Pennyroyal Park

From SuspireWiki

Description

A small park, only taking up a city block or so by most standards, it's mostly always deserted after dark. During the day, some of the local children come to play on the worn and barren, iron and steel "playground", the type with no protection for tumbles and falls. Some of the swings have rusted and fallen off of their set, but so far, Decatur has not seen fit to upkeep it, regardless of a few complaints of child injury each year.

At night, the atmosphere changes entirely. The processing plant next door to the park releases it's contained steam in five minute intervals, so the park is constantly kept with a mildly warm low-flying fog after 9 PM each night. This gives the small park and all of it's landscaping (or rather, wild grasses and shrubbery) a terribly eerie hue, highlighted by the few dim, dingy yellow lampposts placed only around the small gazebo in the center of the park.

Unsurprisingly, teens wishing to frighten each other come here on a fairly regular basis, and the park itself has an urban legend idolized since the late 1800's on a plaque in the gazebo about an Indian woman and her tribe that used to roam the area before it was developed:

They say that the Pennyroyal cat used to be a beautiful Indian woman. The men of her tribe were always going on hunting trips, but the women had to stay home. The Indian woman secretly followed her husband one day when he went hunting with the other men. She hid herself behind a rock, clutching the hide of a mountain cat around her, and spied on the men as they sat around their campfires telling sacred stories and doing magic. According to the laws of the tribe, it was absolutely forbidden for women to hear the sacred stories and see the tribe's magic. So when the Indian woman was discovered, the medicine man punished her by binding her into the mountain cat skin she wore and then transforming her into a terrible monster - half woman and half mountain cat. Ever after she was doomed to roam the hills, howling desolately because she desires to return to her normal body.

A man was hunting one night with his dogs when they both whimpered and ran off the path. At that moment, the woods were overpowered with a horrible smell like that of a wet animal that had fallen into a bog after it messed with a skunk. Then something howled on the path behind him and the man whirled around, dropping his rifle. His heart pounding with fear, the man found himself staring into the big, glowing yellow eyes of the Pennyroyal Cat. The creature had huge fangs dripping with saliva. It looked kind of like a mountain lion, but it was walking upright like a man. Then it howled, and the man's skin nearly turned inside out in horror.

With a scream of terror, the man leapt backwards and ran as fast as he could through the woods, the Pennyroyal Cat on his heels. He fled to the home of a friend who lived nearby, and burst through the front door only a breath ahead of the creature. His friend slammed the door in the face of the Pennyroyal Cat. Instantly, it started shuddering under the weight of the attacking monster. The man's friend grabbed his Bible and started reading aloud from the Psalms. Upon hearing the holy words, the Pennyroyal Cat howled in frustration and then slowly abandoned its attack and went back into the woods.

The man spent the rest of the night at his friend's place. When he went home at daybreak, he found his dogs huddled in the barn, shaken but still alive. The man never hunted after dark again.

Each year, there are reports of the Pennyroyal Cat stalking a friend-of-a-friend's-brother, but most everyone has just waved it off as an Urban Legend from the city.