I’m going to tell you a story

it’s going to involve a woman trying to outrun a childhood nightmare

that has clawed its way into her adult life and parenthood

Oh, and maybe a pinch of sand, it really does get everywhere

Welcome to the Aurora Wasteland

In every aspect of life, Stephanie was a normal girl. At age one, she walked, at age two, she talked, at age six, she went to Disneyland. Every aspect of her life would be classified as 100% normal and uneventful until the age of 8. That is where things become interesting for us and unpleasant for her.

Stephanie and the Aurora Wasteland website have a history going back a few years. Initially, in 2018, she posted about an event that happened to herself and her daughter on their first excursion out to the brand new park in their newly developed subdivision. The post simply stated that Stephanie heard voices coming from below the sand while she was at the park with her daughter. Then she asked if other Aurora Wasteland posters or readers had ever encountered anything like this before. A few commenters posted about their own experiences with voices from inanimate items, most from urns, couches, and vibrators.

It should be pointed out here that the number one most common household item to talk to you is your vibrator. This goes for both men and women. The more powerful the vibrator, the more likely you are to hear voices. A scientific study was commissioned by the Aurora Wasteland website on the subject in 2010 backs up these finds. It also found that vibrators that pulse as well as buzz are more likely to cause the user to accidentally summon unwanted gods.

Anyways, after Stephanie’s initial post, an Aurora Wasteland team reached out to her and conducted an interview with her at her house. She told them that when she took her daughter to the park, after playing in the park for only a few minutes, she started to hear voices. Her daughter, then 8, also heard the voices, but wasn’t clear on what they were saying. She said they just sounded like mumbled noise, like someone yelling underwater. Stephanie, on the other hand, heard the voices very clearly. She said they just kept repeating the same word over and over again, her name.

After cleaning out their underpants, the Aurora Wasteland team investigated the park without Stephanie’s help. She was unwilling to return and doubted that she ever would. The team found nothing. They stayed for hours with microphones buried in the sand. But they left with nothing apart from improved sandcastle building skills.

The team had hit a wall. They had nothing but Stephanie’s word to move them forward. While reviewing the notes from Stephanie’s interview and preparing a website post, one team member contacted Stephanie about the spelling of her daughter’s name and a clarification of her age. It was then that Stephanie let a vital piece of information slip. She said that Emma, her daughter, is the same age now that Stephanie was when she first heard the voices. Startled by the discovery that Stephanie had heard the voice before the member gently asked Stephanie what about the first time she heard the voices.

Gently, please, the team members practically crapped their panties in excitement that the case was going somewhere interesting.

Flustered by her slip of the tongue Stephanie claimed she’d misspoke, and ended the conversation prematurely.

As you may or may now know, Aurora Wasteland team members don’t let things go easily. They are a highly inquisitive bunch. So despite Stephanie’s attempt at a cover, the team member brought the new information back to her team and the website, where the community set to work looking for when Stephanie maybe have previously heard voices.

A 1998 newspaper article from the Barrhead Leader brought Stephanie’s story to light. It claimed that a child went missing at a local park, the only witness to the event was a little girl, who claimed the boy who went missing was pulled into the sand by voices. Police at the time chalked it up to a custody dispute, but the child was never heard from or seen again. Police didn’t put much stock into the claim that the child was pulled into the sand by voices, but they did dig up the entire park looking for him. The witness to the event, the little girl, matched the age and upbringing location as Stephanie.

So what? What makes this an Aurora Wasteland case? A woman hears voices and you think she is linked to a missing child from the 90s? That doesn’t scream Aurora Wasteland to me, well hold on to your nips, things are about to get mildly more mysterious.

Stephanie cut off communication for the Aurora Wasteland team at this point, and her post from the site vanished. Though the post was later created from a website backup. The team was at a loss. The newspaper held no information identifying the missing girl from 1998, Stephanie seemed to be the only link to the whole story and even she seemed to no longer want anything to do with it. So the team did what every good Aurora Wasteland team does, they respected Stephanie’s wishes and closed the case.

Roll the credits, this story has no ending.

Except that it does and they didn’t. The team did respect her wishes and didn’t stalk or harass Stephanie. But they did go on a road trip.

