When Sam and Dean interview them, pretending to be inspectors from an agency they never actually have to name, every realtor in the office that manages the building says it's been on the market as long as they can remember. Even the oldest there isn't sure what it was before it wound up vacant, even though she swears it was occupied when she was young.
"Maybe a bank," she says doubtfully. "Or a hotel. We lived in Little Italy, we just didn't go to that area all that often."
No one is interested. The last prospective buyers had a viewing two years ago and they didn't even make it past the ground floor lobby. It's become a sort of right of passage, a cross management foists off on the rookies to bear until somebody else naively gets a shiny new license. The system sucks, but it's worked for decades. Until the latest agent with this concrete albatross hanging around her neck went out at midnight to investigate reports of strange lights on the top floor, and never came home.
"Police looked," the senior broker states. "She's not there. My best guess? Didn't even make it into the building, it's not a great part of town." He shakes his head. "Just between us chickens, I hope you guys find a reason to tear it down. God knows we've been looking. It's a million years old, but no asbestos. Floods every time it rains, no mold…"
There's a lot of disappearances in that area. None besides the realtor can be definitively linked to the building, but it's enough for a case. It's been slow for them lately, anyway.
"So, get this." Sam looks up from his laptop. "Junior analyst died in the building seventy years ago."
"Ghost," Dean states. "Called it." He did. "How exactly'd he cash out?"
"Uh…" Sam scrolls, eyes roving back and forth along digital lines. "I don't know."
"How?" Dean asks deliberately. "Guy croaks in an office that size, forty different people are gonna see the body. Might even see him do it."
"Well, he didn't exactly die. Just. Kinda vanished, actually. Showed up for work one morning, walked into his office. Never walked out. Never seen again." Sam shook his head. "My guess? Bones are still in the building. It's either him or one of the...others."
"Others?"
"He wasn't the only one."
Dean chews that over for a second, then whistles, shaking his head and taking a long pull from his beer. "I'm telling you, man. Sticking people in cubes in front of computers all day? Ain't natural. Gimme a gun any day of the week. Least I'm not about to...whatever those people did. Crawl into the vents and starve to get away from it."
Sam smirks, memories of Sandover making the expression so dry it sucks the moisture out of the room.
They go at night, like they usually do. It's not like either of them enjoy that, but it's when the cops are least likely to be called and besides, a ghost hunt? It's a milk run. Either of them could do this alone, in his sleep, and with one hand tied behind his back.
It's about what anybody would expect from a building standing vacant for god-knows-how-long. The reek of must and mildew, water stains and warped floors, furniture broken where it was abandoned decades ago. Obviously there's the usual dereliction flotsam, the beer cans and roaches and garbage piling in drifts in the corner, and the standard graffiti.
"'Hail Satan.'" Sam's flashlight illuminates the fourth one of those on this floor they've seen alone, flanked by a 666 and a shitty pentagram. "Original."
The higher they go, the less of any of that they see. Sam thinks that's normal, Dean doesn't like it. But they don't have a whole lot of abandoned-skyscraper material to exactly fall back on here.
For the most part, they move as a pair all the way until they reach the first floor Sam has concrete knowledge of somebody dying (or disappearing, or whatever combination of the two) on. They open the stairwell door to pristine darkness, and their flashlights pick out a layer of dust on the floor thick enough to bed down in. It's fully unbroken, completely even.
That might be weird enough even without the single trail of bare footprints leading away from the elevator, pressed so crisply into the dust they might as well be five minutes old.
"Yeah, I don't like that either," Dean states, gesturing with his flashlight.
"Pretty standard ghost shit." Sam clears his throat.
"Doesn't mean I gotta like it." Dean aims his flashlight down a hallway. "Okay. I'll take left, you take right? Check vents, walls, closets, ceiling. Holler if you find bones."
"Sounds like a plan."
Conveniently, because the footprints go down the middle hallway, neither of them have to follow the trail.
Things are standard for the most part. Dean checks private offices and cube farms, break rooms and bathrooms. In the drawer of an empty desk, he finds a 70s copy of Playboy in mint condition. Chuckling incredulously, he folds it up and stuffs it into his back pocket (after flipping through it to make sure there's nothing...unmentionable sticking the pages together, because wouldn't that be just their fucking luck to have that be their ghost's anchor point?) for safekeeping.
