The Hungry Slide
Content Warning: children death, mentions of cannibalism
Produced by the CREEPY Podcast - Episode air date: November 29, 2023
My brother Travis Ferguson was a hero.
He was also a bully. Not my bully. He let me trail in the footsteps of his worn sneakers and threatened kids with purple nurples if they dared to tease me about my glasses and freckles. He was a good brother, but a bad kid—the kind you avoided if you were anyone but me.
He was a villain in the seventh grade but a hero in this story about the Hungry Slide. Have you ever heard of it? The Hungry Slide?
No, probably not. In some places the lore has spun into a cautionary tale for children to mind their parents, but in the small town of Maus, Oklahoma where I grew up, the truth about the Hungry Slide is far more horrifying than any rumor. I should know. I was there when it ate its last meal.
The slide was part of Holiday Park. Yes, that Holiday Park, named for the notorious Holiday family and the ruins of their mansion that the playground was built upon. Reports of the gruesome murders flooded the news back in 2004 when the truth came out. I was only seven, so I don’t remember more than a few flashes on TV and conversations between my parents and their friends about the bodies. Since then, since my brother, I’ve done my research. Any unfortunate traveler who ventured too close to the Holiday home got caught in its sticky, blood-soaked web. The home was searched and the Holiday’s were questioned many times, but nothing was found and no arrests were made. Grandfather Holiday and his son Raymond were avid hunters, so their freezers were always full of carefully wrapped cuts of meat. Some say the police were too distracted by Grandma Holiday’s homemade meat pies and unctuous stews—all secret family recipes, if anyone asked—to notice that the rack of ribs in the refrigerator wasn’t from an Elk, the heart didn’t come from last winter’s bear, and the hindquarters didn’t belong to any deer.
The Holiday’s might still be snatching prey, always young people and always from out-of-town, if it wasn’t for the determined backpacker who, after watching his partner being drawn and quartered, decided he’d rather risk death on his own terms than become the centerpiece of Thanksgiving dinner, and set a fire that spread through the mansion, killing the eldest members of the Holiday family and revealing their deepest, darkest secrets buried within the walls. Behind the plaster in nearly every room were bones stacked atop bones, femurs and phalanges and skull caps covered in nicks and cuts from steak knives and the insistent canines that gnawed through flesh and grizzle. At least twenty individual bodies were identified within the ruins of the Holiday home. I’ve heard some people say the number is closer to a hundred, but I don’t believe that. Twenty is horrible enough.
Holiday Park opened one year after the fire. Building a playground on a site of so much death was a hard sell, passing the city council by a margin of one vote on the hopeful—albeit naïve—promise that the town could wash away one family’s sins with the innocent laughter of children, replacing screams of terror with shouts of joy. No expense was spared from the top-of-the-line materials to the famous playground architect hired to design the bridges, tunnels, rocks walls, and climbing ropes that my brother and I couldn’t wait to get our grubby hands on. But the park’s most impressive features were the slides—each different, each magnificent in their own right. There was the eight-foot slide, nearly straight down with low sides—my mother’s nightmare, she’d said, and my wildest dream—a giant twenty-foot slide with three runs side-by-side for racing, and a winding slide, the tallest of all, with a full one hundred feet of twisty, peppermint-colored tubing that spit you out cross-eyed and dizzy.
Then there was another that didn’t spit you out at all.
The smallest of all the slides at Holiday Park, and perhaps the most unassuming at a glance, what has become known as the Hungry Slide was tucked at the toddler end of the playground, a short red tube with no twists or turns. You could look up from the bottom and see clearly out the top. Nowhere to get lost or stuck. And yet…
It was two years to the day after the fire that destroyed the Holiday home, about one year after the playground itself was built, that the Hungry Slide ate its first meal. Many of the parents in Maus warned their children not to play there, but we didn’t listen. How could we resist a place full of such color and wonder, with delightful contraptions we’d never seen before that made the other local playground look cheap and rundown by comparison, promising splinters and scrapes and exactly the same fun we had every other summer? The free-rangers like Travis and me, latch-key kids with parents who worked and couldn’t afford babysitters, flooded Holiday Park, where my brother became an unlikely hero from his perch atop the Hungry Slide where he refused the small children—even me, much to my surprise—access to the small, red tube. How many lives he unwittingly saved, we simply cannot know.
But my brother wasn’t at the playground when a family from two towns over hosted a fiftieth anniversary party at Holiday Park. While the adults congratulated Ma and Pa Williams for five decades of marital bliss, the children ran and played with the reckless abandon of youth. Among those children was five-year-old Seamus Williams, grandchild to Ma and Pa Williams, who wasn’t the first to fling himself down the Hungry Slide but, on that day, he certainly was the last.
His parents heard the gurgled scream, a horrifying wail that was suddenly cut off as if the sound was swallowed by a cavernous throat. When everyone realized he was missing, one of the older cousins claimed they saw Seamus enter the slide. His parents climbed the length of the small, red tube even though their son clearly wasn’t inside. Every slide and tunnel were diligently searched, and the Maus police were called. Seamus’s mom and dad were inconsolable as they explained what little they knew of their son’s disappearance to the Maus sheriff. Nothing, other than the boy’s blue baseball cap that plopped out the bottom of the Hungry Slide covered in some kind of unidentified clear slime, was ever found.
