✕
Midnight Rat Parade
06/2017
It was a perfectly normal, post pub-crawl night in Pioneer Square. We'd been listening to 90s music all night and ended the night at a club that I think was called Trinity?
Both my roommates at the time were with me, and come midnight we'd all decided maybe it was time to start packing it in, so we left the club in favor of waiting for an Uber back to our apartment, which led us to Occidental Square.
My roommates and I wandered to opposite corners of the park, talking to different people as we left, which was how I found myself standing around on the curb with a near stranger. It wouldn't have been a remarkable night in any way, but suddenly the street in front of us was flooded with rats.
I mean, it was a literal flood of rats. I stood, rather dumbstruck, watching what had to be a thousand of them run down the street and around a corner all at once, none veering from their path. They hardly made any noise, and it was over just as quickly as it occurred. I'd have thought I'd imagined it, except the guy next to me had seen it as well. Neither of my roommates did though, nor did anyone else in the square at the time, which makes the entire experience just a hair more creepy.
I spent the entire night wondering what they'd been running from, my anxiety telling me it had to be either a monster, or a flood, or some other natural disaster, but ... nothing ever made itself apparent, so maybe it was just a run of the mill midnight rat parade?
Submitted by:
Emily H