There"s a particular wall beneath the Spring Common Bridge overpass in Youngstown, a grimy, perpetually shadowed expanse of concrete that serves as an unofficial, ever-changing canvas for the city"s graffiti writers. It"s a familiar urban palimpsest: tags appear overnight, bold and defiant, only to be crossed out by rivals, then covered entirely by larger, more elaborate pieces, which in turn eventually succumb to the relentless grey or beige paint applied by city maintenance crews or well-meaning volunteer groups. It"s the usual, predictable cycle of ephemeral street art and municipal erasure. Except for one specific spot.
In that spot, tucked deeper into the bridge"s oppressive shadow, perpetually damp and smelling faintly of river water and exhaust fumes, a single word kept reappearing: "BELOW." It wasn"t elaborate street art – just crude, blocky, capital letters rendered in what looked like faded, ancient black spray paint. It wasn"t artistic, it wasn"t clever, it wasn"t even particularly large or prominently placed. But it was persistent. Incredibly, impossibly, unnervingly persistent.
Every single time it was painted over – whether with standard municipal grey, a hopeful beige, or even incorporated into a cheerful, community-painted mural attempt featuring local landmarks – the word "BELOW" would reappear within days, sometimes mere hours. It didn"t look like someone had meticulously repainted it in the dead of night. Instead, it looked as if the covering layer of paint had simply dissolved, blistered away, or become inexplicably transparent in that specific area, revealing the word exactly as it had been before, stark and unchanging. The fresh paint surrounding the word would remain untouched, pristine, but the word itself, the stain, would be back, mocking the attempts to erase it.
Gary knew that wall, and that specific word, intimately. He was a dedicated, perhaps slightly obsessive, member of a local volunteer group called "Youngstown Clean Sweep," a small band of civic-minded residents who spent their weekends trying to combat urban blight, picking up litter, and painting over graffiti in neglected public spaces. He"d personally applied paint over that stubborn word, "BELOW," at least half a dozen times over the past year. At first, he"d assumed it was just the work of an unusually dedicated and stealthy tagger, someone with an uncanny sense of timing and a bizarre fixation on that single word, perhaps possessing a stencil or a knack for perfectly matching the old, faded style. But after the third or fourth time, witnessing the word reappear seemingly through a still-tacky layer of thick grey primer he"d applied just that morning, his initial annoyance turned to bewilderment, then to a creeping, undeniable unease.
He tried everything he could think of. Multiple thick coats of heavy-duty exterior paint. Industrial-grade primer designed to block stains and graffiti. He even spent one frustrating Saturday afternoon meticulously scraping the spot down to the bare, rough concrete with a heavy wire brush attachment on his drill, ensuring no trace of the old paint remained, before applying multiple layers of sealant and then fresh paint. Nothing worked. Within forty-eight hours, the word "BELOW" had always returned, looking exactly as it had before – ancient, faded, seemingly etched into the very soul of the concrete.
He started documenting it methodically, taking detailed photos with his phone before and after each paint-over attempt, noting the dates, times, and types of paint used. He became fixated. He started staking out the underpass during his free time, hiding in his parked car across the street for hours, sometimes late at night, hoping to catch the phantom tagger in the act. He saw occasional teenagers pass through, sometimes homeless individuals seeking shelter, but observed no one approach that specific section of the wall with spray paint or any other tools. Yet, the next morning, inevitably, the word would be back.
He began examining the graffiti itself more closely, running his fingers over the rough letters. The paint, if it even was paint, seemed incredibly old, faded, almost integrated into the texture of the concrete itself, not sitting on the surface like typical spray paint. When he had scraped it away, he recalled noticing that the concrete underneath seemed slightly discolored, darker, in the precise shape of the letters. It wasn"t just paint on the wall; it felt like it was somehow in the wall, a part of its very substance.
Frustrated, baffled, and increasingly obsessed by the sheer impossibility of it, Gary started researching the history of the Spring Common Bridge, the underpass, and the specific area along the Mahoning River nearby. He spent hours scrolling through digitized local newspaper archives, poring over old city planning maps, and reading local history blogs. He found the expected grim tapestry of a Rust Belt city"s past: accounts of devastating floods inundating the low-lying areas near the river, reports of numerous industrial accidents on the bridge or at nearby factories, grim discoveries of bodies recovered from the murky river waters over the decades, tales of shantytowns that once existed beneath the bridge during the Great Depression. He found vague mentions of strange symbols or markings appearing in the same underpass area during the Depression era, attributed by nervous authorities at the time to hobos, radical groups, or even nascent cult activities. Nothing he found specifically mentioned the persistent word "BELOW," but the location itself seemed to possess a long, dark history, a tendency to attract strangeness, misfortune, and decay.
His rational explanations exhausted, Gary started considering wilder, more unsettling theories. Was it some kind of psychic imprint, a form of place memory where an intense emotion, a traumatic event, or a repeated utterance connected to the word "BELOW" had left a permanent, non-physical scar on the location, forever bleeding through attempts to cover it? Was it a curse, deliberately placed on the spot for reasons lost to time? Was the word somehow bleeding through from another time, another layer of reality, briefly intersecting with our own at this specific, perhaps weakened, point? He even half-joked to his increasingly concerned wife about the graffiti itself being sentient, a stubborn, malevolent idea refusing to be erased, feeding on the frustration of those who tried to silence it.
