I’ve been trapped in a London Underground station for 15 years.
Part I - Part II
I was a university student on her way to a biology lecture. There wasn’t, and still isn’t, anything extraordinary about me. I don’t know why this happened to me. Why does anything bad ever happen to anyone?
Like every other early-morning commuter in that underground station, I let the escalator carry me up to the lobby above ground. I dozily eyed the inclining row of posters to my left, advertising whatever was current back in 2010. I was tired, and likely hungover, which was why I thought little of the feathery lightness in my skull as my mechanical step neared the top.
A white blanket started to encase the world, obscuring my vision, and then—
I was standing not in the station’s above-ground lobby, but at the bottom of the escalator. My eyesight cleared to reveal that I was where I had started.
Supporting myself on the escalator’s balustrade, I stepped onto the moving staircase and tried again. I assumed I’d simply had far more to drink than I previously thought. However, once again, I failed to exit the underground station. That white light swallowed my vision, returning me to the bottom of the moving staircase again, and again, and again.
The horror rapidly set into my bones, as much as I tried to fight against it. After trying five or six times to exit up the escalator, I instead rushed back onto the platform and tried to board a train, but the same thing happened—that white light stole my sight and thrust me a few feet back from the platform’s edge, which somehow drew absolutely no looks of interest from boarding or deboarding passengers.
And believe me when I say that I tried. I turned frantically to passers-by, hoping they would share my confusion and existential panic, but they didn’t. I was invisible to all, despite my best efforts. When I pleaded for help, commuters either ignored me or treated me like a leper. Such as is the way of any major city, I suppose, but this was more than that.
It was as if I were being obstructed from the world not just physically, but mentally.
Something had caught me in a bubble, binding me to that London Underground station—which, for the sake of my personal safety, I won’t name. Just know that I have tried, a thousand different times in a thousand different ways, to escape.
On that very first day, a few friendly souls tried to assist. The first kind stranger came along after I’d spent half an hour relentlessly stepping onto that escalator, only to find myself returning continually to the bottom.
“Are you okay, Miss?” the little old lady asked.
“No!” I blubbered, slouching against the wall near the bottom of the stairs. “I physically can’t leave.”
“What on Earth do you mean, dear?” the woman replied, placing a tender hand on my shoulder.
I sniffled, wiping tears from my cheeks, and nodded at the top of the escalator. “Let me show you.”
I stepped onto the escalator once again, the white light enveloped me, then I found myself back at the bottom. Yet, the most disquieting thing happened. I turned towards that little old lady, threw my hands up exasperatedly, and found myself staring into her vacant eyes.
The elderly woman looked at me as if for the first time.
“Gosh, dear!” she gasped. “You’re crying. Are you okay?”
“I… What?” I whispered. “We were just talking. Didn’t you see me try to go… Actually, what did you see?”
The doddery pensioner’s frown morphed into a timid, doe-eyed look. “I’m sorry, but I don’t understand, sweetheart.”
“Did I just appear out of thin air?” I screamed.
My high-pitched squeal startled the poor woman; she jolted on the spot and clamped a hand to her chest. “Heavens, darling! I’m only trying to help you. When I saw you walking down the escalator, face strewn with tears, I—”
“What?” I interrupted breathlessly. “You saw me walking down the escalator?”
The woman gulped. “Yes, love. You looked a million miles away. Is there somebody I need to call? I mean this in the kindest possible way: you don’t seem to be in a balanced state of mind.”
“Please get me out of here,” I trembled, heart starting to feel as weighty as my head.
“Right… I’ll go and fetch help,” promised the woman, who scurried fearfully past me onto the escalator.
I never saw her again, but I truly believe that the stranger did intend to fetch help. I’ll get to that.
I took my trusty Samsung S8300 UltraTouch out of my pocket. Not sponsored; he was just my dearest friend for many years in this solitary cell. Sammy, I called him. Anyhow, I started by calling and texting every single person in my contact list, which was when the true terror started to wriggle its way into my flesh.
My friends and relatives were all alarmed by my situation. Each of them promised to help. Each of them failed to help. People would read my texts, or answer my calls, but I’d hear nothing back from them. And when I’d ask for updates on the ‘cavalry’ arriving to save me, I’d get responses such as:
Oh, I don’t remember seeing this message. Sorry.
What? When did you send this?
You need help with what?
Every single person forgot about me, and they all kept forgetting about me—kept forgetting, most importantly, about my situation. It was just as it had been with that old woman. People were forgetting me, and I was, supposedly, forgetting moving my feet back down the escalator.
I know this all sounds impossible. Even to me, it still feels like a horrible, horrible dream.
