There was a strange club in the hills around Santa Cruz just a few years back. Not strange in the sense of a horrific backstory or any sightings of stray souls. Ordinarily strange. You know, the location didn’t make much sense, the paintjob was hideous, the architecture was nonsense. That kind of thing.

It was tucked away behind a thicket of trees far away from any homes. At the bottom of the hill was an abandoned construction site – the only indication you were going in the right direction – with a winding dirt path that led from the main road to the club. If you showed up after dark, it was almost impossible to find your way in the pitch black. You had to drive real slow and hope to God nothing happened to your headlights, or else you’re stranded until sunrise.

I went to the club with a couple friends in late October. It was me, Sam, and Theo – a couple old buddies from high school – and Sam’s new girlfriend, Rachel. I’d been there a few times with Theo and some friends from San Jose State. Sam and Rachel had never been, and they were real eager to check it out.

It wasn’t my favorite spot since I really hated driving down that winding road at night. I knew a guy from State who hit an oncoming car late at night, and apparently a friend-of-a-friend went off the road and died after hitting a deer.

Normally I’d refuse to go, but Theo said he’d drive and promised me he wouldn’t have a sip of alcohol.  So, I agreed.

We loaded up in Theo’s truck and headed out. The truck’s size made me nervous, but he managed to take us up the dirt road with practiced precision. The sun was still out, but it was hidden behind the tree line. I was just glad not to be driving.

We pulled into the parking lot and the club came into view. It wasn’t really a parking lot, per se – more like a big patch of dirt where people left their cars. It was a Friday night so it was pretty packed, but Theo managed to wedge his truck between a mini sedan covered in stickers and a disheveled RV.

The big wooden sign read Death Rattle in bold white letters. There were no electric lights outside, no posted hours, not even an Open sign. The only clues of activity were a group of people huddled outside smoking cigarettes, and the muffled noise of dance music coming from within. The building was coated with a garish mix of greens, yellows, and pinks seemingly painted by hand. It was beyond wonders how this place managed to become popular.

We went through the front doors and were greeted by a narrow hallway that went straight forward. It was unclear what purpose this building once served, if it had ever been anything other than an off-kilter nightclub. There were a couple doors which looked like maintenance closets, and a staircase that led down to a basement.

On the way through the hall, I peered down the stairs and saw it led to a closed door. There was nothing remarkable about it, but I remember wondering if there was another room down there with people hanging out. When I saw it closed, I just assumed it was a storage room or something.

The end of the hall opened up into a large room with a sloped ceiling. There were a few doors leading to other parts of the club like bathrooms and dining areas, but this room was the central hub. It started out a normal-sized room, but the further you walked away from the hall, the lower the ceiling became until it was just a few feet off the ground.

It was a strange thing to behold. There were groups at the end of the room, lying on their stomachs with their drinks next to them, chatting and laughing like drinking under a two-foot-high ceiling was totally normal. It didn’t look particularly comfortable to me.

Sam and Rachel laughed with each other when they saw it. They wanted to go to the back of the room. I tried to hide my irritation since I was wearing dark clothes and didn’t want to get them dirty, but I didn’t want to bum anyone out so I went along with it. We got our drinks and crawled to the back of the room where we proceeded to… well, lay there and chat and drink. The music was vibrating the floor, but it’s not like we could dance or anything.

We hung there for a while until a guy came up and made small talk. He was a big, bald dude dressed up like the genie from Aladdin. He was asking us if we were having a good time and everything, so I figured he worked there. We humored him a bit and chatted somewhat awkwardly.

In a lull of the conversation, he said out of nowhere:

“Have you guys been down to the basement yet?”

We all looked at each other and one of us said, “No. Why?”

“Oh, man,” he replied. “That’s where the real party’s at. They’ve got a blacklight set up and everything.”

Me and my friends looked at each other with sort of a shrugging “Sure, why not?” expression. I thought it seemed kinda weird considering the closed door, but Rachel said something like:

“Let’s go check it out.”

We turned to thank the man for his suggestion, and he was gone. We looked around the room. It was a bit crowded, so for all I know he might have just slipped away when we weren’t paying attention. I figured he was a hype man for a DJ playing downstairs, trying to garner a bigger audience for a friend.

We left the sloped room, and this is when things got really strange.

At the top of the stairs, I saw the door was open now. This didn’t feel right. I knew the door had been shut because I explicitly wondered what was back there. And from where I stood, there was no sign of any lights. No music or noise seemed to come from below.

We went down the stairs and walked through the door.

