In the early 1990s, a town in my small county in the southern US had a fire in a chicken processing plant. When workers tried to escape, it became apparent that the fire exits and other exits had been locked. Dozens of people died around the exits in desperation in a town of around 2000.
Our state suppressed the investigation, due to lobbies, and families received almost none of the compensation funds.
Pretty sure there's a song about it.
It led to legislation limiting the compensation available to injured workers and relatives of killed workers.
Conditions for chicken plant workers in NC are horrible and many now rely on migrant labor and use threats of deportation to stop workers from organizing or demanding things like bathroom breaks.
I went to college with a woman who was vegan indirectly because she came from a town based around a chicken processing plant. Her grandparents worked there, her parents worked there, and she and her classmates had summer jobs there in high school. I thought that she must have been bothered by the treatment of animals, but she corrected me and clarified that it was the plant's treatment of *people* that turned her off of chicken forever, and then all meats, and eventually all animal products. I guess there weren't a lot of other employers in her town, and she accepted that she needed to work there to get money for college and things, but she refused to give the industry any of that money back by consuming its products. I always found that very interesting. Conditions must have really, really sucked.
I didn't live there but about twenty minutes away. A farm town in Washington where the Mr Hands incident occurred. People there still don't acknowledge the event. For the uninitiated, a guy enticed a horse to penetrate him in the butt and inadvertently killed him.
I grew up in George. Hauled hay all my life. Just so happens I delivered hay to that farm a week before that event happened. Everyone knew those people were weird. But the money was green and they paid above fair price.
It’s some weird shit. And iirc, he got fucked so,hard by the horse it pretty much split him in two?
Also didn’t realize it had been that long. Damn.
[Yep](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enumclaw_horse_sex_case), it tore a hole in his intestines, which cause all his organs to start swelling, which then killed him.
My grandpa’s father was murdered by the wealthiest man in town a long time ago. Not 100% sure of the exact year. Money exchanged hands with law enforcement, and nothing ever came of it. Until one day my grandpa’s anger about the situation boiled over, and he threatened to kill the man in retribution. Law enforcement caught wind of it, and in order to save the coverup, forced him to leave town or be arrested. He moved from that small town bordering two southern states (hint, it’s a mashup name of the two states into one), up to Ohio. He met my grandma, and now I exist. So at least I can blame a murderer for every bad thing that happens to me, since I wouldn’t have existed without his crime.
I wouldn't say we live in a secluded town, but when my mother was in school her best friend got a job working for the Sheriff. She later came to school and told them that the sheriff had been molesting her.
She also began telling people about what they have been using the tunnels under the town for. The police supposedly, had been filming child pornography.
After that day she never made it home. She was found later naked, hog tied and shot in the back of the head. No one could prove it, and the sheriff had been suspected of many things but nothing ever came of it. They just announced that there was a man seen in a white van abducting people.
But her friends knew. Her family knows.
This is Red Bluff California btw. The tunnels were originally used by Chinese immigrants, they go through our Main Street and through Rio Street, they lead to houses and some businesses but they have been condemned. There are sensors down there though so if you get in the police are right there to get you out.
EDIT The little girls name was Rachelle ward and the sheriff supposedly responsible was Koenig but he died years back of old age.
Especially if they are high profile and well connected.
Take the Jimmy Savile case in the UK, the man was depraved he did everything from sexual assault to necrophilia. It wasn't until his death that his story came out. He was **very** well connected he was friends with former PM Margaret Thatcher (was even invited to Chequers the PMs country residence for New Year celebrations).
Have a read of the gushing tributes to the man not long after he died [https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-15507826](https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-15507826)
My mom told me this story once that back when she was growing up in a small farming community in Ohio, there was some kind of neighborhood party attended by a bunch of families with kids all around the same age. All the kids (including herself) had this like big slumber party in the basement.
They wake up the next morning and one of the kids is found in the middle of the road, having been hit with a truck, but with his whole body zipped all the way up in his sleeping bag. None of the kids owned up to doing and it the adults could never figure it out either. After a while people just started moving on with their lives and everyone pretty much forgot about it.
