The Mahoning River has always been Youngstown’s dirty secret, its waters carrying the effluent sins of a century of steelmaking. Even decades after the last big mills went cold, the river flows thick and sullen, its bed coated in a toxic slurry of heavy metals, PCBs, and chemical cocktails whose names have been conveniently forgotten or redacted from official reports. Cleanup efforts have been made, cosmetic bandages applied, but the deep contamination remains. Fishermen still pull creatures from its depths – sometimes unnaturally large catfish, other times things so grotesquely deformed they defy description, quickly thrown back with a shudder. Certain stretches, particularly near the sites of former discharge pipes below the abandoned Campbell Works or the old Sharon Steel plant, are known dead zones, the water smelling acrid and foul, the banks stained with unnatural colors. Locals whisper tales, not just of pollution, but of wrongness, of things moving beneath the oily surface that are too large, too fast, too… unnatural.
Old Man Hemlock knew the river better than most. He lived in a shack downstream from Struthers, supplementing his meager pension by setting trotlines, ignoring the warnings about consuming anything caught in the Mahoning. He’d seen deformed fish, sure, but mostly he just caught bullhead and the occasional carp, enough to fill his belly. Until the morning after the big storm.
The river was running high and fast, churning with debris washed down from upstream. As Hemlock checked his lines near a muddy bank usually submerged, he saw it. Washed partially ashore, tangled in driftwood and plastic sheeting, was something that made him drop his gaff hook. It was roughly piscine, maybe three feet long, but twisted into a biological nightmare. Its skin was a patchwork of sickly grey scales and translucent, membrane-thin patches revealing pulsing, discolored organs beneath. Instead of fins, it had multiple, jointed limbs tipped with sharp, metallic-looking claws, some ending in fleshy suckers. Two large, milky eyes bulged from one side of its flattened head, while the other side was a mass of scar tissue and what looked like embedded shards of rusted metal. A gaping maw lined with needle-like teeth opened and closed feebly, emitting a faint, wheezing click. The stench rolling off it was overpowering – rotten fish mixed with ammonia and hot metal. It was dying, but it was undeniably, horribly real.
Hemlock, despite decades of living rough, felt a primal revulsion. He backed away slowly, then turned and scrambled up the muddy bank, not stopping until he reached his shack, heart pounding. He didn’t report it. Who would believe him? They’d call him drunk, crazy. He just stayed inside, the image burned into his mind, the stench seeming to cling to his clothes.
A few days later, Sarah, the same librarian haunted by the river’s dark reflections (Story 1.8), was walking the river path further upstream, near the B&O Station ruins, trying to clear her head. She saw a small group gathered near the water’s edge – a couple of teenagers poking something with a stick, a woman covering her mouth, looking horrified. Drawn by morbid curiosity, Sarah approached. It was smaller than what Hemlock had seen, maybe the size of a large rat, but equally grotesque. Amphibious-looking, with slick, oily black skin, too many legs ending in webbed claws, and a cluster of small, unblinking eyes on stalks. It was dead, already starting to bloat slightly in the weak afternoon sun. One of the teenagers had taken a blurry photo with his phone. "Thing crawled right outta the water," he said, voice a mix of bravado and fear. "Just kinda flopped around, then died." Before anyone could call animal control or the EPA, a nondescript white van pulled up. Two men in plain work clothes, wearing gloves and masks, efficiently scooped the creature into a heavy-duty plastic bag, tossed it in the back, muttered something about "environmental sampling," and drove off, ignoring questions. The whole incident was over in less than five minutes. The official explanation, when Sarah later inquired with the city, was a "severely deformed salamander," likely caused by known pollutants. The teenager’s photo was dismissed as inconclusive.
But Sarah knew better. This wasn’t just a deformed salamander, just as the thing Hemlock hadn’t reported wasn’t just a big, ugly fish. The river was creating things. The sheer wrongness of the creatures, the way they seemed cobbled together from biological parts and industrial waste, spoke of extreme, unnatural mutation. She dove back into her research, cross-referencing historical industrial discharge records (the ones she could access) with the locations of the sightings. Unsurprisingly, the areas downstream from plants known to have handled complex chemicals, heavy metals, and possibly even undocumented experimental waste showed the highest correlation. Was it a specific chemical cocktail? Or the sheer volume and variety of pollutants interacting in the riverbed sediment, creating a mutagenic soup? Could the creatures be incorporating the pollutants into their very biology, becoming living vessels of toxicity?
