You never quite understood what made your furnace so loud. It was only a few years old, and you’d even had it checked out a few times, but the repair guys always said they couldn’t find anything wrong. You weren’t about to fork out several thousand dollars to get a new one just because of some silly noise, so you learned to live with it. More than that, the noise sort of became associated with cozy nights and you started to find it kind of comforting when you slept during the colder months. Tonight though, it’s different because your power’s been out since the morning, and if it had come back on your lights would be on too. No, whatever is making that strange sound isn’t making your house any warmer. The noise, a deep groaning and scratching sounds almost like it is rattling around inside of your air vents, coming closer. You lean over the side of your bed to look at the nearest vent when the metal cover bursts off of the wall and coming out of the vent beside your bed is: The Podcast Inside Your House. 

The first time I visited Detroit I only went to the safe touristy buildings that every other urban explorer visits; the zoo on Belle Isle, the Packard Plant, the Fisher Building. My second time there I went to some more obscure places I found on various urbex blogs and Instagram accounts. I found an old theatre, an abandoned church, and a barely held together power station in the woods. 

On my third visit I was going with Tony, a guy I’d met through Instagram who was even more of a seasoned explorer than I was. He’d gone to Gary Indiana and bribed the cops to let him explore, and he’d been to Centralia before they gutted it. Since I’d been to Detroit twice before, I was feeling cocky, and I floated the idea to Tony that we should go there and scout out new places that hadn’t been hit by everyone else already. I said we should just go in blind,  explore, and see what we could find. 

Part of the perk to visiting the places everyone on Instagram visits is that you know they’re relatively safe because hipsters are always there taking pictures. Unexplored places could have anything; meth labs, drug deals, hell even bodies.  We brought mag lights and mace just in case. I didn’t have Snapchat, but Tony did and said he’d turn on that location-sharing thing and have his girlfriend keep an eye on us if we didn’t check in for a while. With that, we felt like we’d taken all the safety precautions we had to. 

That’s part of the problem with urban exploration, the people who are doing it are all people who have never really run into anything dangerous, so you get a false sense of security. You’ll never team up with someone who’s been mugged by a homeless man or broken a leg falling through a floor because those people get out of it and stop doing stupid things. It’s a whole community of people who’ve gotten lucky and have lost the sense of danger you probably should carry with you in those places. 

The drive up was uneventful, and a bit quiet. Tony lived in a city about two hours away from me, so we really only met up to explore. After we talked through the basics that we never had time to before, like what we wanted to do with our lives, how many siblings we had and all that, we didn’t have that easy camaraderie you have with someone you knew well. The silence wasn’t uncomfortable, but it wasn't casual either. We switched to showing each other music for the last few hours and chatted about that, and I realized for really the first time that I didn’t actually know Tony that well even though we’d planned a cross-state road trip together. 

When we reached the city, we went to an industrial area first, passing the occasional abandoned house, though Tony and I had both agreed to avoid those. Stand-alone abandoned houses are arguably the most dangerous places you can explore. See, with factories and warehouses, people don’t really commit crimes in those because there’s security or random assholes like us wandering around exploring. But abandoned houses are where people go to do drugs or where bodies are found, and in a tight space like that, it’s hard to get out if someone else is there. 

The first place that really caught our attention was a large factory with all the windows blown out. We decided to wander in. There was a fence, but there were plenty of holes in it and no signs of cameras or active security. When we got in, it was pretty impressive, but I recognized some graffiti right away. There was a big mural of bigfoot and an alien kissing on one of the more intact walls. I’d seen at least two explorers I follow post that same picture. I took a few pics too, of course, you have to take a picture of bigfoot kissing an alien, but I was a bit disappointed we’d stumbled into a well-known spot. 

The factory was nice and all, and it made for some great photos with the recent dusting of snow the city had gotten, but it wasn't what I was looking for. 

When we got back to the car I told Tony that we should try a different area, one with less of the industrial stuff. 

“Do you wanna pull up a map or something?” he asked “We could look for old neighborhoods.”

“Let’s just get lost,” I told him.

And we did. We drove through downtown, which by the way if you’ve never been to Detroit, is actually very lovely. We got some food, and then after a bit more wandering, we ended up in a more wooded area. 

“Do you think we’re getting out of the city?” Tony asked, “Looks like we’re hitting the suburbs.”

“Nah, not this is still close enough to downtown,” I told him “We’re probably just at an area with parks or something. Could be something neat over here.”

