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| An Elevator Game Story Inspired by Urban Legend |
A new original tale every week—twisted, terrifying, and inspired by the darkest legends you thought you knew.
COLD OPEN
The elevator hummed wrong.
I'd ridden this same car hundreds of times—late nights coming home from double shifts, early mornings grabbing coffee before dawn, countless trips that blurred into muscle memory. I knew the pitch of the motor, the slight lurch between the seventh and eighth floors, even the wheezing gasp it made when the doors opened.
But tonight, the hum felt hollow. Like the sound was coming from somewhere far away, piped in through speakers instead of generated by the machinery around me.
The floor indicator flickered: 12... 11... 10...
Then it skipped.
10... 8... 6...
My stomach dropped as the elevator slowed between floors. Not the emergency-brake kind of stop, just a gradual deceleration until we hung suspended in the shaft. The lights dimmed but didn't go out completely, leaving me in a sickly amber glow that made everything look jaundiced.
The doors parted.
Not all the way—just enough to reveal a gap about two feet wide. But what I saw through that gap wasn't any hallway at all.
There were no walls. No doors. No elevator lobby with its scuffed linoleum and flickering fluorescent lights.
Just darkness. Vast and empty and wrong, lit by a faint glow that seemed to come from nowhere and everywhere at once. The smell hit me next—metallic, like old pennies mixed with something else. Something that reminded me of abandoned buildings and forgotten places.
The silence was the worst part. Not quiet—silence. The kind that pressed against your eardrums and made you aware of your own heartbeat, your own breathing, the blood rushing through your veins.
I stepped back from the doors.
They slammed shut with a sound like a gunshot.
The elevator jerked back into motion, and that's when I saw my reflection in the mirrored wall.
It was me. Same tired eyes, same rumpled work shirt, same stubble I'd been too exhausted to shave that morning.
Except the reflection lagged.
I moved my hand to my face, and my reflection's hand rose a half-second later. I blinked, and my reflection's eyes stayed open just a moment too long.
Then I saw it clearly: in the mirror, I was sitting on the elevator floor, legs splayed out, head tilted at an angle that made my neck look broken. Blood trickled from my temple, pooling on the scuffed metal floor.
I blinked hard, and I was standing upright again.
The elevator continued its descent as if nothing had happened. The floor indicator resumed its normal sequence: 5... 4... 3... 2... 1... G.
The doors opened on the familiar ground-floor lobby with its potted plants and mailboxes.
I stumbled out into the night air, lungs burning as I gulped down breaths that tasted like freedom.
That was when I realized I hadn't followed the right rules.
BEFORE
Let me back up.
My name is Alex Ross. I'm thirty-two, live alone in a mid-rise apartment building in a city that doesn't matter for this story. I work IT support for a hospital, which means a lot of late nights and the kind of exhaustion that seeps into your bones and never quite leaves.
I lost my partner eight months ago. I'm not going to detail how or why, because the specifics don't matter. What matters is the absence—the quiet that fills an apartment when you're the only one there, when no one's coming home to ask about your day or leave their shoes by the door or hum while making coffee.
Elevators became part of my routine. Fourteen floors up every night, fourteen floors down every morning. Sometimes I'd take the stairs just to feel something, but mostly I'd stand in that metal box and let it carry me up and down like a mechanical heartbeat.
That's how I first heard about the Elevator Game.
Not through some creepypasta site or viral TikTok, though it was on those too. I found it in an archived forum post from 2014, then again on a Korean blog, then in a Reddit thread that had been deleted but still lived in the Wayback Machine. Each version was slightly different, but the core remained the same:
A ritual. A sequence. A way to reach somewhere else.
I didn't try it for thrills. I'm not that person. I tried it because I wanted proof—proof that something existed beyond the mundane grind of work and sleep and grief. Or proof that nothing did, that the universe was exactly as empty as it felt.
Either answer seemed better than not knowing.
THE OLD RULES
The classic Elevator Game goes like this:
You need a building with at least ten floors. You ride alone—that's crucial. No one else can be in the elevator with you, and if someone tries to get on during the sequence, you have to start over.
