One of the things I've hated about becoming an adult is that there aren't really any places to have fun anymore. Sure, there are bars and nightclubs and places like theme parks and escape rooms and stuff, but those all cost money, and a lot of it too. The fun you can have there is priced, timed, and strictly controlled. What I'd prefer is an adult equivalent to the playground, somewhere public for socialization and exercise, preferably with play structures too. Growing up shouldn't mean you aren't allowed to play anymore.
But that kind of place doesn't exist, or if it does it doesn't exist near me, so instead I have to find workarounds. The park rangers don't tell you this, because they don't want you doing it, but you can totally just sneak into regular playgrounds after they're supposed to be closed and use them then. It's not really uncommon, I'm not the only person who does it by any means. Most kids are usually in bed by 9 or 10, so by that time the playgrounds are all entirely deserted, aside from the occasional homeless person looking for shelter or nostalgic adult who had the same idea I did. Being in playgrounds as an adult isn't illegal, all the rangers can do is tell you to leave and maybe you'll get some weird looks from passers-by, but that's about it. There's a tacit understanding when you run into someone else doing the same thing. "All of us are equally not supposed to be here, so I don't judge you and you don't judge me."
That being said I'm a pretty self-conscious person, and even when I know I'm not being judged I still prefer to avoid bumping into other people when I go out on my little expeditions. For that I have to pick the less-known playgrounds, and fortunately there's one right near where I live. My apartment building is only a couple blocks away from the biggest park in my city, I won't name it because I don't wanna get doxxed but it's large, decently hilly and very heavily wooded. There's a path by the entrance that takes you up a hill, and branching off that path is the playground.
The playground is pretty average, I think. There's a ring of concrete floor around the entire thing, and inside the ring the ground is all sand. There's a wooden play structure in the middle, the multi-level kind with a bunch of slides and climbing surfaces and stuff attached. If it were built today it would probably be made out of metal tubes instead of wood due to safety standards or whatever, but this playground has been around since at least the 90s. On the opposite end from the gate in and out, there's a set of four swings in a row. The swings are the reason I come at all. The repetitive movement helps me zone out so I can think, and it's relatively good exercise, at least compared to what I normally get. If I had a house with a backyard, I'd install a swingset there and I wouldn't need to come out to the playgrounds, but I live in an apartment building and don't have the space.
On the night that this happened I had been procrastinating on going out, and didn't end up arriving at the playground until after dark. Usually I try to arrive while it's still light out, then I have time to sit at the tables near the entrance and have a snack, and after that I can sit on the swings and watch the sun set. I was a little disappointed to have missed it, but I've seen other sunsets here before, so it wasn't too big a deal. It was dusk when I got there, and the main light source was the streetlamps set next to the paths a little ways away. The playground was saturated in that dark blue wash that only exists at twilight, the wind was blowing through the trees and one of the swings was swaying slowly back and forth. I was wearing a baggy hoodie that night, and it hugged me close enough that even being here after dark it felt cozy.
I sat at the tables to eat a snack that I'd brought with me, a tube of Pringles and a can of Dr. Pepper. I watched the path as I ate, in the back of my mind hoping a night jogger or someone would pass by and I'd get to spook them. Nobody did, so I was alone with my thoughts as I ate. I looked over the playground as I finished up, then tucked the soda can into the Pringles can and pushed both through the slot of the trash bin next to the entrance. I always thought that was an elegant way to consolidate everything, even if all of it was headed for the trash can anyway. I glanced at the path one more time- for some reason I kept feeling like someone else was there- before walking over to the swings and hopping onto one.
Of the swings in this playground, the one second-closest to the entrance is my favorite. It's the most comfortable of the four, and it's also the one highest off the ground. I have pretty long legs, so I appreciate that there's one swing here where my feet won't drag against the ground while I swing. I always swing facing away from the entrance, there's a gap in the trees that gives you a view over the city that's just as beautiful at night as it is during the day, and it'd be a shame not to watch it.
Normally when I'm on the swings I'm able to get in the zone quickly, I can stay on for hours if I'm not interrupted. But for some reason, this time I couldn't get comfortable. I've been out to playgrounds a lot, so I've developed a sixth sense for when someone else was in the area with me, in case it was a park ranger or someone telling me I wasn't allowed to be there. I kept feeling that feeling, but when I'd turn to check, nobody would be there. I figured it was a fluke when it happened the first couple times, but around the third or fourth I started feeling like something weird was up. I dragged my toes against the ground to stop the swing, so I could get up and look around, but my foot caught on a root and I ended up face-planting into the sand, leaving the swing I was on swaying back and forth from the momentum of me just having been on it.
I got up quickly and didn't bother to dust myself off. The feeling that someone was watching me wasn't going away. I turned around toward the tree line beyond the path, squinting into it to see if there was anyone staring at me from behind the trees or something. I couldn't see anyone, so I looked toward the gate to see if someone was coming in. Nobody was, but now that I was looking that way I was finally able to notice the tree.
It was a pine, or maybe a spruce or something, the cone-shaped kind you could cut down and turn into a christmas tree. It was right in the middle of the playground, and it was so unremarkable that even after I noticed it it still didn't click that anything was wrong with it. I still thought someone was watching me, after all. But after a second it occurred to me that this was a really weird space for a tree to be. It was planted in sand, for one thing, and I'll admit I'm not much of an agriculturalist but I don't think a tree planted in soil this coarse and dry should have been as healthy as this one looked. Also, it was too close to the play structure. The structure is built in sort of an L-shape, and the tree was placed awkwardly right in the domain of the sole interior corner the structure had. And now that I noticed these things about the tree, it occurred to me that I had never noticed this tree being here in all my time coming to this playground, which was close to 20 years.
I'm a pretty jumpy person by nature, and the caffeine from the soda, the creaking of the swing I had just gotten off of still swaying behind me, and the fact that I still hadn't shaken the feeling I was being watched were all getting to me. I couldn't take my eyes off the tree, and my mind was racing trying to figure out why it was there. Had it been planted recently? That didn't make sense, anyone would have been able to tell this was a terrible place to put it. Had it always been there and I never noticed? No, because now that I was thinking about how close it was to the play structure I realized it was blocking one of the ladders up into it. I just kept staring at it, and then I realized the third thing that was weird about it. It wasn't blowing in the wind.
I glanced at all the other trees around me, just to confirm. The wind was blowing hard enough that all their branches were swaying in the wind, not a lot, but enough to be noticeable. This one pine tree, though, was completely still, like it was actively resisting being blown.
I wanted to leave, but the tree was between me and the exit, and for some reason I was absolutely certain that if I walked past it something bad would happen to me. So instead I backed up until I felt the fence behind me, jumped it, and tore out running down the hill. I ran so fast I ended up tripping and rolled part of the way down. When I reached the sidewalk I turned around to look, in case the tree was like, following me or something. That sounds like an insane thing to worry about, now that I'm in a more rational state of mind I can recognize that, but in the moment I thought it might have been. It wasn't, I was far enough away from the playground that I couldn't see it anymore. I kept watching the treeline for a minute or so before turning around and heading home.
I couldn't get any sleep that night. When I was little I used to get night terrors, and I would wake up and start screaming for my parents. I remember my dad, sick of being woken up to have to take care of me, telling me that when I woke up from a nightmare I should envision something happy to help me calm down, and the example he used which I internalized as the default thing to visualize was, no joke, a christmas tree. The whole night I was trying to calm myself down, instinctively visualizing a tree in the dark room with me, and freaking myself out even more. I avoided the park after that, but I didn't seriously think about what had happened until about two weeks later.
I was on my way home from work, and I was taking a detour through the park, able to walk through again after a fortnight's worth of convincing myself I had just been seeing things. I passed by the playground, and I saw that there was a security guard in a hi-vis vest waiting by the gate. I got this suspicious feeling in my stomach, and so I asked him what he was doing there. He tried to brush off my questions, telling me it wasn't my business, but I could tell he wasn't really all that invested in keeping secrets, so after a moment he told me that "Around two weeks ago, they found a body stashed in this playground."
Instantly I looked over at where I remembered the tree being. It wasn't there. Before I realized it was a bad idea, I asked "The 27th?"
If I were doing it again, I wouldn't have implied I knew something to the guard, because he told me to stay there and then turned away and started speaking into his radio. I figured the only thing more suspicious than asking what I just asked was asking what I asked and then running away, so I let him escort me to the police station where they questioned me.
Here's how I'm told things happened. The morning after I had been at the playground, a homeless guy looking to dig through the trash cans informed the police that there was a dead body stuffed into one of them. They identified the body as a neighborhood resident, 15 years old, attending the same high school I used to go to. He had been stabbed dozens of times all over his torso, head and limbs, the investigators think with a screwdriver or an ice pick or something like that. They determined the time of death as just after sunset. I was shown a bunch of pictures of the crime scene, and the tree wasn’t in of them. I saw pictures of the body too, and I'll never forget them, pictures of this kid covered in tiny stab wounds and stuffed in the trash. On top of him was a dusting of pine needles, and the only thing resting on top of that was an empty tube of Pringles with a soda can tucked inside.
I didn't tell the cops everything, it wouldn't look good for me to say I had been at the scene moments after the kid's death, and that I was innocent but I suspected a tree that I had no proof was ever there had something to do with it. So I gave them a half-true version of events. I showed up late at night because I wanted to play on the swings, I didn't see any evidence of a struggle, and I left shortly after I arrived because I felt like I was being watched. I could tell they thought something was fishy with me, but they didn't have any evidence I did anything so they let me go after a few hours.
I haven't been back to that playground since. My opinion of playgrounds in general has sort of soured since I saw what I saw. Pine trees too. I tried researching whether other murders like this one have happened anywhere else, but as far as I know this is the only time this has ever happened. I'm planning on moving out soon, transferring to a different college out-of-state and rooming with some friends. Hopefully somewhere dense and urban. I don’t mind not having a backyard anymore.
Source: r/nosleep · by /u/overthehedge2