28 Jan The Red Car

Posted at 11:00h in Strange and Unexplained by CreepypastaStories.com 0 Comments

📅 Published on January 28, 2025

“The Red Car”

Written by Jasper DeWitt
Edited by Craig Groshek
Thumbnail Art by Craig Groshek
Narrated by N/A

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⏰ ESTIMATED READING TIME — 10 minutes

Rating: 10.00/10. From 3 votes.

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I’m never going back on that ride ever again. And I sure as hell am not taking my kid anywhere near it.

Yeah, I know–you’ve probably heard something like that from plenty of people. Haunted theme parks are a distinct category of creepy urban legends, and I’m sure you’ve heard more than your fair share of them.

But here’s the thing: Most of the theme parks I hear creepy stories about are no longer in operation. Some horrible past event shut them down, or they became haunted after going bankrupt, or…well, it’s always some variation on that kind of narrative.

Those are good stories. But this isn’t a spooky story: it’s a cautionary tale. I’m not going to tell you about how I and my grownup friends went back someplace we weren’t supposed to, or how my kid wandered into the ruins of some forgotten, spirit-infested heap, because you could probably avoid those places because they’re just that: specific, geographically fixed places.

But I’m not sure you can avoid the ride I’m talking about and what’s on it. Because the thing is, this story isn’t about some boarded-up, haunted theme park. This story took place, instead, at a county fair. And if you don’t know, those sorts of fairs don’t usually have dedicated pre-built rides. Instead, they have an assortment of buckets of bolts that travel from state to state and set up wherever a particular county’s fair needs an extra ride. So, while I’m going to talk about my experience at a particular fair in California, you honestly might never know if your fair might have the exact same ride wheeled in next. This is why, to save you from reading the whole story before you even find out what to avoid, I’ll just lead with this:

If you see a ride at your county fair called Blizzard Bobsled, make sure that neither you, your kid, nor anyone else you love goes on it alone. And if, by some chance, they sneak on, you just pray that the ride is crowded enough that someone has to take the seat next to them.

Got it? Good. Now, I’ll tell you why.

I’ll give you just a minimal background about myself. As I said, this took place in California–specifically, in a relatively sleepy part of the state just north of its center, right along the coast, which is where I live. I’m a single father with one child: a beautiful little ten-year-old girl named Michelle. Michelle doesn’t know anything about what I’m about to tell you. I pray she doesn’t find this story, because I don’t want to worry her and give her nightmares about something she escaped by pure luck. At least, I desperately hope she escaped.

Yes–she must have. She didn’t look. I know that for a fact, and it’s all that lets me sleep. She didn’t look.

I’m getting ahead of myself. Let me start at the beginning.

It’s been a tradition in our family to go to the county fair near where we live whenever it’s open, which is usually around the spring to summer. Even if I wanted to, I don’t think Michelle would let me forget. She is obsessed with those rides. Every time we go, she jumps on every single one that she’s not too old or too short for, and she seems to take it as a personal failure if she doesn’t ride it at least three times once she’s gotten the staff to let her on. I can’t remember the last time we didn’t spend at least one day at the fair where we arrived right when it opened, and then left immediately after it closed. Suffice it to say, I’ve become very familiar with which rides are regular attractions and which only come to town for a single engagement. The Zipper, for example, is there every year, and so are the spinning teacups.

But I know for a fact that Blizzard Bobsled was not one of these regular visitors. In fact, I’m pretty certain that I hadn’t seen it before I went with my daughter just a week ago. Of course, it goes beyond saying that I will not forget it now, and I pray to God it doesn’t come back.

As I said earlier, Michelle insists on riding every attraction at least three times if she can convince the staff to let her. This particular ride, however, forced her to violate that principle by paternal fiat, which is a source of great relief for me.

When we first saw Blizzard Bobsled, I didn’t see it as a threat—except, perhaps, to my stomach if I rode it. It was one of those whirling, nausea-inducing contraptions where you lock yourself in with a couple of bars and ride the car in a circle up and down before going backward and repeating the same path at a much faster speed, and then going back and forwards even faster. As you’ve probably guessed from the name, on Blizzard Bobsled, the cars were shaped like bobsleds of various garish colors, and the entire decor of the ride was conspicuously arctic-themed. Michelle waited in line for upwards of half an hour, but she didn’t seem to care once the gates opened and the kids streamed onto the ride, taking every available seat.

