Baath house: cleaning out the Iraqi embassy.

• Author: Pfeiffer, Eric
• Position: 10 Miles Square

A few days before Halloween, I went by the best haunted house in Washington: the Iraqi embassy.

From any serious distance, it looks like any other monumental stone building along Embassy Row, with its brick structuring and gated entrance. But come closer, and you see visible signs of rot: Cords of ivy slither inside open windows, stacks of unopened newspapers have deteriorated into wet pools of grey mush, and weeds, creepily, have overwhelmed the foliage in the front yard and begun to suffocate the sidewalk. Them are literally cracks in the foundation.

The embassy was abandoned shortly after U.S. forces entered Iraq in late March. All but one of its employees were ordered out of the country, and it fell under the control of the American government, like Iraq itself. And just like Iraq, the situation at the embassy has been deteriorating ever since.

No lights were on inside the embassy, even though I visited at one in the afternoon. The embassy's entrance was shielded in a breeze way of dark, reflective Plexiglas that obscured any view of the front doors. I stepped inside the darkened walkway and faced a large, wooden door with a thick metal handle. After three knocks had gone without response, I gave the door a light shove. It opened. My memory flashed to a skit from "The Daily Show" last year. Correspondents for the faux news program went on a trick-or-treat escapade through Embassy Row. Approaching the Iraqi embassy the sky darkened as the soundtrack of a Bela Lugosi-era monster flick filled the background. But what was a parody last year has now become reality.

Faint sounds emanated from inside the 30-room, 9,000-square-foot building, so I called out my most pleasant sounding "Hello?" Several more calls and still no response. I worked my way down a stairway to the building's basement, which was covered with a glass canopy that had a single shattered panel near its center. It was very dark. At the bottom of the stairs, I found a dead bird lying on the floor, head twisted away from its body, the beak pointed toward a thick metal door. A large padlock had been undone, but the room inside was pitch black. At that moment, a stranger's hand gripped my shoulder from behind.

I swung around and stood face to face not with some threatening Lovecraftian menace, but a State Department official. She could have won a Karen Hughes-look-alike contest, in her sleek gray business suit, and cropped, gray-sweaked hair.

"What are you doing here?" she...