All a family needed to do in order to come here was go down a road five miles south of Gladwin, over a small bridge and to this open area. Large cracks zig-zagged the abused blacktop, most of it covered in accumulated grass, all of it in front of a familiar sight: a wooden pirate ship—now rotting unabashedly—as it stood floating on plastered waves. Above the front entrance was supposed to be a sign, but even without it, there was no doubt I found Buccaneer's Bay.

            Stepping outside my parked car, I hauled my backpack out and placed my bandana over the lower half of my face, covering my nose too. Everything, the trees and the woodland ambience surrounding the place, became so remotely quiet. Beyond the fenced-off ticket booths, the casting shadows of the tops of water slides could be seen from here. I could also see gathering storm clouds. The sooner I got in, the sooner I could leave and not have to worry about getting my equipment wet.

            Okay, I told myself as I grabbed my camcorder, let's do this. Click.

            “Hey everyone!" I waved before turning it towards the entrance/exit booths, my enthusiasm rising all the while. “On this episode of 'Trent Explores', we're at a place Buccaneer's Bay Water Park. Right now, I'm outside the gates of this once-popular tourist attraction in the town of Gladwin, Oregon. Lovely place with a great diner, really, but we're not here to talk about local food. Today we're going to explore a water park that's supposedly haunted with the spirits of previous parkgoers. Is it all true?" I smirked. “Let's find out!"

            I placed it away and turned my headgear camera on.

            Of course, this was illegal. After all, scaling a chain-link fence that held a 'do not enter' sign on the front happened to be frowned upon in many jurisdictions, but this was the life of urban explorers. When you were young and eager to go where you weren't allowed to be in, nothing could stop you. This mentality had led me to interact with the police on more than one occasion. Hopefully, it wouldn't be the same for tonight.

            Stumbling off the fence, I basked in the interior of a neglected tropical paradise. Past a boarded-up snack shack (or as the map I printed out earlier called it, the 'Flying Dutchman's Den'), a small pathway led to what used to be a decently-sized water park separated into three sections, all of them easily connected by a lazy river that looped around to the beginning. This allowed everyone to be able to circle the place without walking too much.

            And immediately, the years of inattention could be seen from the overgrown plant life.

            There wasn't anything particularly interesting in the snack shack, nor the long-abandoned locker rooms opposite of it, so I started walking down the path. My footpaws occasionally stepped on some twigs and dead leaves, and my ears could catch the sounds of distant birds. 

            “If you've been watching the news like one of my buddies had," I spoke loudly for my audience, “this place'll be demolished and turned into a hotel soon. Next week, actually. You can probably guess why I decided to come here. There's also the…interesting deaths to talk about. First up is an old ride called…the…"

            The Whirlpool. A circular tiled tube about several yards across that imitated a miniature whirlpool for swimmers to either fight against or sway within the swirling water. Despite it being emptied and filled with dead leaves, the thought of it being filled with chlorinated water and functioning caused my tail to twitch at the imagined fun, even though I hadn't swam in years. I could picture two excitable otters like me and Ben enjoying ourselves in it.

            At least, before he drowned in that river years ago. It was one of the many reasons I rarely went swimming anymore. Not to mention the nightmares that made my rudder-like tail shudder.

            Don't think about it now. Focus.

            “Let's check out the first reported death, shall we?" I scurried off.

            In the center of the property rested a large wave pool, now decrepit and its walls a heavily graffitied mural. Interestingly, some of it looked recent. What surprised me the most though was that somebody placed an ancient couch in the shallow end, leaving it and plenty of liquor bottles behind. I could already imagine a group of eighteen or nineteen-year-olds passing a stolen pack of beer to each other while talking about which female classmates had larger boobs. 

            Not too far past it rested the accumulating green of weeks-old rainwater in the deep end. The idea that hundreds of parkgoers once came all this way to swim in it appeared alien to me.

            “Their first reported accident occurred in 1996," I casually explained, my camera zooming towards the back of the pool, “when a fourteen-year-old wolf named Damien Markwell was in the Caribbean Waves pool. The newspapers chalked it up to a 'freak accident', because it was the beginning of summer and the lifeguards were swamped with how many had come that dat. Doctors believe he was trying to catch the largest wave by going deeper than he should have, but he got tired and passed out before drowning amid the waves."

            I paused to catch my breath. “Rumor has it a few working lifeguards claimed to hear someone shout 'help' near the deep end, only to find nobody in peril. A couple of past parkgoers spoke on occasion about feeling someone desperately tug at their footpaws. Except nobody was under them in the water." A shiver ran up me. “Eerie, isn't it?"

            Stepping beside the couch, I knelt down to zoom closer to the murky water.

            “I can only see tadpoles though…" I turned back to the couch and chuckled, “And the crappy couch of some local teens who made this their hideout. I don't know about you, but I certainly didn't do something like drag a couch into the middle of an abandoned park in the woods and get wasted? Did you though? Leave a comment and like this video if you did!"