Children's Laughter

I went to a remote prison in Pennsylvania for robbery in 1989. If you try and find it, you will be out of luck because it's gone, erased from most memories because it wasn’t well known in the first place.

While the prison was standing, it had a very low escape rate, because of a story that circulated around within the walls. The story was told to me by a friend, and it won’t leave my memory anytime soon.

Harry Winslow was an inmate in the late 40′s, who was in the prison for life. He had been going mad in his prison because he always had said he’d been framed. Every night, he would look out his cell bars and would see the river about 100 yards away. Past there was a thick and immense forest. He would always see children playing and laughing past the river next to the guard fence.

So with this gnawing at his mind, he went after it. It gave him a taste of hope and freedom, that’s why he went for it. The story gets shaky from here, because Winslow didn’t have a journal, so it was just eye witness accounts. On the night of his escape, his friend and cellmate Dom Solchec saw Winslow make his exit from the missing bars in the cell. What follows, Solchec told, was only sounds. Winslow was like a bull, so this made it easier to hear his footsteps on this foggy night, because Solchec couldn’t even see ten feet in front of his cell let alone 100 yards.

Solchec warned him that it wasn’t a good idea, so he had stayed alone in the cell. He tried to go back to sleep immediately after Winslow had departed, but just sat in bed listening to the sounds.

First he heard Winslow’s heavy footsteps trudging in the mud, and by the sounds of suction it was pretty thick. Second came the noise of the fence rattling back and forth as Winslow struggled to climb the fence, all the while he could hear the faint noise of children laughing in the back round. Before this could register as being wrong, he could hear Winslow splash down into the river, probably 20 feet from the river bank. At this point Solchec leaped out of his bed to look out the window, if only to hear more clearly. All he could hear now was frantic splashing and the laughter that was now the overwhelming noise. By the sound of the panting, Winslow had hurried his pace in the water. Finally, and this he could only hear faintly, Winslow walked up the bank, and the laughter was replaced by something else. Screaming.

Screaming and tearing of clothes and flesh. The laughter was now deeper and primal sounding, and after thirty seconds that felt like an eternity, the noise was all gone. Solchec looked out his window the rest of the night for any sign of what happened. All he heard was rustling in the trees.

In the morning when it was discovered how he had escaped and Solchec’s story had been relayed to the authorities, they ventured to the river bank across from the prison and found three items of interest. The first was several pieces of torn clothing. The second was a human tongue. The third was a note that was messily etched into the ground and had since hardened in the wee hours of the morning, and it read as follows:

DO NOT FOLLOW THE SIRENS.

The rest of the body was never recovered, never found, and it was dropped into the cold files case within a year. One day it was said that The Sirens called Solchec as well. He followed them and disappeared just as Winslow had.

The river dried up and eventually, the prison was closed down.

So if you ever happen to find a large complex of bricks in debris form and large blocks with wiring all over the place, go to the far end. I recommend that you wear earplugs, lest the children still dwell across from the dried up river.

Let’s just hope they haven’t crossed the river by now.

Credited to Mike S