Well, not quite everyone. There was one red car, which had been conspicuously marked with an out-of-order sign, which stayed empty. I didn’t think much of this at the time. Some carney was probably just too lazy to detach it. I just waved to my baby Michelle and snapped a couple of pictures of her excitement before I heard the loudspeaker ask everyone to check their seatbelts and then heard the loud, blaring alarm and grinding gears that signaled it was starting.

Idly, I glanced over the line of cars as they began to move–and saw something strange. The red car with the out-of-order sign on it wasn’t empty. A man–a grown man–was suddenly sitting in it, just on the outside seat of the back row of the four-person car. At that distance, I’d say he was probably six feet tall, wearing a dusty button-down shirt with a tear down one of the arms, a pair of tattered jeans, and some cheap, holey boots. I couldn’t make out what his face looked like because his head was craned at an almost unnaturally sharp angle towards the center of the ride, and his hair was too long and unkempt for me to make out what was behind it. I thought he might be some punk kid who’d snuck on and taken the out-of-order car for thrills, and I almost ran up to the operators to tell them to stop the ride and get him off.

But even if I had, it would have been too late to avoid danger entirely because, by the time I fully realized what I was seeing, the ride was already at its first full speed. I wondered with some ghoulish curiosity whether I might be about to witness one of those infamous accidents that happen when people don’t adhere to proper safety. But instead, I witnessed something much more disturbing.

When the red car came into view again, the man was still sitting in it, unscathed. But, and this was the main thing, he wasn’t sitting in the back row of the car anymore. He was now sitting in the front. I wasn’t sure if I’d imagined his original position at first, so I chalked this up to me just not looking closely enough. But then the car rounded the corner again, and when he came back into view, he was in the back again. And it went on like this for the entire ride. He just kept warping between the back and front rows of his own car with each rotation of the ride. Not that you could tell it from looking, because his posture remained so exact that you could’ve sworn he was a statue. I wasn’t sure what I was seeing, but I knew I didn’t like my daughter being anywhere close to it.

Abruptly, the ride stopped. One of the kids had thrown up, prompting an anxious parent to insist the staff let the child off. Bawling, the delicate unfortunate in question walked off, and with the same buzzing crank, the ride started up again.

It was when the now half-empty row where the sick kid had been had come back into view that I realized that this kid had been sitting next to my daughter. I felt a little anxious seeing that empty seat, given what I was already seeing in the out-of-order car, but I wasn’t sure if the ghost or whatever it was could move beyond that car yet. That is, until the cars rounded the corner one last time, and I saw something that made my heart stop. My daughter was holding her arms in the air, her eyes shut to enjoy the pure exhilaration, but she was no longer alone in that car. The man from the red car, which had been at least six cars behind hers, was suddenly sitting right beside her, staring at her with the same relentless gaze he’d been directing at the innards of the ride just moments ago.

I rushed over to try and get the operators to stop the ride, but that seemed to be the final turn, as the alarm blared and the cars began to slow down. I looked up, waiting, with bated breath, for them to stop. Michelle came back into view, her eyes open this time, but there was no sign of the man beside her. He’d vanished. I looked with some trepidation at the red car he’d started in, but he wasn’t there either. I shuddered, and when Michelle got off the ride, I practically ran to pick her up and hold her out of protective terror. She didn’t seem to mind the hug for the first few seconds, but as I didn’t let go, she craned her head to look at me reproachfully.

“What’s wrong, Daddy?”

I looked back at her, still feeling my own fear behind my gaze, and asked as calmly as I could:

“Michelle, when you were on that ride, did you see anything…weird?”

She looked at me quizzically. “I didn’t see anything, Daddy. My eyes were shut the whole time—you know I always do that!”

I breathed a sigh of relief and put her down. She looked up at me expectantly.

“Can we go on the Ferris Wheel now? Please?”

“Yes,” I said with an audible sigh of relief. “Yes, of course you can. Come on.”

The Ferris Wheel was a few rides down, and I felt unspeakably relieved knowing that Michelle would be spending the next few minutes hundreds of feet off the ground, far away from whatever I’d seen on Blizzard Bobsled. Thankfully, the next few hours of our visit passed peacefully, during which time I felt a little courage leak back into my system, and I came to a difficult decision: I was going to find out what was on that ride, even if it meant getting on it myself.

By the time I had come to this rather foolhardy conclusion, the crowds had thinned out at all the rides. So, while Michelle took her second run at one of the rollercoasters, which just happened to be two rides away from Blizzard Bobsled, I made my way up through the fairly thin line of people and up to that suddenly far more frightening attraction. When I reached the ride, I made a beeline for the red car with the out-of-order sign, wondering if I could somehow sneak on without the staff noticing. After all, they hadn’t noticed the man, or whatever he was, so perhaps I could take advantage of their laxity.

