Speaker 1: Welcome to micro Terrors, scary stories for kids where it's
always the spooky season, full of chills, thrills and spine
tingling spooks. Micro Terrors are family friendly frights for those
ages eight and up, and while our stories are for
younger years, we are still talking about things that go
bump in the night, and some children may not be
able to handle what others can. Parental consent is recommended
now for tonights micro Terror.
Speaker 2: Sludge by Scott Donnelly. The first week of summer had
flown by in my hometown of Duncan. I wouldn't say
I was bored per se, but well, yeah, I was bored.
A lot of my friends went on vacation to beaches
or the mountains. Some of them said it was too
hot to go outside and play catch or ride our bikes.
I scoured the internet for something to do. The Duncan
Mall had just shut down a couple of months ago,
so aimlessly wandering its holes was out of the question
unless we slipped in unnoticed to experience its currently dilapidated
creep factor. The public pool was always too crowded and
mostly consumed by kids much younger than us, yelling and
screaming and turning the water yellow. So gross, and plus
the chlorine they used was overpowered and could disintegrate a
beetle who thought a lazy dip in the pool was
a good idea. Then I found something, the Duncan Swimming Hole.
I'd never heard of it before. It was listed on
a Remember These Old Places in Duncan website. There was
a picture of it which literally just looked like a
hole in the ground filled with muddy water. The picture
must have been taken decades ago, and when I saw
the years mentioned by some of the people in the comments,
I can tell this wasn't modern day attraction. Most of
the comments mentioned the eighties or early nineties as the
swimming hole's heyday. It was an isolated hangout for kids,
located behind the Duncan Quarry in a small wooded region.
Surely it was still there. The only way to know
for sure was to hop on my bike, brave the
heat that my friends feared so much, and check it
out for myself. And that's exactly what I did. I
rode through town, past the public pool and to where
Duncan Quarry was. It wasn't in use anymore. Actually, nothing
on this side of Duncan was used much anymore. There
were numerous vacant and boarded up buildings, an empty quarry,
and natural overgrowth almost everywhere. I drove around the quarry,
close to the wire fence that was supposed to keep
people out, and spotted the small section of woods that
I was looking for. I stopped my bike and lay
it in the grass before I stepped through the bushy
edge of the wooded area. There were no paths or trails,
just rough, leafy and bushy terrain to conquer. A few
minutes into the conquering, I came to a clearing. There
it was the Duncan Swimming Hole. It was just as
the picture made it look, giving me the impression that
the image online could have just as easily been taken
today instead of decades earlier. I looked around. It was
very isolated. It was kind of peaceful. We had to
take advantage of it for the summer, rediscover it for
a new generation, and make it the place to be
once again. That night, I called my two best friends,
Leah and Zach. They both loved to swim, so I
figured it would be an easy sell to get them
to come to the swimming hole with me. Leah jumped
at the chance and took only a couple of minutes
of convincing and the promise that I'd bring sandwiches for
Zach to agree. We had a plan. The next day
at noon the three of us wouldn't meet at the
Duncan swimming Hole and finally begin our summer. Leah and
Zach were blown away by the location. I can't believe
I've never heard of this place, Leah said, Yeah, how
come I've never heard of My parents mentioned it before,
Zach added, I shrugged.
Speaker 1: Who knows.
Speaker 2: Maybe they never came here, or maybe they made a
pact to keep it a secret to make their summers
at the swimming hole that much more special. Zach tore
his shirt off and stood there in his oversized swim trunks.
Secret or no secret. I caught DIBs on being the
first one in the hole. Zach then sprinted through the
dirt and leaves that covered the ground and cannon balled
into the swimming hole. The water splashed high and wide,
soaking Leah and I and the hot mugginess concealed in
the woods. The water felt great, even if it was
a little muddy, Leah and I laughed and followed suit,
cannon balling into the swimming hole along with Zach. We laughed,
splashed each other, and created a strong whirlpool for nearly
thirty minutes before any of us began to get tired.
But when that swimming fatigue inevitably hit, it hit hard.
We all remained in the water, but sidled up along
the rounded edge of the swimming hole to catch our
breaths and fully take in the scenery. Birds chirped, bugs
buzzed by, and a clear sky through the canopy hit
us with the right amount of light. Yeah, I'm hungry,
Zach said about those sandwiches, I laughed, they're in the
picnic basket. I pointed off toward the thick base of
one of the trees. Our clothes and bikes were piled up,
along with an old woven picnic basket I found buried
in my garage. It was filled with sandwiches, chips, fruit,
and bottled water. Zach tried to crawl out of the
swimming hole, but Leah and I laughed at his attempt.
The muddy edges made it difficult to get out. He
kept slipping back in his hands, unable to find good
placement to pull himself out. Yes, stop laughing, Zach said,
becoming more and more frustrated as he tried to climb
out with no luck. Eventually we did stop laughing. It
wasn't funny anymore. Zach was struggling, teetering on the line
of panic. It hitt be that hard, I said, turning
around and trying to climb out myself. But he was
that hard. The mud was too slippery. Leah tried too,
with the same results. We all started to panic in
our own ways. Leah whimpered, my breathing picked up, and
Zach began to shout for help. No one's gonna hear you,
I told him. There's no one around. Someone's got to
help us. Zach shouted, someone help. We're stuck just in
a ransid moldy odor blew through the trees and surrounded us.
Made all three of us want a gag and stopped
us from trying to get out. Yeah, it gross, Leah said,
what on earth is that smell? I covered my nose.