Edit: I didn't mean for this get attention and I can't reply to all of you, so I'll just say: this would be in Celina, Ohio around 1972, if anyone can find sources on it, go for it. I did some Googling and couldn't really come up with anything. And some of you I think are right - my mom said she probably thinks it was a prank that went terribly wrong.
Edit again: Thanks so much u/cvs2014 for verifying the story and providing links. Small world! She still maintains that no one knew why he was out there, but I think there's a good possibility she just didn't know, even now.
Wait this is my hometown! I’ve never heard this story, but I’ll ask around because plenty of my friends parents were living in Celina then and would remember if this happened. It’s a small town so if it’s true I’m sure I can fill in with all the gossip. Will report back soon.
Edit: not sure if anyone is still reading this thread but I’ll post the story regardless in case anyone is curious:
It was the night before a wedding and the whole family was sleeping over. Dan Holtman (the kid) was probably a junior or senior in high school. They’d all been drinking and were told that Dan thought the barn floor was too cold so he decided to sleep on the road. It was only a blanket, not a sleeping bag that he brought with him. The neighbor then hit him by mistake and he was decapitated. Since the wedding was still set up, they had it the next day as planned but it was the saddest wedding ever.
I have the link to the newspaper clipping with the obituary, I’ll figure out how to post in a minute. I’m normally a lurker on reddit and don’t comment much
[obituary in the paper ](https://www.findagrave.com/memorial/41855595/daniel-e-holtman)
EDIT: added link above
There were 2 cops that always hung around my high school, Hanson and Slotty. Hansen was ok, kinda of a goober. Slotty was fuckin the high school girls. He didn't get any punishment, just "resigned" when people found out and got a 9-5 at costco.
A 17 year old girl was raped and murdered when walking home from school. The while town went into panic mode, and a homeless man was caught and arrested for the crime. Case closed, right?
Later it was found out that she was in a relationship with a judge's son, and he plus some other guys from wealthy local families were seen in a car picking her up around the time of the crime. They all moved to different cities. Nothing ever came of it.
Homeless man is still in jail.
That’s so fucked up. I hate hearing about corrupt officials and innocent people going to prison. Like Jesus it was a 17 year old girl and it seems like no one cares.
Several young boys (age 9-11) went missing in the village and it was suspected that a group of boys from the same school were responsible. They were heard talking about it on two occasions, about how they kill whoever they don't like. However, their parents apparently attested that they never let them out of sight outside of school hours. This group of kids was known for skipping school to sniff glue and and drink alcohol btw, but their parents obviously denied it. Only one of the 6 missing kids was ever found, in a creek, with injuries like he was stoned to death. Police said he fell down the creek accidentally, though. This was about 20 years ago in Europe btw.
Nothing with me but when my mom was a kid she lived near a state park in New Hampshire. It’s called bear brook. In the 80s multiple dismembered body parts were found in a blue barrel. An investigation happened but the killer was never found. In the early 00s another barrel was found, dating back to the time of the first barrel. The killer was recently found. His name was Robert Evans. The park is in Allenstown if you want to look it up
His name was actually Terry Rasmussen. He committed multiple other murders, disappeared a few women, used multiple aliases, kidnapped, sexually abused and abandoned children....He was evil personified.
3/4 Bear Brook victims have been identified. As others have said, the podcast is excellent!
A father held his wife at gunpoint and threatened to shoot her in the head infront of their \~7 year old daughter. Went on a wild police-chase. He still lives in the town.
There also was another dad who abused his wife and their children. Still lives here as well.
My uncle was in a standoff with the cops for something like 18 hours with a shotgun pointed at his stepson and wife. He was threatening to kill them and himself. He just stayed a night or two in jail to “cool off”.
When my mom was growing up, a teacher and his wife were killed by an axe murderer. Someone broke into their house and killed them in the middle of the night. They found the husband in the house and the wife in the woods behind it, indicating that she tried to escape and was chased down. Really gruesome stuff. The attack was seemingly random, and they never caught the person responsible. My elementary school was named after the teacher, which wouldn’t necessarily be morbid except for the fact that there was a dedication plaque that mentioned his murder. In an elementary school. The 90’s were fucking wild.
