I’ve never liked urban myths. I’ve never liked pretending to believe in them; never understood why everyone else doesn’t see straight through them. Why is it they’ve always happened to a friend of a friend - someone you’ve never met? Why does everyone smile and nod and pull the right faces, when they must know they’re not true? Pointless. A waste of breath. So I sneered at the myths about Scaderstone Pit. It was just an old quarry – nothing more. I never believed in the rumours of discarded dynamite. It had decayed, they said. It exploded at the slightest touch, had even blown someone’s hand off. I shrugged off the talk of the toxic waste. It was dumped in the dead of night, they said. The canisters rusting away, leaking deadly poisons that could blind you, burn your lungs. I laughed at the ghost stories. You could hear the moans, they said, of quarrymen buried alive and never found. You could see their nightwalking souls, searching for their poor crushed bodies.I didn’t believe any of it – not one word. Now, after everything that’s happened, I wonder whether I should’ve listened to those stories. Maybe then, these things would’ve happened to someone else, and I could’ve smiled and said they were impossible.But this is not an urban myth. And it did not happen to someone else, but to me. I’ve set it down as best I can remember. Whether you believe it or not, is up to you.
~ Mikey Campling