We drove a bit longer and pretty soon one side of the street was all trees. There were a few run-down houses on the other side, but it looked almost like we were in a rural area with the massive forest taking up most of what we could see. 

“Do you wanna see if there’s anything in the woods?” Tony asked me.

I did, and I didn’t. The woods were a different kind of creepy, one that I wasn’t as familiar with, but that also made it exciting and new. After a minute of deliberation, the excitement won out. “Let’s check it out!” 

We parked just in front of the woods, no one was going to yell at us out here, and Tony took a screenshot of where his car was on the map. And with that, we stepped into the forest.

It must have been an old park, the trees were tall and the undergrowth was thick. Even at the tail end of winter, it had been warm enough that many of the honeysuckles had never even dropped their leaves. For a city park, there was a distinct lack of trash, and I wondered if maybe we’d found a nature preserve or something. 

Soon we stumbled upon the first house. It had been white at one point, with red trim, both of which were peeling now and largely overtaken by ivy, which had also kept its leaves despite the snow. 

We debated about going in but decided against it, and just took some pictures of the exterior. Tony had two lenses he was switching between, but I didn’t know all that fancy camera stuff, I just had a point-and-shoot with a great default setting, at least to my untrained eyes. 

We decided to keep going, and we weren’t walking for more than a minute when it became clear that the dense forest was hiding more secrets. 

The first building snuck upon us, it was one of those red-bricked apartments with all the balconies and nice trim around the outside of the windows. As we walked around the side of it, the forest revealed a whole row of similar structures behind the first, and starting a bit to the left, a second row. We’d come at the building from the side at exactly the right angle to hide the rest of the neighborhood. Looking farther to the left, it was clear there was at least one more block beyond this hiding in the forest. 

Tony and I shared a glance but didn’t say anything, I was feeling a need to match the silence of the forest and I wondered if he was as well. We started photographing exteriors, staying close, and occasionally making eye contact as we kept tabs on each other. I’d been feeling a bit awkward around Tony this trip just hanging out in the car, but when we started shooting I was reminded of how well we knew each other in the field. I would slow down when he was switching lenses, and he’d nod to the best angles I’d missed, and we danced around each other in sync. This was what our friendship was based on, and it made me feel at ease. 

It made me feel too at ease. 

We were only about halfway down the first block, with the promise of much more on the way when I felt the urge to explore further. The exteriors were lovely, and though many of the buildings had the same design, each one had its own unique plant life: vines or young trees sprouting up and tall grasses overtaking the lots. Some had fire damage, and a select few had graffiti. The sunlight through the trees hit every building differently making them each unique. We could have kept to the exteriors, there wasn’t a need to go inside. I don’t know why I said it. I wish I hadn’t, but finally, I broke the silence.

“We should go in.”

“You think it’s safe?” Tony asked. 

“I mean, look at this place! People have got to come here all the time right?” 

“I’ve never seen pictures of this before.” Tony answered “And a lot of the people I follow have been to Detroit. Hell, those two girls I went up to Cleveland with were from here and they never mentioned this place.”

“Well, if we’re the first ones to find it, it would be a shame not to explore it more right? What if it gets torn down in a year, and we didn’t look inside when we had the chance?” I squinted to my right and saw at least another row of buildings off to the side, so there were at least three blocks worth of stuff here. We could spend all day just exploring this place.

Tony sighed “Okay but if we get murdered it’s your fault.” 

He said it jokingly, but those words will haunt me for the rest of my life. 

We pulled out our mag lights and picked out one of the buildings that didn't seem to have any fire damage. 

Most of the windows were broken, but when we walked in we found that very little of the sunlight was making its way through. 

The inside was like every other abandoned interior, both familiar yet totally unique. The walls were mint green and peeling, and there was less destruction than one would normally find in an old house. The doorframes and walls were largely intact, and the ceiling, with those big white school cafeteria panels, was only falling down in a few places. There was also a good deal of stuff left over from the last people who lived there. It’s always creepy the first time you find a house where it looks like the residents up and left in the middle of the night, but oftentimes it’s just because people left behind all the things they didn’t want, or in the sadder cases they were rushed out during an eviction. 

