Almost as good as a good story is a good story behind the good story itself, which we suppose would make a good story better and a better story best. Sorry. That one made our brains hurt too.

Today's feature is the story behind the story of our very own R. Perez de Pereda's sword and sorcery novel, The Many Deaths of Cyan Wraithwate, which, if you haven't checked it out yet, you really should. It's a great fantasy novel that almost never was. 

Our story begins in Cuba in 1941 with nothing short of the author's  birth. Pereda was born at a time when then-democratic Cuba was experiencing unprecedented foreign investment under the presidency of Grau San Martin. The influx of foreign capital brought with it the pop culture items of the day, among them pulp fiction magazines, which young Pereda avidly read and collected. Far and away, his favorite were the Conan the Barbarian stories by Robert E. Howard.

Unfortunately, the good times would not last long. In 1956, Cuban Communist insurgents launched an uprising. Nowhere was safe -- the rebels holed up in the countryside and carried out bombing attacks on urban centers. All at once, the island nation became a dangerous place to live. Pereda, fifteen years old at the time, walked to school with his father's World War II 9mm Luger in his pocket. The gun was always unloaded -- Pereda's father never told him where he kept the magazines -- and Pereda hoped the sight of the gun alone would be enough to scare off anyone who meant him harm.

Two years later, the fight became all too personal for Pereda. He did things in furtherance of the anti-Communist movement which he was not comfortable sharing at the time of this writing. That notwithstanding, his fight was over by 1959, when the Communists assumed control of the country. He wasn't Communist Cuba's public enemy number one, but he was still too high on that list for his liking. He bought a one-way airplane ticket with the cash in his pocket and fled to Miami, leaving behind everyone and everything he ever loved.

With naught but the clothes on his back and a fair grasp of the English language, Pereda found work in a produce warehouse. Several years and several jobs later, he landed an entry-level position at a blue-chip company and worked his way up the corporate ladder. By the mid-1960's he was living the American Dream -- he had a wife, a car, and mortgage. He took up his old hobby of collecting the pulp magazines he enjoyed in his youth and rediscovered the fantastic adventures of Conan the Barbarian. It was about this time that he tried his hand at writing, and after two years of diligent work at the typewriter, in 1967 he had penned -- in his native Spanish -- The Many Deaths of Cyan Wraithwate. It was, in his estimation, a story of the sort he enjoyed growing up, replete with fantasy creatures and plenty of hack-and-slash action.

Miami in 1967 was a different time and place for the book publishing industry. Much as he tried, Pereda could not find anyone who would take his novel on. In a way, it was understandable -- he was an unknown author and had written a novel in Spanish. When news came later that year that he had a baby daughter on the way, he all but shelved his dreams of becoming a published author.

Fast forward to 2013. Pereda, since retired and now a grandfather of five, was looking through his filing cabinet for the deed to his home. After he'd scoured the filing cabinet but could not find the deed, he turned his attention to the desk in his study. There, at the bottom of a drawer, was his manuscript, where it had sat for over forty years. Even he had forgotten about it. Figuring he had nothing to lose in attempting to publish it, he searched the Internet for Miami-based publishers and found us.

Turning the manuscript into a paperback was a daunting task for two reasons. First, the text had to be translated from Spanish. A word-for-word translation would not have sufficed, as the product would have lost much of its wit and readability. Second, the prevailing conventions in both English and Spanish writing had changed in the intervening decades. Both are living languages, and some expressions that may have been chic in their time might today be considered trite. Now imagine encountering a concept or expression that has since fallen out of use in one language, then attempting to figure out what it means, then finding an English equivalent. Or, say you have a particular sentence structure that, in order for it to have maximum impact on the reader, has to follow a certain word order. Now translate that across forty years and from one language to another. It's not easy, but we're glad to have done the work.

Pereda today is seventy-three years old. He has lived long enough to see all that life held in store, or at least that's what he thought. Never in his wildest dreams did he think something he wrote as a young man would be shared with the world. Never did he suspect that his novel could transform from the story that almost wasn't to the novel that is.

Our story begins in 1939. Senator Claude Pepper backed a proposition to build a permanent "World's Fair" style exposition in South Florida to showcase the culture, industry, and innovations of the western hemisphere. The project really picked up steam in 1950, when the government of the United States and of several South and Central American nations lend their support to the project.

With their financial backing and practical know-how secured, the developers set out to begin construction of "Interama" on land currently occupied by Oleta River State Park and  Florida International University Biscayne Campus.