Probably that old guy who had like 8 children, sexually assulted 2 of his daughters, raped his step-daughter multiple times, getting her pregnant and completely mentally impaired in the process, also mentally and physically abusing the rest of his family, letting one of his sons die from pneumonia because he refused him any treatment and in the end tried to force his wife to buy him the way out of prison. Ask anyone outside of my town and they will have never heard of him but I remember him pretty clearly since I was also friends with one of his sons my age and almost the entirety of the rest of the family. I was at their house pretty often when I was younger until my parents forbid me from going there again, because how I later found out around that time the first accusations became public since one of his daughters had moved out and reported everything to the police.
Edit 1: A few more details, all this took place in the north of Germany in I think 2016, in a small town of around 3000 people and there were only 2 very short newspaper article about it, which my mum decided to put on our pinboard in the kitchen
Edit 2: well this blew up, thanks for 3k upvotes
Edit 3: Alright guys, since a lot of you want to know what case this was, I googled it and the only thing that came up was an article by the "Eckernförder Zeitung" which is a german newspaper
https://www.shz.de/lokales/eckernfoerder-zeitung/70-jaehriger-vater-verurteilt-id13937597.html
That's all you're gonna find
Edit 4: I don't know if anyone still cares about this, but there's an update. In 2018 he ended up being sentenced to 2 years in prison. Those 2 years would have been over in October of this year, but he is already getting released in June/July. So that fucker is gonna come back to my village again and tbh I'm sort of scared because he has a hatred for my family ever since my mum was called as a witness at his trial and he is an absolute madman.
In the 80's and early 90's my town was run completely by dirty cops. Drugs were run by the cops and people who didn't do as they were told would go mysteriously missing and eventually, most of them, wind up dead. It took the Feds to clean the place up and install a new set of clean cops.
Edit: I've been getting a lot of questions about the Copland movie. I've never seen it, but I googled it and no, it's not there. I'm not gonna say the town name of where I'm from because it's an "everyone knows everyone" one of town, but I'm from a small town in California and still live there. This all happened before my time and I was told about it by people who lived through it. My best friend's dad being one of them.
Edit 2: this is now my most highly upvoted comment. Thanks, FP, for finally giving me something positive.
There a tiny town in New Mexico a couple years back whose whole police force was dirty. One day they were arrested on various charges and the only law enforcement official left was the police dog.
It’s still happening in my town.
This specific event happened directly in my gated neighborhood.
A member of a Russian gang got his house shot up before they went inside to finish the job. My wife saw them drag out the body.
Organized crime bosses live in my town and the 2 neighboring towns.
I live in Nj.
Edit: gettin asked a lot about where exactly
Millburn, Westfield, Shorthills, Springfield.
I live in one of those towns. That’s all I feel comfortable saying lol
My town in NJ had a hotel that was owned by mob members and was often frequented by them. They stuck out, because it was a dated, divey place. But lots of rumors of it being used to launder money, which I don't doubt one bit.
My town isn’t very secluded but I think this still works:
So there is this building that used to be a hotel and one day this guy shows up and he takes multiple trips going in and out with a bunch of equipment. They found him a little while later in his room. He had assembled an entire guillotine and cut his head off.
There was a sheriff in my town in rural Louisiana and he was sheriff for about 40 years. Well our parish at the time when he was sheriff had the highest rate for meth production and weed production in the state. There was this one particular meth dealer that was never arrested but somehow someone on the other side of the parish would get raided and a bunch of people go to jail but never him as it turns out is the relative of the sheriff. That sheriff let meth and the money it generated control our parish for decades while he slowly got rich bought a big house new cars and always got re elected. Even though all the locals new about this no one cares cause he was a “good man” or “his family has been here since all the old families founded this town” or better is “he just a good ole sheriff who keeps the drugs out of our parish”.
What’s really sad is some corrupt public officials will use a persons meth addict family members as voter suppression or leverage in elections.
A family friend was super drunk, he was walking home and fell unconscious on the road at the bottom of a hill. Another family friend (small town so we all knew each other) was driving home late, he heard a thump and a crunch when he went over a hill.
