The Mystery of Fun Time Kidz Kare: What is this Place Really?

A neon green building with purple doors shouldn’t feel terrifying, but for years Salt Lake City drivers couldn’t shake the same question: why does a “working daycare” look abandoned, silent, and sealed off from the world? Fun Time Kidz Kare at 1248 South 300 East became a piece of modern Utah folklore because locals claimed they never saw a single child walk through its doors. That one observation was enough to turn a commute time curiosity into a viral internet mystery.

We follow the moment the story catches fire on Reddit in 2015, then spreads into a full scale online investigation: a suspiciously slapped together daycare website, a near identical cloned site in another state, phone calls that end in hang ups, and eerie anecdotes like a mail carrier insisting the kids are always “napping.” As the crowd sourced sleuthing ramps up, so do the theories, from cartel front to CIA safehouse to trafficking ring. Even mundane details get weaponized, including licensing citations and a bizarre discovery in import records showing 8,818 pounds of plastic jewelry shipped to the daycare, a clue the internet tries to bend into something far darker.

Then the story collides with real life. Threads get deleted for witch hunting, a “Storm Fun Time Kidz Kare” raid event gains traction, police issue warnings, and the people connected to the property report repeated harassment and break in attempts. Finally, officials and local reporting offer a grounded explanation that flips the scariest details on their head, including why the windows might be covered and why only a few children are ever seen.

If you’re into true crime adjacent mysteries, internet culture, urban legends, and Salt Lake City history, this deep dive will change how you think about “creepy places” and the stories we build around them. Subscribe for more, share this with a friend who loves local lore, and leave a review with your theory: what detail convinced you most along the way?