It was unlike anything I'd ever smelled before. It reminded
me of a hot sewage or something. Wait, Lea suddenly said,
someone's there. She pointed off into the woods. Zach and
I looked. Someone was there, standing still in the trees.
It was hard to make them out. They appeared to
be wearing dark clothing and even a matching mask. Perhaps
help us, Zach called out to the mysterious loiterer. We
can't get out. Something caught my eye off to the left.
It was a second person, identical to the one Leah
had spotted. Look, I said to my friends. They glanced
and saw the second one as well. Behind the second person,
a third and fourth one appeared. They all stood as
still as statues and just watched us. Are they really
not going to help? Leah quietly said. I spun around
and checked the woods behind us. There were more of them,
all concealed in the brush, all at once, every single
one of them activated something on their faces that resembled
bright yellow lights. Leah gasped and Zach froze up in fear.
His fingers stug as deep as they could be into
the muddy edge of the swimming hole. Without warning, all
of the mysterious figures began to slowly advance toward us
on all sides. Lea's gasps and whimpers turned into pandic
to shrieks. Zach frantically tried to pull himself out of
the swimming hole with as much energy as he could.
I froze watching the horde of strange figures close in.
As they got closer, I thought I was seeing things.
They no longer looked like people at all, and their
dark clothing and matching masks, well, they didn't look like
clothing or masks anymore. It was their bodies. They all
appeared to be covered from head to toe in a
dripping muddy substance. Either that or that's what they were
made of. Their muddy, sludgy composition flowed downward on their
bodies like a hypnotizing cascading ripple effect. Yellow eyes burned
through the thick substance on their faces, emitting a droning
hum or buzzing noise. By now, Leah and Zach had
also noticed their appearance. They began to scream, as did I.
Within seconds, the horde of muddy creatures from the woods
had surrounded the swimming hole, tramping us and gawking down
as we pas and thrashed about in the water. Zach hollered,
aliens are invading aliens. I thought, could that be what
we were looking at? Some sort of species from another world?
Speaker 1: Right?
Speaker 2: Then, one of the creatures bent down and stuck their
hand in the water. I watched as mud slid off
its arm and into the swimming hole. As it mixed in,
it began to turn the water brown and thick Leah,
Zach and I quickly found ourselves in a pool of
brown sludge. The water we had first jumped into ceased
to exist. We all tried desperately to grab on to
one another for safety for comfort. As we huddled together,
the buzzing noise that their eyes emitted grew louder and louder,
like a million bugs, all buzzing at the same time. Then,
without warning, the buzzing stopped. The woods fell silent, and
the three of us all eased off one another. The
mud monsters were gone. Nothing surrounded the swimming bole, and
the sludge we were stuck in began to change in consistency,
thinning out and turning back into water. We all swam
for the edges again, and with a mix of fear
and determination in our attempt this time, we were all
able to claw our way out of the swimming hole.
That night, I hopped onto my computer and went back
to the website that I initially found the swimming hole on.
I scrolled down and read more of the comments. They
went from Oh yeah, I remember that place too. We
stopped going there after the water became too muddy. There
was another comment that indicated the area was blocked off
by police at one time, while an additional commenter clarified
that it wasn't the police, but rather a government agency.
The computer screen started giving me a headache. I turned
it off and lay in bed. My head felt like
it was swimming, like my brains had turned to mush
and were just sloshing back and forth in my skull.
I pulled the blankets up over me as chills began
to ravage my body. I was shivering. Every muscle in
my body cramped up at the same time. Then a
tickle in my nose triggered a sneeze. Brown sludge shot
out from my mouth and nostrils and splattered the wall
on the other side of the room. I watched as
it slowly oozed down the wall and puddled on the floor.
I'd have to clean it up before my parents saw it.
I couldn't have them finding out what happened to us
at the swimming hole. I couldn't have them finding out
my brain was now sludge, or that sludge was running
through my veins and beating from my heart. I couldn't
have them finding out that their precious little child had
now been recruited by an alien species from the stars
to systematically take over every single region of Planet Earth.
They'd be gone tomorrow anyhow. Consumed by a surprise sludgy attack,
I reached out and turned off my bedside lamp, my
goofy touch, leaving sloppy prints all over it. My eyes
droned loudly and glowed yellow, keeping the room bright even
in the darkness. They rolled over my body, squelching beneath
the sheets. Planet Earth didn't know what it was in
for big news micro Terrorist fans. The first ever micro
Terror's short film, The Dire More Phantom, inspired by the
twenty twenty three micro Terror's original story Bump in the Night,
is now available to stream over in the fan club.
If you're not a member, now's the perfect time to join.
From now through August first, twenty twenty six, you can
use the promo code sci Fi Summer when you sign
up to get fifty percent off your first month of
the Terrified Tier That's sci Fi Summer. Head on over
to micro terrors dot com and sign up. Thank you
all for being such dedicated micro Terrors listeners. We'll see
you next week when an interstellar creature pays a visit
to a suburban neighborhood, unless it decides to take a
dip in that swimming hole first, at which point it
probably won't arrive.
Speaker 1: Thank you for listening to micro Terrors. Join us each
Saturday for another scary story. For more fun, visit our
website at microterrors dot com, where you can get the
latest micro Terrors news, read fun facts about each story,
sign up for our monthly newsletter, and even send in
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can become one of the Terrified by joining the fan
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like reading stories a week early, receiving complimentary books, and
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soon for Microterrors scary stories for kids,