The word began to weigh heavily on him, infiltrating his thoughts. He"d see it in his mind"s eye when he closed his eyes at night. He started noticing the word "below" cropping up with unnerving frequency in conversations, in news headlines, on signs – apophenia, perhaps, but it felt significant, targeted. He developed a constant, low-level dread associated specifically with the underpass, a visceral feeling of being watched, not from the sides or above, but from beneath. He started actively avoiding the area, taking longer routes to get where he needed to go, even though his obsessive curiosity demanded he check the wall constantly, documenting its stubborn persistence.
He discovered he wasn"t the only one affected by the wall"s peculiar behavior. Other Clean Sweep volunteers began quietly refusing to paint that specific spot anymore, making excuses or simply leaving it untouched during cleanup events. He overheard locals in a nearby coffee shop muttering about the "cursed word" under the bridge, sharing stories of bad luck befalling those who tried to deface it further or even touch it. Children in the neighborhood apparently dared each other to run up and touch the letters, whispering that it felt cold or made their fingers tingle. The persistent, inexplicable word had become more than just graffiti; it was a low-grade psychological irritant for the community, a small but undeniable tear in the fabric of everyday normality, a constant, nagging reminder of something unknown and potentially malevolent.
One grey, overcast Saturday morning, driven by a desperate, almost frantic need for answers, for some kind of resolution to his consuming obsession, Gary decided on a more drastic, perhaps foolish, approach. He loaded a heavy sledgehammer and a sharp cold chisel into the trunk of his car and drove to the underpass. If painting wouldn"t work, if scraping failed, maybe physical removal of the affected concrete itself would finally silence the word.
He started chiseling away at the concrete surface where the letters appeared, the sharp clang of metal on stone echoing unnervingly in the enclosed space. The concrete was surprisingly hard, dense, resistant, much tougher than the surrounding areas seemed to be. As chips of grey concrete flew, he noticed with growing unease that the dark discoloration forming the letters went deeper than just the surface layer. It wasn"t a surface stain; it seemed to permeate the material.
As he worked, swinging the sledgehammer with more force, the atmosphere under the bridge grew heavy, palpably oppressive. The air felt colder, damper, clinging to his skin. He heard strange echoes that seemed disconnected from the traffic noise overhead – the distinct sound of dripping water that wasn"t there, a low groan like stressed metal under immense pressure, a faint, sibilant whispering just beneath the threshold of hearing, seeming to come from the wall itself, or from below his feet. He felt a sudden surge of irrational, primal fear, a voice in the back of his head screaming at him to stop, to leave it alone, that he was disturbing something that should not be disturbed.
He ignored it, fueled by frustration and a desperate need to conquer the inexplicable. He swung the sledgehammer harder, connecting squarely with the chiseled area. A larger chunk of concrete, perhaps six inches across, broke away with a crack. Beneath it, embedded within the wall itself where solid concrete and rebar should have been, was something else entirely. Something dark, almost black, fibrous and organic-looking, vaguely shaped into the form of the letters. It looked disturbingly like heavily compacted black mold, or perhaps the dense, tangled root structures of some unknown subterranean plant, unnaturally hardened. And from the broken section, a foul, gag-inducing, earthy smell emanated – the smell of deep, stagnant decay, of things left too long in the dark and damp, of the grave.
Suddenly, Gary felt overwhelmingly dizzy, nauseous, his vision blurring at the edges. The whispering intensified, seeming to coalesce inside his own head into a single, insistent word, repeated over and over, cold and hollow: "BELOW… BELOW… BELOW… BELOW…" He stumbled back, dropping the heavy sledgehammer with a clang. The exposed dark, fibrous material embedded in the wall seemed to pulse faintly, obscenely, in the dim, grey light filtering under the bridge.
He realized then, with a certainty that chilled him to the bone, that destroying the wall wasn"t the answer. The word wasn"t just on the wall or in the wall; it was the wall, or at least something integral to its structure, something ancient and perhaps alive in its own horrifying way. Trying to remove it might not erase the message, but instead release whatever it was holding back, whatever was festering and waiting in the darkness "below."
Shaken to his core, Gary hastily gathered his tools, his hands trembling, the foul smell clinging to his clothes and nostrils. He left the underpass quickly, not looking back at the scar he"d made in the wall. He never tried to paint over or damage the word again. He quietly quit the Youngstown Clean Sweep group shortly after, offering vague excuses about lack of time.
He learned to live with it, in a way, or at least to actively ignore it. The word "BELOW" became just another piece of Youngstown"s weird, unsettling background radiation, filed away in the back of his mind. A persistent, inexplicable reminder that some stains don"t come out, some messages refuse to be silenced, and some things lurking beneath the surface of the mundane world are better left undisturbed.
Years later, Gary, now older, greyer, found himself driving through that part of town again, something he usually avoided. He slowed as he approached the Spring Common Bridge underpass, compelled by a morbid curiosity he couldn"t entirely suppress. He glanced towards the familiar wall. The word was still there, of course. Faded, ancient-looking, but starkly clear against the grimy concrete, untouched by the layers of fresh, colorful graffiti surrounding it. It looked permanent, inevitable. As he looked, his eyes playing tricks in the dim light, he thought he saw, just for a fleeting second, the concrete immediately around the letters darken, as if moisture was slowly seeping through from behind the wall, or perhaps, seeping up from within the concrete itself. He shivered despite the warmth of his car heater, pressed down on the accelerator, and drove on, trying very hard not to think about what, exactly, might lie below.