And, like every bad dream, it comes with a monster.
That very first day of imprisonment passed in a horrid blur. The arms of insanity had already embraced me by midnight, when the station emptied and the trains stopped coming. This was, unbeknownst to me, only one day out of thousands to come. Still, I had hope.
There’s one thing Transport for London doesn’t abide, and it’s homeless people, I thought, pressing my spine into the curvature of the corridor’s tiled wall. A member of staff phone the police when I’m caught sleeping rough. Then somebody will come to rescue me. Arrest me. Same thing.
Nobody came.
I felt foolish for thinking somebody would. After all, that place was muddying people’s minds. I’m absolutely certain that an underground employee will have seen me on a CCTV camera, but that mysterious force will have wiped his or her memory. I pictured somebody reaching for the phone, fully intending to rat me out to the police, only to absent-mindedly get up and fetch a biscuit from the tin instead.
I sobbed as the nature of my paranormal prison, far below the ground, dawned on me.
I was trapped, and nobody saw me.
No person saw me, I should say.
Around three in the morning, as my eyelids drifted together, there came the sharp smacks of something striking the distant floor of a distant hallway—somewhere deep within the station. It sounded like wet feet, fresh out of a bath, slapping against tiles. I dismissed it as a dream, of course. Besides, I was already focusing on my migraine, which seemed to have been induced by the pounding of something akin to a tiny mallet behind my retinas.
When I opened my eyes to find myself sitting against the wall near the escalators, sunlight pouring from the lobby above, I screamed; worst of all, I screamed right in the face of a kind young rail service worker looking at me. I remember thinking that he looked quite sweet, with his warm smile and overgrown brown locks. That distracted me, if only for a moment, from the terror of what I’d endured the day before. It all quickly came back to me, of course.
“I’m afraid you’re not allowed to nap here,” the blue-shirted station worker said. “I know you’ve probably not been here long, but—”
“I’ve been here all night…” I interjected with a quivering voice; I was half-telling myself, as I struggled to believe that I’d actually spent the night at a train station.
The young man, possibly only a few years older than me, smiled. “As I said, I don’t think you’ve been sleeping for that long, Miss. You’re probably just a little disoriented. It’s three o’clock in the afternoon. If you’d been here all night, somebody would’ve moved you along.”
I didn’t reply; I just turned to look at that awful escalator which had haunted me the day before.
The worker nodded slowly, and a pitying frown—much like the one of the old lady—started to spread across his face. “You look hungry. Would you like a bite to eat?”
I didn’t want a bite to eat. I wanted to get out of that hellish place. But this was the first person who’d properly seen me since I first found myself trapped down there, and it had been a long, long twenty-four hours. I was tired. I was hungry. I was frightened. For all of those reasons, I obliged and followed the young staff member to his office down a nearby corridor.
As he entered the four-digit code beside the door, I logged it in my mind. I had a feeling that this room might become essential to my survival, and I wasn’t wrong. The worker sat me on a swivel chair and fetched a cheese sandwich and some grapes from the fridge—a blessed sight after a whole day without food. Anyway, I practically inhaled all of the grub whilst he sat on another swivel chair opposite me.
“I’m not homeless,” I insisted between mouthfuls, nodding at the bag by my feet. “Look inside. I’m a student at King’s College.”
I kicked the yellow rucksack over, and the worker unzipped it.
“Oh, right,” he said, eyeing one of my biology books. “Were you just skipping a class to catch up on some rest? My sister goes to uni, and she never gets enough sleep.”
I shook my head. “I’m trapped.”
He raised an eyebrow. “Trapped?”
I nodded. “I know you won’t believe me, but every time I try to leave this station, I end up right back down here. It started yesterday. I reach the top of the escalator, or the inside of a train, then a white light blinds me, and I find myself back in the station.”
He seemed concerned by my admission. Unlike anyone else, however, this employee—this stranger—didn’t treat me like a mad woman. And that felt like the first dose of something resembling normality in the past day.
“That sounds awful,” the worker replied. “Are you prone to seizures?”
“I might’ve believed so,” I said. “But… Well, that doesn’t explain the rest of it.”
“The rest of it?” he asked.
“The scariest thing about all of this is the way folk are treating me,” I explained. “Strangers. Relatives. Friends. It doesn’t matter. They all promise to help me, but then they forget that we even had a conversation.”
“Well, that’s just simply not true,” the man said, standing up and extending a hand. “Come on. I’ll lead you out of the station right now. We’ll walk up the escalator together, then we’ll book you a taxi to the hospital, okay? I’m not a doctor, but it really sounds like you’ve bumped your head or something.”
