Previously: “Braid.”
This week, a 2ch classic from Japan: “Forbidden Slide,” a creepypasta in which the slide at a school playground is… not quite what it seems. File this one under Childhood Traumas — if you had experienced something like the narrator of this story did, I’ve no doubt you, too, would have avoided slides for the rest of your life.
Unfortunately, I’m not sure precisely when this story was first posted; 2ch is by nature ephemeral, so the original — along with the date it was published — has been lost to the sands of time, as it were. I did, however, manage to track down two archived versions of the text of the post; they don’t include the initial publication date, but if you speak or read Japanese and want to see what the story looks like in its original language, you can do so here and here.
[Like what you read? Check out Dangerous Games To Play In The Dark, available from Chronicle Books now!]
Luckily for folks who only speak or read English, however, translator and author Tara A. Devlin of the wonderful Kowabana network has translated “Forbidden Slide” smoothly and cleanly and made it available in several places and forms. She narrated it on her flagship podcast, Kowabana: “True” Japanese Scary Stories From Around The Internet, in episode 53, which hit the internet on Aug. 16, 2019; then she posted the written translation to the Kowabana website about two weeks later, on Aug. 30; and it’s included in the sixth volume of her Kowabana book series, which she put out in December of 2019.
What exactly happened on this particular — cursed? Haunted? Something… else? — slide? That remains something of a mystery… although you may never look at playgrounds the same way again. At least this one isn’t just hanging out alone in the middle of the woods, right?
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This happened when I was in elementary school. I was one of those so-called “latchkey kids” and whenever I got home, nobody was there. This made me so lonely that I always stayed behind at school until it got dark.
I spent most of my time throwing around a ball with my friends in the playground, but they all had to go home once it reached 4:30. After they disappeared, I’d play alone for a while and then finally go home. First on the horizontal bars, then the swings, the monkey bars, and then the climbing pole. Last of all was the slide.
This slide was strangely shaped. Once you reached the top of it, it split into a V shape, so it was really two slides. Kind of like an elephant with two noses. It was no doubt made so two children could use it at the same time, but in reality, we could only use the left-hand side. The right-hand side was sealed off with wooden planks and a piece of paper that said “Keep Off!”…
Keep reading here, or listen here, or read in Japanese here and here.
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Follow The Ghost In My Machine on Twitter @GhostMachine13 and on Facebook @TheGhostInMyMachine. And for more games, don’t forget to check out Dangerous Games To Play In The Dark, available now from Chronicle Books!
[Photo via StockSnap/Pixabay]
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