Only, construction never actually got much further than preliminary steps.
 
The Interama project languished over several decades. With each passing year, backers withdrew, and budget constraints forced the project managers to rethink their plans. The grandiosity of the project fluctuated with each revision -- pie-in-the-sky revision three featured an underwater pavilion under a clear plastic dome, accessible via a submersed airtight walkway.

The 1970's saw the final nail hammered into Interama's coffin. Out of money and with nothing to show for it but an undeveloped site, the project's backers sought to repurpose the land for the U.S.'s upcoming bicentennial celebration in 1976. That plan was halted in its tracks by 1974, when the federal government cut funding to the Interama project.

Plans B and C

Shortly before Interama went bust, the City of North Miami purchased a sizeable tract of the project land. The purchase was financed through $12,000,000 in municipal bonds. Then, in 1972, the city leased the land to
Munisport, Inc., with the purpose that Munisport develop a golf course on the land. For reasons not entirely clear, Munisport instead turned the premises into a landfill -- a landfill located on prime oceanfront property, and on wetlands that provide the county's source of fresh water to this day.

In 1976-77, county investigators discovered several leaky fifty-five gallon drums on the Munisport Landfill. These drums were labeled as containing toxins. The EPA stepped in. During the course of its investigation, the Agency declared it a superfund site. The land was placed on the EPA's "National Priorities List", which the Agencydefines as its list of the most polluted sites in the nation.

The property sat idle for decades, owing to the land's then-precarious physical condition and legal status. By 2005 its status had been upgraded to a brownfield, by which time Boca Developers commenced construction of the $1 billion, 5,000-unit condominium known as Biscayne Landing, located on the selfsame land. The project was completed in 2007.

One Of The Biggest Bond Busts In History

During construction of the condominium towers, the State was in the throes of a real estate crisis. The bottom had all but fallen out of the market by the time the towers were opened to residents. The full 100% of the Biscayne Landing investment was written off, making it one of the biggest mortgage securitization failures in history.

In order to understand the magnitude of the failure, here's a quick primer on how the bond market works: homebuyers solicit mortgage loans from lenders, such as banks and thrifts. Since most home purchase loans have long maturities (20 to 30 years), the lenders typically don't hold the loans through repayment. Instead, they sell them off to Wall Street firms, who bundle them according to their size and risk. The Wall Street Firms then package the bundles into bonds, which they sell on the stock market as mortgage-backed securities.

The bonds themselves are divided into tranches, and each tranche is priced according to several factors: the amount of interest it pays, its riskiness, and its stability, among others. Junior tranches tend to be cheaper because they involve greater risk, but they pay higher interest rates. Senior tranches are safer, but are more expensive and the interest paid on them is less.

When a bond fails, sometimes it gets written down. This credit risk is inherent in the investment. If there is any recovery, senior tranches get paid first, while junior tranches take the losses first. If there is any money left over after all the senior tranches are paid, then the junior tranches may receive some of what's left over, otherwise, they get nothing.

In the case of Biscayne Landing, the entire bond structure was written down. That means not even the most-protected senior tranches got any money out of it. Everyone who invested in the project lost every last cent.

Castles In The Sky

When you buy a car, you kick the tires. When you buy a house, you do a walk-through. These are steps you take to protect yourself by making sure you're getting what you're being sold. Banks do this too, when you request a loan from them. The first thing they do is check to see if you're creditworthy. The next thing they do is ensure they're protected if you default on your loan. In the event of a foreclosure, they need to be sure they can take ownership of the land underlying your loan.

You'd think a bank would be extra careful when extending $200 million of loans on a condominium project, right?

The City of North Miami owned the land when construction began in 2005. It granted Boca Developers a 200-year lease of the property. Boca Developers, in turn, obtained construction loans with its leasehold as collateral.  When the lenders prevailed in their foreclosure action against Boca Developers, they were in for a rude awakening. Instead of actually holding title to the land free and clear, all the lenders had to show for their trouble was a leasehold -- they weren't owners but tenants, with the city as landlord. And the city wanted its money. When the lender/tenants failed to pay, the city sued to terminate the lease and prevailed.

All That Glitters...

Biscayne Landing's towers as serve home to the families who live there, but several units are still vacant. In the midst of the nationwide economic conditions, the community can be a tough sell.

When you look upon this land today, it's hard to imagine the world-class magnificence that was practically its birthright back in the early twentieth century. Throughout its history it's been a land of frustrated dreams, broken promises, bureaucratic ignominy, and crushing ruin.

