We returned two nights later. It was much colder, and snowing, to boot. Being good Minnesotans, we layered up. Before going in, Foxilla, who loved climbing things, opted to scale the chimney using the internal rungs. These things were well over 2 feet apart and old as hell. Plus, the inner walls of the chimney tapered sharply about halfway up, which meant that at times she was climbing while hanging backward.

Now, here comes a lesson in exploration safety for any novice explorers out there, so pay attention. It's a lesson I know very, very well. However, somehow it totally slipped my mind at the time … probably I was too busy enjoying the view of the woman above me.

I'd lent her my headlamp for the climb. When she got all the way to the top, I reminded her to turn it off so no one would notice her peeking her head out and appreciating the view from up there. Well, she was unfamiliar with my headlamp, and had some trouble turning it off (insert lewd comment here). After quite a bit of fumbling, the light stopped shining.

That was when I was reminded rather pointedly that even with all my experience, I could be a total moron when it came to basic safety. There was a brief second of a slicing sound, and then "crack!" Something hit the ground on the other side of the chimney base like a shot.

What the FUCK was I doing standing at the base of the shaft gawking upward like a fool?!? You NEVER stand around where falling objects (dislodged or dropped) might crack your stupid head open. I know this. I live this. Yet somehow I'd totally spaced this, and had almost caught a headlamp's battery pack in the head for my stupidity.

I quickly hopped up into the coal chute before anything else fell down the shaft and into my skull. Foxilla finished her scenery-gazing and climbed back down. It took awhile, but we did eventually find all the scattered AAA headlamp batteries amidst the logs and coal dust.

We adjusted our dustmasks and proceeded to climb into the furnace through the vent. I fastened a knotted rope we'd brought for the occasion to some sturdy pipes, and I climbed down easily into the furnace room. (The rope turned out to be pretty unnecessary, but it's better to err on the side of being able to continue, I think.) Once I'd done a quick check for a security system, Foxilla descended the rope as well, and the exploration proper began.

We started out, obviously, in the furnace room, which in this case was its own little building. Since we had to go up a flight of stairs to get into the main building's sub-basement, I suppose we started in the sub-sub basement, sort of. The deep levels were what you'd expect: lots of pipes, utility stuff, laundry rooms, etc. There were a couple of dead, rotten birds. You could see the dead bird-shaped mark where they'd lied there and rotted, but their actual corpses had been moved by processes or agents unknown to locations a foot or so away. Hmm. We poked around the subbasement and basement, took some pictures, and moved up a level into the 1st floor of the hospital building.

At first, we were very relaxed and very casual as we went through: the place was very clean (almost boringly so), in very good shape, and boarded up tight as can be. It did not seem creepy at all, and it seemed highly unlikely that we might get busted or run into violent squatters.

However, the mood can change rather quickly, especially when you are a crew of only two people. First, we heard some inexplicable clunking noises back from the direction of the subbasement. This was especially disconcerting because the furnace was our only way out, since all the damn windows and doors were boarded. Then we noticed the "alarm" sound was still going on, and seemed to be coming from a floor above us somewhere. It was high pitched, wavery, annoying, and very off-putting.

Adding to the fun, as we were walking down the main hallway, all keyed up due to the clunking noises, a closed door we walked past opened suddenly, entirely of its own accord, just as we went past it. We hadn't touched it, and there was no wind. Foxilla almost jumped out of her skin, and even hard-headed rationalist atheist me was irrationally creeped-out a bit in spite of myself.

Our mood was much less casual as we continued. After we explored the entire main floor of the Building (as opposed to the House), we took a wide, curving hallway into the main floor of the House. The ground floor of the House was rather institutional, consisting mainly of a large kitchen area and some community room deals. We both thought we heard something like footsteps from back in the Building at one point, and killed out lights and stood there silently listening for a few minutes. It was tense, but we did not hear or see anything else, so we continued exploring.

We took some stairs downward into the House's basement (which was separate from the Building's basement) and checked out all the weird storage rooms and such. One room featured all barred windows and torture devices. Well, OK, maybe they were really bed frames and some kind of antique printing press, but I'm going to say they were torture devices, so shut up. There was also a dead bat, which I named Alfonso.

