Dark Midwest: Issue 4

During a single weekend in June 1980, hundreds of suspicious phone calls were received throughout Ferry, Wisconsin.

A caller claiming to be from “The State Drug and Chemical Enforcement Agency” convinced at least a dozen answerers to commit bizarre actions such as accosting a pharmacist, driving hundreds of miles to nonexistent offices, and even ingesting their elderly parents’ or young children’s medication.

The caller was never found, and no prime suspect was ever identified. 

When a 1980 minor league western Illinois baseball game was interrupted by a small aircraft emergency landing, the pilot landed the plane, ran from the scene, and was never found.

Within the cabin, locals reportedly discovered a “glass-like living body—bound, unspeaking.” Federal authorities quickly confiscated the plane and the cargo. The locals have never accepted any of the official explanations for the episode. 

In 1999, a group of teenage boys fishing on the Granite River in eastern Missouri pulled a dead animal fragment from the water. It was reportedly a long reptilian leg and hip sheathed in heavy mats of moss. They kept it near their campsite, but it was allegedly dragged off in the middle of the night by something “mossy and large as a school bus” that emitted a “mournful cry” as it claimed the animal part. 

“The Churn” is a mysterious barn in a remote patch of Orion County in southern Illinois.

For decades, pilgrims have traveled on foot to visit this dilapidated barn and spend a night beneath its rafters. Pilgrims make “donations” said to be as high as hundreds of thousands of dollars for the privilege. The barn is owned by a single family associated with the Churning Waters religious organization. No reason for the pilgrimage has ever been publicly stated.

In 2002, amateur ghost hunters surreptitiously investigated the barn and discovered a large “pterosaur-like” skeleton embedded in a tile floor in a secret basement. The group claims to have taken photographic and electronic evidence of the scene.

However, a lightning storm struck as they attempted to leave and their vehicle—they claim—was struck by lightning several times. All of their records were erased. The barn is now guarded. 

According to a number of Midwest hydrologists, an underground lake in Kentucky seems to be increasing in size by “attracting” other subterranean quantities of water toward it.

The unusual and erratic movements have been tracked for decades in a specific and “spooky” phenomenon not recorded elsewhere by the US Geological Survey. Detection of this movement was first traced to a series of farm failures in the 1920s.

Each of the farms had been associated with a campaign of terror and murder against an unnamed “Utopian” community in rural Kentucky that was said to practice a new, dangerous, and little-understood form of water science.  

The patter of children’s feet running up and down the halls, the violent banging of pots and pans inside kitchen cabinets, and the sound of a vicious argument between two distinct adult men rising from the basement are only some of the phenomena ascribed to “the morning ghosts” of Mary’s Bed and Breakfast in Wilfred, IN.

According to guests, the morning ghosts are intensely active during a brief window that stops abruptly at 7:01 AM as though silenced by some other force. 

The Evers-Keeper Family Feud of Southern Indiana has directly or indirectly claimed more than 75 lives since the blood feud erupted in 1929. The two large families were initially friendly.

That April, Bee Evers brought onion soup to new mother Marge Keeper. The pot later spilled, burning Marge’s baby’s chest. Marge’s brothers, rather than helping the baby, shot all of the Evers’ animals in retaliation. Now, nearly a century later, the feud still erupts in occasional violence. 

On Nov 7, 2006, two strangers experienced an inexplicable mutual medical emergency.

While walking separate directions through Chicago's Union Station, Jon Waller (39 of Green Bay, WI) and Raj Carver (22 of Lundy, SD) collided and found their forearms instantly linked through the radius and ulna.

They expressed no pain, only panic and confusion. The men never had contact before or after surgical detachment. No medical explanation for the incident has ever been accepted. 

 In 1990, a longevity researcher investigated claims the Perry family in remote Wanner, MI, cared for their 200-year-old patriarch Atlas.

Atlas, it was said, stayed in the barn and enjoyed the “worship” of his family. Allegedly, the researcher found only a human skeleton, dressed in skins, hanging in a cellar, manipulated by marionette wires strung from weather vanes.

As the wind blew, the skeleton seemed to sway, reach and tremble. The Perrys were never found and the skeleton never IDed. 

Meredith Harder lived alone and quietly in a small house beside the dog grooming salon she owned in Pax, Il, for the entirety of her adult life. When she died in 1990, police uncovered that she had secretly made a small illicit fortune for herself by allowing cartels to store kidnapping victims in cages beneath her home indefinitely. There is no evidence she ever chose to spend any money she earned from her services. 