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Transcript

The Green Building That Haunts

Reddit Ignites A Local Mystery

Break In Stories And Threats

Records Reveal Real Violations

Wild Theories And Shipping Manifests

SPEAKER_00 0:53

Welcome back to another deep dive episode of the Small Lake City Podcast, where we cover some of the stories, legends, and things that make Salt Lake City unique. Most of the time on this podcast, we're talking with the people shaping the city today. But every once in a while, we like to take a step back and explore the strange history, the rumors, and the local lore that's been floating around Salt Lake for years. And today's episode is about one of the most unusual ones. Every city has that one house or business that just doesn't fit. You drive past it on your commute, you stare at it at a red light, and you get that sinking feeling in your gut that something isn't right. Today we are talking about a place that looks like a child's drawing brought to life. It's located at 1248 South, 300 East in Salt Lake City. It's called Fun Time Kids Care. And on the surface, it's just a colorful local daycare. But if you grew up here, or if you spent any amount of time on the local internet forums, you know the name. For decades, locals have driven past this day glow green building with its purple doors and yellow window edges. And for decades, people have noticed one terrifying consistent detail. Nobody has ever seen a child go in or out. The windows were always boarded up or completely covered from the inside with paper or old children's drawings. The playground in the back looked dilapidated, covered by a mysterious camo tarp, and was choked with noxious weeds. Legally, it was an operational childcare center and it passed health inspections. But the total lack of life, the silence, and the bizarrely aggressive reactions from those connected to it spawned one of the most intense internet mysteries of the 2010s. Was it a front for a drug cartel, a CIA black site, or an organ harvesting operation? Settle in, turn the lights down, and let's dive into the legend of fun time kids care. To understand how this local oddity became a global internet sensation, we have to go back to January 2015. A Reddit user going by the name DiscoFather922 posted a picture of the building on the Salt Lake City subreddit. They pointed out a simple unsettling observation. They had lived across the street from this daycare for five years, and in all that time, they had never seen a single child on the property. Initially, the poster assumed the building was just abandoned, but almost instantly the comments came flooding in. Neighbors confirmed the building was fully functioning, or at least people were maintaining the outside. And yet everyone agreed on one thing: they had never seen any children either. One neighbor even commented that her kids referred to it simply as the scary house. Things got weirder when people started digging into the daycare's online footprint. At the time, Funtime Kids Care had a website, but users who visited it said it looked incredibly cheap, filled with bizarre stock photos of children and random quotes that didn't match the images. Stranger still, Sleuths found another daycare website in Virginia that was a near-exact one-to-one clone of the Funtime website right down to the text. Shortly after, Reddit found the website, it was completely wiped from the internet, returning only a blank page. When curious locals actually got someone to answer the phone, the staff would often aggressively hang up or tell the callers that they could only enroll through workforce services for low-income families. But when users contacted the state services to verify this, the representatives on the line had no idea what the daycare was talking about. Out of all the comments in the original thread, two stood out. A former letter carrier for that neighborhood stated that it was an active daycare, but with a terrifying caveat. He said that no matter what time of day he delivered the mail, morning or late afternoon, the children inside were always taking a nap. The second comment was far more menacing. A user named Deathship left a single ominous warning on the thread, advising everyone to stop looking into the place. When other users dug into Deathship's post history, this user claimed to be a linguist for the Air Force who spoke eight languages, who had been stationed at Area 51, and had been questionably discharged. After issuing that threat, Deathship vanished. By now the internet was completely hooked. What started as a local Salt Lake Curiosity was exploding across Reddit and bleeding into 4chan and above top secret. People were no longer just posting, they were investigating. One user claimed that a pizza delivery guy went to the building, knocked for over five minutes with no answer, and eventually just left the pizza at the door. But as he was leaving, he watched as an elderly Mexican lady opened the door to let two kids with backpacks inside. Another account, perhaps the most chilling, came from a user who said their friend, a local teenager, had broken into the facility in the middle of the night. When they jimmied the door and sneaked inside, they didn't find a colorful wonderland of toys. They found an empty main room with a single chair facing a television, displaying a live, closed circuit feed of the rest of the building. To find answers, Sleuth started looking at public records. State records showed that a woman named Ava Solano had registered Funtime Kids Care Inc. back in 2005. In 2012, a man named Jose Solano registered the business as Funtime Childcare LLC, but the business license was frequently left to expire and go delinquent. When the new ownership took over, the citations began rolling in. In 2007, an inspector arrived and found a staff member identified in reports as Marjean outside aggressively yelling at a boy on the swing set. Inspectors reported that after dragging the children inside, Marjean continued screaming at them to sit on the rug. In other instances, a group of 12 school-age children was left completely unattended while the only teacher was in the kitchen. But the most alarming citation was a violation regarding disciplinary measures. The state cited the daycare for restraining a child's movement by binding, tying, or otherwise restricting them. The facility was cited again and again for failing to submit immunization reports, and the owner, Jose Solano, was repeatedly cited for lacking documentation of basic orientation or childcare training. In 2018, they were even slapped with a moderate citation because inspectors found a highly dangerous choking hazard accessible to the toddlers: a single small