The Hollow Field

In the autumn of 2012, my friend Leo and I decided to attend a underground techno festival held in an abandoned industrial park on the outskirts of Karlsruhe, Germany. The venue was a massive concrete warehouse, its walls covered in faded graffiti, surrounded by a sprawling field of dead grass and scattered debris. My cousin, Elena, drove us there in her battered van, parking at the edge of a muddy lot adjacent to the field, where a chain-link fence partially collapsed separated the lot from the wasteland beyond. We clambered through a gap in the fence and followed the thumping bass through the dark, weaving between groups of ravers, their faces painted with neon glow.

After hours of dancing and losing ourselves in the noise and the crowd, the music finally died down around 3 AM. The festival was over, and the crowd began to trickle out, but Leo and I, disoriented from the sound and the lights, found ourselves near the back of the warehouse, far from the exits. When we finally made it outside, the sky was pitch black, and the only light came from a few flickering lamps along the path. We walked, chatting about the night, until we realized we had been walking for what felt like half an hour and hadn’t seen the van or the fence. Instead, the ground beneath our feet had changed from gravel to a spongy, damp turf, and the air grew colder, carrying a faint, sweet odor—like rotting fruit.

We stopped. I pulled out my phone, but the screen flickered and died, and Leo’s had no signal. Ahead, the path we had been following was gone, replaced by an endless expanse of featureless grassland under a starless sky. We turned back, but the warehouse lights had vanished too. The silence was heavy, broken only by our breathing. Then we heard it—a low hum, barely audible, like a distant generator, but it seemed to come from beneath the ground.

Leo laughed nervously and said, ‘Maybe we wandered off the festival grounds. Let’s just keep walking straight; we’ll hit the fence eventually.’ But as we walked, the hum grew louder, and I noticed that the grass was moving, as if pushed by a wind that wasn’t there. And then, ahead, I saw a shape—a woman, standing still, her back to us, wearing a long, soiled dress that seemed to blend with the grass. She was too far away to see clearly, but I felt a primal dread, the kind that makes your legs want to run but your mind stays frozen.

I called out, ‘Hello? Are you lost?’ But the woman didn’t move. Leo grabbed my arm and whispered, ‘Don’t.’ We tried to walk around her, but no matter how far we went, she remained the same distance ahead, always facing away. The hum became a rhythmic throb, pulsing like a heartbeat, and the grass began to part around our feet, revealing dark, wet soil that smelled of iron. I looked down and saw a half-buried object—a child’s toy, a small plastic car, faded and cracked. Then another, a doll with missing limbs. The ground was littered with forgotten things, as if this field collected the discarded remnants of lives.

Suddenly, the woman turned. Her face was a featureless void, smooth like a mask of skin, but her mouth gaped open, and from it came not a scream, but a sound like thousands of voices speaking at once, in languages I didn’t recognize, all pleading and whispering. The grass seized our legs, wrapping around our ankles, pulling us down. We fell, and the soil swallowed us like water, cold and suffocating.

I woke to daylight, lying on the edge of the field, the chain-link fence just a few meters away. Leo was beside me, unconscious. The festival was gone; the warehouse stood abandoned, its windows broken. We stumbled to the van, where Elena was waiting, her face pale with worry. She said we had been missing for three days. But neither of us could remember anything after the field. Over time, we learned to live with the gaps in our memory, but sometimes, at night, I hear that humming, and I see the hollow field, and I know it is still waiting, hungry for more forgotten souls.