The basement was dark and dank. The walls, floor, and ceiling were bare concrete. There was no music. There was no DJ. There was no audience. There was nobody.

Just a rusty bathtub bolted to the floor, a single light bulb hanging above it, and chains piled around the room. In the back, there was another door. The frame was covered in black duct tape as if someone had sealed it shut.

“What the hell is this shit?” Theo said.

“That’s so weird,” Rachel said. “Should we open it?”

“I’m not opening it,” I said.

“Yeah,” Theo said. “This is like a dungeon. Let’s get out of here.

“I’ll open it,” Sam said. “I’m not scared.”

Sam went across the room toward the door. Meanwhile the rest of us were anxiously watching the top of the stairs, waiting for the door to slam shut behind us at any moment. He twisted the doorknob and tried to open it.

“It’s stuck,” he said.

“Let’s get out of here, man,” Theo said.

Then Sam tugged on the door, and it ripped open.

None of us agreed on what happened next. We all saw Sam pull open the door, and we felt air rush out, and we all felt a strange energy push against us like something had been released from the room. The others said they heard someone scream from the inside, but I didn’t hear anything.

As soon as the door flung open, there was a loud bang like something had been propped against the door.

Sam slammed the door shut and we all sprinted upstairs and out of the room.

When we reached the top of the stairs, we saw the police busting up the party. I later heard the owner got arrested, but I never saw anything in the news about it. Everybody was milling outside, still drinking and smoking and laughing. After that harrowing experience, we were all glad to leave.

Most people were hanging around the makeshift parking lot. People jeered at the police who were arresting partygoers for coke and pills and the like. The crowd just wandered around, and cars left one at a time. There wasn’t much traffic on the dirt path back to the road. I was thankful for this.

We all piled into Theo’s truck and headed out. Nobody said a word. Theo gripped the steering wheel with white knuckles and cruised down the dirt path. Sam sat in the back pouring sweat while he stared out the window. Rachel just watched him.

It was pitch black outside. I couldn’t see anything past the headlights. My whole body was tense.

We turned around a bend, and a deer jumped out in the road ahead of us. It scared the shit out of us. Theo tried to swerve around it, but he clipped the deer’s hindquarters. The truck went off the road and we went down the hill.

And I remembered the kid who had died just like this. I knew we were done for.

At the bottom of the hill, we slammed head-on into a huge tree. The truck was totaled. I barely remember what happened because I took a nasty blow to the head and never really felt right again after that. All of us were hurt real bad, and nobody had seen us go down the hill. The engine died on impact and all our lights were off.

But by some miracle, Sam was unscathed. He checked on all of us, then stepped out of the car and promised to trek back up the hill and get help from the police. We were terrified, but we knew it was our best bet of getting home alive.

Then Sam said,

“Look! Someone’s coming.”

I turned as best I could, but I couldn’t see anything in the dark. Sam started talking to the stranger. He came around and looked at us.

It was the man in the genie costume. He was horrified by the accident. He checked on each one of us before he said:

“Stay here,” he said. “We’re gonna go get help.”

Sam and the stranger went back up the hill together.

We waited for hours, and nobody came.

It wasn’t until morning when somebody found us. A towing service had been taking away all the cars that were left behind, and one of the employees just happened to step away for a smoke at the bottom of the hill when he spotted us.

We got airlifted to the hospital, and we all made a recovery.

But Sam was missing.

We filed a police report and explained, as best we could, what happened. We told them about the bathtub in the basement. The cop simply told us, “We’ll look into it.”

The last time I saw Theo was a few days after the incident. We drove back to the Death Rattle during the day to see if we could get any answers, but the building had been condemned. The doors were padlocked shut. We left without a hint.

This was three years ago.

We never got a follow up from the police. Sam’s parents are still holding out hope he might show up one day, but everybody else sees the situation for what it is. We fell out of touch with Rachel, and I haven’t talked to Theo since.

I can’t help but wonder if Sam might be alive had I insisted we don’t go. Or if I’d been the one to open the black taped door, maybe Sam would be here and I wouldn’t.

So I made a decision.

Tomorrow morning I’m going back to the Death Rattle. I’ve bought a pair of bolt cutters, a heavy-duty flashlight, and some thick work gloves. I need to know if there’s any sign of what happened to Sam. I know there’s no way he’s alive today. But I’m bringing a six pack so I can pour one out to my last memory of my friend.

What do you think I should do for my last party at the Death Rattle?

James Maxwell is a technical writer and horror enthusiast from San Jose, California.

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