In the mid-1990s, a dark urban legend stirred up criminal activity among youths throughout the Chicagoland suburbs. “The River Man’s Handbook” was a supposed list of bizarre actions that, when executed in a certain sequence, could transport kids into a fantasy world ruled by “the River Man.”

Crimes ascribed to the handbook included arson, property destruction, theft, and—most notably—dangerous stunts such as leaping from bridges onto passing boats on industrial waterways. 

“The Cane Man” is an urban legend that seems to rise and fall in prominence in Northwest Indiana in roughly 50-year cycles.

Locals—usually kids—speak of their sightings of a tall, thin, shadowy figure walking among the cane of the Cowles Bog trail at night shouting to children for help. Most kids intuit that the sinister figure is lying.

Local historians have linked at least one lost or missing child in the area with every supposed return of the Cane Man. 

“The Monster Summer” of 1899 was a notorious (and noxious) affair in Northwest Indiana. Over the course of the season, an untold number of “animal fragments” washed ashore on the beaches of the Indiana Dunes.

At first, it was only partial animal skeletons but, over weeks, the surge of fatty, rotten, and never identified chunks collected faster than town cleanup crews could keep up. Theories abounded but the species or cause of the phenomenon were never identified. 

“The Tall Lodger” legend was born in 1850 when a mystery visitor at a guesthouse in Bartles, IL, seemingly sacrificed his life to save two children from a room as the house burned down in the middle of the night.

Though the true identity of the tall lodger has never been determined, some believe he was prison escapee John Gryner, who set the blaze himself to help fake his death, bolster his reputation, and put a stop to his pursuers. 

“The Rover Cell” was a mobile torture chamber hidden within a disguised intermodal shipping container hauled by truck up and down I-57 in the 2010s. Its use by the Sandoval Cartel was discovered by US Marshals during interviews with alleged sicarios arrested in a northwest Indiana riverboat casino, and later confirmed when the Cell itself was discovered in Cicero, Il. 

Simon Trusker’s corporate attorney career spanned the 1950s through 70s in Southern Illinois. He also, secretly, may have been “The Gamesman of Southern Illinois.”

After his disappearance in 1979, a storage unit linked to Trusker was opened. The contents within painted a disturbing “fantasy” life as a captor and hunter of men and women.

If his writings are true, he captured, released, and hunted at least 12 individuals in remote midwestern federal land across the decades. 

The mysterious and little-known mileslong subterranean stretch of Route 66 known as "The Route" is allegedly home to multiple transient and "off-grid" communities of cavedwellers.

A length of the "The Route" was extensively searched by US Marshals in 1998 during their pursuit of the alleged domestic terrorist known as "The Highway Bomber".

That search was ended when Marshals encountered heavy and violent resistance from "dozens of unknown assailaints" who used guerrilla tactics and then receded into unexplored depths of the natural and seminatural caves.

Revolution City is the fifth largest city in Illinois and has benefitted from generations of stable and skillful political leadership. When former Mayor LQ Powers died in 2002, his son Michael discovered an unpublished novel in his father's belongings.

The novel tells the story of an undercover "illegal" Russian spy living within midwestern America for years, eventually becoming a mayor of Revolution City.

His son became so convinced that the story was real and his father had actually been such an illegal that he embarked on an international "factfinding" trip, following the clues and information within the novel. Michael was last known to travel from Mexico City to Latvia where he disappeared somewhere between his hotel and the local train station. He has neither been seen nor heard from since.

$15.5 million. That seems to be the amount of money it took to convince famous Chicago-based bounty hunter Wade Grundler to abandon his life, family and career and became a paid agent of the Sinaloa Cartel in 2020.

It is uncomfirmed but rumored that Grundler now operates out of a mansion hidden in the Sierra Verde mountains. He now allegedly hunts and captures US and Mexican anti-cartel agents and political figures.

Dissappearances attributed to Grundler have occurred in St. Louis, Detroit, Washington DC, Mexico City, Paris and Munich.

In 1770, the French adventurer Jean-Luc Allard established a successful trading post at the mouth of the Orion River. This was the first permamnent settlement in what would become Revolution City, Illinois. Allard's lifetime of exploits were largely forgotten until the Revolution City Historical Society investigated and reassesed his legacy in the mid-20th century.

It was then learned that Allard was also a prodigious seeker and collector of dinosaur bones which he sold to area wanderers and occult troupes.

Small troves of dinosaur bones and other fossils believed stolen from Allard's orginal collection regularly surface at underground auctions throughout the midwest to this day.