Upon getting out of the stormy darkness and entering the mansion's foyer, I was greeted by a ghostly girl with blue hair and a tattered blue dress. She floated down from the ceiling above a grand double staircase.

"Hello. I am Spooky," she said, "and this is my home. Can you, humble visitor, make it through a thousand rooms? Can you find what lies at the end? …or is there even an end? 'Cuz I don't really know. Anyway, just… just go." With that, she floated back up into the ceiling.

That introduction was… not reassuring at all, given the mansion's history.

But that didn't stop me from moving on. I climbed up the left set of stairs and went through a door on the same side of the landing.

One room. One room was all it took for me to get my first "scare." OK, technically it was this cheap, spring-loaded cardboard cutout you'd see on some dark ride at the county fair or some small-town amusement park. But the fact that it was a cutout of a skull covered in blood and a bit of skin, staring at me with wild eyes, was kinda creepy, I'll admit.

It was weird. All the indoor walls were made of dark stone. Torches lined the walls. Like, fully flaming torches. The layout of the house made absolutely no sense. Some rooms were huge bedrooms with too much room for not enough furniture. Some felt like empty attic space, with tall, arching windows. Most "rooms" were more like hallways. Some of them doubled (tripled? quadrupled?) back on themselves in impossible ways. Some branched off in different directions. Some had ornate handrails that guided me through the center of the hall. Some were ridiculously thin, barely fitting through a standard doorframe. Some were basically a set of ramps going up and immediately back down. Some were a long stretch of empty prison cells. Bones were scattered here and there, likely the people who disappeared after trying The Dare.

More than once, I ran into more of those cardboard cutouts. These were more cartoonish: A full skeleton; a blue-spotted purple spider; a green tentacled creature somewhere between an octopus and a creature made of ghostly goo; a Jack-o-Lantern; a strawberry ice cream cone; a generic ghost; a slice of toast; a coffee mug; a tree stump.

Sometimes, I'd run across some paintings on the walls: A Southern mansion on fire; what looked like a zoomed-in eye with a red iris and a huge pupil; some sort of pale, feminine face that reminded me of a banshee; the shadow of a person hanging from a tree, a purple sunset behind them. Even some torn, blank canvases.

In the 15th room, I came across a note:

At first this house just seemed cute,
but I've been here for days now…
I'm feeling quite parched now, and
I keep getting this feeling that I am
being watched by something.

This is not romantic at all…

The more I thought about it, whoever left that note… kinda seemed right. I don't know if it was my mind playing tricks on me, or the old house settling, but I started to get the feeling that Spooky and I weren't the only ones in the place.

Fifty rooms in, I came to an elevator. Like, the entire room was some sort of huge, industrial elevator.

There was a statue of a purple cross on a table off to one side. When I touched it, a comforting whit light flashed. For a moment, I felt… weirdly safe.

Before pressing the button for the elevator to take me down a level (down was apparently the only direction I was allowed to go), I caught sight of one of those motivational posters of an adorable orange kitten on a branch, with a caption of "Hang in there!"

I ran into another cardboard cutout, one of a cartoonish purple cloud person. Somehow, another note was stuck to it.

I know something is following me.
But I feel like I am prancing through
the same rooms over and over..
Hopefully leaving notes as breadcrumbs
will prove I am making progress and
reaching some destination.

I just hope I don't run out of ink.
I am dreadfully thirsty…

If that guy was in there long enough to start feeling desperate enough to drink his ink, that was… a bad sign.

Within a few rooms, my vision clouded over with static. The room was a giant loop, and it wouldn't let me leave until I ran through the loop and read a note several times:

This was such a surprise.
That there would be another entry.
Another actual entry.
One I could admire.

But then as suddenly as it came,
it left.

And now you disband.

Your influence and inspiration will
never leave me.

Something about that whole situation sounded vaguely familiar, but the thought left my mind after I reached room 60.

A green glob of ectoplasm, like something out of Ghostbusters, sat on the floor in the middle of the room.

On a table on the far side of the room, there was another note. In red ink. I probably shouldn't have read it out loud. It felt almost like a spell.

Spouting, Splashing, Soaking.
Innards, Ingest, Invoking.
Nailing, Never, Stops the Choking.

As if on cue, a low groaning, almost choking noise came from behind me.

A green, ghostly figure formed, rising up from the pool of dark goo on the floor. It had no eyes and a mouthful of long fangs. Its right arm was missing a hand, and the left arm ended in a hand with spindly fingers that seemed like they'd been permanently outstretched, reaching for victims. Its ribs nearly poked through its chest, and the rest of its torso melted into a point.

And it began to float after me in chase.

It chased after me for a number of rooms, with globs of ectoplasm splattered across the floor. Sometimes I could avoid them, other times, the hallways were thin enough for me to trudge through the goo.

And if that wasn't enough, sometimes a cardboard cutout would spring out. While I was still being chased.

It was during this chase that I encountered a series of unnecessarily frustrating rooms. With the exception of a couple torches near the doors, they were large, nearly pitch black chambers where the floors were cut into mazes… and there were no handrails to keep me from falling into the void.

Almost as soon as the goo monster stopped chasing me, I came upon a new room: A maze full of doorways of blinking white light. If I chose the correct door to go through, I'd hear a friendly ding. If not, the room would loop me back around until I found my way through the maze.

I still sometimes heard strange noises in the background. Honestly, this probably was more like "old house settling," if it had a metallic, "the rooms are actually switching places" feel to it.

I continued through the house after making through the "heavenly maze."

And the goo monster somehow managed to find me again and start chasing me until I reached a room where I found a map of the house that basically confirmed what I suspected: The house's rooms were moving around and rearranging themselves.

Just three rooms later, I found myself in another industrial elevator room. There were two posters this time. One was another motivational poster, this time with a cutesy-yet-bleeding cartoon heart, captioned "KEEP THAT BLOOD PUMPIN!" The other was a plain advertisement for something called "GL Labs."

The name sounded vaguely familiar. I couldn't tell if it was something I'd read in passing somewhere in the documents surrounding the house or if it was something that I'd repressed from before my childhood accident.