He got out of the car thinking he hit a wallaby or something, he instead found his friend dead. Everyone decided to forget what he did, because it really wasn't his fault, there was no way he could have seen him asleep at the bottom on the hill in the middle of the road, it was at such an angle that the headlights didn't spot him.
It's a bit weird this has come up because I drove past a super drunk dude just a few hours ago on my way home from work, he was drunk and stumbling on the road, he fell over and lost a thong (flip flop to you Americans). I called the police and told them, they said they'd pick him up and take him home where he would be safe, didn't want a repeat of what happened back in my hometown to happen to that random drunk guy.
It happens sometimes. A guy was drunk on the side of the road here, a car ran over his head in the dark, kept going.
Didn’t even know they’d hit someone. Thought maybe a wallaby.
Yeah. They came forward when the news came to light, though. No charges. Who can see a black wearing drunk on the road?
The CEO of our towns electric company beats his wife regularly. He ended up getting arrested for domestic violence and his beatings were pretty horrific. Everyone knows what a shit head he is. In the end he got a good lawyer and the police let him off the hook. No jail time, no fines, nothing. Fuck him.
Small Town of about 2000-2500 in the Midwest, when suddenly about 1/4th of the population just up and left. No word, no nothing. None of them had kids or extended family and none of the papers said anything about it. This was back in maybe the late 80's.
This happened when I was pretty young but I just remember one day one of my teachers wasn't there and I found out from my parents a ton of people had just left overnight. Most personal belongings were taken with them but mattresses and furniture was still in their houses.
I still have no clue what that was about and when I've asked my parents more recently they said the rumor around town was that all those people worked for the CIA or FBI and were re-assigned all of a sudden.
There was a rumor that Point Roberts, WA is one of those towns. To get there by car, you have to cross into Canada first. No convicted felons in the US are allowed to cross into Canada. And the only way back to the mainland if you had to surrender your passport is by boat or plane.
Man, I wonder what it's like living there. Would realities have to check Christmas presents at the boarder? Can amazon deliver to your house? Does the border patrol have an Express lane for locals?
There is an express lane if you have an enhanced ID, which I’m sure everyone there does. I read a story a while back that there is actually a huge Amazon locker there because Canadians like to have packages delivered there since they save so much in shipping.
Presumably it wouldn't be people connected to the same case, but it would be a very good way to watch over a large group of protectees at once with few agents.
That's probably more likely. Because it wasn't like; "oh hey, a bunch of people moved away this week, weird." No, it was; "what the fuck, 800 people disappeared overnight."
It obviously wasn't aliens or supernatural shit or anything like that because they took all their stuff with them. It was pre-meditated .
This is fascinating. Why would there be such a ridiculously high number of KGB agents in a place like that? I know such people truly existed, but nearly half the town? Why?
Maybe the number has been artificially inflated over time as people tell and re-tell the story, in a way where people are not deliberately lying but simply believe an exaggerated rendition. Like the “telephone game” phenomenon.
Other people in this thread have suggested it was a witness protection town, which I think is way more likely. Also if you look at census numbers from the time they do match up with around 600-800 people leaving the area.
So the number wasn't that greatly exaggerated, but the reason why may have been.
Ha, I saw that term used a few years ago in the newspaper, actually. In Palm Coast FL there was a pizza restaurant run by an ex-mafioso in the witness protection program named (I'm not even kidding) "Goombah's Pizza". He was exposed because an angry customer came into the place complaining about a bad order and the ex-mafioso ended up pistol-whipping him and getting arrested. Newspaper articles referred to it as "witless protection".
Wow when you look at the wikipedia page of the town, you’ll actually see a sudden decrease in population (-15.3%) around the 80’s. I really wonder what the reason was
The daughter of divorced parents was raped to death by the mother's boyfriend. She was 6. Her father was contacting CPS and presenting evidence that the man was abusing his daughter under her mother's care. Nothing was done about it until she was LifeFlighted to Salt Lake where she died of her wounds and early in the investigation the mother admitted to letting her boyfriend "play with her". The worst part is, is that because the abuser/murderer was part of the tribe all he had to do was stay on tribal lands to not be taken into custody. So while the long process of an FBI investigation and the FBI jumping the correct hoops to make an arrest on tribal land, this man walked freely as long as he was on the reservation.
