I have this super-vivid memory of when I was, like, ten years old or so; my family and I were at some kind of carnival. It wasn’t anywhere near the size of a state fair, but it must have been at least something of a known event, because they had tons of different huge rides and funhouses, plus all sorts of food trucks/trailers and stuff. I’ve always loved small and enclosed spaces all my life, so at some point during the day, as soon as I saw this one particular funhouse-style thing set up, I kept going again and again. But one memory I have of it is….different.
It starts the same as all the others do, just like the first time I’d been through it. I had to crawl under this netting made of foam-covered bars, but at different points you’d have obstacles in different shapes made from mats and metal forms built into the structure. And this first part was a maze, so aside from the physical exercise of crawling through tunnels and over/around stuff sticking into them, I got lost a few times the first two or three laps I took. From there, I finally made it to a platform tower, like the ones the awesome PlayPlaces used to have back in the early 2000s. I caught a bit of a breather, turned towards the queue area to wave to my parents and younger brother, and climbed up to the next level. This bit wasn’t really all that unique, at least not nowadays; search up any European funfair video and you’ll probably find at least one funhouse with these weird, one-foot-wide ladder things that move up and down, and you have to step from one side to the other to ride them all the way up. That’s basically all the second “floor” had in it, plus a few punching bag-type things hanging from the roof. I make my way up, wave down at my family once again, and make my way up to the third, and final, floor. At this point, there’s only a slide left; it’s a clear plastic inverted u-shaped trough with a clear plastic bottom, angled downwards from the top right of the maze towards the bottom left, spitting you out behind the face of a clown and a rotating tunnel back out to the front side. Pretty simple, no gimmicks like hanging string or fog or lighting or anything, just a cool “behind-the-scenes” view of the backside of a really cool funhouse. That’s where the memory changes.
As usual, I stepped up on the lip of the platform, climbed up a smaller regular set of metal stairs, and waited behind some other kids for my turn. Everyone before me took their place on the edge of the slide before sliding down to the bottom and running out of the clown’s mouth at the end, so I wasn’t worried or anything. My turn came up, and as I push my way into the run, everything changes. The first half or so of the slide is perfectly normal, but suddenly the second half climbs upwards and re-enters the backside of the structure on the second level instead of on the ground level, and there’s this whole other section of the funhouse I didn’t even know existed. There obviously wasn’t any physical space left over for a space of that size just looking at the outside, so I’m sure it was just a jumble between that memory and another funhouse I loved; I’ve been a big funhouse enthusiast for a while now.
I can’t remember much else besides that; I do “remember” there being a pretty dark area with different colored lights and really loud music, but again, where could that have been? I remember being able to see pretty much the entirety of the course from the ground, sans the slide, and there was no physical way an entire area that size was packed in among all the other stuff. But each time I tell myself that it’s just a false memory, that it’s not actually what happened, I feel like I’m lying to myself. I do doubt that things happened exactly as I remember them, but I know that something really strange happened to me that day, I just can’t really remember what it was. It’s this core sensation I’ve had ever since, that there’s one specific thing tied to that location, or that event, and I’m just trying to somehow mentally cover it up with this weird mashup of different actual memories.