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The town I grew up in could boast exactly one remarkable event. The accident of 2004. It resulted in the indefinite closure of Stover Road and a stricter screening process for new bus drivers.

No one ever lived on Stover Road, but it was a key stretch of pavement, linking our small town with the even smaller village of Buckhill. After the 2004 tragedy, I learned that the road’s construction had caused a bit of a fuss with some of the older folks in the region. The few who were still alive in 2004 wasted no time in shouting “we told you so” loudly enough to convince the authorities. The resulting closure meant kids from Buckhill had to suffer a doubled commute time to and from school.

I never had to ride the bus. My mom was a bus driver, so I’d just go to school with her in the dark hours of the morning and wait at the bus garage until the main building opened up. My mom didn’t drive the Buckhill route, fortunately, but the accident still rattled her. It rattled a lot of people. I can only imagine what it was like in Buckhill. All those kids, just gone like that.

Because my mom was a bus driver, I knew a few things about school buses. Things that came up frequently in the aftermath of the accident. For instance, federal law requires the body of a bus be strong enough to support one and a half times the bus’ weight, the idea being that it’ll hold up in the case of a rollover or collision, preventing the kids inside from getting crushed.

Investigators determined that the bus hadn’t been properly inspected. The closure of Stover Road spoke to how much faith our town put in the investigators’ opinions. Afterall, the bus hadn’t rolled over, and there were no other vehicles it could have collided with. And no lack of inspection could explain what had happened to the missing rear half.

They set up orange and white barricades on either end of Stover Road. The pavement crumbled, and slowly succumbed to weeds. The forest through which the road ran closed in on either side and covered everything in fallen leaves. Years later, after the shock and mourning had passed, kids would dare each other to approach the barricade, to shout across it and listen for an answer. But not even the toughest kids would set foot onto that cracked and faded blacktop, nor dare their friends to try. It was an unspoken law that not even the most irreverent among us cared to violate.

There was some argument about what to do with the bus—what was left of it, at least. Some parents wanted it destroyed, others wanted it preserved as a memorial. It sat behind the bus garage, at the very edge of school property, waiting to learn its fate. The debate went on for weeks, then gradually simmered away without any decision. And so the bus stayed there. The grass grew tall front of it, and the woods, which formed the back edge of the school grounds, reached out to claim it. Between the road and the bus, it was like nature was slowly erasing the tragedy from our history.

But you can’t erase something like that. Not completely.

The latest episode of the Scary Stories Told in the Dark podcast features Swamp Children from the Noctrium Library, along with three other frightening tales by other authors. You need a patron’s account to hear the full episode, including Swamp Children, but you can listen to the first half of the episode for free.