The Hungry Roots of Hollow Creek

The summer of 2011 found me and three friends, Dale, Maggie, and Pete, driving down a dirt road that seemed to fold into itself like a serpent. We were heading to a place local to the swamps of southern Georgia, a spot called Hollow Creek. It wasn’t a cemetery, but an old, abandoned church overgrown with kudzu and Spanish moss, its steeple leaning like a broken finger. The road was barely a trail, with trees leaning in so close their branches scraped the car’s roof, their roots bulging like veins in the dark soil.

We’d heard stories, of course. How the woods around the church were haunted by the memory of a congregation that vanished in the 1800s, leaving their pews moldering and their Bibles open to the same page: the one about the valley of dry bones. How on certain nights, if you stood in the ruined nave, you could hear the faint hum of a hymn, and the air would turn thick with the smell of decay. But we were young, and summer was long, and we wanted a thrill.

We arrived around 3 a.m., our headlights cutting through a mist that had no business being there, clinging to the ground like a second skin. The church was a black skeleton against the star-pricked sky. We got out, and the silence was so profound it felt like a weight on our ears. The air was warm but carried a chill that seemed to seep from the ground itself. We walked toward the entrance, our flashlights casting wild shadows that moved on their own.

The door was gone, so we stepped into the nave. It was a cavern of darkness, with shattered pews and fallen rafters. The floor was a patchwork of dirt and old planks, and in the center, a gaping hole had opened, leading into blackness. ‘Probably where the crypt was,’ Dale said, his voice echoing too much. ‘Or a root cellar,’ Maggie added, her light trembling over the hole’s edge. We all peered in, expecting to see nothing, but there was a faint rustling from below, like something stirring in sleep.

Pete, the joker among us, bent and picked up a piece of fallen wood. ‘Anyone want to wake whatever’s down there?’ he said with a grin. I told him to stop, but he tossed it anyway. The wood clattered down, and for a moment, nothing. Then we heard a sound that didn’t come from the hole but from all around us—a low, wet groan, like the earth itself swallowing a scream.

The ground beneath our feet began to tremble. The trembling became a shudder, and from the hole, there shot up a mass of roots, thick as a man’s arm, black and slick as if drenched in oil. But these roots were not normal. They writhed like snakes, and they reached out with blind hunger. Maggie screamed, and that’s when we saw them—the shadows that had been there all along, not in the corners but woven into the very air, solidifying into forms with long limbs and no faces. They didn’t attack us; they just stood at the edges, watching, as the roots reached for us.

We turned to run, but the entrance was now a wall of interwoven branches and thorns, growing faster than we could blink. The windows, too, were being sealed. We were trapped. The roots grabbed Dale first, wrapping around his ankle and pulling him down with a horrible crack. He didn’t even have time to yell. Maggie and Pete and I huddled together, our backs to a fallen pulpit. The roots came on, blind but relentless. They brushed against my leg, and I felt a cold, sucking sensation, like they were draining the warmth from my flesh.

In desperation, I grabbed a loose board and swung, but it passed through the roots as if they were smoke. ‘They’re not real!’ I shouted. But they were real enough, because they grabbed Pete by the waist and lifted him high, his legs kicking. ‘The hymn!’ Maggie yelled, pointing to a dusty book on the pulpit. It was open to that same page. ‘Sing it!’ she cried, and without thinking, we all began to hum the tune we had heard in a dream. The roots stopped moving, as if listening. The shadows drew closer, but they were not threatening anymore; they seemed to be… singing along.

The roots loosened, and Pete fell to the floor, gasping. The wall of branches began to recede, the windows cleared. The shadows faded back into the air, and the hole in the floor closed as if it had never been. We scrambled out of that church, not stopping until we reached the car. We drove in silence, the only sound being our ragged breaths.

When we got back to town, we told no one. But Dale never walked again—his leg was twisted and cold, with root-like scars that never healed. Pete became obsessed with that hymn, humming it constantly, even in his sleep. Maggie couldn’t stand the sight of plants anymore, and her garden withered and died, no matter what she did. And I… I can still feel the roots brushing against my leg, even now, years later. Sometimes, when the summer air is warm and the night is still, I look toward the swamp and see the silhouette of that leaning steeple, and I wonder if the roots are still hungry, waiting for us to come back and sing them to sleep again.