The Third Floor Doesn’t Exist

When Eliza moved into the Halthorne Apartments, she was just looking for peace. A quiet place to recover from a breakup, focus on her freelance design job, and get away from the city noise. Halthorne was oddly cheap for how upscale it looked marble lobby, polite doorman, and an antique elevator with brass buttons polished like gold teeth.

But from the day she arrived, something felt off.

There was no third floor.

The elevator panel skipped it: 1, 2, 4, 5, PH. She asked the doorman, an old man named Franklin, about it.

“Superstition,” he grunted. “Some folks don’t like the number three.”

But she wasn’t convinced. On her first night, around 3:00 AM, she heard footsteps above her. Heavy, dragging footsteps like someone walking barefoot across a floor littered with glass. But she lived on the second floor, and the third didn’t exist.

She told herself it was nothing. Old buildings made noises. But the next night, it came again—same time, same pattern. This time, it ended with a low knocking sound... right above her ceiling.

By the fourth night, she couldn’t sleep. She paced her apartment, eyes wide, ears tuned to every creak. And then she noticed something strange.

Her hallway had seven doors. But she could only name six tenants.

So she started watching.

Door 2D never opened.

She’d wait by her peephole for hours, but no one ever went in or out. No packages. No mail. Just an old black number painted crookedly across the wood.

One night, her curiosity took over. She walked to 2D and pressed her ear against the door.

Silence.

Then click.

The doorknob turned from the inside.

Eliza ran.

The next morning, she told Franklin. He looked uncomfortable.

“2D’s been empty for years. Some say it’s a storage room. But no one has the key.”

Later that day, her elevator stopped at Floor 3.

She hadn’t pressed it. The button didn’t even exist.

The doors slid open slowly, painfully, like lungs filling with tar. A hallway stretched in front of her
gray walls, flickering lights, and doors without numbers. The air smelled like burnt hair and damp cloth. Something primal in her screamed leave, but her legs moved forward anyway.

She walked slowly, heart pounding so hard it hurt. A distant lullaby echoed from the end of the hall, a child's voice humming something ancient and broken.

Then she saw it.

A woman. Pale, hair falling in clumps, standing in front of a mirror that reflected nothing. Her mouth was sewn shut with thick black thread. Eliza gasped, stepped back

And the elevator doors slammed shut behind her.

No button. No panel. Just walls.

The woman turned.

And smiled without lips.

Eliza doesn’t remember much after that.

She woke up in her bed the next morning, clothes damp, fingers raw as if she had scratched at concrete all night. Her elevator refused to open for hours. When it finally did, the third floor was gone again.

But she was never the same.

Every night at 3:00 AM, her lights flicker. Sometimes she hears whispering from the vents. And sometimes, the mirror in her bathroom shows two reflections one that moves, and one that smiles.

Eliza tried to move out, but Halthorne doesn’t allow it.

Every realtor she contacts says the same thing:
"There’s no record of you living there."

And Franklin? He retired.

But sometimes, late at night, she sees someone in the lobby through the peephole. An old man in a doorman's uniform, whispering to the elevator.

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ghost, haunted, elevator, cursed building, supernatural, mirror horror, whispers, abandoned floor, psychological thriller, mysterious doors, horror apartment, unseen entities, sleepless nights, eerie silence, vintage horror, third floor mystery, horror fiction, creepy reflection, paranormal, urban legend

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