"Ooh, yes please. Hell-o Miss September."
He's almost wrapped up, wondering where Sam is in his sweep, bitching to himself about how repeating this same process five or six more times is gonna take all goddamn night, when he steps into his third men's bathroom so far. He realizes immediately this one's different.
The lights are on.
Standard fluorescents, two boxes. They're both flickering in an uncomfortable pattern that has something faintly red pulsing behind his eyes. Looking up at them, Dean reaches for the switch next to the door that's just shut behind him. It's in the off position. Flicking it a few times does nothing. Neither does knowing for a fact this place hasn't had power since there were two Vietnams.
"Huh," Dean says out loud, because this could be a ghost thing. He's never actually seen it before, but flickering lights are pretty much part of the package deal. It's just the temperature's still normal for night in an abandoned building, and there's no smell except dust and age, and the EMF detector clipped to his belt is...weirdly silent for being in a big city.
The lights that absolutely should not be operating give a sharp buzz, die fully for half a second. When they come back on, there's hair spilling out from under the door of one of the three stalls.
Dean's eyes are yanked pretty much straight to it. It's blonde, stringy. There's a lot. It's like the owner's sitting on the toilet with their head bent over far enough for their masses of hair to pile onto the floor. He can't see feet from where he's standing, and he should be able to.
He takes a step, and the hair whips suddenly back and up, like somebody's suddenly straightened.
Of course Dean kicks the door open, salt-loaded sawed-off at the ready, and of course there's nobody there. Stall's empty. No Kayako, no Samara. The toilet's even dry, stained a yellowing brown with evaporation.
The lights go off again, they come back on. Dean comes out of the stall, but he can't see anything that's changed. Until it occurs to him to look up.
A scrim of hair, filthy and blonde, hangs from the drop ceiling, dangling in squares where the acoustic tiles meet the metal they rest on. It gives one brief shudder, and the lights stop flickering, suddenly strong and painfully clear with a harsh and throbbing buzz. Dean's mouth is dry.
No cold, no ozone, no EMF. Not a ghost.
Is it just him, or are the lights getting steadily brighter?
The hair is shaking again. As the lights glow more powerfully and it shakes more and the buzz gets louder, Dean starts to back away. Then he turns, shoots through the door, and kicks it shut behind him just as the buzz reaches a noxious scream. The sound abruptly cuts off. No light makes it through. The noise of the slamming door echoes through the building, muffled a lot by the dust.
Dean's breathing hard. His heart's racing. He wouldn't be able to explain why what he just saw settled dread like swallowed mercury deep in his intestines if he tried. He notices a blonde hair on his shoulder, so long it reaches to the floor, and he brushes it off, making sure he gets any others in a frenzy of patting and sweeping and spinning like he's just woken up with ants all over him.
He finds Sam not too long after. They're looking for each other. Sam's nausea-white and hollow-eyed, and there are marks on his cheeks that Dean only realizes when he looks closely in the flashlight are dusty handprints, fingertips almost touching his bottom lashes. They're as long as they should be, have as many fingers as they ought to, but they're only about an inch and a half wide.
Sam doesn't want to share. Fine with Dean, neither does he. They leave, and they don't go back, and they only stay in town long enough after that to check out of the motel and for Sam to wash his face.
Turns out the handprints aren't in dust, or anything else that'll wash off. Sam scrubs until Dean stops him, would have kept going until he hit bone if he didn't, but they don't come off. Breaking all the mark-leaving curses they know doesn't work. They only fade, instantly and completely, when Dean remembers and burns the magazine in his back pocket.
Sam's face is raw and sore for days, and every incoming call from anybody at the real estate office is instantly declined. They only reluctantly listen to the voicemails until finally everybody stops trying to get hold of them.
The last Sam and Dean hear, the missing real estate agent turned up safe and sound at her parents' house, having had a realization about her career path on her way to go check out an abandoned building in the middle of the night, and her former company finally got the all-clear to bulldoze the property.
Sam and Dean would rather avoid all news coming out of that part of the country for a while after that, but they skim for missing persons cases (none) all the way up until the destruction starts, when radio silence is immediately enforced by both of them.
Neither of them wants to know what the demolition crew might have found in the rubble.