r/creepypasta

The Playground

In this dimension, people on the verge of death get one last chance to live in a place of torture and pain. Here, people are forced to play twisted versions of games from our world, and from others. Twisted versions of Seesaw, The Human Knot, Ring Around The Rosy, Tag, Hide And Seek, anything you can think of. All twisted and made something unrecognizable. Rumors on The Playground say once, a group of people had to play The Human Knot, and were fused into one biomass and were forced into tearing themselves out of the mass. They could push people in to get out, or pull people out and get pushed in. And if you cheat the game, alien entities defying logic and physics will come for you and put you back into the games, but harder. And there is no death here, only pain. If you loose the game, you just get made a part of the dimension and it’s games, but nobody really knows. And if you somehow manage to escape, there’s only a void of non-Euclidean structures and Lovecraftian Beings, with Eldritch Entities in the darkest corners. Death is no end, it’s only the beginning of eternal pain

Tonight I come home and both my S90D and S90F are signed out of my account... however my dead mother's account is signed into the S90D... i dont ever remember signing her into that TV. The only device she was signed into is her phone which after 3 months is probably dead...

Any ideas how this could happen?

Hello again,

Okay, so where to begin. After I found that article at the library, I spent all night researching the Calder family. Luckily, I was able to go through some records and finally found the connection. T Calder (the missing person) is the grandson of the Calder in the picture. I had no idea if he was taken against his will or if he decided to go away but I figured, if there were answers to be found, they’d be at Gold Hill. So I went.

After picking up my car from the service station, I asked Jim how to get out there. Reluctantly, he gave me directions but also informed me that my car wasn’t exactly the best option for the trip. He explained the roads are rough and that my best bet was a truck. I don’t have that as an option, so I took my car anyways. I stopped by the gas station to fill up and get some snacks before I left and started heading out around noon.

For a place only 50 miles away, it took much longer than I thought it would to get there and the roads were worse than Jim described. They were a mix of concrete and gravel, with occasional washouts that claimed parts of the road. It felt like no one had been out there for decades. I started to see what used to be houses that were now no more than ruins of what used to be. Houses burned to nothing more than rocks and ash, foundations with rotten and collapsed walls jutting out in the air like a skeleton's rib cage. The sun shone down into the valley casting strange shadows through the hollow bones of houses that now stand completely empty.

The road continued to get worse, and I knew there wasn’t much of a point in trying to take it any further. Rather than turn around, I parked the car on what was left of the road, grabbed my bag and started on foot. I figured it was better to have to walk than risk getting stuck and hearing Jim’s inevitable “I told you so” when he had to pull me out. The town snaked and twisted back and forth between the low points of the mountains and hills that dotted this area. The further I made it into town, the stranger it felt. There is something incredibly eerie about walking through a place that hasn’t been populated in almost 80 years. I found what looked like an old general store that was partially reclaimed by juniper trees and bushes. Next to the store was a house still standing with a porch. The windows were all broken and the porch had smashed rocking chairs still sitting on it. At one point I found a child’s shoe half buried in the dirt. As I continued down the road, I found tire tracks on a dirt road that split off and went further back into the valley.

I tried to think back to my conversation with Jim to remember when he said it had last stormed out here. I thought surely, those tracks couldn’t have lasted through that right? I decided to follow the tracks down the path. Walking down the road I couldn’t help but feel watched. I knew it was just my mind playing with me but something about the angle of the sun and trees just makes it feel strange. The shadows danced and more than once made me think I had seen something moving on one side or the other, but every time I looked, I saw nothing. After about 15 minutes of walking, I started to smell smoke. Smoke? Was something burning out here? Then a few minutes later, to my right I heard a low, mechanical humming coming from just over the hill side. I started up the hill towards the top, pushing my way through trees and bushes so thick, you can hardly see in front of you. When I finally made it to the top I stopped.

Wedged in the valley, right there in the middle of nowhere Gold Hill, was a small camp.

Several small structures arranged in semicircles on the sides of the makeshift road. I could hear a generator running.  Several trucks parked nearby, none of them looked like they were particularly old. One of them even looked like the one that Mr. Johnson had described seeing leaving town with supplies. I just stood there trying to process what I was seeing.

Someone was living here…more than just one person, multiple people were living here.

“Hello?” I called out.

No one answered.

“Is anyone here?”

Still nothing.

I stood there in disbelief, staring at this camp. Tables sat in the middle of the structures, with what looked like boxes and canned food sitting on one. Propane tanks lined one side of a structure, children’s toys in front of another. A small fire burned with folding chairs arranged around it. At one point I could have sworn I heard music playing quietly.

I wanted to keep looking around but I knew that I didn’t have long before it would start to get dark and I didn’t want to be out here at night.  With that in mind, getting back to my car became priority number one and my curiosity would just have to wait. I got back to the dirt road and started walking back the way I came. After a few feet I noticed something on the road. Footprints….walking just off to the side of mine as if they were following me.

I figured I would post this as a running log, like a journal to arrange my thoughts as I work through this. I work as an investigative journalist for a paper in Utah and have recently been given the assignment of investigating a rash of disappearances along the I-80 corridor.

A little bit about me, my name is Sam. I grew up in a small town in Texas. When people who aren’t from there hear that, more times than not, they think of your stereotypical version you’d see in media. Everyone knows everyone, people to church on Sundays, high school sports are the most entertaining thing you can find to do and no one typically leaves, and in my case you would be right. I had no interest in working blue collar jobs and living my whole life 15 minutes from my childhood home. In high school I enjoyed writing and did good enough to get accepted to college, and focused on a degree in investigative journalism. I figured since everyone in a small town grew up knowing everyone else’s business anyways, might as well turn that into a job.

After graduation I got an offer to write for a small local paper near Salt Lake City, Utah and I took it. As the newest one there, I spent a few years with nothing too spectacular to write. There was the occasional accident to cover, changes to local municipal staff, and other boring things like that but nothing ground breaking or exciting. That is until a couple of days ago when my boss, Mr. Gregory, came to my desk and gave me this assignment and it may just be my first chance at something important.

My first stop was yesterday in Tooele. I arrived at the Tooele County Sheriff’s Department, where I met with Sheriff Deacon. Four missing people had been reported from the outskirts of the county and he was happy to answer any questions I had. After the normal pleasantries and generic questions, I asked if he had any leads about what was happening and he said:

“Unfortunately no and to be honest we don’t have a ton to go on. None of the four individuals had any family in the area and none of their cars have been located. All but one of them were only reported missing when they stopped showing up for work. We still aren’t 100% sure what happened. They could have just decided to leave and start over somewhere else. It’s a beautiful town but there isn’t always a ton of growth around here for restless people.”

I told him it didn’t make much sense. When I asked why they wouldn’t have told someone they wouldn’t be coming back at least, he just replied:

“I don’t know Sam. We’re still treating these as missing persons cases but, so far we have come up with anything. Everyone we have talked to never offered much to go on.”

He was able to give me the place of employment for each person thankfully and I spent the rest of the day going from one place to the next. Unfortunately, each stop was the same as the previous, fruitless.

This morning I woke up and started back on the road. The I-80 corridor from Tooele to Elko is a 215 mile stretch between west Utah and eastern Nevada with mostly nothing but desert beside the interstate with mountains off in the distance. As miles rolled by, I couldn’t help think about what the sheriff said. They didn’t find any of the cars? No sign of them at all? I mean it’s flat desert for miles in all directions. You would be able to see if they had pulled off or got stuck somewhere. Where could they have gone?

As I arrived on the outskirts of Wendover, my cars radiator decided it had had enough and my engine started to overheat. Luckily, I was able to limp my car into the first service station I saw. A tall portly man with a balding head and a beard that would make members of ZZ Top jealous named Jim, came walking out as I pulled in with a cloud of smoke pouring out from under my hood. As I parked he said:

“Lord have mercy son, how longs it been doing that?”

I explained to him I had only limped it along for maybe 10 minutes and popped the hood for him to check it out.
He took a few minutes to check out the engine compartment, muttering and humming as he looked and then said:

“Son, you’re lucky you pulled in when you did. Judging by the look of it you’d have done a lot hell of a lot more damage had you gone much further. I ain’t got this specific radiator in the back but should be able to get one in tomorrow morning, shouldn’t take more than four or five hours to get it swapped out. I’d say safe bet you’re back on the road the day after tomorrow.”

I told him that definitely beats having it towed all the way back home and having to start this process all over. He offered to take me to a hotel that was maybe 10 minutes down the road. I told him thank you and grabbed my bag out of the back of my car. I climbed into the passenger seat of Jim’s truck as we started down the road.

He asked what brought me out and I explained what I was working on. Being my first time out this way, I asked him if he had seen or heard anything about it. He said:

“Well hell, it’s a big desert out here. Many a people come out here and drop life savings into a casino then crawl in a bottle a drink away what little they have left. Plus, there’s plenty of places to go if a person don’t want to be found.”

I asked him if he had seen anything suspicious lately.

“Suspicious? No. I did have to tow a fella who broke down maybe 25 miles north of Gold Hill. That’s honestly about it.”

When I asked him about Gold Hill he explained that it was an old ghost town out between Wendover and the Goshute Reservation. He said the town had gone away and popped back up on and off since the 1850s. The gold rush, the arsenic boom, tungsten mining, reason after reason of the town to open and close. He also said that since the mining in the 1940s ended, there hasn’t been a reason for anyone to go back out there and in his own words:

“and I never had any reason to go check it out.”

When I asked him if the guy had said why he was out there, Jim just replied:

“No. I figured he got lost and turned around. Cell signal isn’t exactly a guarantee out there. It’s out tucked in the mountains and to call the paths out there roads is generous. I doubt much maintenance is done out there and there’s been some real rough storms in that area the past few months. Luckily the storms don’t ever make it up this far.”

It was about that time that we made it to the hotel and I was dropped off. Since I’ve got a couple of days until my car is back up and running, I might as well ask around here and see what I can find out. I haven’t ever heard of, much less been to Gold Hill. Maybe someone around here can give me some more information and I can check things out.

Well, now I’m going to go take a shower and get into bed.
I’ll write more soon.

for me it would be, Jeff the killer, slender man, sonic.exe (yes I know the story sucked but you cant escape him), and suicide mouse

Hello everyone,

Since my car isn’t supposed to be fixed until tomorrow, today was filled with walking around town and talking to some of the locals. I started with Bonnie, the front desk clerk.

She’s a nice enough woman, older maybe mid sixties? She’s petite with thick glasses and a warm presence almost like a grandmother. When asked about the missing people she didn’t have much to add, just the same things we’ve all heard. When I asked about Gold Hill though, it was a different story.

Bonnie mentioned an older man named Mr. Johnson who claimed he’d seen people hauling large amounts of supplies into the mountains in that direction. Immediately, my interest was piqued and I asked where I could find him. Bonnie told me that Mr. Johnson is always sitting in the diner down the street, so I headed that way. The diner was a textbook version out of a lifetime movie. Red cushioned stools along a counter, booths lining the walls on both sides with the smell of breakfast and fresh coffee filling the air. Mr. Johnson was right where Bonnie said he would be. He sat in a booth in the corner, large plate of eggs and a coffee in front of him. I walked over and asked if I could sit down.

I introduced myself and explained what I was doing here. I asked him to tell me about himself. He explained that after serving in Vietnam, he got a job as a truck driver and settled out here because he liked how far away it was from big cities. After warming up to each other a bit, I started asking him about Gold Hill and what he saw.

He said about 2 months back, two men loaded a truck up at the hardware store with as much as it could hold. Tools, a couple generators, some building materials and other basic supplies. When he tried talking to them about it, they were polite but vague. Then they took off towards the mountains and that was that. He said:

*“I’d seen them a couple times after that. It’s always the same thing, load up supplies and head off. I can’t figure anywhere else they’d be going heading in that direction.”*

It was about this time that a friend of his, Mr. Randall, sat down next to him. According to him, the two men had been friends for years. Mr. Johnson continued:

*“Place ain’t been used in over 70 years. Don’t know what those fellas are looking for but I doubt they’ll have any luck.”*

*“Why do you say that?”* I responded.

Mr. Randall spoke up:

*“Supposedly there was a lower shaft somewhere in the mine that got sealed up long ago. Every couple of years somebody gets a wild hair and claim they’re going to go find it. No one ever finds anything though.”*

I asked if the mine was dangerous to which Mr. Johnson just replied:

*“Hell son, everything in a mine is dangerous. You’re in a tunnel hundreds of feet below the rock. Ain’t enough money in the world to convince me to do that.”*

I continued to sit and talk with the two men for about an hour or so more. Everything just seemed so bizarre. Why would anyone care about an old mine? But they were adamant that every few years, someone gets almost obsessed about it and then that’s it, nothing ever comes of it. Still, if people are going back out there now, I’m definitely interested in why they’re doing it.

They said if I had any more questions about Gold Hill, I should swing by the library. So that was my next stop. I figured why not, I’m stuck here until the morning anyways, worst case I find something to read in the meantime.

When I arrived at the library I was greeted (and I use that term incredibly loosely) by an intimidatingly quiet librarian. Likely in her mid 50s, the woman sat maybe five foot tall, had straight, gray hair pulled into a tight bun. I couldn’t tell if she was annoyed or what. She wasn’t exactly unfriendly but seemed like any conversation was an unnecessary interruption of whatever she was doing before I arrived.

When asked where I might find information about the mines she didn’t say a word, she just pointed to a back corner of the library where the archive terminals were located. I thanked her and went to the back.

For the most part, it was just more of the same. I went through document after document. Following articles talking about the operations picking back up in 1892 when the first mills started seeing productive gold and copper extraction, just to close in 1895. There was a “Major Boom” with the arrival of the Deep Creek Railroad in 1917 followed by closure in 1925. A “Resurgence” in 1943 to supply the war department during World War 2, just to come to a halt shortly after.

I found one article with the headline:

*“MINERS STRIKE NEW VEIN IN GOLD HILL”*
Dated: May 2nd, 1942.

Beneath the headline was a picture of six men standing in front of the newly opened mine. Below the picture were the names of the six men from left to right:

*M. Voss*
*T. Williams*
*J. Calder*
*W. Holiday*
*H. Elliot*
*L. Kessler*

After reading that I paused. Calder? Why did that name sound familiar? I pulled out my notes and looked through the names that Sheriff Deacon gave me.

There it was…

T. Calder.