Tips for writing Abandoned Hospitals
✮ The smell arrives before anything visual does. Always before. Decades-old antiseptic that never fully evaporated, black mold, particulate plaster, and something underneath all of that you will not name. Your character detects it from the parking lot. Do not skip this. Writers skip this constantly. Smell is 70% of fear. If your character walks in and immediately describes what they SEE, you have already lost the reader's stomach. Fix it.
✮ Long hospital corridors are acoustic funnels. A door swinging on a corroded hinge forty feet away sounds, physiologically and neurologically, like it is directly behind your character. It is not. But they don't know that yet. And more importantly: they can't immediately tell the difference.
✮ Original floor tiles: white hexagons, many cracked, grout gone grey-black with decades of something. Footsteps echo differently on intact vs. cracked tile. Your character will begin unconsciously stepping around the cracked ones without deciding to. Write it as unconscious. Don't give them the decision.The body knows things the mind hasn't processed.
✮ Nurses' stations have the room call-board still mounted. Metal slots, room numbers, some still containing names on yellowed paper in faded handwriting. Perfectly legible. Your character should read one name specifically. A real first and last name. This is what grounds supernatural dread in human scale. The horror of a ghost is always the horror of the specific person who became one.
✮ Do not have your character open a patient file and find something horrifying written in it. That is lazy and everyone does it. The horror in the file is that it is completely routine: a 54-year-old man admitted for a hip replacement in 1987, three pages of unremarkable medical notes in a nurse's tidy handwriting, then nothing. No discharge date. No transfer. Just nothing. The nothing is the story. Let the reader ask the question. Don't answer it.
✮ Operating theaters are always on upper floors. The surgical table is still there. They never take the table. In real abandoned hospitals, across multiple countries, documented cases: they always leave the table. Your character should wonder why no one took the table. Do not have a character explain why no one took the table. Some questions should stay questions.
✮ The morgue is in the basement. This is always true. The drawer handles are still there. Your character's hand will move toward one of them. Write this as involuntary. The hand goes first. The decision to stop, or not stop, comes second. We don't choose our curiosity; we choose whether to follow it.
✮ The drawers are not all empty. Not because of anything supernatural. Because animals nest in sheltered spaces in abandoned buildings, and a heavy insulated metal drawer that latches shut is extremely sheltered. Your character knows this. They do not think of this until after they've opened one.
