Rarely do people volunteer to step into their own coffin. Vampires maybe, but the average person spends a lifetime avoiding seeing how one feels from the inside. Most don’t even pick their own casket out when it finally comes time to be buried, and something about the confining, trapped nature of them even forces some to consider cremation. I mean, what if you’re buried alive and can’t get out? This fear is compiled by old reports of dug up graves with claw marks on the inside, giving rise to horror stories and tales of the undead.

Maybe that’s why we don’t like elevators.

There’s an old Tom and Jerry episode where Tom dies and has to ride an escalator to Heaven. Once his sins are revealed, he has to try his best to win his old enemy over before the transport disappears and the pit to hell opens up. This image, stairs or moving staircases, is shown time and time again in literature as some sort of analogy of moving up towards something better. Holes appear, but steps lead us to something better, and the prize is clearly visible. If we can dodge the pits and do enough to climb, we will be saved. Just keep moving up to those clouds in our view.

Maybe that’s why we don’t hear so much about haunted escalators but can recite stories of spooky or mysterious elevators. The door shuts, and who know where the hell they’ll open, if they will at all. There is that moment sometime in a person’s life when those gates close and you wonder what would happen if they don’t ever move again. We have all seen a movie where the broken elevator is opened and the hero gets out to climb to safety, but that is the extent of most people’s knowledge on how they work. What would you do if you were trapped? Can modern elevators drop all the way to the bottom and how far does that fall need to be to kill? And how modern is this machine I have just stepped into anyway? All these thoughts come rushing like the ground whenever we feel that unexpected, unnatural lurch as we ride.

Elevators are inherently foreign to people. You get in trusting you’ll be safe but closed off to any visual signs that this is true. We ride with strangers, temporarily forming awkward bonds. Even when you hear statistics on how safe they are, it feels made up. There are 1,600 deaths on stairs in the US every year, but the odds of dying in an elevator are one in ten million. An average of 27 die a year, but most of those are installers and repairs. That is so abstract. Those stairs gives us a false sense of control. There is no way to control an elevator.

This may be why there are so many stories involving haunted elevators. We hear backstories, and it makes sense they would fail or crush people below. Other ghosts, roaming halls lost, often find their way to them, and it becomes part of their lore. The stories are unsettling because there is a part of us, no matter how ubiquitous they have become, that is already scared.

When Elisa Lam made in news in 2013, it was not just for the nature of her death. The 21 year old who had been suffering from several different mental health issues disappeared and was later discovered mysteriously drown in the water tank on the roof of her hotel, the infamous Cecil Hotel. Conspiracy theories soon surfaced, including a connection to the 2005 horror movie Dark Water. What captivated people was the elevator footage captured the night she disappeared. A viewer can take anything out of it they want (depending on what they are trying to prove or already think about the case), but it appears Lam is hiding and then interacting with some unseen entity as she tries to get the elevator to start up. It’s mystifying not just because of what the viewer is seeing and not seeing, but because it taps into that terror we already feel. It is the perfect set piece for the unexplained to on. We are scared because we have already heard, and somehow also just feel, like the two are connected.

I lived in the haunted Charlesgate Hotel from 1993-1995, and there were enough ghost stories to fill a book. What students were really scared of was the elevator. You were never quite sure what floor you were going to travel to. Often it went from the ground floor to the hidden 8^th, a sure sign it had to be possessed. Sometimes it never came or never opened. It was often out of order, and the way the students treated it may have led to its unreliability. It was a vicious circle of cause and effect. If you could count the bumps just right, you could slam the doors open just as it reached your landing. I was trapped in from not doing it just right more than once.

It is no wonder then that students also spread stories of a haunted legend to explain the faulty machine. It it’s early days, a young girl was playing in the basement with her rubber ball. Back then, the elevator opened up directly into the basement with only a small cage to keep the employees (who else would be in the basement) safe. The ball somehow got into the cage, and when the little girl followed, she was crushed by the returning car. Since then, she likes to play with the people in the elevator because it’s the only place her spirit is allowed to go.

Phillip, an accountant for the Biltmore Hotel in Greensboro, North Carolina, has a similar story. Just replace ball with the Mafia who were running the brothel and crushed with stabbed to death. He was murdered for saying he would go to the police after he found other criminal elements inside the books he was keeping. He tends to knock hats off people riding in the elevator. People have heard his whimpering as they have traveled up and down, noticing it gets louder the higher they go. That is if the thing works. Whenever it won’t run, which happens often, the staff knows they have to say hello to Philip before it will move again.