We also found a trash-picking-up stick (sort of a short broomstick with a spike on the end), which I tried to convince Foxilla to carry for defense in case we ran into a territorial crackhead, but she didn't.

After that it was time to explore the upper floors of the House. So we did. They were generally just as empty and as clean as the rooms in the Building had been, but had neat wooden shit, a fireplace, and slanted ceilings, due to the peaked roof of the house. A bathroom on this floor had a sign claiming to be occupied at the moment, but there wasn't anyone in there, not even a corpse or a ghost. The attic was pretty awesome; it was in crappy shape, had lots of little midget-sized doors and weird storage spaces, and one room had a brush-painted message about some Jesus guy, who was apparently somebody's boss or something. One storage nook featured a blanket and a plastic soda bottle filled with urine, but it seemed that the occupant had not been there for a long time.

This completed our tour of the House, so we retraced our route back into the Building, where the ultra high-pitched squealing sound still echoed faintly from upstairs. There were two stairwells, one at each end of the building. We ascended up the one that did not lead down into the basements, perhaps subconsciously avoiding the source of the earlier faint, mysterious clunking noises from that direction.

The next floor up was very similar to the first, but the weird electronic-sounding warble was more piercing. We had to be stingy with our lights, since many of the windows at the level were not boarded up and we did not want to attract attention. There was one of those nursery rooms with the window to the hallway for looking at rows of humanoid grubs. The "vibe," which had mellowed out while we explored the house, was getting increasingly creepy the longer we explored the Building. I mentioned this to Foxilla, who scolded me for mentioning it (she later told me that my total lack of apparent concern was instrumental in her not getting totally freaked out).

I think the sounds in this area were largely responsible: there was the subtle, weird squealing from upstairs, which as we got nearer seemed to also feature random short beeps, and the memory of the clunking sounds and the likely imagined footsteps. Additionally, the windows on the upper levels were not boarded up, and someone had broken many of the windows. This allowed the cold winter breeze to sneak through the halls and whistle and moan eerily, as well as to rustle the dead leaves of the creeping ivy that had climbed into the open windows.

We finished up the second floor (which if you are looking from the front of the building, would be the 1st floor, since the hospital is built on a slope), and prepared to ascend to the third floor; it was time to face the source of the mystery noise. Foxilla was not excited about this, but she was willing, so up we went. It's hard to explain how what was clearly an electronic noise of some kind could be so creepy. It's all context, I guess. Any unknown when exploring an abandoned hospital takes on bonus significance.

We came out of the stairwell, and headed down the hallway toward the source of the constant noise. Short, staccato beeps in the same pitch as the constant whine sounded off at completely random intervals from elsewhere on the floor, and were impossible to locate; they seemed to come from everywhere and nowhere. We tracked the constant sound down to a corner room. It seemed to be coming from the lights mounted on the wall, but it was impossible to locate it any more precisely.

We shut the door to mute the annoying, unnerving sound a bit, and finished exploring the floor, which was on the whole more or less identical to the second floor. The random beepings continued, and we had no luck figuring out where the hell it was coming from: the sound moved through the floor without apparent rhyme or reason. I decided that some kid had died receiving shock treatment and now his ghost was trapped in the electrical system. (Slim Jim later suggested that the sounds were smoke detectors with dying batteries, but the electrical ghost theory is far more interesting, damn it.)

I'd noticed earlier that one of the stairwells went up another level beyond the third floor, so we ascended yet again. We found ourselves in a short, cramped and dirty hallway with two doors. The first one we tried opened up out onto the roof, so we went out and enjoyed the decent view of downtown Minneapolis and checked on the car. It was freezing, so we didn't spend much time on the rooftop. The other door led into an elevator room, where the machinery that controlled the "lift" hung out.

Then it was go time. We quietly made our way back down through the Building, into the basement, into the sub-basement, down and over into the furnace room, up and into the furnace, through the vent, and out of the chimney, into the night. We were absolutely covered in coal dust, cold, tired, hungry, and happy as clams on laughing gas as we hopped in Foxilla's car and drove away, basking in the afterglow of a successful mission.