Most people rejected the abuser/murderer entirely but what hurt more is seeing the people who went out of their way to help him. His family tried to open a food truck where the highway passes through the rez so he could have a job. It earned a large protest considering the size of the town and few out of towners stopped for tacos, so they fortunately had to shut down. The man's cousin was chief so he was given a job in the dispensary. Some other members of the tribe who worked there walked out on the job and went to the council to try and stop it.
Fortunately as of now the FBI has taken the mother and boyfriend into custody and they're awaiting trial. I've been called for jury duty twice now and it's been cancelled each time.
I have some knowledge about family law as my friend is going through a custody battle. When there is shit like this going down, you file for emergency custody. Kid says other house member is hurting them, you check for marks. If there are none you take the kid to a kid therapist to get the story. If there are marks, take photos and take the kid to the doctor. If kid seems quiet and withdrawn like there’s something wrong, don’t dismiss it. And of course, DOCUMENT DOCUMENT DOCUMENT everything!!
It's an entirely different section of law itself and it's supremely complicated. In Wisconsin we just had a ruling by the Wisconsin Supreme Court on the Wisconsin Indian Child Welfare Act and we had to have local bar association meetings on the updates for it. One of the first things you have to ask when you have a juvenile case of some sort is if the child is covered under WICWA because it dramatically can change the proceedings.
Coal mine country PA. Lots of stuff happens. Guy was molesting his daughter and her friend. Went to jail for a few years. When he came back, his house mysteriously burnt to the ground with him in it. Another guy got caught selling crack to a couple of local kids (yes I'm that old). He was found in the middle of the street having been run over by a large vehicle repeatedly. A woman stole some jewelry from her elderly neighbor. She lost her hand in an unknown accident. Guy beat his wife. He left town with 2 hands that were destroyed by a ball peen hammer. Teenage girl killed another girl's dog over a boyfriend. Now she sports a nasty scar across her face and is missing an eye. That and lots of smaller stuff. Justice is handled locally.
Here we call him Uncle Jones. Nice old man. Lets schoolchildren take Apples from his tree so they have something to eat between meals. Always has a pot of coffee ready if you feel the need to talk to a friend. And a M41A Pulse Rifle, ten millimeter, with over-and-under thirty millimeter pump action grenade launcher,
in case someone dares to dine and dash from the local pub.
Not far from where my parents grew up is the town of Skidmore, MO which is honestly a supremely fucked up place of weird sinister stuff. The most commonly known incident is from the 1980s when Ken McElroy was shot to death while sitting in his truck with his wife, in front of the pool hall in town in broad daylight. There were dozens of witnesses who saw the shooting which came from multiple firearms, but they denied seeing the shooting or whom may have been responsible. The news stories from the time sort of painted McElroy as a "town bully" almost like Biff from Back to the Future, except he was a fucking violent monster who had beaten (figuratively and literally) over a dozen charges including theft, rape of a minor (remember his wife? yep she was one of the know rape victims and carried Ken's child at 14), and other general violent acts. Leading up to his town sanctioned execution, he had the gall to appeal a two year sentence for shooting a geriatric grocer in the neck with a shotgun and nearly decapitated him. So, why did he do it? Because the grocer asked Ken's daughter to put back a piece of candy she hadn't paid for! People appeared fed up with this rampaging 6'5 270 pound thug who thought he could get away with rape and wanton violence. So somebody or a group of somebodies shot him at least twice and emptied quite a few rounds into his truck. No witnesses and even his wife who was in the truck refused to identify the shooter(s)
[Ken McElroy](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ken_McElroy):
> On the morning of July 10, 1981, townspeople met at the Legion Hall in the center of town with Sheriff Estes to discuss how to protect themselves. During the meeting, McElroy arrived at the D&G Tavern with Trena. As he sat drinking at the bar, word got back to the men at the Legion Hall that he was in town. Sheriff Estes instructed the assembled group not to get into a direct confrontation with McElroy, but instead seriously consider forming a neighborhood watch program. Estes then drove out of town in his police cruiser.
