The Muddy Sinkhole

The year was 1981, and our family of six—my parents, my three brothers, and me—had moved into a decrepit farmhouse on the edge of a vast, dying peat bog in northern Minnesota. The house was a sagging, two-story Victorian that had been abandoned for decades, its clapboard siding gray and rotten, its porch listing like a drunkard. It was all we could afford after my father’s business went under, and the owner, a distant relative, offered it rent-free if we would keep an eye on the bog and prevent poachers from digging up the peat. We had no electricity, no plumbing, no heating except for an old cast-iron stove that we fed with scrap wood and dried peat bricks. Our water came from a hand pump behind the house, but it was brackish and tasted of rot, so we drank mostly from the shallow well near the barn, which was fed by the bog. My brothers and I took turns hauling buckets of that murky water to the kitchen, always careful not to slosh it over our clothes, because the water left a dark, gritty stain that never washed out.

The bog itself was a strange, otherworldly place. It stretched for miles, a flat expanse of brown and green, dotted with stunted black spruce and tamarack that looked like skeletons. The ground was spongy, and if you stood still too long, you would slowly sink. Our father warned us never to venture onto the bog alone, especially after dark. He said the bog had a way of swallowing things—animals, people, even memories. He told us about a local legend of a girl who had wandered into the bog in the 1920s and was never found, and how sometimes you could hear her crying if you listened closely. We laughed at the story, but we never tested it.

The first sign that something was wrong came on our third night. I woke to the sound of a low, rhythmic thumping, like a giant heartbeat, coming from beneath the floorboards. I lay still, my heart racing, and listened. The thumping was regular, almost soothing, and after a few minutes, I convinced myself it was just the old house settling. But then I heard a voice, a woman’s voice, singing a lullaby. The words were indistinguishable, but the melody was haunting, and it seemed to rise from the very walls. I pulled the covers over my head and tried to sleep, but the singing continued until dawn.

The next day, I mentioned it to my oldest brother, Dale, who had slept in the next room. He gave me a strange look and said he had heard the same thing. He also said he had seen something in the middle of the night: a shadowy figure standing at the foot of his bed, so dark and undefined that it seemed to be made of the darkness itself. He had thought it was a dream, but then the figure pointed a long, thin finger toward the window, which looked out over the bog, and whispered, ‘She’s waiting.’

We told our parents, but they dismissed it as nightmares from the move and the strange surroundings. Our father said, ‘It’s the bog gas. It seeps up through the foundation and causes hallucinations.’ He made us burn candles with camphor to ‘clear the air,’ but the incidents only escalated.

The following week, my youngest brother, Toby, went missing for an afternoon. We searched the house and the yard, and finally Dale found him at the edge of the bog, staring into the water with a blank expression. When we called his name, he didn’t respond until Dale shook him. He blinked and looked around as if he’d just woken from a trance. He said he had seen a girl with long black hair sitting on a log in the bog, motioning for him to come closer. He said she sang the same lullaby he’d heard in the walls, and it made him feel sleepy, but in a pleasant way. We dragged him back to the house, and our father forbade us from going near the bog again, except for filling the water barrels at the well, which was only a few feet from solid ground.

But the bog would not be denied. That night, the singing returned, loud and clear, and it seemed to come from directly beneath our feet. It was no longer a distant lullaby; it was a desperate, sobbing chorus, as if many voices were crying out at once. We all gathered in the living room, huddled around the sputtering stove, and listened in terror. Our father tried to calm us, but his hands were shaking. He said, ‘It’s just the wind through the bog,’ but we knew better.

Then the floor began to sag in the center of the room. It didn’t creak; it just slowly dipped, like it was turning to jelly. The furniture began to slide toward the depression, and we scrambled to get away. In the middle of the floor, a dark, liquid substance began to ooze up through the cracks, thick and black, like oil but with a sickly sweet smell. It pooled and spread, forming the shape of a human figure—a woman on her hands and knees, her long hair hanging over her face. She raised her head, and we saw her eyes: two black wells, empty and endless. She opened her mouth, and a sound like a drowning gasp filled the room. Then she lunged at us.

We fled the house, running through the yard, slipping on the muddy ground, until we reached the gravel road. We didn’t stop until we were half a mile away, gasping for breath. When we turned back, the house was still standing, bathed in the frail moonlight, but the windows were glowing with a sickly green light, and the silhouette of a woman could be seen moving inside.

We spent the rest of the night in the pickup truck, shivering, and at dawn we drove to the nearest town and called the sheriff. The sheriff listened to our story with a skeptical expression, but he agreed to send a deputy out. When they arrived, the house was empty. The floor was solid, the windows dark, and there was no trace of the black substance. But in the backyard, near the well, there was a large sinkhole, about eight feet across, filled with murky water. The deputy said it was a common occurrence near bogs; the ground was unstable. He also mentioned that the previous owners had warned about the sinkhole, and that a child had drowned in it years ago.

We packed what we could and left that same day, never to return. I’ve never told this story publicly before, but I think about it often, especially when I hear a lullaby in a language I don’t know. And sometimes, late at night, I feel a phantom pressure on my shoulder, as if a hand is resting there, and I hear a faint voice whispering, ‘Come back to the bog.’ I never will.