felt deliberate.
Lena, Igor, Viktor, and Sara came anyway. They were seventeen, bored, and determined to prove that none of the rumours mattered. No ghosts. No curses. No hidden rooms or midnight disappearances. Just a ruined building and a story they would laugh about later. Lena, who never admitted fear first, forced open a side door until the hinges gave a long, rusty groan. Sara stayed close behind Viktor, pretending not to notice how hard her own pulse was beating.
Inside, the air was cold and wet, carrying the smell of mildew and old dust. Viktor swept his torch across the first floor, catching broken beds, empty cabinets, and patient cards scattered like forgotten names. Their footsteps moved through the rooms in low whispers until they reached the main hall, where the remains of a chandelier hung over shards of glass that cracked underfoot. The sound made the place feel less abandoned than watched.
"Someone was here recently," Igor said, nudging a bottle of wine with his shoe. Fresh tracks marked the dust beside it.
No one laughed.
The staircase to the second floor rose ahead of them, black and narrow. Each step answered with a hollow echo, as if the building were counting them. Lena led the way, eyes fixed on the dark corridor at the top, when she noticed the doctor's office door standing slightly open. She pushed it wider and stopped dead.
On the desk, amid torn folders and yellowed papers, lay a single sheet of clean white paper. In sharp black letters, it said: Don't climb the tower, if your life is good to you.
"This is a joke," Viktor said, but his voice had lost its certainty.
Lena folded the note and slipped it into her pocket anyway.
They moved on, past rooms stripped bare by time, until they found the hatch to the attic beneath the Copper Tower. The lock was old and rusted, but Igor worked it open with his penknife. A ladder waited in the dark above them, leading straight up into the tower itself.
Then footsteps sounded somewhere below.
Slow, measured, and unmistakably coming toward them.
A shadow shifted at the far end of the corridor, thin and unsteady in Viktor's torchlight. Nobody moved. Nobody even breathed.
Something in the sanatorium had heard them come in.