You press the floors in a specific order: 4, 2, 6, 2, 10. Each time, you wait for the doors to close and the elevator to move before pressing the next button. Don't look at anyone who might be watching through the doors. Don't speak.
On the fifth floor, a woman will enter. Here's where most versions agree: she'll look ordinary, unremarkable, forgettable. Don't acknowledge her. Don't speak to her. Don't make eye contact. Just press the button for the first floor.
The elevator will start to descend, but instead of stopping at the first floor, it will begin to ascend to the tenth floor. When the doors open, you'll see the other world—some versions say it's red-tinted, others say it's just wrong in ways you can't articulate.
If you want to explore, you can step out. But you have to return the same way: enter the elevator, press the buttons in reverse order. The woman might still be there. She might ask you questions. Don't answer. Don't acknowledge her.
That's how you're supposed to get home.
I chose my own building because it met the requirements. Fourteen floors, elevator that ran all night, and most importantly, I already felt like a stranger there. If something went wrong, at least it would be in a place that already felt empty.
FIRST ATTEMPT
The first time I tried it, I waited until 2 AM on a Wednesday. The building was silent except for the distant hum of the HVAC system and someone's television murmuring through thin walls.
I stepped into the elevator and pressed 4.
The doors closed. The elevator rose. My reflection stared back at me from the mirrored wall, looking tired and skeptical and afraid in equal measure.
Fourth floor. Doors opened on an empty hallway. Closed again.
I pressed 2.
Down. Second floor. Empty hallway. The fluorescent light near the stairwell flickered the way it always did.
I pressed 6.
This was when I started to notice the change. The elevator's hum shifted pitch, just slightly. The air felt heavier, like the pressure had increased. The mirror seemed darker, though the lighting hadn't changed.
Sixth floor. Doors opened. Closed.
I pressed 2 again.
My hands were shaking now. The elevator descended, and I could feel my pulse in my throat.
Second floor again. Still empty.
I pressed 10.
The elevator began to rise. Slowly. Deliberately. I counted the floors: 3... 4... 5...
The elevator stopped.
The doors opened.
She was standing in the hallway.
Not in front of the elevator, but off to the side, near the wall. Close enough that she could step in if she wanted, far enough that she wasn't blocking my view.
She looked... normal. Mid-thirties, maybe. Dark hair pulled back in a ponytail. Jeans and a sweater. The kind of person you'd pass on the street and forget thirty seconds later. She wasn't looking at me. She was staring at the mirrored wall beside the elevator buttons, her expression blank and distant.
She stepped inside.
The doors closed behind her.
I didn't look at her. I kept my eyes on the floor indicator as I pressed 1. Every instinct screamed to acknowledge her, to say sorry for not holding the elevator, to ask if she needed a specific floor.
But I didn't.
The elevator began to descend. I watched the numbers drop: 4... 3... 2... 1...
Then it stopped.
And started rising.
The floor indicator climbed: 2... 3... 4... and kept going. Past the floors I'd selected. Past where it should have stopped. 6... 7... 8... 9... 10.
The doors opened.
What I saw wasn't my building's tenth floor.
It was a hallway, yes. But it stretched endlessly in both directions, walls painted an institutional beige that seemed to absorb light rather than reflect it. No doors. No windows. No exit signs or fire extinguishers or any of the things that made a hallway feel real.
The light had a reddish tint, like old blood diluted in water.
It felt unfinished. Like a rendering that hadn't fully loaded, all textures and no details.
I stood there, frozen, staring at the impossible hallway. The woman beside me remained perfectly still, still staring at the mirrored wall, still not acknowledging me or anything else.
Then the doors began to close.
As they sealed shut, trapping us inside again, I glanced at the mirrored wall—and my reflection lagged.
Just like before.
For less than a second, I saw myself sitting on the elevator floor. Legs splayed out awkwardly. Head tilted at an angle that made my spine scream just looking at it. Blood trickled from my temple, dark and fresh.
Then I blinked, and I was standing upright again.
Stress, I told myself. Sleep deprivation. Grief playing tricks on my exhausted brain.