Florida has its own Biltmore. Actually, there are several, all of which have their own ghosts and ghostly legends. The one in Miami boosts a cursed elevator of its own, haunted by the spirit of Fatty Walsh, an infamous mobster who was accused of being a snitch. It was either his speaking to the police or his gambling debts that raised the anger of the men running the hotel. He was gunned down on the 14^th floor and never left. He opens the doors of the elevators for beautiful women, especially ones who work in the hotel. He plays with riders, making the lights flicker and dropping them off on different floors than the ones they called for. Of course, Walsh was not shot in the elevator but one of the suites, but no one questions why he would still haunt there.

 When a building has at least 14 floors, another supernatural story kicks in, and its modern day popularity speaks to people’s fears and mistrust. If you ask most teens and young adults, they can give you their version of how the Elevator Game works. You enter and travel to a predetermined number of floors, usually the fourth, seventh, and tenth. You do not move as the doors open, and if anyone enters you need to start from the beginning again. That is unless it is the Dark Woman. She enters at some point, and you are not to make eye contact. She will leave, and you then you know the stage has been set. You hit the thirteenth floor, and she will get out. You must never say a word to her. The doors will close again and when they reopen, you are transported to another dimension (in some versions you arrive in hell). You can get out an explore for an hour, but you must return before the doors close again. You then need to travel back to the floors in the reverse order and leave the building or you will be trapped forever.

It’s the kind of story that captures the imagination and has the same dare appeal as Bloody Mary. People don’t really believe it will work, but its real enough to try. This may be a reason why it begs to be repeated and filmed. You can’t fall into the Backrooms, but you can find an elevator and freak yourself out. It’s also easier to make your own fake version and present it on social media, so the story gains more momentum. A location that is just familiar enough, a little shaky camera work, a jump scare or dropped camera, and a teen can make their own legend. The story is popular enough to make an appearance in movies and television shows like Evil.

School elevators are ripe with ghost stories.  Norman Hall at the University of Florida in Gainesville has an odd haunting. It used to serve as the College of Education building, which students use to explain why a group of children were on the third floor. They died a mysterious death (elevator malfunction, murder, fire) and are now trapped. They particularly like to play with the elevator. Residents say you can hear laughing and knocks on the walls when you ride in it. They also report the elevator randomly opening up or being called to a floor and orbs, just at the right height to be children, getting in or coming out.

At the Pine Ridge School in Deltona the ghost is said to be a worker (or maybe two depending on who is telling the story) who died while building the lift. He may be the man whose voice comes on over the school intercom sometimes or the person who makes the bell, unlike the school’s actual bell, go off at random times. Students say it is the moment of his death. He is most definitely the one travelers feel putting his unseen hand on your shoulder when you use it and the one who will make the door not open until you have said thank you.

The most infamous elevator ghost on a Florida campus is known more for the way she died than how she haunts. In the late 60s, a local girl living in Beaty Towers was tempted in her freshman year to try drugs. The first time she dropped acid it drove her insane. She took the elevator up to the thirteenth floor, climbed up to the roof, and jumped believing she was a bird and could fly. The story became so well-known on campus that Tom Petty, who spent quite a bit of time in Gainesville, wrote the song American Girl after the student. If you listen to the lyrics with the legend in mind it makes sense, even though he often spoke about the spooky origin of his hit being nothing but an urban legend before his death.

In fact, there is nothing to substantiate the death ever happened. There was no suicide ever reported at Beaty Towers or any accident on campus where a student died from jumping from a building. Despite propaganda from the 1960s to the 1980s, no one has ever leapt from a roof thinking they were a bird after taking a hallucinogenic. The story is a cautionary tale reflecting a society’s fears of an increasingly independent young adult population during a time of increased casual drug use. It talks more of the loss of innocence small towns, especially college towns, were feeling. What better way to help kids Just Say No than to tell them they will go blind after staring at the sun if they get high.

Yet something still haunts the floors of the dorm. A young woman dressed in clothes from the 60s is seen walking through the halls on every floor from the eighth to the twelfth. She looks confused and disappears through walls after knocking on doors. Students say the elevator will open on a random floor and then travel to the thirteenth, even if there are people in who have pushed other buttons, and a girl’s soft crying or singing can be heard as it moves. Perhaps the story of the drugged freshman has been told so many times it has created its own ghost.

Or maybe the story just makes sense. After all, elevators are dying to be haunted.

You can contact us with questions, comments, and your favorite legend or tidbit of folklore at spookytripping@gmail.com.

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