The small town of Barrhead is somewhat of a focal point for the strange and weird inside the Aurora Wasteland. Notable Aurora Wasteland places from the town itself are Moe’s trailers, and Thunder Lake. The team was excited having never been there. Their first stop was a local coffee shop to meet a former school teacher. His name has been redacted as per his request. From here on out we will refer to him as Mr P.

The team filled Mr. P in on everything that they knew about Stephanie and the missing child from before. Mr P in turn, filled the team in on the events from 1998. He told them the story that was familiar around town, while he had worked at the elementary school where the park was located, the event took place after school hours and everything he knew was second hand. His story matched that of the newspaper article with one notable exception. He noted that Stephanie, more than other kids, seemed to be affected by the events. That she refused to play, not just at the school parks, but all the parks and that the parents had taken her to counseling for it. He recounted that gossip around town was that she was crazy. And that her family would later separate themselves from her because of it.

While the team and Mr. P parted ways, the team had a better idea of the events from 1998, but they didn’t have a direction to take their investigation. So they marked it as incomplete and parked it.

Time passed by on the case, roughly a year, then as suddenly and out of the blue as Stephanie’s initial post had appeared on the Aurora Wasteland site, the team that had been investigating her case received a panicked phone call from her.

While barely able to make out what she was saying, the team member could make out nothing more than, “park...daughter...alone.” Then Stephanie was gone. The team assumed, and would later be proven correct, that while having a friend over, nine year old Emma had been convinced to go to the nearby park without her mother knowing. Only she did find out, and nearly lost her mind with panic. The only thing she thought to do was to contact the Aurora Wasteland team, who contacted the police before setting off to the park themselves.

By the time they reached the park Stephanie and her daughter were being attended to by medics.

Elated that the team was there, Stephanie told them the same story she told police, she’d been attacked by something in the park again, only this time it grabbed her, and tried to pull her in. Neither her daughter nor her daughter’s friend could back up the events as described by Stephanie. They reported that Stephanie showed up shouting and yelling, she startled the girls, and embarrassed the daughter.

But I mean who hasn’t been embarrassed by their parents about not being allowed to play at the park because they hear voices every time they are near one? And that they constantly remind you about some childhood event that was way harder to get over then kids today have to deal with because, as she claimed, “ kids are addicted to phones these days, even if, she’s the one who’s always on her phone and has to run to it every time it makes the littlest it sounds”...Mom.

Anyways, Stephanie and the Aurora Wasteland team agreed to meet again that night at the park. She’d show them what happened, and she’d tell them about the missing boy from 1998.

Only the meeting never took place. The team was late because of an unrelated episode of diarrhea, and by the time they got there, Stephanie was no wear to be found.

Disappointed, they tried contacting her but had no luck. So they traveled to Stephanie’s house where they found her daughter home alone, and claiming that her Mom was supposed to be at the park meeting them.

Panicked, the team again contacted the now massively annoyed local police, who agreed to meet them at the park one last time.

Which they did and the team went over the entire story with them, and just before the police were about to arrest the team under suspicious disappearance charges - true story, those were the charges sighted - a phone was found in the sand. A phone that would quickly be determined to be Stephanie’s.

To the police's credit, they took the suggestion of the Aurora Wasteland team and quickly had the park excavated.

You see the Aurora Wasteland team believed that something had been chasing after Stephanie, and that that something had attacked her and pulled her down into the sand.

As much as the team wanted to be right, they hoped that they were wrong. They didn’t want to find Stephanie’s body at the bottom of the park, buried down below the sand. But they did. And their hearts were broken.

Stephanie’s body was found several feet below the surface of the park, her arms and legs held in place by dried up old skeletons. One each holding onto her limbs. Stephanie was dead.

And the body of one of those skeletons was later identified as the child that went missing back in 1998. The one Stephanie was playing with. The one, as it was later determined and backed up by Stepanie’s daughter, called out Stephanie’s name as she was taking back in ‘98, and was the only actual word Stephanie heard from the sand she was afraid of going to.

Stephanie was haunted and hunted by the child who she’d failed to get help for. It called her name decades after it’s death.

But why? Why Stephanie? The story died here for the Aurora Wasteland team. Though they routinely check in on Stephanie’s daughter, who, to this day, stays away from parks.