The Emergency Exit

I opened the exit door during a routine check… and it didn’t lead outside.

Hey everyone. I work as an usher at a pretty normal, mid-sized movie theater. You know the type—sticky floors, minimum wage, endless popcorn, and managers who think “teamwork” means doing three jobs at once. Nothing glamorous.

Anyway, one of our job requirements is doing exit door checks during every showing. Basically, we walk down the hallway, open each exit door just a crack, make sure the alarm isn’t tripped, make sure nobody propped it open or snuck inside from the parking lot. Super routine. I’ve done it hundreds of times.

Last week on a Thursday night, I ended up scheduled for the closing shift. And before anyone asks—no, I wasn’t tired, drunk, high, or anything else. Just bored and annoyed that the last movie was running late.

Around 10:40 PM, I went to check Theater 9’s exit door. The movie was almost at the climax, so the hallway outside was silent except for the bass rumbling through the wall.

I pushed the crash bar and opened the door.

I should’ve seen the alley behind the theater: dumpsters, asphalt, the usual.

Instead…

It opened into a hallway.

A long hallway.

Red. Not painted red—glowing red, like there were bulbs behind the walls. The color was pulsing, sickly, almost like it was breathing. The floor looked like old linoleum smeared with something dark. It smelled like iron and mold and something sweet rotting underneath.

The only sound was this low, electrical humming, and above me were those old-fashioned light bulbs—the round clear ones you see in antique shops—lining the ceiling in a perfectly straight path. They flickered in this rhythmic pattern, like they were trying to signal something.

I just stood there with my hand still on the door, trying to process what I was looking at. I figured it was some kind of insane prank the managers set up, or maybe I opened the wrong door somehow.

Then the door slammed behind me.

I didn’t pull it shut. I didn’t bump it. It just slammed so hard the sound echoed down the hallway like a gunshot.

I yanked on the handle immediately. It didn’t budge. I kicked it. Nothing. I screamed for help. The sound went nowhere—it died in my throat like the air itself absorbed it.

I didn’t know what else to do, so I started walking. Every few feet, one of the light bulbs would pop—not shatter, just blink out—and the sound echoed like it was happening right next to my ear. I swear the floor was getting stickier the farther I went, but every time I looked down, there was nothing there.

It felt like I walked for ten minutes. Maybe fifteen. Somewhere around the point when I started crying because I thought I was going to pass out from panic, I found another door. Just a plain metal door, identical to the exit door I came through.

I shoved it open without thinking and fell through.

I collapsed onto a carpeted floor. Theater 9’s carpet.

The movie was still playing, but it was the very end—the credits had already started rolling. My coworkers were there, all three of them, staring at me like I’d crawled in from a sewer drain.

One of them said, “Dude, where the hell were you?”

I told them I must’ve gotten locked outside or something. I didn’t want to sound insane.

But then my supervisor showed me the time.

I had been gone two hours and seventeen minutes.

I swear to you, hand on my heart, from my perspective I was in that hallway maybe twenty minutes tops. Not even close to two hours.

I tried to laugh it off at first, but my coworkers looked weirded out the rest of the night. One of them straight-up refused to check exit doors anymore unless someone else was with him.

I tried reopening the same exit door after closing. Multiple times. Nothing weird. Just the normal alley.

I don’t know what I walked into.

I don’t know where I went.

And I don’t check exit doors alone anymore.

If anyone’s had something like this happen—or knows anything about… I don’t know, time slips? liminal spaces? whatever that hallway was—please tell me.

I haven’t slept right since.