It was summer holiday and I was a student looking for opportunities to make some money during my break. I got a job as a nighttime security staff member at a large theme park which attracted significant numbers of people all the time due to the impressive quantity of intense rides it harboured. It also contained various other entertainment venues and even had a mascot character - a silver-coloured bunny rabbit dressed in a basic suit. There were even costumes of this character worn by other staff members who worked during the day. My job would be to patrol specific areas of the park after hours, from 12am to 6am, while other nighttime security staff members were patrolling other regions of the park simultaneously.
During the first week on the job, there were no issues and I got through my shifts without any significant obstacles. However, it was after a week, when three children had disappeared in the park during the day, that things began to go wrong. During my first night shift following the three child disappearances, I saw something extremely unsettling. It was one of the mascot character suits standing upright in a random location in the park. I froze immediately upon seeing it. Nobody during the night was supposed to be wearing them, so to see one standing in the middle of the park after hours was unnerving to say the least. It was facing in my direction as I stared at it apprehensively. It began to take slow but certain steps towards me, as I then lost my nerves, turned and ran. The next day I reported the occurence to the park’s higher authorities. I was initially pessimistic about the extent to which they would believe me given the absurdity of what I had seen, which is why I was pleasantly surprised when they seemed to take me seriously. Apparently, the two other nighttime security staff who were on shifts that night reported witnessing the same thing. Since they were patrolling separate regions of the park, this suggested there were at least three distinct costumes mysteriously moving around the park during the night. We were all told to avoid the costumes if we ever saw them again during our shifts and try to carry out our work regardless. We did our best.
For the next few weeks all of us who worked night shifts continued to see these costumes wandering aimlessly around the park. Sometimes they would try and walk towards us, resulting in us moving away from them, while other times they would simply walk around as though they could not detect the presence of anyone else around them. It got to the point where witnessing the appearance of such costumes around the park became an expected phenomenon to experience if ever you were about to begin a shift. That was until something was discovered. The police at this point had been investigating the three child disappearances which occured a few weeks prior extensively and, after much work and effort, had successfully discovered the bodies. They were each stuffed in a suit hidden in a storage room deeply embedded within an area of the park scarcely entered by anyone. The only person who was known to enter at a noticeable frequency was the owner themselves, who had already been a prime suspect. This led to an arrest, the bodies finally being used for the corresponding funerals and the suits themselves being burned. I and the other nighttime security staff helped the police transfer the suits to where they could be set alight. In the flames flickered the barely visible words just possible to see above the crimson lighting: “Thanks for setting us free.”