We found toys strewn about in a children’s room, always an eerie sight. In what used to be the master bedroom there were clothes in the closets that didn’t even look that old. It was a pretty intact house. We ventured upstairs and found more of the same in the other units, most of them still had people’s stuff, and it did make me wonder what had happened. You usually don’t find that in every building, if I had to guess I’d say maybe like one in every five or six houses and apartments I’ve been in would still have a lot of the last owner’s possessions. 

We were on the third floor, taking pictures of a teddy bear that had been nailed to the wall when we heard it. The noise came from the lower levels and sounded like a person moaning. We both froze in our tracks. It was a low moan that went on for a good thirty seconds or so, like some damn cheesy horror movie ghost. It didn’t sound quite like in the movies though, it sounded almost artificial like someone had recorded a scream and then slowed it down on the playback. 

“Fuck.” Tony whispered. 

“It sounds like there’s uh… there’s someone down there.” I said, “What do we do?”

“Well, we can’t stay here.” He answered simply. 

I pulled out my mace, and side by side we began our descent. 

I was creeped out of course, but I figured our options were either that there was someone messing with us, or that there was a homeless person jerking off, and while I desperately hoped for the first one, I felt that together we could fight off a half-naked homeless guy. 

But when we got downstairs, we didn’t see anyone. There were no creaks or coughs or any other noises to indicate a person had been there. When we got out of the building, we started to wonder if it had actually been a person making that noise. 

“Maybe it was the wind?” I said.

“Maybe, or something settling in the house,” Tony replied. And that’s another thing about urban exploration that makes it so dangerous. You basically turn off any instincts that tell you that you’re being the stupid person in a horror movie, and you learn to ignore creepy things. Half the buildings I’ve been in have graffiti that says “he’s right behind you”, or “get out while you can” and you ignore things like stuffed animals nailed to the wall or old rusty handcuffs. Noises are the things you take more seriously, but usually, it's the wind or something breaking or the house settling, so you kind of train yourself to ignore all of those warning signs that you’d normally listen to. 

We stepped into the next building and found even more of the things left behind by the old tenants. All of their furniture was still there, and there were dishes left out on the table. That was more creepy but not unheard of. At the time I thought it was more than likely that another explorer had set the table for a creepy photoshoot. You’d find a lot of stuff like that, dead cats on spray-painted pentagrams, fake blood poured out gratuitously over an abandoned hospital bed. People would do all kinds of things to make an edgy photoshoot even edgier. 

Of course, now I know that scene hadn’t been staged by anyone. I wish we’d left then. 

We started taking pictures, but honestly, it’s blurring together in my mind at this point. The beds were messy but still had all the blankets, a rare sight, and I think we found another room full of toys. We made our way to the second floor, and that’s when I saw the first one. I thought it was a bird. I had my light shining into an old bedroom, and Tony was in another room farther back, so I knew it wasn’t him in the hallway. Out of the corner of my eye, coming down the dark and dank hallway was a light, ethereal shape. I quickly turned towards it and tried to shine my light on it, but the light went out. My eyes tried to adjust to the dark, but it was too soon. 

The shape glided through the air, distinctly not flapping and I realized it was most definitely not a bird. I thought perhaps it could be a moth or something but as it came closer to me down that long hallway, it became apparent that it was much too big. Though exactly how big it was was tough to pinpoint. It seemed to shift and ripple, and didn’t look quite solid. 

Just then Tony burst out of the room, dangerously close to the creature, and it spooked it. Tony shone his light on my face, but I could still make the form behind him, It turned to the right, and vanished. There weren’t any rooms on the right side of the hall, it was like it had gone through the wall. 

Tony registered me looking behind him, and turned around, but he missed it. He turned back to me and whispered “What is it?”

“I don’t know.” I answered, walking towards the stairs “But we’re getting the fuck out of here.” As we walked past the area the thing had vanished in, I saw a slit carved into the hallway. It was smooth and narrow like someone had taken a knife and carefully carved out just a bit of the wall. 

We took the stairs carefully, and I described what I’d seen to Tony

“It sounds like you saw a ghost dude.” And just as he said that we heard moaning again but quieter. 

I had to laugh, it was so absurd. But I quickly stopped, thinking he might be right, as I didn’t have any better ideas. I didn’t think I believed in ghosts, but if it wasn’t one, then what else could it have been?

We made it outside and started heading out of the complex. For the first time, I looked at the ground, realizing that this must have at one point been a road. There was cement hiding under the sparse winter undergrowth. I noticed cracks in the pavement, and some of them seemed very straight and smooth which I thought was a bit odd. 

