Chapter 1: The Playground Call

In the middle of the night, we got a call: an elderly woman was seen with a child, swinging on the playground swings behind the old elementary school. The moon was a thin slice above them, barely enough to see by.

The wind rattled the chain-link fence and set a Burger King wrapper tumbling down the empty sidewalk as the dispatcher’s voice crackled over the radio. It was the kind of call that made you shiver, even before you arrived—something about a kid out this late, especially with the playground lit only by the sodium glow of distant streetlights, never boded well.

The dispatcher thought it was a prank, but the caller insisted:

"They've been swinging all night," he said. "They haven't stopped."

There was a stubbornness in the caller’s voice, the kind of worry you heard in people who’d lived in that neighborhood their whole lives. You could almost picture him—maybe an old-timer, peeking from his kitchen window with his phone pressed tight to his ear, unwilling to be dismissed.

When we arrived at the scene, the little girl on the swing was already dead.

The scene looked almost peaceful from a distance—the slow, steady arc of the swing, the hunched figure behind it. But as we drew closer, our headlights sweeping across the woodchips and faded hopscotch lines, the truth hit us: there was something terribly wrong.

The old woman kept putting the little girl back onto the swing, again and again, over and over.

She moved like someone trying to rewind time with her bare hands, desperate and out of sync with the world. The empty playground felt heavy with silence, the only sound that steady creak of the chains.

The little girl had been scared to death.

It was one of those rare times when the whole world seemed to hold its breath—a moment so cold and sharp you could almost taste the fear in the air, mingling with the scent of damp mulch and rusting metal.