A few weeks later, a couple passing through town who hadn’t heard the stories of the Holiday family or the recent disappearance of young Seamus Williams, stopped to stretch their legs and let their two-year-old daughter, Cassidy Baker, enjoy the elaborate playground. Cassidy’s mother, wild with hysteria, would tell the police that she only looked away for a second when her little girl waved from the top of the Hungry Slide. When she looked back, Cassidy was gone, her small, pink barrette dropping to the ground at her mother’s feet.
As with Seamus Williams, searchers combed the park and surrounding woods for any sign of the toddler, whose short legs couldn’t have carried her very far. The only curious clue was found beneath the Hungry Slide. Carved into the red plastic tube were the letters S.W. and beside the S.W. were the letters C.B.
Once this detail circulated around town, people came—teenagers in particular—to take pictures of the letters. Some—teenagers in particular—tried carving their own initials into the plastic but it didn’t matter how sharp their knives were or how hard they scraped, the slide would not accept any additional carvings. Even attempted graffiti bubbled up and sloughed off without a stain. The slide quickly became a place of myth and legend. Who would dare go down the Hungry Slide? There’s a rumor that the youngest victim was no more than a few hours old. Many years after the playground was torn down, I heard about sixteen-year-old Maise Hoffman who was nine months pregnant when she went for a drive one Friday afternoon, but when she came back two days later, she wasn’t pregnant anymore. Some people say she gave the baby up for adoption. Others, the most malicious gossips, claim she chucked the newborn down the Hungry Slide. We can’t ask Maise directly anymore because she killed herself a few months later. But to add fuel to the vicious rumors, the letters B.H. appeared beside the C.B. underneath the Hungry Slide—some thought for Baby Hoffman who no one in Maus ever saw with their own eyes.
The legend of the hungry slide spread. Brothers threatened to throw their sisters down the slide, parents—who didn’t really believe there was anything sinister about the slide—used it to get their children to clean their rooms or do their homework lest they become the Hungry Slide’s next meal. Twisted though it was, I think everyone was just trying to make light of the darkness that continued to cloud the town. The playground remained open despite the rumors because the children who disappeared weren’t from Maus, and it was just a slide after all. Besides, as most parents later claimed, local children—their children—didn’t play at Holiday Park.
Except we did. The last victim of the Hungry Slide was the very bully that saved so many other children from the same fate. Travis Ferguson, my brother, threw himself down the Hungry Slide one Tuesday afternoon on a dare. He hated looking weak in front of the other kids. Our dad was a bastard back then, always so hard on Travis. Always making sure my brother felt like he never measured up. The surest way to prove his worth to the other kids, and himself, was to survive the Hungry Slide, coming out the other end on his feet with a triumphant, shit-eating grin.
Only he didn’t.
I stood at the top of the slide with a few other kids who wanted a front row seat. Others waited at the bottom. All of them taunted and egged him on, but I…I fought back tears as I begged my brother not to go. I didn’t care if they teased him or called him a wussy or that he’d have to give about dozen knuckle sandwiches just to save face—it wasn’t worth the risk. He gave my shoulder a shove to keep me away from the slide and told me to stop being such a tit baby. A tit baby—exactly what our dad called him when he fell out of our treehouse and started crying before we realized he had broken his arm. I knew I couldn’t stop him then. He winked at me, like it would all be OK, flipped the other kids the bird with both hands, and flung himself down.
A second passed, then two. An eternity for me, waiting for my brother to come out the other end. He must’ve braced himself inside to give everyone a scare, to make everyone pay for taunting him. I walked up to the opening and saw…something. Something I couldn’t explain, but something I can’t forget. Then…I locked eyes with the slack-jawed kids looking up from the bottom. My brother was gone.
The other kids scattered, most leaving the park white-faced and screaming. I didn’t move from the top of the slide until that evening when my parents—having heard that something had happened at the park that day, even if they didn’t know what—came to collect me. I couldn’t tell them what I’d seen. That Travis had gone into the slide with a wink and the bird and gotten lost on the way down. Other kids told their versions to the police. This time there was no refuting the evidence since twelve-year-old Caty Lutz had captured the whole thing on her father’s digital camera. The video was grainy but showed Travis enter the slide at the top, and his shoes, a pair of ratty Nike sneakers from a secondhand store, fall out the bottom. The whole town searched for Travis, efforts that dwarfed the searches for Seamus Williams and Cassidy Baker. He wasn’t found. Some claim his initials appeared beneath the Hungry Slide beside B.H., but no pictures exist to prove it, and the slide, along with the entire playground, was dismantled a short time after Travis disappeared. The sound at the end of Caty Lutz’s video sealed the playground’s fate. It’s a detail no one who watches the video can explain, but that those of us who were there clearly heard. That I still hear at night when I think about my brother and can’t fall asleep.
When he didn’t come out the other end of the Hungry Slide, the kids at the bottom stuck their heads in, and as they did the slide let out a giant, satisfied belch.
And if that wasn’t enough of a nightmare, what I saw when I looked in the tube flashes before my eyes every time I close them. My therapist says it helps to put things on paper so I’m writing this story. I haven’t actually spoken since that day on the playground seventeen years ago. I can’t. Not after seeing what I now draw on construction paper, post-it notes, the fog on the bathroom mirror after a shower, and up and down the sidewalks in colored chalk at the institution for disturbed adults that I call home.
There isn’t a wall that surrounds me that isn’t covered in the horrific scratchings from my memory from when I peered into the Hungry Slide. Black, cavernous holes at the bottom of swollen red throats. Pink shreds of flesh stuck between sharp pointed teeth. And briefly, so quick that it might’ve been my imagination, my brother’s face, frozen in a silent scream.