The Empty Carousel

Two summers ago, I worked the night shift at the abandoned amusement park on the edge of our town. The park, once a bustling seaside attraction called ‘Coral Pier,’ had been closed for decades, but a local preservation society paid me to keep an eye on the rotting structures. My job was simple: walk the perimeter, check the locks, and report any vandalism. The first week was quiet, save for the constant creaking of wood and the distant moan of the tide. But on my eighth night, I heard footsteps in the old funhouse, ‘The House of Mirrors.’ They were slow, deliberate, coming from the long hallway that led to the Hall of Infinite Reflections. I shone my flashlight down the corridor and saw nothing. The footsteps stopped. I shook it off as rats or settling wood. But over the next few nights, the occurrences grew stranger. Lights flickered in the carousel’s control booth, though the power had been cut for years. I’d hear the jingle of keys near the ticket booth, a sound that always stopped when I approached. Other guards reported similar phenomena, and we began to notice two distinct patterns. We called them ‘Skips’ and ‘Drops’—names from the graffiti we found. Skips was playful: it would tap you on the shoulder, and when you turned, a small spinning light would dance across the walls before vanishing. Drops was more methodical: it paced the boardwalk from the ticket booth to the graveyard scene—a fake cemetery with plastic tombstones—and back again, its footsteps echoing even when no one was there. The strangest part was that these incidents centered on two locations: the carousel and the graveyard. I assumed they were just memories of old employees, but then a runaway named Mira showed up. She was a scrawny kid with a dirty face, and she’d been sleeping in the bumper cars. I took pity on her, offered her a granola bar and a place to crash for the night in the staff shack. That’s when the activity intensified. Skips and Drops seemed to zero in on her. They’d flicker lights directly in her eyes, and she’d laugh, thinking it was a game. But Drops would follow her, his footsteps heavy and unrelenting, stopping inches behind her, only to reveal nothing when she turned. On the third night, Mira was wearing a bandana, tied in a double knot, hanging from her belt loop. She’d told me it was her lucky charm. That night, I was making my rounds and heard her scream from the carousel. I ran over to find her standing inside the ride, petrified. The carousel was old, with hand-carved horses, and they were all moving—not in a circle, but bobbing up and down in eerie synchronicity. In the center, where the mechanical organ used to be, there was a figure: a tall, gaunt man in a faded carnival barker’s suit, his face obscured. He was pointing at Mira, his finger glistening like wet wood. And right behind him, a smaller, childlike figure with glowing eyes was tugging at her bandana. I yelled, and the figures vanished. Mira collapsed, and I dragged her out. She was shaking, and when I looked down, her bandana was gone—not untied, but cleanly ripped from her belt loop. The next morning, I found the bandana hanging from the neck of a ceramic clown near the graveyard. It was double knotted, just as she’d worn it. I never saw Mira again. The preservation society shut down the park the following month, citing structural damage. But sometimes, late at night, I still hear those footsteps on the empty boardwalk. And I know that Skips and Drops are still waiting, patient as the tide, for their next visitor.