“No,” I said. “You’ll forget that we had this conversation. My own mother keeps forgetting about my situation, no matter how many times I explain it to her. With strangers, it’s worse. They forget that I exist.”
“Let’s not be strangers then. I’m Peter,” he said. “What’s your name?”
“Carla,” I answered.
He smiled. “Lovely to meet you, Carla. Right, here’s another idea. Stay here until the end of my shift. I’ll keep popping my head in and out to check on you. Raid the fridge—you must be starving. And charge your phone. But, at the end of my shift, we need to make a plan, okay? And if I see any sign of anything resembling a medical emergency, then—”
“I’m fine. I’m not having seizures,” I insisted.
Peter frowned. “I really should just call someone, shouldn’t I?”
“If you try, you’ll forget all of this,” I promised.
“I don’t believe that,” he said.
But he did—he must’ve done. Otherwise, as he said, he would’ve called someone. He wouldn’t have let me spend the next eight hours in that room.
Just like the day before, I spent Peter’s shift attempting to get help from family members and friends, but the nightmare repeated—looping endlessly. My loved ones were worried. They hadn’t forgotten that I existed, but their minds were muddled. Befuddled. They were part of whatever had cursed me. Something—whatever was keeping me in that underground station—seemed to be ensuring that I would receive no outside help.
Worst of all, come eleven in the night, Peter did not appear in the office’s doorway. Instead, I was greeted by a very confused woman in the same blue uniform.
“Who on Earth are you?” she asked rather placidly; I realised that I’d been fortunate, over the past day, not to come face to face with any rough, tough employees. “Get out before I call the police.”
I wanted to explain myself, but I was young, so I panicked. After collecting my phone, charger, and bag, I scurried out of the office, then ran through a near-deserted corridor towards the escalators. I nearly tried, once again, to escape, but I thought, instead, of Peter, so I decided to look for him—the one person who’d truly seen and heard me.
I searched the emptying tunnels of the station, but there was no sign of him.
He forgot me after all, I dejectedly thought.
I sat against the wall by the escalators, hoping that the woman on duty would spot me on the CCTV camera and call the police, but no-one ever came. I didn’t need to be taken by the white light; people were capable of forgetting me on their own. And that, I was well aware, had something to do with the force orchestrating my imprisonment.
I thought about all of this as I drifted off to sleep again. The headache behind my eyes returned, though there came no haunting smacks against tiles on that second night.
I never saw Peter again. And from that third day onwards, I found that my humanity flitted rather quickly away, much like time itself. I focused only on my survival. For weeks, and then months, I survived as a panhandler, subsisting by begging for whatever strangers would give.
Utilising Peter’s code, I’d occasionally sneak into the office too. I always waited for the on-duty employee to leave, of course, then I’d steal food from the fridge and charge my phone. I knew full well that, even if a member of staff were to catch me, my existence would quickly be erased from his or her memory.
Even I had forgotten that I existed. I was no longer Carla; I meant as little to the world above as the rats scurrying through the tunnels, surviving on whatever scraps they found.
That being said, I still tried to escape in various ways. Once, I attempted to burrow through the station wall. As I picked away at a brick with a kitchen knife, railway workers and commuters attempted to stop me, but I would wait for them to forget, then I would continue. After months of work, I had successfully removed quite a few bricks, and I poked my head through the opening late at night. However, the white light spat me back out, killing that dream of escape.
There came the sounds, from time to time, of smacking against tiles—distant, but never really that distant at all. And so it continued that way, for years, until a visual joined the noise. One night, around the Christmas of 2013, I saw something which almost made me scream; fortunately, my paralysed throat stopped me.
A shadow, like a rising and falling wave, painted the white tiled walls of a corridor perpendicular to mine. My eyes ached from my nightly migraine, but I knew that they were telling me no lies, and neither were my ears.
Something was skulking in the hallways.
I wanted to run, but my mind and body somehow drifted off to sleep. As I fell into that dark slumber, I screamed internally, imagining that I would never wake up again; I was certain that the source of the shadow would find me whilst I rested.
And this will finally come to an end, I bleakly thought with a hint of relief.
When I woke on the floor of the station, I was both relieved and disappointed in equal measure.
After three years, time had become a fuzzy concept to me—I’d made it that way; otherwise, I would’ve succumbed to total psychological ruin, driven mad by isolation in that dungeon of cream-coloured tiles and fluorescent lights. Essentially, I still wanted to survive, and dissociating was the way to do that.
However, Christmas was a marker that I struggled to ignore. A reminder of the years passing by. And when I saw that festive tree go up for the fifth time, I felt my 25-year-old heart strain. I’d forgotten by the world above. Actually, it was more terrible than that—my friends and family remembered me, yet they’d done nothing to save me in five years. That wasn’t their fault, but it was a tough pain to put into words.
