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“They used to call it the beating heart of the Yards. Now it just smells like something that never stopped bleeding.”

Description - Exterior

The Transit House sits hunched just off Exchange Avenue—four stories of soot-streaked brick with arched windows half-boarded, half-broken. A faded sign over the doorway still reads STOCKYARDS TRANSIT HOUSE – LIVESTOCK & HANDLERS in rust-colored paint, barely legible beneath layers of dust and time. Old cattle pens stretch out behind it, now rotted to bone-colored fences under tall grass and trash fires. The building looks abandoned—until you notice the lamp in the second-story window that flicks on at dusk.

Description - Interior

Inside, the floorboards groan like hooves over planks. The first floor is mostly collapsed, but the upper levels remain intact—part lodging house, part holding station, part memory trap. The smell of ammonia and old sweat never left. Moldering bed frames, half-rotted ledgers, and rusted hooks still line the walls of the upper rooms, where livestock handlers once slept in shifts. The stairwells are dust-choked, and the boiler room in the basement hums faintly, despite having no power. People who stay too long say they hear animals moving—ones that shouldn’t be alive.

History

Built in the 1870s to accommodate drovers, livestock agents, and meat inspectors moving with the herds, the Transit House was once a key node in the stockyards’ ecosystem. After the decline of the yards post–WWII, the building was unofficially shuttered. But it never emptied. Some say a Veil breach opened beneath the main livestock chute, and now the building shifts subtly between times—bleeding sounds, smells, and things that never left the kill floor. The Outfit uses the second floor for low-heat meetups and hush-job stash spots, trusting in the building’s bad reputation to keep outsiders away.

Owned By

Technically city property, but long since “forgotten” in official records. Quietly managed by a janitor who doesn’t exist on paper.

Run By

Edwin “Knobs” Greller – old rail porter turned unofficial caretaker. Keeps the boiler lit, never speaks above a whisper, never leaves the grounds.

Employees

• Nobody officially – but drifters come and go. A woman in a bloodstained dress has been seen folding linens in Room 4.

Regulars

• Outfit runners using the second floor as dead-drop space
• Fear Crew toughs testing rookies with overnight dares
• A preacher with no flock who lights candles on the back porch every Sunday at dawn
• A boy with a lamb’s head drawn in charcoal who walks the halls barefoot and vanishes when followed

Notes

• The boiler room door has three locks on the outside—and none on the inside
• A ledger found in 1950 listed "phantom livestock" that never arrived, never left, and still generate noise at night
• The Veil is thin in the northwest stairwell—time feels heavy, and clocks stop when carried past the second landing
• Room 12 is nailed shut. No one remembers when or why
• During storms, the smell of fresh blood rises in the hallways—even when the rain’s bone dry