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I recall a scary event that occurred to me when I was younger. Our junior high is next to an old Chinese restaurant that served Cantonese and Szechuan style foods that was shut down a long time ago. We used to tell each other all kinds of stories about it and why it was shut down. We even used to sneak around it to try to see inside.

One dark night in winter my friends and I were walking home when decided to force each other to go inside and see what we could find. One guy completely chickened out and said he would not go in whatsoever. I said that I would not go in, but I would pick the lock for the others. I ripped out a crowbar-like metal rod out from a part of the roof and used it to break open the rusty old padlock (we had had quite a lot of rain for the past several years and a lot of things were rusty in the neglected areas of town.) One of my other friends went in for a few minutes but came running out soon after completely freaked out. We asked him what he saw but he said nothing, he just got too scared to go on. Then last guy went in.

We waited for almost ten minutes and didn’t see him. We called in to him in the most taunting, jovial manner we could to allay our own fears. We didn’t hear from him. A few more minutes elapsed and suddenly we heard all kinds of crashing and banging and the noise was coming towards us. We practically wet ourselves figuring that we were about to die.

We were about to turn and run for our lives when we saw our friend running out as fast as he could. When he got out bent over and began to vomit furiously. He must have vomited up five pounds of bile for as many minutes before he stopped, pale as the moon. We now knew the stories were true. We could only imagine the horrible things our friend had seen, the decaying bodies, the blood stains, the jars of body parts. The unimaginable horrors that could make a person vomit so badly. We summoned every bit of courage we could and asked him what was in there, not really wanting to know. He was too flustered and could not. We walked him home and went home ourselves. The next day we walked to school together and noticed that he gave a wide berth to the old restaurant as we neared school. At recess he related his ordeal.

He told us that he had gone in and looked around. He tried the lights but not surprisingly they did not work. Fortunately the moon was pretty full and quite bright so he had enough light to see well although the place had an eerie blue glow. He had found the main dining hall to be boring so he moved into the kitchen. The kitchen was pretty much what he expected but found it a little creepy that a bunch of old equipment was still there. He looked through the cupboards and refrigerators and found some old cans and jars. He told us that they all looked normal albeit kind of old. He found some bottles of wine and thought we could take them, drink them, and perhaps make some good money since wine gets better with age. He also found some old cans of Chinese soups and noodles, dried pasta, fruits, old candies, and a supply of chopsticks and fortune cookies. He went on to tell us that he took a swig of the wine but it tasted awful, tried a little bit of the canned noodles which also tasted awful. I asked him what he expected since they were several years old. He said that the candies were okay and the fortune cookies were good if a little stale and had eaten a few and put some in his pockets for us. We told him to hurry up and get to the scary part, the part that made him run out and vomit. He told us that after the kitchen, he made his way into the office. He checked around to see if there was any cash but found none. He looked for anything of value but other than paperwork, there was nothing around. So he looked at some of the papers and that’s when it happened. On top of the pile of papers on the desk was a formal looking letter from the health inspector. We knew this was it. We knew that he was about to tell us what had caused this place to be shut down, and we were right. He told us that he read the letter and found a list of offences that the inspector had found. There was the standard fair like cooks not wearing hair nets and garbage not being taken out often enough, but the thing that had really shaken up our friend and scarred him for life was this part of the list:

6 – Wine stored improperly, mold found in older bottles
7 – Traces of rat feces detected in a can of noodles
8 – Hair found in a fortune cookie