When I was kid, I was irrationally terrified of sinkholes. Well, the fear wasn’t irrational — Who wouldn’t afraid of a giant hole under the ground, ready to collapse any moment and bring everything on top of it down? — So maybe the better description would be “disproportionately terrified.” Sinkholes are, after all, far less common than car accidents, earthquakes, thunderstorms… but in the landscape of my imagination they were around every corner waiting to suck in unsuspecting suburbs, cars, schools, and shopping malls.

In my memory, there was an elementary school somewhere in the country that had a sinkhole open in its athletic field, below several temporary classroom trailers and pull them down into a subterranean cavern below. I remember helicopter shots on the news of looking down to see one or two of these trailers, stranded and impossible to reach… but upon doing some Googling and research I can’t seem to find anything of the kind.

In fact, as I research it seems that the average sinkhole is actually nothing like the cavernous horror in my header image here; rather, most of them seem to be closer to “pits” that pose more logistical annoyance than deadly threat. Is it possible, then, that my childhood fear is based on something else? Where did I get this image that I was so certain existed in my memory? From a book? Or a TV show? At this point, with so much time passed, it might be impossible to ever know for sure.

Still, even if they’re not the nightmare horror I thought they were, I still wouldn’t want to be on top of one of these when it collapsed: