Alright, since it’s October, have some spooky true stories from my childhood.

Sand Claw

That happened when I was in kindergarten. Me and a bunch of other kids played in a sandbox building a mountain. As games went, it was actually pretty dumb and repetitive, yet surprisingly popular. Basically, we were gathering all sand into the middle, trying to make the ensuing construct as tall as possible.

Naturally, the sand didn’t hold form very well and occasionally surface parts of it would slide down. During one such event, I suddenly saw a claw similar to that of a cat poking from inside the sand before retracting back.

I don’t remember what I felt at the time, though I think it wasn’t fear. Surprise, maybe? I remember running for adults to show them the discovery, though they ignored me, so I went back. Other kids saw it as well and were digging the sand mountain to find the owner of the claw, but there was nothing.

Dog’s Jaw

Another story from the same kindergarten. Said kindergarten was surrounded by a fence that was supposed to keep us inside, but of course there was a hole in it in a remote area that all the kids knew about. There wasn’t actually anything interesting outside the whole, just a patch of ground with some trees separating the kindergarten from the town. Beyond that patch were apartment complexes and squares between them. There was also a playground not long ahead, but we never went there since it would have taken too long, and the adults could have discovered us.

In other words, going through the hole was attractive not because of what we could find outside but because of the very fact of breaching a forbidden boundary, so naturally we went there often.

So, one day, during one of our games outside the fence, my eyes were attracted by grayness breaking the dark tone of the ground. I went closer and saw half of a jaw bone pressed into the ground. It was perfectly gray, not a bit of meat left on it. Some teeth were still intact. It looked like it belonged to a dog, though at the time I didn’t know what I’ve found. Being a curious child, I picked it up and went to show other kids. We all agreed it was cool and decided to play with it. I think I pretended it was a gun due to the bone’s shape.

When time came for us to head back to the building, the bone was discovered and confiscated by Maria Simeonovna, who was supervising us.

On the next day, we were supervised by another adult. There wasn’t any explanation given to us beyond change of staff and, being kids, we accepted it easily enough. We’ve never seen Maria Simeonovna again.

Leech Girl

The third and final story from that kindergarten. It’s actually kinda weird that all of that happened in the same kindergarten since I actually attended two. They were both located relatively close to our home, and I kinda rotated between them over the years due to family factors. Nothing weird ever happened in the other kindergarten that I remember.

Anyway, back to the story. In a remote location on kindergarten grounds there was an abandoned bathtub placed there for reasons that escape me. I don’t know, it could be that people didn’t bother to carry it all the way to junkyard and just placed it there, but then, I don’t remember any bathtubs in the building itself, so…

In any case, as one may expect, during the summer the bathtub was usually full of dirty water before freezing over in autumn. There were something inside the water. We thought it could be leeches, though in retrospect I’m not so sure. Could be some weird plants for all I know or some other animals.

As one may expect from such a development, we were constantly daring each other to get inside the bathtub, though nobody actually ever did that for obvious reasons.

One day, I went there by myself for some reason. A part of a game, I think? Could be that I just wanted to play by myself at the time.

When I arrived, there was a girl sitting naked inside the bathtub. An ordinary girl as far as I remember, not any different from other kids in the kindergarten aside from her position.

She heard me approach and looked at me without saying a word. Her body was covered in those maybe-leeches, but she showed no sign of discomfort. I didn’t know how to react, and she didn’t do anything besides looking at me, so eventually I turned away and went to tell other kids about her. By the time we arrived back, she was gone.

School Catacombs

As you may guess from the title, this one didn’t happen in kindergarten. In fact, we’re jumping, like, a decade or so because it happened in a new school that I attended in upper classes.

Building a new school was a major project for our town, and unfortunately not one that went flawless. Specifically, due to some budget problems, there were various issues in the basement level. Once we were flooded when the pipe system broke down, electricity often glitched and so on. In the context of this story, what matters is that one of the basement sections was left entirely without power and apparently was not properly finished to begin with. There was ground instead of floor, the walls were naked and no source of light was installed.

I’m not entirely sure about the actual purpose to that section. Storage rooms, I guess. I was there once or twice to help clean it. There were old wood planks lying around and a fence decoration which I nicked because it looked cool.

Overall, the section wasn’t really all that remarkable by itself, but its position underground and the complete lack of light beyond what you bring with yourself gave it a sort of mysterious allure. It wasn’t too far from more used basement sections, and you could hear school noises there, but the acoustics distorted the sounds, making them sound like a distant hum rising and falling in volume without any understandable meaning. The end of the corridor connecting the rooms could not be seen, curved and dark as it was, and it was easy to believe that it just went on forever.

In short, it was awesome.

Apparently, other people agreed with me. Bear in mind that this story didn’t happen to me, I just heard it third-hand, so the details could be wrong.

The gist of it is that apparently a bunch of teenagers decided to make the basement their hideout for the summer. It was easy to do, too: the basement had an entrance from the street without a lock, so it was trivial to sneak inside as long as you could get on the school grounds to begin with. So, those teenagers did exactly that and basically lived (or at least spent a few nights) in those empty dark rooms.

Later, one of them was dead and two others went to the police to report it, though not before a few days have passed since the demise. I’ve heard that they claimed to not be able to find the exit and that someone else has killed their friend.

Drugs were suspected and allegedly found on the scene. The two became main suspects of murder, though I don’t know their ultimate fate.

A lock was installed on the door to the basement and we were forbidden from entering it.

Well, that’s it for now. Share your own stories if you have any.