Mason Blake Journal
One night, I was investigating a former funeral home the kind from another era, where death wasn’t separated from daily life. The family lived upstairs. The funeral parlor occupied the main floor. And the basement… that’s where they prepared the bodies.
From the moment we walked in, the place felt alive in a way it shouldn’t have been.
The entire investigation was charged from start to finish. Voices in empty rooms. Laughter when no one was speaking. Shadow figures slipping past doorways. Objects moving. Intelligent responses that came at the exact moment we asked questions. Waves of emotion that would hit out of nowhere heavy, overwhelming, like grief still clung to the walls.
But what stuck with me most happened with something simple… my walkie-talkie.
Throughout the night, it kept going off. Random bursts of sound. Fragments of words. Static mixed with voices that didn’t belong to anyone investigating with me. I didn’t recognize them. Not one. Still, I tried to rationalize it. Maybe interference. Kids with radios. Someone nearby on the same frequency. It made sense enough that I pushed it aside and stayed focused on the investigation.
And the activity never slowed.
By the end of the night, we were exhausted but wired. We had captured multiple pieces of evidence, more than we expected for a first visit. It felt like the location had thrown everything at us at once. As we began packing up, the energy in the building shifted. Not louder… just heavier. Like something didn’t want us to leave.
I unclipped my walkie-talkie and brought it up to shut it off.
That’s when it happened.
A woman’s voice came through clear as day. No static. No distortion.
She said my name.
Then, softly… “Can you hear me? It’s me.”
The sound hit me like a drop in my stomach. A cold, sinking feeling spread through my chest and down my arms. I looked up, and everyone around me was frozen. Faces pale. Eyes wide. They had heard it too.
There was no mistaking it. No explaining it away.
In that moment, every rational thought I’d used all night disappeared. I didn’t try to debunk it. I didn’t search for interference. I just knew.
Something had been trying to reach me.
I shut the walkie-talkie off. No hesitation. No second attempt to listen. It was time to step away. Time to breathe. Time to be done for the night.
And that was only the first investigation at that location.
One of the most personal and unforgettable encounters I’ve ever had happened inside an abandoned tuberculosis hospital. Even now, when I think back on it, I can still feel the air in that building heavy, stale, like the place was holding its breath.
I was there during a public tour, but I wasn’t just another guest. The guide knew me and my background in the paranormal, so I was asked to go alone where others wouldn’t. A guinea pig, in the best and worst sense of the word. They sent me to a floor people avoided the one whispered about as the “shadow figure floor,” sometimes called the “crawler floor.”
I pushed the door open and stepped into silence.
Within minutes, something rushed across my face. I jumped back instinctively, heart hammering, and stumbled into the stairwell where the tour group waited. It took me a second to realize what happened a bat. Just a bat. I laughed it off, made a joke about a “flying rat,” and told them nothing happened.
But I knew I had to go back.
So I did.
I stepped out onto the floor again and shut the door behind me. The sound echoed through the hallway, and suddenly it felt like I was completely cut off from the world below. I turned to my right and that’s when everything changed.
About thirty feet down the hallway, I saw a woman.
She wasn’t transparent. She wasn’t shadow. She was solid. Real. Walking from one room to another like she belonged there. Shoulder length brown hair. A sleeveless hospital gown straight out of the 1950s. Bare feet against the cold floor. Her eyes fixed forward, focused on the room she was entering, completely unaware of me.
I could see her as clearly as I could see my own reflection.
Time didn’t slow it stopped. My mind couldn’t catch up to what my eyes were seeing. I just stood there, frozen, trying to understand how someone who shouldn’t exist could look so… alive.
I slowly backed away, never taking my eyes off where she’d been, and slipped back through the door into the stairwell. The group immediately asked what happened, but I couldn’t answer. Not yet. All I could say was, “Give me a minute.” I needed to breathe. Needed my brain to catch up to reality.
When I finally told them what I saw a full-body apparition, clear as day the energy shifted. People went quiet. The guide listened closely. And then I learned something that hit just as hard as the encounter itself: not many people had ever seen her like that. Not clearly. Not fully.
But the way I described her her height, her hair, the gown matched the accounts of the few who had.
I wasn’t overwhelmed with fear. That’s the part people always expect.
I was in shock.
Because in that moment, standing alone in that hallway, I didn’t just feel something watching me… I was watching her…