Creepers

Creepers is a novel by the American-Canadian writer David Morrell, published in 2005.

Creepers are people who go into sealed buildings without permission, and the Paragon Hotel is worth the risk: a luxury hotel on the New Jersey shore, shut up for years and left full of furniture. The group includes a reporter writing about the practice and four experienced explorers, and their plan is to spend the night searching for a vault rumoured to hold a fortune. Part of the way through, a second group arrives with the same intention and much less patience, and the explorers are forced to lead the way deeper into a building with more occupants than anyone expected. Morrell writes the hotel as the whole world of the book: flooded floors, dark corridors, and the sense of a place whose history is still going on.

It won the Bram Stoker Award for Best Novel, and a sequel followed two years later with the same reporter caught in the middle of somebody else's careful search.