Previously: “The Village In The Attic.”
Have you ever wanted to go explore a dead mall? I mean, I don’t blame you — they capture the imagination in a way few things do. But before you hop in your car to go drive around in an attempt to find your nearest long-closed shopping mecca, give the creepypasta “Dead Mall” a read. It… might give you a few second thoughts.
You’d be wise to heed the warning your gut is giving you.
I’ve written before about my fascination with dead malls. Admittedly, t’s been… quite some time since I published that piece (roughly a decade — my, how time flies!), but the fascination remains — and, indeed, has actually grown, especially now that these already-deceased altars of consumerism are now vanishing altogether.
[Like what you read? Check out Dangerous Games To Play In The Dark, available from Chronicle Books now!]
I live in the same region as one particularly notable one — the Landmark Mall in the Washington, DC area, which served as the shooting location for the opening sequence of Wonder Woman 1984; I bought a couch there years ago, when the Macy’s was still open (it was an extremely weird experience!) — and even that one is not long for this world: It’s being rebuilt as an ever-popular mixed-use development in conjunction with a new campus for one of the big hospital systems in the DMV.
This story, written by Creepypasta Wikia user Digigekko and published in the waning months of 2021, taps into that fascination — and then it runs with it, giving us a found footage-style story that I… don’t really think I should tell you much more about, lest it spoil things too badly.
It’s a long read, but stick with it. It’s worth it.
Although “Dead Mall” is mostly a standalone story, it was created by the same mastermind behind a bigger project called the Cold Relics series. If you’re interested in large-scale, interconnected stories that all take place within a specific universe, Cold Relics is worth checking out. Find the stories here and here.
There’s also a prequel to “Dead Mall,” too — hence why I’ve described it as “mostly” standalone; originally it was written as a one-off, but sometimes, our writerly imaginations just can’t shake a subject — so if you want to see what Sleepy Pines Mall looked like in its prime, you can find that story here and here.
An excerpt of “Dead Mall” can be found below; find the full story here. And in the meantime: Fellow ’80s and ’90s kids, I know the draw of nostalgia can be strong… but sometimes, it’s best to let the past stay in the past. Get careless, and it might drag you down with it.
***
It was called Sleepy Pines Mall. A few miles off an interstate in America’s northeast, at the center of several small towns. It was a single story and only had two anchor stores, but it was sprawling considering its almost rural location. Built in 1973, it was one of the older shopping malls, and opened before there were long-term strategies on mall viability. Popular for a time, its occupancy dwindled in the late ’90s, and it lost its movie theater and Sears by 2003 before becoming a neglected, poorly maintained, and sometimes dangerous commercial plaza that was outdone by nearby rivals, and doomed by surrounding negative growth trends of the towns that kept it fed. The food court closed in 2006, and the last stores followed a year later. Sleepy Pines had its fans and grown adults who had gone there as children paying it nostalgic visits, as all malls do, but by 2010, it had become a mostly-forgotten derelict with a parking lot full of weeds.
Ten years later, a lengthy demolition was in its final stages. I had been assigned the foreman of the construction of the building that would replace it: A large warehouse and distribution center for a major retailer. I would frequently pay the site a visit as the walls were torn down and the roof was gutted, myself having gone to the mall several times in my youth whenever my family was passing through the area — so I knew its layout well. By the winter of 2020, all that really remained of the structure was the back wall of its atrium, which once overlooked the fountain. A painted mural on tiles covered that wall. …
… Now the mural itself would be coming down soon, and ground on the next building would be broken after the spring thaw. What little demolition remained was also put on hold while the earth was still frozen. I went to the site a few days after New Year’s, to get my last look at the public painting, exposed to the elements and surrounded by a landscape of snow. I checked in on the operations trailer while there, just to give my best wishes for 2021 to the guy in charge, who I had gotten to know over the years from various other projects.
“Hey, you still like strange shit, right?” he asked me after a few minutes of us chatting about our holiday get-togethers. “Got something you’ll love. My guys found it just before they left for the winter. I’m no good with electronics, you know. So you might as well see what you can do with it.”
***
Follow The Ghost In My Machine on Bluesky @GhostMachine13.bsky.social, Twitter @GhostMachine13, and Facebook @TheGhostInMyMachine. And for more games, don’t forget to check out Dangerous Games To Play In The Dark, available now from Chronicle Books!
[Photo via Brett Levin Photography/Flickr, available via a CC BY 2.0 Creative Commons license]
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