The Man In The Black Suit And Other Chilling Tales

The Rope Swing

There's a playground in your town that no one wants to go near. You know the one. The one that has a half dead tree with a swing made of rope hanging from it. The one with the rusty metal slide. The one that has a creaky dilapidated swing set. The one that even on the brightest, cheeriest sunny day, no one wants to set foot on simply because the mood changes whenever someone goes near.

The rope swing is the culprit of it all. Before, nobody was afraid. Before, everyone was excited to play on the playground near their house.

The tale of why the playground is abandoned is one that is told around campfires at night, at sleepovers to scare your friends, and as a warning from parents to their children that you can't trust anyone.

Every so often, you'll find a group of teenagers that didn't believe the stories and went to the playground on the darkest nights of the year. Friday the 13th, Halloween, any day that has ominous and potentially dark intentions and premonitions. Of course, since when do teenagers listen to that sort of thing? All they want is a good scare, and a good scare they will get.

You see, at one point in time, there was nothing sinister noted about the playground, especially not the rope swing. It's just a swing, right? Why would anything be scary about that? It's a piece of rope tied to a tree. That's it, right?

Wrong. The tale of what happened one evening rocked the town it's located in forever. There was a little girl. A very unassuming one, that loved to go to that particular playground because it was just down the street from where she lived with her parents and grandmother. She went out to play there one day, and never returned in the evening when it was time for dinner.

Her parents sent out the alarm, and everyone started looking. She was nowhere to be found. Yet, what happened after that was so much worse then just having a missing child. They had to give up when it got too dark and too late, even though they didn't want to stop looking.

In the morning, they found the little girl. She was not unharmed, in fact she was quite harmed. The little girl was found, tied by the waist on that rope swing, just dangling with her throat slit in a bright red, cheery smile. They never managed to find the person who would commit such a heinous act, and the playground sat empty after that fateful day. 

Sometimes at night, you can hear the little girl laughing, and on full moons, you might even catch a glimpse of a small figure swinging on that rope swing.