My dad worked at a mental hospital. The elevator wasn’t sitting level on the ground floor; it was staying half an inch too high. When the maintenance guy checked the bottom of the shaft, he found probably tens of thousands of toothpicks.
No joke—just toothpicks. Little wooden ones, stained with time and god knows what else, scattered all over the bottom of the shaft like leaves in the fall. Some were broken, some still whole, some chewed at the ends.
Everyone was confused, a little creeped out maybe, but no one had an answer. Just a bunch of “Huh, that’s weird.”
But my dad went quiet. Really quiet.
That kind of stillness that doesn’t come from calm—it comes from remembering something you’d tried to forget. I asked him about it that night. We were sitting in the kitchen, he was nursing a glass of off-brand whiskey, and I tossed it out like a joke.
“So, what’s up with the elevator toothpicks? Was it a crazy patient stash?”
He didn’t laugh. Didn’t even smirk.
He just stared into his drink, then looked up and said, “I think those are from Luis.”
I didn’t know a Luis. He set the glass down, rubbed his face like he was waking up from something painful, and then said, “Back when I first started working at the hospital, there was this patient. Luis Mendoza.
In for decades. Quiet guy. Never screamed, never got violent, never caused a problem.
But he chewed toothpicks constantly.”
I nodded, unsure where it was going. “He wasn’t allowed them, technically. Not supposed to have anything sharp.
But somehow he always had one. Every morning, like clockwork. And when no one was looking, he’d go to that old elevator on the east wing—the one they barely used back then—and he’d drop his toothpick through the little gap between the floor and the elevator.”
“What, like a ritual?”
“Exactly.” My dad nodded slowly.
“Same time every day. Always alone. Never told anyone why.
I caught him at it once, and he just looked at me and said, ‘They pile up, you know. Every one of them counts.’”
That could’ve been the end of it. Just an eerie memory about an eccentric old man.
But something about the way my dad said it stuck with me. Like he was holding onto guilt. Or fear.
Over the next few days, I couldn’t shake it. I googled Luis Mendoza. Nothing came up—at least, nothing tied to the hospital.
The story doesn’t end here –
it continues on the next page.
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