Dark Midwest Vol I

The Midwest High Intensity Drug Trafficking Area is the most critical region in the US for narcotics and human traffickers.

Since at least 2005, an organized group of commercial truckers modeling themselves after Outlaw Motorcycle Gangs have aggressively surveilled and in some known cases violently confronted traffickers along these routes.

Tragedy struck the 1930 Winfield County Iowa Fair when, after destructive overnight storms, the fair was hastily reassembled. Faulty work electrified a wet artificial grass mat courtyard instantly killing 19 fair goers.

The electrical engineer allegedly responsible fled the scene before he could be apprehended.19 days later, he was found dead in a Chicago hotel room — killed in a bizarre electrical incident of unclear cause.

In May of 1901, Doctor P.W. Kinderhook of Stalwart, Il, was asked to treat a snakebite victim at a farmhouse fifteen miles out of town.

According to Kinderhook’s notes, the victim was a 40-year-old male who had been bitten on the bridge of his nose by a snake of unknown species coiled behind a book on a shelf. The victim “must have lain in incredible agony for hours. When I arrived he was sprawled on the floor in his study. His skull had quite liquified.”

In 1850, a pharmacist in Missouri caused an uproar when he sold a cure-all he claimed to have developed from the glands of a newly discovered species of fish in a local underground lake.

After many users fell ill and two died, an angry mob stormed his home only to discover he had hastily left town, abandoning his home laboratory and its contents: a mysterious 4-foot-tall gelatinous block of fat, dozens of hanging smoked tentacles of unidentified origin, and sacks of a noxious metallic powder.

In 1995, professional wrestler JP O’Laughlin made a deathbed confession that he and a number of other wrestlers in his promotion had functioned as actual hitmen throughout the Midwest wrestling territories in the 80s.

The “Armistice Hum” is a strange persistent low-frequency sonic phenomenon long known to affect the Armistice County area of Southern Illinois.

In May 1982, two 15-year-old boys became lost in the local cave system. When both emerged 3 days later, they claimed the unusually loud Armistice Hum guided them out. This was also the day local authorities received the highest number of complaints and inquiries about the rising volume of the hum. It since returned to (and remained at) its typical volume.

In 1976, Fire Chief Jonathon Atherton of Duglow, Indiana, successfully and single-handedly stormed the farmhouse property belonging to “The Churning Water” commune and freed three teen girls — including his own niece — from what police later described as a cult compound.

In the aftermath, several senior Churning Water leaders fled to South America.

Years later, Atherton, at the age of 75, followed them to close his “unfinished business.” It is not known what happened to either party.

In 1999, a small town in eastern Kentucky was briefly terrorized by a “de-patched” outlaw motorcycle gang member. When he was found dead in his trailer of multiple hammer blows to the face, suspicion immediately fell on a local fixture in the community: the 65-year-old iron artist known as “The Hammer Woman.”

Though there seemed to be overwhelming circumstantial evidence and she never denied the killing, local authorities declined to investigate her further. She still lives there quietly.

A series of banks were robbed throughout Southern Illinois in the summer of 2011. An exhaustive, multiyear investigation yielded few clues and no suspects.

In 2019, an anonymous tip led to the investigation of a Carbondale, Il, morgue and the discovery of a capital flight system in which cash was hidden in cadavers and channeled through the human body trade pipeline. Ultimately, 12 people were arrested including two city morticians and a medical examiner.

Between 1973 and 1990, six unrelated young men vanished from Sparrow County, Kentucky. No significant clue was ever found.

In 1995, a never-finished housing development in the local unincorporated highlands was demolished. Each of the six missing bodies were found in chimneys — the most likely cause of death was “positional asphyxia.”Why and how the men came to be in those chimneys has never been determined.

In the 1930s and 40s, a secret unnamed men’s drinking club operated throughout Kansas City and neighboring towns. Based on the Mensur societies of Germany, men would drink beer, practice swordplay and duel.

The secret society fell into conflict with the local mafia and lost many of its leaders in a wave of murders.

Defeated, the club disbanded, though for years afterward the occasional midwestern mafioso was found dead of a sword wound, an empty beer stein beside him.

A 12 ft tall obelisk of unknown purpose was discovered in the Orion National Woods near Cairo, Illinois, in 1985. Experts believe the object was placed there nearly 1,000 years ago.

The obelisk is inscribed with multiple sets of unknown glyphs. The sets of glyphs are believed to be written hundreds of years apart. The most recent set was inscribed within the last decade.

In 1990, a 2-year-old child was plucked from the stands at a high school football game in central Wisconsin by a large owl, carried a distance and dropped in a nearby pond.

That child’s father had also been inexplicably attacked several times — and partially blinded — by owls in his own youth.

In 2006, city inspectors in Link, South Dakota, discovered a locked room in a derelict public works basement.

Inside, they found six dressed human-sized figures made of cornhusk, debris and animal parts positioned around a table as if discussing the news of the day.

The story of the Young Fighter is a cherished local legend in Hatters, Iowa. Allegedly, in the early 1920s a debt-ridden young man was forced into an underground boxing match and left for dead beneath the Quarry Road Bridge.

On misty nights, locals claim to hear his pained groans sweeping up from below. It’s customary to leave a dollar on the bridge for the dead fighter’s debts.

Henry Riggins, a lifelong southern Illinois coal miner, died in 1980 at age 85. His eldest daughter discovered a cache of his secret artwork in his basement: paintings and drawings detailing a complex subterranean pantheon of entities and fantastic creatures.

Upon examination, experts concluded the work was a collaboration between two artists and was completed over decades. The other artist has never been identified.

On Saturday, May 7, 1924, dozens of witnesses claimed a 12-foot tall “shadow man” inexplicably walked through the town square of Orion, Il.

In 1955, the small remote town of Otter, Indiana was abandoned suddenly and for reasons unknown. Many of the former residents were known to either distantly relocate, change their names and/or develop severe psychological problems.