 We were near the edge of the complex, almost back into the woods when we saw something drifting towards us through the trees. It looked like a bigger version of the thing I’d seen in the house, and Tony’s eyes widened. I didn’t get a good look before we wordlessly moved to hide closer to one of the last buildings. As it grew closer, we stepped inside, hopefully out of its line of sight.

The building we chose had a lot of fire damage, and the floor made me nervous, but not as nervous as the thing outside. We stepped further into the building carefully and ended up in the kitchen of one of the units. A glance back at the wall showed me more of those slash marks in varying sizes, as well as a calendar. Up until I saw it I hadn’t really been thinking about how old this place was, but I figured based on the woods around it, it had to be decades since it had been abandoned. 

But the calendar did not agree with that. It was open to December of 2009.

I tapped Tony’s shoulder and showed him but he didn't pay it much attention, too focused on the situation at hand. That was probably the smart move, but I was distracted now. It was all so strange. There were full-grown, mature trees here that could not have sprouted up in less than 20 years. The level of decay, I know can happen fast, but this place felt older than it should have.

My thoughts were stopped when we heard moaning, this time at a lower pitch, coming from right outside the building. It shifted in frequency and speed, sounding almost sexual, and we both stepped back into the house. We didn’t look back or below us, and that was our mistake. 

In a second we were both through the floor. I don’t remember even hearing any cracking, I think we might have just stepped off a ledge. I landed on my back and felt all of the air leave my lungs as I hit the floor. I didn’t see how Tony landed, but I heard him scream, and when I regained my senses enough to look at him I saw his leg twisted. I took in just the surroundings between us and saw numerous bones strewn about the basement. There were three deer skulls, but other than that most of the bones were shattered. There were other antlers strewn about too, and though I felt my heart quicken at the sight of the graveyard, none of the remains appeared to be human. 

“Fuck!” Tony yelled and clutched at his leg. I didn't know what to do, but I started making moves to crawl over to him. 

But I stopped when I saw the white, spirit-looking thing glide down from above. And then my eyes locked onto a strange sight. Jammed into one of the holes in the wall was the unmistakable form of a human skull. 

It all happened fast after that. The thing flattened out, making itself into a long ribbony worm, and it approached Tony. It put its front close to his leg and wriggled its rounded edge. I couldn’t make out any features, any sign of eyes or sensory organs or anything, but it was interested in his injury. 

It straightened out once again, then in a flash folded around Tony. The thing put its back end into one of the crevices in the ground and began pulling. 

Tony followed as it retreated into the hole, sliding along as if this wispy thing had some kind of impossible strength. Tony clawed at the ground and looked at me, pleading for help but unable to conjure up the words, and I just sat there. When it reached the hole though, I had hoped it would drop him, because it looked too narrow to bring prey so large into that burrow. 

But the creature didn’t even slow down as it dragged Tony’s legs into the crevice. It lost no momentum when it reached Tony’s torso and I heard his ribs crack. He let out the last scream he ever would as I watched the bits that wouldn’t fit slough off at the edge of the ground. 

When the creature had him up to his neck, Tony’s head simply popped off with a crack. 

I stared at Tony’s severed head, and at the hole for a minute in shock. The edge of the hole was red with the bones and flesh that wouldn't bend to fit in the hole. Tony’s head was facing away from me, that was a small mercy for me at least. 

I got out of the woods but I don’t really remember it, I think I was in shock. I didn't see any more creatures though, they already had what they needed. I’d lost my phone at some point, probably when I fell, and I had to flag down a car to take me to the police station. 

I told them what happened, but I don’t think they believed me. They found Tony’s car though, but his body has never been recovered. I wonder if maybe the police decided not to check because they clearly thought I was on drugs. Or perhaps, they know not to go there. Maybe the people who live near that patch of woods stay out of it. It sounds paranoid, but I don't know how else they wouldn’t have found his head, so freshly severed, in that basement. 

I tried to talk to Tony’s girlfriend about what happened but I don’t think she believed me either. But I know she had his last known location on her phone, and she said that if the cops couldn’t find his body, she’d do it herself. 

She’d been gone a week now. That’s why I decided to write all this down. I couldn’t save her, but maybe if I can warn as many people as I can, I can save someone else. So please, listen to me. Don’t go urban exploring in Detroit, but if you do, stay in the city. Stay the fuck away from the trees.