The Fall Between Floors

The Haberfelde Building has so many ghost stories that they have started their own page. HauntedHaberfelde.com

The sound came every night at 2:17: a man’s scream moving downward through the Haberfelde Building, followed by a crash that shook dust from the transoms. It never began on the same floor, but it always ended beneath the basement.Elias Rook, the new night custodian, learned to ignore it. He had debts, two daughters, and no patience for dead workmen. He pushed his cart through offices that still carried the shapes of old professions—frosted glass, narrow sinks, cabinets deep enough for bones. Sometimes laughter fluttered behind a locked door. Sometimes a window opened itself to the heat. Elias closed it and kept moving.

On his sixth night he found a plumb bob swinging in the fourth-floor hallway. It hung from a black cord descending through a hole no wider than a nail. The brass weight stopped at eye level. Scratched into it were four words: HOLD FAST BELOW ME.

At 2:16, the building grew perfectly still. Elias wrapped the cord around his fist. At 2:17, someone screamed above him. The cord snapped taut and dragged him across the tiles. Ceiling plaster split. For one instant he saw two hands gripping the other end from inside the floor—hands white with lime and missing their fingernails.

Then came the crash below. The cord went slack.

Elias followed it down the stairs. It passed through each landing, each floor, and at last through a crack in the basement concrete. From under the slab came a weak knocking, measured like a carpenter testing a wall. Three taps. A pause. Three more.

He returned with a sledgehammer. Every blow made the lights dim. The building answered with opening windows, dozens at once, their frames banging in a rising wind. When the concrete broke, Elias uncovered a narrow vertical shaft lined with old brick. The cord disappeared into blackness.

“Hold fast,” a voice whispered below.

Elias braced his boots and pulled. The cord burned his palms. Something heavy rose through the shaft: first a crushed hard hat, then a shoulder powdered white, then a face folded at an angle no living neck could bear. Behind it came another man, and another, linked hand to ankle in an impossible chain descending farther than the building’s foundation.

The first dead man opened his mouth. The scream erupted upward through Elias, through the floors, through the offices and their trembling glass. Elias understood then: they were not falling. They were being pulled down, night after night, and the plumb line was the only thing keeping the last of them from vanishing.

He tied the cord around an iron column and ran. At dawn, contractors found the basement undisturbed except for a fresh brass weight swinging from the ceiling. Elias never returned for his pay.

Years later, tenants still report laughter in the empty suites and windows lifting in calm weather. But the scream has changed. It no longer belongs to a stranger.

Those who hear it say the voice is begging someone – anyone – to hold fast.