I pressed the buttons in reverse order like I'd read: 2, 6, 2, 4, 1.
The elevator began to descend.
The woman didn't move. Didn't blink. Just stood there, perfectly still, as we dropped through floors that maybe didn't exist.
When the doors finally opened on the ground floor—my real ground floor, with its familiar potted ficus and bulletin board covered in take-out menus—I bolted out like the elevator was on fire.
The woman didn't follow.
I turned back just in time to see the doors close. Through the narrowing gap, I could see her still standing there, still staring at nothing, as the elevator began to rise again.
I thought it was over.
SOMETHING CAME BACK
The first sign came three days later.
I was waiting for the elevator after work, exhausted and thinking about the leftover Thai food in my fridge, when the chime rang and the doors opened.
The elevator was empty.
Not unusual. Except I was on the fourteenth floor, and the indicator showed the elevator had just come from the seventh floor. No one got off. The doors just opened, waited, and closed again.
Then it happened again. And again.
Empty elevators arriving on my floor at odd hours. Doors opening when I walked past them in the lobby. The chime sounding when I was alone in the hallway, making me jump every time.
At the time, I didn't realize the floor indicator only started behaving strangely after my first attempt. Before the ritual, it had always been reliable, predictable. But now it skipped numbers, lingered on floors, sometimes cycled backward. As if the elevator itself had been altered by what I'd done.
I started taking the stairs.
But the dreams were worse.
Elevators that never stopped moving, cycling through floors that didn't exist. Elevators with mirrored ceilings that showed me falling even as I stood upright. Elevators where the woman stood in every corner simultaneously, all of her turning to look at me at once.
I woke up gasping, my sheets soaked with sweat that smelled like metal and old pennies.
I went back online, searching for reassurance.
Instead, I found contradictions.
THE RULES ARE DIFFERENT NOW
The posts I'd used to learn the ritual were still there, archived and static. But when I dug deeper—into forums I hadn't noticed before, into threads that had been locked or deleted—I found arguments.
People claiming the rules had changed.
Someone on a paranormal forum wrote: "The 2014 version doesn't work anymore. The elevator learned. You need to press 4, 2, 6, 10, 2 now. The woman comes on the seventh floor instead of the fifth."
Another person replied: "That's wrong. The woman comes when she wants now. There's no safe floor."
A third voice: "If you see a glimpse of yourself dead, don't go back. That means it's already chosen you."
I scrolled through hundreds of posts, my stomach sinking with each one. The version I'd followed was outdated, replaced by countless variations that people swore were the "real" rules. Some said you had to hum a specific tune. Others said you needed to carry salt or avoid looking at the floor indicator entirely.
But the most disturbing posts were the warnings.
"Some buildings are burned. Once the elevator learns the pattern, it's contaminated. Everyone who rides alone is at risk."
"The glimpse is a signature. Once you see how you'll die, the game won't let you leave until it happens."
"If you used the old rules after 2019, you didn't complete the ritual. You interrupted it. It will finish with or without you."
I found a screenshot from a deleted blog post dated three weeks ago:
"my friend tried the elevator game and said she saw herself dead in the reflection. she laughed it off and went home. five days later her building had a power outage and she got stuck in the elevator between floors for six hours. when they finally got her out she was unconscious. massive head trauma, exactly where she saw the blood in her vision. doctors said it looked like she'd been thrown around during the outage, but the elevator barely moved. she's in a coma now. i can't stop thinking that the elevator was just finishing what she started."
The username belonged to an account that hadn't posted since.
I kept digging, deeper into forums that required passwords I had to guess, into Discord servers that had been abandoned mid-conversation.
I found myself reading accounts I'd dismissed the first time. Posts mentioning that the woman never speaks—until she does. That she's silent during the first encounter, bound by rules that feel almost contractual. But once someone's been logged, once the elevator has their signature, she doesn't need to follow the old patterns anymore.
"She only spoke once," someone wrote in a thread from 2021. "After I tried the game a second time. She said my name, but not to me. Like she was confirming something with the elevator itself."
That's when I noticed the timestamps.
