Previously: “Dead Mall.”
There are plenty of reasons to avoid ball pits. They’re gross, for one — something you don’t necessarily register as a kid, but which becomes rapidly apparent the older you get. Then there’s the general anxiety of being in incredibly close proximity with a bunch of strangers. But the ball pit in the creepypasta “I Work At A Family Entertainment Centre, And I’m Pretty Sure The Ball-Pit Is Bottomless”? That one is an entirely different can of worms.
Written by Creepypasta Wiki contributor and admin Christian Wallis and originally published in August of 2019, this story traffics in a particular brand of horror: The kind that slowly unspools its increasingly strange details, bringing a situation already naturally rife with horror (seriously, have you ever been to a family fun center? It’s NIGHTMARE FUEL) into a place that you… probably don’t want to actually bring your family.
[Like what you read? Check out Dangerous Games To Play In The Dark, available from Chronicle Books now!]
Or yourself, for that matter. Yes, I know, most service industry jobs are not exactly a barrel of laughs — I know because I, like many, did my time in the service industry — but this particular service industry job? It’s… more hazardous than most.
And I’m not just talking about the diapers and bodily fluids and other kid-related detritus you, as an erstwhile family fun center employee, would routinely find yourself needing to clean up in the course of the job.
If you’ve got ANY other options… they’re all preferable to this one.
Trust me.
You’ll see why soon enough.
Find an excerpt below, and head to the Creepypasta Wiki to read the full story.
***
I mean, I’ve worked at this place for as long as I remember and it’s pretty weird and even harder to describe. It’s your usual family-fun indoor park, I guess. There’s a million of them all over the place and they all have different names. We have a shitty little café that overcharges for stale hotdogs and then a butt-load of warehouse space filled with random crap to keep kids entertained. There’s a jungle gym, an arcade with ancient games, a greasy bowling alley, and obviously there’s a ball-pit.
… We have a high turnover rate, that’s for sure. We chew through new employees like popcorn and I think it’s because kids have this weird ability to home in on anyone they make uncomfortable and just thrive off the awkwardness. At least teachers and parents get to deal with one set of kids, right? They get to know them over time, and sure those kids will occasionally explode or have prolonged periods of being crazy high energy, but for the most part, the parents and teachers are there to manage the kids.
But that’s the exact opposite of what we do. We’re here to manage the centre, not the kids. Every kid here is meant to blow off steam, that’s why parents bring them here. It’s why they pay the entry fee. We can’t make these kids sit down or write lines. We can’t threaten or goad or shout. What we have is a revolving door of kids who are permanently psyched out, and we’re just meant to keep them occupied long enough for their parents to smoke a joint around the back or cry in the toilets where no one can see them break down.
I gotta say, it’s tough. I only stuck it out because I’m in management and that means my job is to get a bunch of teenagers to do all the dirty work. It’s like a pyramid scheme but grosser. Nobody at Enron had to brush vomit out of a crying 9-year-old’s hair. Still, I limit my exposure to the kids and for a damn good reason.
They scare the shit out of me.
***
Follow The Ghost In My Machine on Bluesky @GhostMachine13.bsky.social, Twitter @GhostMachine13, and 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 bogitw/Pixabay, remixed by Lucia Peters.]
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