Not all that glitters is golden, but when all one has is dreams, even yellow stones can be gold and shiny rocks can be diamonds, if only in dreams.

It is the middle of the day. A group of friends and I jump the fence surrounding a seaport. Security is nonexistent. There are no cameras, no police - there is no one in the port but us.

We run under a canopy of idle gantry cranes to a concrete pier. The facility is tiny, as far as seaports go. It is the watery equivalent to a neighborhood municipal airstrip, but also is home to several factories. Not too far along the curl of the bay, the smokestacks of a petroleum refinery spout flame into the sky like giant pilot lights.

Moored alongside the pier is a flat-top freighter. Interestingly, this freighter is low-slung, with its deck level to the pier. This is peculiar, as most freighters are built to float high above the waterline - take it for what it’s worth, it’s a dream, after all.

We cross the gangplank and steal away onto the ship. The crew is nowhere to be found. The deck is empty except for a about a dozen cardboard packages, each the size of a large watermelon.

Our group sets off to work the mischief we’ve come here to do, which is to reenact the events of Boston Tea Party. We make quick work of the parcels, and before too long all of them are floating in the brackish water.

Our devious deeds complete, we make a break for home. I stop after a few steps even as my friends are already scaling the perimeter fence. Standing on the concrete pier, I notice that one of the parcels we had tossed into the water was addressed to me. Pasted onto it was a letter I had written that had been stamped “Return to sender.” I focus with razor sharpness on my home address emblazoned on the envelope.

Paranoid thoughts steal into my mind. I’m really in trouble now - when the police arrive to investigate, they’ll get my street address from those packages, and somehow know that I was responsible for trespassing in the port facility. So that’s when I do what I’d felt heretofore was unthinkable - I sit down on the pier and dangle my legs over the edge, then slide off and land in the water.

Surprisingly, the water is shallow, rising up to about my waist. The water is brown and perfectly opaque, topped with that soap bubble sheen you get when mixing petroleum and water. I am thoroughly disgusted.

I wade through the sludge, keeping up a vain attempt to have as little of me touch the water. Once I get within reach of the packages, I scoop them up into my arms, snatching up the ones addressed to me and leaving the others.

All of them have my name on them.

“Crap!” I say, slapping the water with my palm. At just that moment I clap my jaws shut. It wouldn’t help to have someone hear me, nor did I want to risk accidentally ingesting some of the sludge I was wading in. A mental checklist of carcinogens flashes through my mind. My skin prickles.

I corral the floating parcels and wade back to the pier. That’s when I realize that there is no ladder.  The dockside is a sheer vertical face that rises well over my head. With my arms extended, I can just barely curl my fingers over the edge of the pier.

Knowing I’ve already put myself through too much to leave without the parcels, I throw them over my head onto land. Then, in a feat of superhuman strength (at least for me), I leap up, catch the lip of the wall with my hands, and haul my dripping-wet body out of the water.

I flop onto my chest atop the pier, roll onto my back, panting for breath. I am winded. The industrial stink leaves a coppery tang in the back of my throat. I scramble to my feet and reach for the packages so I can make my getaway.

Inexplicably, the packages have become several times heavier. Mind you, only a moment ago they floated on the surface of the water, and I did just throw them up to the pier from below, but now I can hardly budge even the smallest one. My only explanation for all this is that the packaging must have been made of oil for it to float so easily on the water below.

My ears perk to the sound of distant sirens drawing nearer. Forgetting the packages, I sprint - sneakers sopping wet and gushing all the way - to the perimeter fence and the alleyways beyond.

The old Buick was built like a tank - solid steel slicked over in weathered stoplight red paint. The car was eighteen years old, literally and figuratively.

Literally, in that the vehicle had more than crossed that age when its parts didn’t work like they did when new. In car years, which are shorter even than dog years, the Buick had reached the point in its life when it would have to make regular visits to its pharmacist for Viagra.

Figuratively, in that the car was by rights a teenager - a moody one at that - and the parts that still worked gave you attitude when you prodded them into action. Stomping the brake elicited frustrated groans from the front-wheel discs. The car would deign to stop when it felt was right, regardless of how hard you stood on the pedal. And when we finally did get the brakes fixed the shocks went bad. Mashing the pedal locked the tires like a vice, but the inertia of the two-ton rolling mass hurled the car (and its passengers, and everything in its cabin) careening forward at a thirty-degree decline.

