Xander finally unjammed his zipper but accidentally smacked his chin with his hand and nearly knocked his glasses off. As he adjusted the frames on his face, he spotted a fenced-off building down a side street. Curious, he walked a few steps down the block to get a better look. A smile crept across his face. He raced back to his friends.

“Come check this out!” he said. “I may have found our spot.”

“Better than the museum?” Omar scoffed. “Doubt it.”

“Where?” Li asked.

Xander led the group to the building. Standing eight stories tall, the structure behind the blue chain-link fence towered over the teens. The main-floor windows and entrances were covered with sheets of plywood. Taggers had spray-painted the lower-level walls. Some of the second- and third-floor windows were broken.

“George Wickerman Hospital,” Xander announced. “The haunted hospital.”

Li shivered. “Oh man, I totally forgot about this place. Twisted.”

“Why would they shut down a hospital?” Omar asked.

Xander looked at Omar. “Right, I forgot that this went down before you came to our school. The hospital’s been closed forever.”

Li chimed in. “More like five years.”

“Sure, sure,” Xander said. “They say it was originally a place for really sick patients. People who came down with TB—tuberculosis. And that in the 1950s the government started to run secret tests on the patients.”

“Why?” Omar asked.

“Because it didn’t matter if they lived or died. There was no cure for them, so the doctors were free to do experiments to see how different chemicals would affect their bodies.”

“I heard it wasn’t TB patients,” Li said. “I heard it was orphans.”

“Can you let me tell the story?” Xander said.

“Sorry.”

“Anyway,” Xander continued, “they shut down the hospital when a bunch of bodies were found. The patients who didn’t survive the tests were tossed into a dumpster. After that normal people started to come down with a mystery disease. The doctors. Then the nurses. Then patients who went in for broken arms or something. It spread fast, killing several people. No one knew the cause or the cure, so the government shut down the hospital, like, twenty years ago.”

“Five,” said Li.

“Stop fact-checking me, Li.”

Li shrugged. “Facts are important.”

Omar peered through the fence. “Nasty.”

“Here’s the twisted thing,” Xander said. “They say the ghosts of the dead walk the halls even to this day.”

Li joined Omar at the fence. “I remember hearing stories about this place when I was in elementary school. I can’t believe we didn’t think of it before.”

“We never walk down this way,” Xander said. “But it’s totally got what we’re looking for. Exciting new territory, a little danger…”

Priya peered at the building. “I don’t know.”

“I heard that this guy, Josh—you remember him?” said Xander. “A couple of years ahead of us? Yeah, well, I heard he went to check it out last year. No one has seen him since.”

“I heard his dad got a job in Saskatoon,” Li said.