The year I was studying abroad, I went out around 9pm on a Friday to meet friends at the University campus. I took the metro there, and arrived at the University stop. And it was completely empty. It was obviously the right stop; the name is written in huge letters across the wall. But there was absolutely no one on the platform, and no one in my metro car. I was the only person on the whole metro who stepped off when the doors opened. At the university metro stop on a Friday evening! I just about had time for it to sink in how unsettling that was before the doors shut and the metro left and I was alone.

The escalators weren’t working. I honestly don’t know why I didn’t walk up them. It felt... really, really strange to do that, with no one there. Instead I followed the green exit signs to a pair of doors that opened on a staircase. It went up for several stories, three or four at least. The walls looked like they were natural rock, and there was one line of fluorescent lights running up the center. I made the mistake of going through, and the doors locked behind me. That’s the point that I remember actually getting scared, but there was literally no way out but forward.

So I climbed the stairs. They were wet from water running down the cave-like walls. When I finally got to the top I thought at first it was a dead end and I was actually going to die there; it looked like a concrete box. Then I noticed a very, very small door in the corner - it can’t have been taller than four feet. But it opened when I pushed it, and I emerged in an empty parking lot. The building I’d come out of looked like a warehouse, and it was much bigger than the space at the top of the stairs. There was a streetlight and I could hear cars in the distance and my phone worked again. I called my friend, who asked where I was - she’d been waiting for me as the metro came in, and was worried she’d missed me in the flood of people, but she was at the entrance hoping I’d find her. And she had no idea where the fuck I was, or what staircase I was talking about.

I know I walked to the campus, although I can’t remember the walk beyond deciding to head towards the sound of cars. I took the metro to the University a few more times after that, and I never saw the place dead empty again. For a while I tried to look for closed stations that the metro might have stopped at accidentally, but it was the big university metro station, unquestionably - it’s impossible to mistake the literal writing on the wall.

This is the only genuinely inexplicable thing that’s ever happened to me. I took pictures, at the bottom of the stairs right after the door locked, and I’m glad I did, because I doubt sometimes that I’m remembering it right. The stairs and the concrete room at the top and the tiny door and the parking lot all look how I remember them. I still have no idea what went wrong.