It sounds like a comfortable lodging house, perhaps a dignified old brownstone holding warm, spacious luxury apartments. And once upon a time -- a long time ago -- perhaps it was, at that. Today, however, it's a vast, decaying building as gray with dirt and soot as all the buildings around, and it holds only squalid, crowded tenements holding impoverished families, drifters, and just about anyone else with the cash to pay the rent on time -- no questions asked. Thus, the Arms are as often home to cults as to families, murderers as to wanderers, vampires as to drifters. The owners just don't care enough to check tenants' background, credit or credentials; only cash. The plumbing almost never works, the heating and AC are nonexistent, but it's a roof over one's head (even if that roof frequently leaks) and a handy place to hide.

Though most of the tenement's available space has been packed full of tiny apartments that, in turn, have been crammed full of people, the sixth floor of the east wing remains empty and abandoned. Theoretically, that area of the building has been declared structurally unsound and unsafe for human occupation, but since that description could apply to nearly every other part of the building, most people assume that there's some other explanation. Of course, most people don't particularly care why the apartments on the sixth floor are empty, but the few people who have entered that part of the building in recent years have reported strange lights and sounds, the apparition of a little girl of unsettling beauty and childish giggles that seemed to follow them wherever they went.