Every campus has ghost stories.
But this one isn’t a story.
It started one stormy night, when the janitor was cleaning the main building downtown—the old one with the red gate and the basketball court that always floods when it rains. The power had gone out, and only the emergency lights hummed faintly in the halls.
He heard dripping. Then tapping.
He followed the sound toward the court.
When he got there, the rain was coming in through a crack near the far end. The tiles looked warped, swollen with water. When he stepped on one, it sank.
He crouched down and pried it loose.
Underneath was a metal hatch. Rusted shut, like it hadn’t been touched for decades.
He thought it was part of the drainage system.
Until he heard something breathing beneath it.
Slow. Wet. Gasping.
He took his flashlight, wedged the hatch open—and the smell hit him first. Old blood and iron. The beam revealed a set of stairs spiraling into darkness. Water trickled down each step like tears.
He called out, “Hello?”
Something answered.
But not in a voice he knew.
It spoke in fragments of words—half Cebuano, half Chinese—slurred, whispering, and coming from everywhere.
When he reached the bottom, his light swept across what looked like a hallway. Then he realized the walls weren’t walls. They were cells.
Iron bars.
Chains.
And fingernail marks etched into the stone—so deep they’d left grooves.
There were names, too. Hundreds of them. Carved in a mix of characters and letters. Some still wet, the lines red like open wounds.
He took a step closer. His shoe touched something soft.
He looked down.
A hand. Pale and swollen, reaching out from beneath the water.
Then the faces began to appear—pressed against the bars, eyes clouded, mouths stretched too wide. They whispered over and over in different voices:
“We never left.”
“We never left.”
“You let us out.”
The flashlight flickered and went out.
He screamed, but no one heard over the thunder. When they found him the next morning, he was lying in the middle of the court, drenched and trembling, his fingernails gone. His pupils were milky white. He hadn’t spoken since.
On the wet floor beside him, scratched into the tiles with what looked like his own nails, were words no one could forget:
“They’re under us.”
Since then, every time it rains, the floor near that same corner of the court turns darker than the rest. You can hear the water dripping underneath… followed by tapping.
Some say if you press your ear to the floor, you’ll hear breathing.
And if you stay too long—
you’ll hear your own name whispered back.