Anyway, during that Christmas of 2015, I was possessed by a strange idea. As the nightly migraine swam through the crevices of my grey matter, I thought of that shadow I’d seen, only the once, years earlier. I thought of how much tighter my eyeballs had felt—tighter than ever before. The rhythm of that pounding headache had been loud enough to fill my ear canals. It had dulled slightly when I closed my eyes, however.
I wondered whether sight might be causing the headaches. Maybe, even when I didn’t realise it, I’d been seeing the skulker.
I climbed to my feet and made my way to the station’s platform, then I eyed the black mouth of the tunnel to the left. Over the past five years, I had heard the tunnel spit occasional smacks and splatters—similar to those awful sounds I’d first heard years earlier.
Something prowled the halls of the station at night—something that, I feared, might live in the tunnel.
I’d tried to escape through that tunnel before, many months earlier. The white light had, of course, taken me. However, unlike my other escape routes, the experience came with a skull-splitting headache. It had been an agony that put all of my other migraines to shame.
Something was special about that tunnel, which was why I chose it over the escalator.
I clambered down from the platform onto the railway tracks, knowing that the night guard in the office would likely have seen me on her security feed. Of course, I also knew that she would’ve already forgotten about me. This was the blessing and the curse of the underground station’s spell.
Once I was standing on the tracks, facing the black void of the tunnel, I blindfolded myself with my old, filthy scarf. Then, with a deep breath, I walked forwards.
Thirty seconds later, I could tell that I’d entered the tunnel. My footsteps had been ricocheting off the large expanse of the station, then the enclosed space had muffled them. I’d made it through the mouth of the tunnel.
My heartbeat quickened as I pushed onwards. The last time I’d entered the tunnel, without a blindfold, I’d been walloped by that familiarly horrid wall of white. Worse, I’d been torn apart by an ache in my skull. This time, none of that happened. I walked, and nothing stopped me.
Five minutes later, the reverberating sound of my feet against the metal tracks started to spread far and wide—started to fill a far larger space.
“No…” I gasped, realising what that meant as I started to undo my scarf blindfold.
I uncovered my eyes to find myself standing on the tracks beside the next station. For the first time in five years, I had travelled beyond the bounds of my prison.
I started to bounce giddily from foot to foot, but my jig lasted only a moment. My eyes caught something, twenty feet away, on the otherwise-deserted platform.
A man.
He was facing the wall, wearing the cerulean jacket and light-blue under-shirt of a typical station worker. His knotty, shoulder-length hair was marred with muck and specks of red, but it looked vaguely familiar.
“HELP ME!” I screamed.
As I ran towards the edge of the platform, my headache returned, and white crept into the sides of my vision. I felt myself starting to reset; I felt, in fact, something worse—scalding breath, billowing in puffs of steam against my goosebump-covered nape. And then, just before the world slipped away from me, the man on the platform raised his hands backwards to part his scraggly hair.
Only, those shaggy curtains did not draw to reveal the back of his head. His hair parted to reveal a horridly glum face—the face of Peter.
The railway worker, who I hadn’t seen for five years, was facing the wrong way. His neck had been twisted all of the way around, pointing his morose facial features in the opposite direction to his body below.
Undeniably, the blood-covered man was no longer alive.
I shrieked as the white enveloped my vision, then I found myself back where I belonged. I was sitting against the wall in the station which had been my home for five years. And all became clear. Even if I could escape beyond the boundaries of my prison, the thing in the tunnel would find me and pull me back.
Now it’s 2025. Ten years later. Christ. Since then, I’ve only stooped deeper into the throes of depression and lunacy. I’m a 35-year-old woman who breaks into a night guard’s office, stealing sandwiches, water, and a socket to charge my phone—which is now a dusty, half-broken iPhone, as my Samsung was, sadly, pickpocketed eight years ago.
Something keeps me going—my will, or that of the thing in the tunnel.
I have, in the past ten years, stayed far away from that tunnel, but I still hear and see things. That long, wavy shade on the wall. Wet, thwacking footsteps against the floor. It is searching for me. Not every night—or perhaps I simply don’t hear it every night.
I stumbled across this subreddit today, and I’m reaching out to you for help. I don’t have much hope that this will work. I think you’ll read this post, promise to help me, then forget about me. That’s the way it’s worked for years.
Perhaps you’ll remember, one day; perhaps you’ll all remember the things you’ve forgotten about me when the spell is broken. I’m just afraid that it’ll only be broken once that thing finds me.
Once I find myself standing beside Peter.