The sightings escalated. A boater near Lowellville reported something large and multi-limbed surfacing briefly alongside his boat, leaving an oily residue on the hull. Fishermen further downriver snagged lines on things that fought with unnatural strength before breaking free, leaving behind scraps of leathery, unknown tissue. Then came the attack. A homeless man camping under the South Avenue Bridge woke to find one of the smaller, amphibious horrors trying to crawl into his sleeping bag, its multiple eyes gleaming in the dark. He kicked it away, receiving a vicious scratch from its claws that quickly became infected, swelling grotesquely and oozing a foul-smelling pus. He survived, but his terrified, rambling account was dismissed as delirium tremens.
Sarah felt a growing sense of dread. The river wasn’t just a passive victim of pollution; it felt like it was actively fighting back, using the poisons humanity had fed it as weapons, birthing horrors from its corrupted depths. She had to see one alive, document it properly. Armed with a high-resolution camera and a heavy flashlight, she started spending her evenings near a known discharge point below an abandoned factory, a place where the chemical smell was particularly strong and oily slicks often coated the water.
She didn’t have to wait long. One drizzly evening, she heard a splash and a skittering sound on the concrete embankment near the water line. Keeping her distance, she aimed her camera. It was larger than the salamander-thing, perhaps dog-sized, with a segmented, insectoid body covered in overlapping plates that looked disturbingly like rusted metal fused with chitin. Multiple spindly legs ending in hooks scraped against the concrete as it dragged itself further onto land. Its head was a nightmarish fusion of insect and machine, with complex mandibles clicking rapidly and multifaceted eyes that glowed with a faint, internal chemiluminescence. It moved with an unnerving, jerky speed despite its apparent bulk. It seemed to be sniffing the air, sensing her presence. It turned its horrifying head towards her and emitted a high-pitched chittering sound mixed with the hiss of escaping gas. Then, it lunged.
Sarah scrambled backwards, dropping her flashlight. The creature skittered towards her, surprisingly fast. She fumbled for the heavy wrench she’d brought for protection, swinging it wildly. It struck the creature’s carapace with a dull clang, barely slowing it. It lunged again, mandibles snapping. Sarah dodged, slipping on the wet concrete, falling hard. The creature was upon her, its foul, chemical stench overwhelming. She saw its mandibles open, revealing rows of metallic teeth. Then, a sudden splash from the river. Another creature, larger, more piscine but with the same metallic growths and too many eyes, had launched itself from the water, seizing the insectoid horror in its jaws. The two monstrosities thrashed violently on the embankment before tumbling back into the dark, churning water with a final, echoing splash. Sarah lay there, trembling, bruised, and nauseous, staring at the spot where they disappeared.
She had her proof – terrifying, visceral proof. The river wasn’t just polluted; it was spawning monsters. She tried again to warn people, showing her shaky, terrifying photos, recounting her encounter. She found a few others online who claimed similar sightings, forming a small, frightened collective of witnesses. But official channels remained closed, dismissive. The cover-up, whether due to incompetence, fear of panic, or something more deliberate, held firm. How many were down there? Were they breeding? Getting bigger? Adapting?
Sarah developed a paralyzing fear of the river. She couldn’t even look at it without feeling nauseous, haunted by the clicking mandibles, the dead, multiple eyes. She scrubbed herself raw, terrified of contamination from the creature’s proximity, imagining she could still smell its chemical stench on her skin. Sleep brought nightmares of murky depths and grasping claws. She became obsessed, tracking pollution reports, mapping sightings, trying to predict where the next horror might emerge.
One cold morning, she stood on the Market Street Bridge, looking down not at the reflection, but at the water itself. It looked almost peaceful today, deceptively calm. But she knew. She knew what festered beneath, what horrors the river held, birthed from decades of industrial sin. An oily bubble rose slowly from the depths near the bridge piling and popped on the surface, releasing a faint, almost inaudible sigh that smelled faintly of ammonia and rust. The river kept its secrets, but sometimes, it couldn’t help but cough them up.