It was great fun for us, as we always wore our seatbelts. Our passengers who didn’t wear theirs never saw the humor, especially the guy whose front teeth got embedded in the dashboard.

Toeing the brake sent the Buick into a sheer nosedive. Eventually, the tires would dig in and bring the car to a halt, but not before screeching ten car lengths down the pavement with the Buick’s trunk in the air. On hitting a dead stop, the sudden reversal of force would buck the car’s front bumper into the air, sometimes so hard that its front tires would pop up off the asphalt. Fifty-Dollar Hydraulics, we called the effect, because that was what the brake job had cost.

In retrospect, we should have known better than to expect much from a fifty-dollar brake job. It was probably not the best idea we’d had, because the Buick, old as it was, was probably worth as much. Even so, we were eighteen then, too, and we had that in common with the car. It was something we could bond over.

Summertime rolled around. School let out, and we were without cash or anywhere to go, and sitting in a car worth more in parts than intact. Sitting shotgun in the red Buick with my friend at the wheel, we coasted down suburban streets in a quiet, tree-lined neighborhood. Up ahead on the right was the supermarket where we’d occasionally get lunch between classes. It was 3:00 p.m. on a Wednesday afternoon, and the parking lot was empty save for a half dozen cars and twice as many shopping carts scattered across the pavement. A teen in a green apron collected the carts into a long train while his co-worker hustled down the pavement for the lone stragglers further afield.

My friend cut a sharp right off the roadway and pulled into the lot, sending the Buick’s tail into a shimmy. He punched the gas and the tires spun, catapulting the car’s rear into a crescent-moon power slide. The teen pushing the train of carts threw his hands in the air and leaped backward as the Buick smashed through the line. Shards of shopping cart baskets fell like stainless steel rain.

The Buick recovered from its one-eighty turn, spun to a halt with its tires whirling in place. Engine roaring, tires flailing, the Buick lurched forward, hesitant, testing its prey like a bull pawing the dirt in anticipation of a charge. In its sights was a lone shopping cart.

Like a spring released, the Buick launched forward once the tires caught asphalt. We were pressed into our seats as the cabin went skyward - all the power to the rear wheels bucked the front end airborne. The car bobbed on its chassis as its acceleration leveled out and we hit thirty miles per hour halfway down the length of the plaza.

My friend leapt in his seat and came down onto the brake with the full weight of his body. The car shuddered with the rapid reversal of force, its inertia dragging it along, kicking and screaming, even while it dug its heels in to stop. I slid up and out of my lap belt, was tossed against the dashboard and split the roof-mounted fold-down mirror in two with my face. Then I was thrown back against my seat again, snapping the vertical seatback into the reclining position as the car stopped.

The Buick must have hopped several feet off the ground, because in our windshield was nothing but sky. A blur of chromed metal soared up and over us as the shopping cart our fighting bull of a Buick had hooked went airborne. The Buick’s front bumper had caught the shopping cart in the sweet spot between the underside of its basket and its lower brace, catapulting it no less than fifty feet into the air. The cart soared, tumbling, in a near-vertical path, disappearing for a heartbeat as it passed in front of the sun. Its fall was cut short when its basket got caught in the bough of a nearby tree. It swayed there, dinged and dented, too hurt to come down, and too insulted to do anything but stay where it was.

The store manager, a squat, balding man whose scalp had migrated over the years to his hairy forearms, had seen everything. He ran three paces from the supermarket’s front doors and stopped short when he beheld the chaos we’d caused.

We gunned it for home and cut a hard turn around the cul-de-sac where my friend lived, our tires tracing mud runnels across his front lawn. He mashed the brake and skidded the Buick into his garage, which - thankfully - was open by the time we arrived. We rolled down the garage door and hoped the cops hadn’t seen us.

Swapping the red Buick for our bikes, we pedaled back to the supermarket and got there twenty minutes later. The two kids from before were still out in the lot, one of them with a push broom and dustbin, scooping up bits of those shopping carts we had reduced to slivers. The other kid held a push broom too, except he used his as a prod to try to coax the shopping cart out of its tree. He’d have sooner gotten the cart down if it were a cat in a tree and he’d called the fire department, as the cart was a good foot or so above the end of his broom, even when he stood on tiptoes.

All the while the manager stood under the cart in the tree, shaking his head and throwing his hands up in exasperation.

Who better than he, an authority figure, to serve as our referee, and his throwing his arms up signified nothing less than that our field goal attempt had been successful.

Us: three points. Supermarket: zero.