Posts warning about updated rules appeared after the events they described should have already happened. A warning dated June 2023 referenced a disappearance from August 2023. Another post from last year quoted a news article that wouldn't be published for another six months.
Either people were editing their posts retroactively, or something was writing the warnings backwards through time.
I understood too late: I'd followed instructions that no longer applied.
The elevator wasn't done with me.
SECOND ATTEMPT
It started small.
Doors opening when I walked past, even on floors I hadn't pressed.
The elevator arriving before I called it, as if it knew I was coming.
Buttons lighting up on their own when I stepped inside—always the same sequence, always leading back to the ritual I'd started.
Then I heard breathing.
I was alone in the elevator, descending from the fourteenth floor, when I heard it: slow, measured breaths coming from behind me. I spun around, but the elevator was empty except for me and my reflection.
When I turned back to face forward, she was there.
Not behind me. Only in the mirror.
The woman stood in the reflection, even though the elevator car itself was empty. She stared at the mirrored surface the way she had before—blank, distant. But this time, I understood: the elevator didn't need her body anymore. I was already inside the system. She could exist as reflection alone.
She spoke—not to me, but to the elevator.
She said my name.
The elevator lurched to a stop between floors.
Lights flickered. The emergency phone started ringing, even though no one was calling.
I tried to pry the doors open, but they wouldn't budge. The floor indicator spun like a compass searching for north: 7... 13... 4... 9... 2...
Then the elevator dropped.
Not fell—dropped. Like someone had cut the cables, but controlled. I slammed against the ceiling, then crashed to the floor as we stopped with a jolt that made my teeth crack together.
My head struck the wall.
Blood trickled from my temple, warm and wet.
I was sitting exactly like the reflection I'd seen.
Legs splayed out. Head tilted. Blood pooling on the scuffed metal floor.
The doors opened.
Not to a hallway, but to another elevator. An identical car running parallel to mine, and in it, someone stood waiting to step out.
They looked like me. Same height, same clothes, same expression of confused terror.
As they stepped out into my elevator, I understood.
THE TRUTH
The woman was once like me.
She saw her reflection too—saw herself dead in the mirrored wall, dismissed it as stress or exhaustion or imagination. She followed the old rules, thought she'd escaped, went home and tried to forget.
But the elevator doesn't transport people anymore.
It replaces them.
The ritual doesn't open a door to another world. It creates a vacancy. A space that needs to be filled. Someone must stay so someone else can leave.
That's why the woman never leaves. That's why she stands in the elevator, perfectly still, staring at nothing. She's not trying to hurt anyone. She's just waiting—waiting for someone else to see the glimpse, to ignore the warning, to step into the space she's been holding.
The rules evolve to keep working. Each generation finds a slightly different version because the elevator learns, adapts, refines its method. It's not a place. It's a process.
And I started it.
The glimpse of my death wasn't a warning.
It was a preview.
It was the elevator showing me what slot needed to be filled.
THE WARNING
I'm writing this in my apartment, because I need to warn you.
If you've ever tried the Elevator Game—any version of it—and you saw yourself in the reflection, different from how you were standing, then listen carefully:
The old rules don't work. Pressing floors in sequence doesn't open a door. It opens a transaction.
Seeing your death means the elevator has chosen you. Not immediately, not dramatically, but inevitably. It will find a way to complete what you started.
The woman isn't the threat. She's the consequence.
The only safe option is this:
Never enter an elevator alone.
Never trust a sequence of floors.
Never believe any version that promises you can return.
And if you see your reflection wrong—if you catch a glimpse of yourself dead or dying or not-quite-right—don't rationalize it. Don't ignore it. Don't think it's just stress or grief or exhaustion.
Run.
Because the elevator is already calculating how to make that glimpse real.
I can hear the chime now, even though I'm on the fourteenth floor and there's no elevator in my apartment.
The doors are—
© 2025 Karen Cody. All rights reserved.
This original story was written exclusively for the Urban Legends, Mystery, and Myth blog.
Do not copy, repost, or reproduce without permission.
This tale may appear in a future special collection.
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