plastic dinosaur. Because the daycare seemed to have no clients, boarded up windows, and an incredibly secretive staff, theories began to run wild. The most prominent and darkest theories accused the daycare of being a CIA safehouse or a front for a child's sex trafficking ring. Proponents of the trafficking theory pointed back to the mailman's claim that the kids were always asleep. They chillingly speculated that the children were being heavily drugged to keep them quiet, which would explain both the constant napping and the blacked-out windows. And then, internet detectives found the shipping manifests. Deep in import records, investigators discovered that an astoundingly 8,818 pounds of plastic jewelry had been shipped from China to the daycare. But it wasn't just shipped to Fun Time Kids Care. The exact shipment was sent to a bizarre network of seemingly unrelated businesses across multiple states, all of which had the word fun in their names like Fun Crest Bait Shop and Funland Jumpers. Conspiracy theorists calculated the weight and suggested that crates were perfectly matched to the exact weight of bulk 7.62mm ammunition. Whether it was drugs, guns, or something worse, parts of the internet decided that fun time kids care was the epicenter of a massive criminal conspiracy. Locals began driving by, taking photos of the building at night, and trying to peek through the blocked windows. The harassment towards the owners got so intense that the Reddit administrators stepped in. They entirely nuked the original Salt Lake City thread and then actively banned and deleted any future discussions about fun time kids care across the platform, citing severe witch hunting rules. But erasing it from Reddit only made the conspiracy theorists more rabid. To them, the deletion was more of absolute proof of a high-level government cover-up. By the time 2019 rolled around, the legend of the green building had firmly cemented itself in the modern folklore. Riding the wave of the viral Storm Area 51 phenomenon, a Facebook event was created titled Storm Funtime Kids Care. They can't stop us all. Over 2,000 users joined the group, pledging to physically raid the daycare on April 20th. It got so out of hand that the Unified Police Department of Greater Salt Lake actually had to step in and issue a public warning, ordering people not to create these types of groups. For the owner, Jose Solano, the joke had gone way too far. Solano reported that homeless individuals and internet trolls were consistently trying to break into his property, forcing him to install heavy deadbolts and exterior security cameras just to keep the conspiracy theorists at bay. With the threat of physical raid looming, local officials finally had to go on the record to address the rumors. Simon Bolivar, a supervisor for child care licensing at Utah Department of Health, publicly stated that despite its incredibly creepy appearance, Funtime Kids Care was just a functioning daycare. Bolivar confirmed that it had passed a comprehensive inspection with absolutely no public findings. When asked about the absolute lack of children, Bolivar gave a surprisingly honest, slightly sad answer. He stated that the times they had been there, there have only been a few kids, perhaps two. But they do have children in care and they are in business. So after all of the threats from Area 51 linguists, the 8,000 pounds of Chinese plastic jewelry, the boarded up windows, and the terrifying break-in stories, what is the actual truth about fun time kids care? As it turns out, the reality is far more human and far sadder than any cartel, stash house, or CIA black site. According to local writer Brian Young, the facility was a totally normal, well-loved daycare back in the 60s and 70s. But as the neighborhood changed and the original owners moved on, the business began to fail. The man who took over the property didn't run a criminal enterprise. The most credible explanation is that he had purchased the failing daycare for one very specific reason: his elderly mother. The completely unprofitable, rundown facility was kept open at a massive financial loss, simply to give an aging mother a sense of purpose. Having the daycare gave her a place to go, a building to maintain, and something to occupy her time. This explains why there were almost never any kids. The business wasn't actually trying to attract a massive clientele. It explains the elderly Mexican woman seen letting the two random kids inside. And it explains why the staff were so incredibly hostile to internet sleuths. They were an elderly family just trying to exist, suddenly besieged by thousands of people accusing them of running a horrific trafficking ring. But what about the boarded up windows? This is where the story takes its ultimate twist. The internet thought the covered windows were a sinister tool used to hide abused children. But according to a local resident whose father attended the daycare, the facility often served impoverished children and acted as a safe haven. The daycare intentionally protected kids who had dangerous family members or parents who were legally not allowed to contact them. The windows were semi-covered with curtains and old drawings to protect the identities and locations of these at-risk children from dangerous relatives passing by outside. Those creepy window coverings weren't a sign of abuse. They were a shield to keep vulnerable children safe. As for the citations, negligence from owners who were running a struggling business as a hobby, the shipments of plastic jewelry, likely a bizarre administrative mix-up or a completely unrelated drop shipping side hustle that internet sleuths forcefully tied to the daycare. Funtime kids care is the ultimate cautionary tale of the modern internet. As folklore professional Lynn McNeil pointed out, when a community sees something visually jarring, our brains demand an explanation. And when there isn't an immediate logical answer, the internet will rush in to fill that void with the darkest, most terrifying conspiracies imaginable. A family trying to protect vulnerable kids and give an elderly woman a reason to wake up in the morning was twisted into an international crime syndicate. Next time you drive past that weird, rundown building in your neighborhood, maybe think twice before you post it online. The truth hiding inside might not be a monster, it might just be someone's mother. If you enjoyed this episode of Small Lake City, make sure to hit that like button, subscribe, and drop your thoughts in the comments below. Have you ever driven past Funtime Kids Care? Let me know. Until next time, keep your eyes open, but remember, not every mystery is a nightmare. Stay safe, Small Lake City.