The afternoon had been uneventful. I made a right turn and rolled into heavy traffic just before the T-intersection at 57th avenue. That should have been the first sign something was off.

The dashboard clock read 2:36. Traffic was never so thick at this intersection so early in the afternoon. Hell, it wasn’t even a through-street. This roadway was a traffic artery that dead-ended at the edge of a neighborhood airport. Most days at this hour, you could lie down in the street and nap uninterrupted until the evening rush, when the rich moms in their SUV’s came to pick up their tots from day school.

Something else caught my eye. A new yellow caution sign had been put up: Warning! Dangerously Excessive Noise Levels Ahead.

Dangerously excessive. I chuckled at the thought. What traffic jargon genius thought that one up? I snapped a picture of it with my phone’s camera, making a mental note to upload it to that comedy website that consumed so much of my time at work. Meanwhile, João Gilberto sang a duet with his guitar: “Chega de saudade, a realidade é que sem ela não há paz...”

The earth shook. My phone tumbled out of my hand and onto the passenger seat. There was a distant hiss, like water coursing through long-dry pipes, and then a dull thud. A shrieking missile shot out of an underground silo, trailing a fiery tail like a comet splitting the skies in its passing.

The cars ahead lurched forward, zigzagging haphazardly to get away before the missile touched ground.

The rocket slammed into the open field at the airport’s outer fringes. Dirt hailed down onto the passing cars as a tiny mushroom cloud blossomed just within the airport’s perimeter fence.

Times must really be tough when the municipal airport in an upscale neighborhood has to lease some of its land to a munitions proving facility just to get by.

A cacophony of horns blared. Cars elbowed past each other to flee the intersection. A semi-truck hopped the center median and roared past the gridlock, stripping the side view mirrors off of several luxury sedans in its path. Meanwhile, chartered jets headed for the airport runway veered in sweeping arcs as the air went thick with rockets.

What does it mean to say a man fell from the ceiling? That is, if what fell from the ceiling was even a man at all.

I'll warn you here: you're about to read a ghost story. Unlike most you've read or heard, this one isn't fiction. It's real. It doesn't have any plot or character development because its purpose is to relate the facts of these experiences. Believe what you will, if you wish, or not, if it suits you. As with last week's entry, its point is not to convince you that these events happened. Rather, it is to share with you that they did.

To fully understand the weirdness you're about to experience, we'll have to get technical. A ceiling is the overhead interior surface that covers the upper bounds of a room. In contrast, a roof is the uppermost covering of a building. While it is wholly possible to fall from a roof, it is not possible to fall from a ceiling. The surface of a ceiling faces downward, toward the floor of a room, and so it is impossible to stand on ceiling without first nullifying gravity.

One night, lying in bed, I awoke. For no apparent reason, my eyes simply opened. I had been sleeping on my back, and so the first thing I should have seen was the ceiling. Our ceiling was white with a popcorn finish. A ceiling fan hung in the center of the room. None of these things could I see. Instead, there was pitch black. This was peculiar because, although it was dark and the only light that entered was from the incandescent streetlight outside my blinds, there was usually enough light to make out the edges of things inside my room. Many a time had I awoken at night to see the ceiling fan hanging above my head (I'd been against installing it from the start, and too many of my nightmares consisted of the thing coming loose and scoring a direct hit on my face). Tonight was different. Tonight, it was as though a black tarp had been hung from the ceiling.

I looked left, toward my window, wondering why it was so dark. At first I thought there might have been a block-wide power outage, but discarded this notion when I saw the streetlamp burning outside. Shifting my eyes back to center, I noticed something very wrong in the corners of the ceiling. Thick ash billowed in the corners, as though the room were on fire and were filling with black smoke, yet I sensed no heat nor the smell of burning. There was a lot of smoke in the room. The entire ceiling, end to end, was completely consumed. (See: The Cyclone In The Corner).

Just as I was trying to make any sense of all this, the cloud snapped like a taut rubber band. The smoke collapsed into itself, forming a tight sphere about the size of a basketball. In the next instant it drew up into the shape of shadow man and plunged from the ceiling.

It struck me. With its palm. Right square on the flat of my forehead.

The thing that fell on me hit me with enough force to bow the mattress and send my legs kicking into the air. Then, nothing. It was over as quickly as it had come on.

I ran to the bathroom mirror and checked for injuries. A blow like that, and I'd have black eyes in minutes, possibly a broken nose. Nothing. There were no marks. My head didn't even hurt.

The following morning I checked again, thinking that by then the bruises would have started to show. Still nothing.

I've experienced several bizarre occurrences, as I've shared with you. This one is unique in that the manifestation touched me -- hit me pretty hard. Most times, when these things meant me ill, there was a feeling of menace about them, but never did they touch me.

I've only told this story to a handful of people. Very few know, excepting you, now, of course. No one believed me when I told them. I don't mind so much if you don't, as I'm writing this more for my sake than anyone else's.

Some things you just have to get out.

Continuing with our series of real-life ghost stories, we bring you a short run-in with shadowy manifestations: The Cyclone In the Corner.

Most ghost stories are fiction. Some are written with a moral theme in mind, or perhaps tell a story of some too-good protagonists triumphing over (or falling prey to) an age-old curse. The ghost story presented here doesn't fit those norms because it isn't fiction. Believe what you will, if you wish, or not, if it suits you. The point of this is not to convince you that this event happened. Rather, it is to share with you that it did.

Things come out of angles. H.P. Lovecraft was on to something when he wrote "Dreams in the Witch House," a short story about a house inhabited by a dimension-hopping witch. Within the house is a room with a bizarre design -- the corners, the angles are off in ways that make no sense and indeed, are hard on the eyes. It's done more for function than form, because the angles permit the witch (and her horrifying attendants) to travel between dimensions. Much like a knife's edge cuts through one surface of a two-dimensional sheet of paper to the other, so too does the witch traverse dimensions using higher-order mathematics that might stump even Stephen Hawking... only to perform such gruesome acts as might have been thought up by Stephen King.

Sorry. I thought the parallelism was funny.

In any event, Lovecraft's art seems to imitate life, as you'll find out now.

For some time before I married my wife we maintained a long-distance relationship. She left home to attend college upstate. I was still living with my parents. Since we couldn't see each other regularly, we made sure to call every night. Our phone calls usually started at 9:01 p.m. because that was when the free cellular talk time promotion kicked in. Often our conversations would go on well into the night, and I'd be the only person still awake in the house. As a courtesy to everyone else trying to sleep, I'd turn off the lights and TV in my bedroom at around 11:00 p.m., and shut my door.

This one night, at around 12:30 a.m., we were in the midst of a conversation too good to cut short. I noticed my cellphone battery was about to die, so I got up off the bed and plugged the phone into a wall socket under my window. The house was dark and silent, and the only light entering my room was the orange glow of the streetlamp coming through the blinds.

I cut off mid-sentence when I noticed something odd at the opposite end of the room. In the corner near my hall door was a billowing cloud of inky black churning up at the ceiling. At the floor directly beneath it was another cloud. Now, mind you, it was dark in the room, but the clouds were darker still, like the exhaust from coal-fired factories of the late 1800's.

"Oh God," I remember saying.

My wife (fianceé at the time) panicked. "What? What is it?" she yelled into the phone.

I could not respond. She kept demanding to know what was wrong.
"Honey," I said, eyes fixed on the thing in the corner. "Quiet."

The clouds churned and rolled in their respective corners. In their darkness there was an almost granular aspect, like they were dust devils or whirlwinds that kick up the dust when a breeze sweeps past tall buildings.

The clouds grew larger. Each let out a tendril as they spun in place. The fingers met in the middle and swirled in a tight spiral.

"Oh my God," I said. A funnel cloud had formed in the corner of my room.

"What's wrong?" my fianceé yelled.

Before I could tell her, the whirlwind spun itself out. The black clouds dissipated. Where once the clouds had been, I could now see into the corner, even with the dim light of the streetlamp outside my window. The corner was empty.

"I..." I stammered. "I'll call you tomorrow."

To this day, I'm not certain what it was I saw. I mean, I am certain what I saw is in fact what transpired, but whatever it was that I saw manifest in the corner is anyone's guess. It's not like an actual cyclone could have formed in my room. The room's only window was shut, and the air conditioning alone could not have caused so strong a breeze. Or the clouds, for that matter. Moreover, if a whirlwind had actually formed, there would be no dust or dirt to sweep up into itself, yet the thing was pitch black.

Another interesting point is this: my dresser sat near to where the cyclone formed. The dresser was covered in loose papers (mostly letters and other opened mail). When the cyclone touched down, it had formed a tight vortex, which would indicate that the "winds" were strong, yet it disturbed none of the nearby papers.

It's never happened before, or (thankfully) since.

Last week, we commenced our exploration of the creepier side of Miami-Dade County. This week, we delve deeper into the abandoned facility on the western fringe known colloquially as the "insane asylum".

