Brian Miller

Democrat staff writer

I never saw a young boy with dead eyes staring out a blackened window as a full moon’s light glistened off panes of fragmented glass.

But I’ve been assured by others, he was surely there with me the first night I visited "Sunnyland."

For the longest part of my youth, growing up in Tallahassee meant you heard tall tales about our very own abandoned and haunted children's mental hospital.

And it was a rite of passage to go check out the urban legends on your own.

I only went twice, once somewhere around 18 years old and another time after I had graduated from college, just a few years before it would be torn down in 2006.

I’ll never forget that first time.

Sunland: From hospital to haunted hangout

Sunland Hospital, which we only knew as Sunnyland, was on Perkins Road, where Victoria Grand Apartments now stand.

At that time, Blair Stone Road didn't exist as the grand cut-through it is now. Sunnyland sat firmly off the beaten trail, nestled with oaks, just a stone’s throw from the Florida Department of Law Enforcement building.

That last detail meant you couldn’t just run out and go haunted house hunting on a moment’s notice. You had to do it in the middle of the night – which was really the ghostly appeal anyway – and you had to coordinate with a few others.

We had lookouts with walkie-talkies who hid under cover of darkness, dark clothes and bushes, watching for police patrols so that those inside could turn off their flashlights.

Those moments of pure quiet, sitting in darkness waiting for a squad car to pass, were a nice side thrill to the experience.

We parked a good distance away and trekked through tall grasses to the back side of the hospital. There was a chain link fence. We found the section bent from frequent use and ducked under it, entering the hospital around the back left corner.

It’s a rather expansive building to navigate in the middle of the night with just flashlights guiding you.

As my group progressed toward the central entrance on the ground floor, I remember coming across an ominous elevator shaft, doors wide open and elevator long removed.

As you walked, you tried to stay close to the person around you. There always seemed to be at least one person in your group that was overly familiar with the layout and totally at ease with turning off a light and trying to scare you at every opportunity.

Documentary recounts story of Sunland Hospital

The space below floor level, approximately 5 feet in depth, was filled with water, the surface as unbroken and shiny as black obsidian. If any of my friends had dared submerge themselves in water and burst out with a machete, my heart would surely have exploded.

In Sunnyland, too, there was always the threat of turning a corner and being genuinely surprised by a passed-out homeless person, slumped along a hallway.

We made our way up a stairwell and to a higher floor, which one I can’t remember.

What I recall — a sight that has never left my gray matter— is that of a children’s hospital room, painted in shades of light blue with balloons and rainbows decorating the interior but well-worn, faded and peeling from time.

Creeeeeeeepy.

Especially under the broken light filtering through windows as tree branches’ shadows danced murderously on the wall.

I later looked out a fourth-story window. It seemed as if I could see for miles. In the middle of the night, the outside seemed eerily calm.

No, I never saw that boy staring out a window, but perhaps I was him to an unsuspecting passerby.

That’s how legends are created. Sunnyland had some of the best.

Brian Miller can be contacted at bmiller@tallahassee.com.