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Visit Salt Lake City in February, in inversion season, and you'll hardly see further than 50 yards. The rocky mountain ranges, the dozens of craft breweries, the looming Salt Laky City Temple are all shrouded in gravy-thick smog. But even through the haze, if you wound up at the intersection of 1300 South and 300 East, it's impossible not to see the Fun Time Kidz Day Care, a DayGlo-green building with purple doors and yellow trim around windows blocked with pictures that look like they've been torn out of old coloring books. There's a deserted playground out back which, if it existed in a Silent Hill game, would definitely be a place where a zombie child would lurch out at you.
Depending on who you ask, Fun Time is either a normal day care (albeit a slightly creepy one) or a cover-up for something insidious. Possibly a CIA black site, a drug front, or an organ harvesting operation. For the people who suspect something sinister, it's become the subject of an enduring mystery: What's going on in this building, and why has nobody seen kids come in or come out?
The Fun Time Kidz Day Care conspiracy began on January 25, 2015 when user discogodfather6922 posted a photo to Reddit. He wrote that he'd lived nearby for five years, but he'd never having seen any "kidz" having a "fun time" inside. (The original thread, now completely redacted, is preserved on Imgur.)
Soon, other Salt Lake City locals weighed in. One user had admitted to seeing children inside, despite the cardboard in the windows. Another user claimed to be a letter carrier who had been inside the day care and said it was fully functioning. "The only strange thing is," the user added, "no matter what time of day I showed up with their mail, it always seemed to be nap time." Another user claimed to know someone who broke into the facility out of curiosity and found one room with a "chair facing a TV displaying a live video of another room in the building."
Later, users claiming to live in the neighborhood chimed in to say the place was just a normal day care, swept up in paranoia from digital sleuths. But their defenses aroused suspicion from other users. "I'm just going to point out that every person in this thread saying this place is legit registered their accounts in the last 15 or so hours," posted a user called Gthing.
The conspiracy theories reached a fever pitch so quickly that after only a few days, Reddit admins deleted the original thread from r/saltlakecity. At that point, there were already hundreds of posts and users had begun harassing the business and posting personal information about the owner, which the admins said amounted to doxxing. Banning all discussion of the day care, the admins argued, was necessary to stop future "witch hunts" and to " by an ignorant person who doesn't know what's going on," Dolan said. That said, he conceded the place was "creepy as hell."
And perhaps that's it—our hunger for the strange, bizarre, and fantastical can outweigh the more boring truth. The conspiracy against Fun Time took a peculiar building and turned it into a larger-than-life legend, much like shadows on a wall appear large and scary, and take on an entirely different shape than the objects they come from. "They have these steel spring playground animals," Dolan said, "and on a winter night, or any night really, when it's desolate, those things take on a creepy vibe."
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