Our last few entries have been ghost stories. Admittedly, this entry is not one. Even so, the experiences shared here are creepy in their own right.

Two things to point out before we proceed. First, these photographs were taken several years ago, in March of 2005. The facility may or may not have changed since then, it may since have been developed or brought back into operation. Regardless, the property was in no condition for anyone to be venturing in it. The place is dangerous, especially at night, and that says nothing of what creatures (wild hogs, venomous snakes, spiders, scorpions) one might stumble upon inside. In short: do not go there!

Secondly, and on a related note, "No Trespassing" signs have been stenciled in at the facility entrance (see the photo immediately below, courtesy of Google Maps). The land is purportedly owned by the U.S. government, as the signs indicate. When we ventured out here in 2005, there were no such warnings or "Keep Out" signs. We've heard from those in the know that people found on the land have been escorted off the premises by armed government agents. Thus, we reiterate: do not go there!

That said, read on.

We approached from the north along Krome Avenue (not shown, to the right-hand side of the photo below). It was the dead of night.

Upon pushing through the dilapidated chain-link gate, we found ourselves standing on a broad asphalt access road that ran the length of the property. We turned left, putting us in a parking lot at the front of the building. Once there, the gaping black maw of the facility entrance awaited us.

From this end, the building looked like a long strand of shotgun houses stacked end to end. It was a long, continuous hallway. The corridor was tight -- wide enough for foot traffic walking two abreast. There were small concrete rooms at regular intervals, built with their corridor entrances facing each other. None was much larger than an office cubicle.

Even if you knew nothing of the place, you'd definitely get the impression from this corridor alone, that the facility likely was built to restrain its occupants.

At one time, the building had had a dropped ceiling. The framework for the ceiling tiles was extant but rusted, falling from the ceiling, and warped out of shape. Strands of electrical wires hung from the roof like cybernetic ivy. Piles of pressboard ceiling tiles moldered on the ground, having succumbed to vandalism and the elements.

All the interior doors had been yanked from their hinges and removed; the windows were nothing but concrete encasements where once the panes had been. Errant bullet holes pitted the ceiling and concrete walls. The building showed evidence of fire damage. Everything that wasn't made of concrete was rotting away.

The corridor hit a dead stop at a wall. A perpendicular hallway bisected the hallway.

Here again is where the facility's design seems to point to its apparent use. Our corridor met a dead end at the intersection, but upon entering the intersection and taking a few paces to one side, we saw that the corridor continued on to the rear of the property. This bend in the main corridor prevents one from running the entire length of the facility to the doors leading outside. Were you to run full sprint down the hall, you would have to stop and change direction to continue down the passageway, or else charge face-first into concrete. This pause would buy your pursuers a few moments to circle up from the other side (further ahead in the direction you're headed) and cut you off.

It didn't come as much of a surprise that there was graffiti in the bathroom. Granted, there was graffiti everywhere else in the structure, but no bathroom is a proper bathroom without graffiti, even in an abandoned asylum.

Beyond the living quarters was what looked like a loading bay with an adjoining utility room. The utility room had been stripped of most of its electrical wiring. What remained of the room showed signs of fire damage.

Some time after our visit, we conducted independent research which indicates that the facility in fact operated as a mental hospital. While in operation, it was colloquially named "the annex" and it served as an overflow facility when the other local mental hospitals were at or over capacity.

This place definitely gives off bad vibes. It came as no surprise, then, when we found out the worst of the worst were sent to the annex. According to what we've heard, these walls housed people accused of heinous crimes who were too mentally ill to stand trial.

Is the place haunted? We think so. Even if it isn't, it's still not a place we'd like to return to.

Few know of an abandoned facility known colloquially as the "Insane Asylum". Located on on Krome Avenue's west side, south of Southwest 8 Street, it would be the best setting for a ghost story if it didn't seem so trite. The location is not open to the public, as is made clear by the concrete barriers erected in front of its entrance. Even so, the very barriers set up to keep people out announce the presence of something beyond them, where otherwise no one would think to look.

It seems like Krome Avenue gives off all sorts of bad vibes. Also known as Florida State Road 997 and West 177 Avenue, Krome is a 36 mile stretch of two-lane highway running along Miami-Dade County's western fringe. The highway is a traffic bypass through a sparsely populated region of the county. Straddled on one side by the sprawling Everglades swamp and on the other by a whole lot of nothing, no matter where you are on Krome or which direction you travel, you are in the middle of nowhere.