To my surprise, before I even managed to get into the car, I felt a hand tap me on the shoulder and heard a curt voice in my ear.

“Can’t you read the sign, pal?”

I looked back at the angry and rather burly ride operator standing behind me and did my best to look confused.

“Sorry, I thought I saw another guy in there a while back. I didn’t know if the sign was for real.”

At my mention of “another guy,” I almost thought I saw the carney’s face lose a little blood. He shook his head at me curtly.

“No one’s allowed in that car, sir.”

That wasn’t going to work for me. I wanted an answer.

“Then what about the guy I saw?”

“Sir, am I going to have to ask you to leave?”

“Not if you just answer me that question, no. I’ll just pop in another car and be out of your hair.”

The carney seemed to deflate, and he leaned into me.

“That ‘other guy’ you saw is why you can’t ride this car, sir. And don’t ask any more questions, because that’s all I’m going to say.”

I nodded, now suddenly wondering what the operators of this ride knew that I didn’t. But, not to be cowed, I instead took the closest car to the red one that I could find with an empty row of seats. It was only after fastening my seatbelt that I saw a notice plastered on the seat in front of me with some rather odd instructions:

If you don’t have a buddy for Blizzard Bobsled, please keep your eyes closed for your safety.

I looked up at the seat in front of me, where a callow-looking young man in camouflage cargo pants and a South Park hoodie, stinking of weed, was also sitting alone. I saw a similar notice in the same place. I poked him and nodded my head at it.

“Hey, dude,” I said with what, in retrospect, was probably the most paternal inflection possible, “what do you think that’s about?”

I pointed at the sign.

The young man gave me a tired and annoyed look. “How should I know, pops? Probably some nonsense in case a kid knocks their head on the bars. Now leave me alone.”

Charming. I wasn’t going to get any more out of him. And besides, the alarm had just gone off, and the cars had begun to move. I kept my eyes open right up until we turned around out of sight of the fair, and squeezed them shut as tightly as I could without losing vision completely. Then, I brushed my hand to the side ever so softly and felt my fingers connect with something that felt like damp fabric wrapped around something cold. I moved my finger back on reflex and strained my eyes to get a look at what was next to me without turning my head. I couldn’t see more than the ripped shirt and the beaten-up jeans, but what my eyes didn’t pick up, my ears and nose did.

There was a sudden, disgusting smell, like opening up a leftover steak weeks after it’s gone bad, which seemed to crawl into my nostrils. And while my eyes might’ve been mostly shut, I could still feel the cold, invasive proximity of that…thing leaning its face into mine. I could hear a musty, slow inhalation, followed by an even slower exhalation, and I realized that it must’ve been sniffing me. I shut my eyes and waited for the ride to turn around again. When it did, the smell and the breathing were gone.

I opened my eyes again, this time wide enough to see what was happening in the seat before me. The figure was now sitting next to that smartass kid I’d talked to earlier. And unlike me, the kid apparently hadn’t decided to heed the warning. He was staring at that face obscured by that matted tangle of hair with a look of transfixed, indescribable terror, like a rabbit that’s just been cornered by a wolf. He opened his mouth to scream, but no sound came out, and as he did so, the thing leaned in further and seemed to press its face against his. It was like watching the most grotesque, invasive imitation of a kiss in the world. I shut my eyes and didn’t open them for the rest of the ride.

When the ride finally slowed down, I did open them, of course. The kid was still sitting in the seat ahead of me, but he didn’t look terrified anymore. He looked oddly…relieved, actually. Then, with a faster and more confident stride than I would’ve expected from a stoner, he stood up and walked out of the ride. I didn’t know what else to do, so I followed him out and met Michelle outside the roller coaster.

It was only as I turned away from my former ride-mate that I noticed something that froze my blood. His camouflage cargo pants and South Park hoodie were nowhere to be seen.

Instead, he wore a pair of old jeans, some ancient-looking, well-worn worn boots, and a yellowing dress shirt with one sleeve torn open.

I left with Michelle as soon as I found her. She complained, but a sufficiently large bribe of pizza and cotton candy seemed to do the trick in assuaging her damaged sense of honor. I didn’t bother taking another look at Blizzard Bobsled before we left. I knew what I’d probably see, and my curiosity was gone.

And if you’ve been paying attention, yours should be, too. If you’re the type who goes to country fairs and you see a ride called Blizzard Bobsled, with one red car holding an out-of-order sign, please keep yourself–and your loved ones–away from it.