Abandoned school rang its bell at midnight. There was no one there.

I wasn't going to post this but it's been years and I still hear it sometimes.

Back in college I was in a photography club and we had this whole thing where we'd go find abandoned places to shoot. urbex stuff, ghost spots, whatever. One night we drove out to a shuttered elementary school in southern Gyeonggi province. The kind of place that shows up on Korean haunted location lists with like zero actual details about what happened there. Just "something occurred in the early 90s and they closed it." Cool. Great. Very reassuring.

We got there past midnight. My junior Sujin, she goes:

"Hey oppa¹... did you know people hear a bell ringing here after 12?"

And I laughed it off. "Who's ringing a bell at an abandoned school, come on."

But also I felt something. That gross, unsettled thing sitting in your chest that you can't explain and don't want to look at.

The front gate was rusted shut but somebody had twisted it open already. We squeezed through with our flashlights. The whole place was exactly what you'd expect. Dust everywhere. Broken classroom doors. Faint chalk marks still on the blackboards like time just. stopped.

One classroom in particular kept rattling. Door swinging back and forth.

Sujin: "that's... just wind right?"

Me: *shrugs because honestly I had no idea.*

We went up to the second floor and found the staff room at the end of the hall. Door was shut tight but there was this tapping sound coming from inside. tok tok tok. We shone the flashlight through the gap. Nothing.

And then.

From the bell tower in the center of the building.

*Clang. Clang.*

"DID YOU HEAR THAT" Sujin grabbed my arm, her face had gone completely white. "THE BELL. THAT WAS THE BELL."

I tried the "maybe wind?" thing again but it wasn't wind. It was ringing in perfect 5 second intervals. Like someone was pulling a rope on purpose.

We went up toward the bell tower. Third floor stairs, completely covered in mold and dust, but we just kept climbing because the sound was pulling us up somehow.

Halfway up the stairs my foot went THROUGH a rotted step.

I caught myself but Sujin screamed and fell. I pulled her up fast, she seemed okay, nothing broken.

And then the bell stopped.

Instead: footsteps. Dress shoes on a hard floor, that sharp click click click sound, coming down the stairs from above us.

We stood there. Not moving. Just looking at each other.

"Oppa," Sujin said, and she was basically crying at this point. "we need to leave. right now."

We started going back down and the footsteps followed. Click click click, right above us on the stairs. And when we stopped walking, the footsteps stopped too.

We made it to the first floor. Through the iron gate I could see a light. A flashlight. Someone was out there.

We both screamed "HELP, SOMEONE'S IN HERE" and the light started moving toward us.

Slowly.

And then we saw.

There was no one holding it. The flashlight was just... floating. Moving through the air by itself inside that beam of light. Nothing attached to it. No hand. No body.

I grabbed Sujin's hand and we SLAMMED through that gate and ran. Full sprint to the car. I don't even remember running, I just remember the cold air hitting my face and then we were in the car and I was turning the key.

I looked back at the building one last time.

On top of the bell tower.

Something was standing there looking down at us.

Wearing a school uniform.

---

After that night I never went back to any abandoned building. Not once.

But weird stuff started happening in our photography club room. Prints of the abandoned school would show up on the desk. Nobody took them. And in some of the photos, just barely visible, blurry, there was a student in a uniform standing somewhere they shouldn't be.

Sujin quit the club not long after. Stopped answering messages. Just gone.

I put down my camera too. Living a normal life now.

But sometimes, late at night, I hear it through the walls of my apartment.

Clang. Clang.

And I'm back there.