I'll warn you here: you're about to read a ghost story. Unlike most you've read or heard, this one isn't fiction. It's real. It doesn't have any plot or character development because its purpose is to relate the facts of these experiences. Believe what you will, if you wish, or not, if it suits you. As with last week's entry, its point is not to convince you that these events happened. Rather, it is to share with you that they did.

Backed by a small army of friends in three cars, I set out for the asylum on a clear Miami night. We left our homes and ventured west, leaving civilization behind as we pressed into the swamp. We turned south when we hit Krome. Short of our headlights and those of the tractor-trailers roaring by, the roadway was pitch black. For the most part, Krome Avenue is devoid of streetlamps. Geddy Lee of Rush fame sang of those places beyond the bright lights that lie in the far unlit unknown -- I knew then what Geddy meant, as I was in one of those places.

We pulled off the road when we saw the concrete barriers. The tall brush that flanked the roadway had all but consumed the facility entrance. Scaling the barriers and pushing through the brush put us at a chain-link gate that had been punched through. Beyond that, to the left, was a concrete hut, where once a guard might have stood watch.

Once past the entry checkpoint, we found ourselves on a tarmac path that cut a swathe down the length of the facility. There was no way to tell how far the path went. It was too dark, and although we shined our flashlights  down the path, the road far outran the flashlight beams. To the right was a length of hedge, or a shoulder-tall string of trees (the exact details escape me, but I recall there was a line of foliage). Up ahead and to the left was a fork in the road that led to the facility's main entrance.

As I was one of the three in our group with the foresight to bring a lantern, I took up the rear position. Our flashlights were interspersed -- with our group marching in single file, we had one flashlight at the lead, one in the middle of the line, and me at the end. We were a group of about fifteen, which meant there around five bodies between flashlights. There was just enough light to see by, but not enough to feel comfortable.

As the group marched ahead and to the left, toward the structure's entrance, I spied a pair of shadows out of the corner of my eye. They were humanoid, but I could not make out their finer details. The shadows stood against the line of trees to our right, opposite the group's bearing. Interestingly, there was no ambient light in the facility. Remember, we were in the swamp by a rural road, and it was the middle of the night. Light from passing trucks' headlights could not get in to where we were because of the thick overgrowth at the facility's perimeter. What's more, the only lights in the facility were our flashlights. The only other two flashlights were already well along the path, meaning that whatever light made that pair of shadows visible had to be coming from my flashlight.

Then it hit me -- my flashlight was pointed away from where I'd seen the shadows.

I turned in place to look straight on at the shadows. As if sensing they had been spotted, the two shadows ran -- as in, they seemed to pivot in place and pump their arms and legs and flee -- away from the hedge and out into the open air. They vanished. Once in the open air, there was no surface against which they might be seen.

My flashlight swept into the spot in the hedge where I'd seen the shadows only a moment ago. There was nothing there. Tentatively, I took a step toward the hedge, wanting to know more but knowing it would risk separating me from the group. Nothing. There were enough gaps in the hedge to clearly see through it. Nothing hid within it, or behind it.

Check back soon for this story's continuation (click here for part 2), for photographs and a description of the derelict facility's interior.

It was bound to happen sometime. 

I had just turned eighteen, and before I’d even purchased my inaugural pack of smokes I came home from school to find a jury summons waiting for me. Bah. Lucky me, I’d been called to uphold one of our nation’s dearest held liberties through the workings of dual misfortunes: (1) I’d survived to the threshold age and (2) I’d not committed any felonies by then. Growing up in Miami in the eighties, it really was something of a perfect storm.

Daybreak on Monday morning saw me fighting bumper-to-bumper traffic to get downtown. With how dirty and dangerous downtown was then, you’d think people would be more concerned with leaving the place than cutting across three lanes of traffic just to get good parking. I found an open lot across from the courthouse, handed some weirdo five bucks to park there. The smell of booze on the guy was pungent; you could light his breath on fire.

By the time I reached the courthouse steps, there was already a line to get in. I joined the lockstep march to justice and was shunted into a security queue staffed by two big guys who likely moonlighted as nightclub bouncers. One of them, the guy with the magnetometer wand, held the device across his chest and thumped it in slow rhythm against the palm of his other hand. I would not have been surprised if his nameplate read “Warden,” but we’ll call him that just the same.
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This story was featured in Author’s Voice, a publication of the South Florida Writers Association, September 2013, Issue 9.