A Collection of Scary Stories, Rituals, and Urban Legends

☽ | Happy Sun Daycare

Just a few miles outside of town stood an old country house. It had been converted into a daycare where parents would drop off their kids for the day and pick them up in the evening. However, said daycare had been out of business for a few years now. There was a sign posted in the front yard just a few feet from the house that read "Happy Sun Daycare" with a drawing of a cute-looking cartoony sun painted on it. In the fenced-in backyard stood playground equipment that had since fallen into disrepair and had begun to rust. A slide, a couple of swing-sets, some monkey-bars, and a merry-go-round were once covered by swarms of children as they ran and played in the outdoors. They had since become perches for the local birds and squirrels and were swarmed by ants rather than children.

I had decided to write a report on the Happy Sun Daycare for the news blog I worked for. For one thing, several of the citizens today had gone to that daycare. I figured it might make for an interesting story to read about their experiences there and if it affected their later life in any way. The other reason wasn't quite so innocent. There had always been concerned parents who would fret over leaving their child in someone else's care. That constant worry over how safe their sons and daughters were, especially with all the horror stories posted online about various daycare-related tragedies.

For my report, I decided I would interview both employees and people who had gone to the daycare as children. I wanted to get as many different points of view as possible so that it wouldn't seem too terribly biased. Of course, I agreed to not use their real names for the sake of their privacy.

The first person I interviewed was a middle-aged woman who looked after the infants at the daycare. For the sake of her privacy, we'll just call her "Margret".

"What was it like working at the daycare?" I asked her.

She replied, "Oh, it wasn't anything too spectacular. Just your typical day of working with children, or babies in my case."

"I see." I told her before I asked, "Have you had any problems while working there?"

Margret shook her head, "With the babies? Of course not. They could be fussy, but they weren't any trouble at all. The children were another story."

This piqued my interest. Were the children that attended Happy Sun Daycare too much for the employees to handle? Or, could it be that there were cases of abuse going on that had been kept secret until now? I had to find out.

"Why might that be?" I asked.

"Well," Margret paused for a second as though she was apprehensive about speaking to me, "there were times when I heard muffled squealing. No, not squealing. Screaming. At first, I thought it was just the children pretending to be scared. But, the more I heard it, the more I realized those screams were real. That something was terrifying or possibly even hurting them."

"Did you ever see any children get hurt?"

Margret nodded, "Yes. Most of them were just the typical scrapes and bruises you'd expect to find on a child who fell while playing or who bumped his head while trying to show off to his or her friends. Some of them, though, seemed off to me. Every so often I would see a child walk past on the way to the nurse's office. And, each time, the child looked like he had been scratched or even bitten."

Children scratched or bitten? That would be cause for alarm for anyone. Perhaps some wild animal had decided to make its home near the daycare and curious children had gotten too close. Maybe a stray dog had wandered into the playground and some poor unknowing kid wanted to pet it.

"Were there any animals in the area?" I decided to ask, "Stray dogs? Raccoons? Perhaps a possum nest?"

"I doubt it. Pets weren't allowed at the daycare, and traps were set up at night to keep any wildlife away. Though, there might've been a dog roaming around the area." Margret shook her head.