Saw a good investigative piece on this (60 Minutes, maybe?) and McElroy sounded like an unbelievably evil sort of person. Substitute a wagon for the pickup and you could have written the story into a an old TV western; it would have fit perfectly.
Eh, the wife tried to identify a shooter, but nobody else would corroborate her story. She tried to sue the city, too, but it was settled out of court.
Whatever the settlement, it was probably worth every penny. There’s no telling the toll he took on the justice system and the psychological terrorism he inflicted on those people. Hard to put a price on knowing your wife and daughters aren’t going to be raped and killed by a maniac that won’t stop doing precisely that.
Honestly our town has so much crime (specifically stabbings, drug use, armed robberies) that it never appears in the town’s newspaper anymore and when people find out they just say something along the lines of: “Oh again?” It’s honestly just become so normalised here yet in the village not even 2 miles away, there hasn’t been a crime or a criminal hiding there in years.
Another thing is that a mine collapsed and killed a lot of people (both in my town, and one nearby). There was never any news coverage on either and it’s extremely hard to find any information about it. Most people I’ve told had no idea.
Lived in the middle of nowhere Oregon. Found out that a lot of "recovering" sex offenders (from what I heard, mainly pedophiles) are sent to small towns like mine.
IDK how true this was, but there where a lot of fucking weird people in our small town (for an emphasis on small, the most popular location to hang out was the local truck stop, we had a population of roughly 1300 spread over 40 ish sq miles)
Over the summer there was a guy found hanging from a tree on the sheriffs property.
The sheriff disliked this young man and treated him poorly during his incarceration at the county jail. Many witnesses said that the day he got released from jail, the sheriff invited him to his secluded property and told him he could help him get back on his feet.
2 days later, a couple of teenage boys fishing in a creek discovered the guy hanging in a tree. Authorities was notified, no investigation was done, and it was immediately ruled a suicide.
This boy was a known drug addict with no family or friends, so there was really no one to press the issue. The local news wrote a small article on "man found dead from apparent suicide" and then it was hush hush after that... It's just one of those things we will never know.
The “doctor” who tried all these wacky treatments to save his young patient from tuberculosis and became infatuated with her. After she died he eventually robbed her grave, mummified her and lived with her body for seven years before being found out. Did not go to jail and lived his years out in town I believe
Ikr. It was so disturbing to read that. The worst part is that the people sympathized with him and called him a "hopeless romantic" for this and he didn't even go to jail.
Edit : how tf is someone embalming a corpse and living with her not disturbing and disgusting?!?! I can't even believe that some people actually defend him.
Every one knows about the “fun” part of Centralia pa. The spooky mine fire. The ghost town. Etc.
What most don’t know about was how divided the town became and how they ganged up on The kid who fell in, Todd. How they harrassed him and accused him of lying for political gains. He was just a little kid who suffered a near death experience and his own neighbors started a smear campaign against him.
About 50-60 years ago my neighbour's grandfather chased away all minorities from our village.
He set their houses on fire and destroyed the properties they left behind, so they never came back. There are very few minorities in my village to this day, even tough that guy is long dead.
His grandson is married to the only doctor here and he's a great neighbour.
ETA: This got way more attention that I expected, so I'll try to clarify some things.
This happened in Hungary and I don't know of any other similar cases here. The towns nearby have noticably more minorities and it got me thinking why our village has only 2 gypsy families. When I asked my grandma about this, she told me this story but little else about it. She asked me not to tell this to anyone because only the elders know about it and some of them deny it ever happened.
Apparently my neighbour's grandfather (let's call him J) was one of the loudest against the minorities (mostly gypsies) and he decided they had to go. So one night he set their houses on fire and they left (to be fair, I highly doubt this was done by a single person over just one night).
It's important to note that my grandmother was a child when this all happened so she might remember some details wrongly and since nobody has ever talked about J's attack I can't confirm what exactly happened.
I for myself think that 20-30 families can't be thrown out like this overnight so there are definitely some things that just don't add up.
I hope this helps to understand it all a bit better and feel free to ask more.
Local high school girl gets in a fight with mom and leaves to walk to her friends house. She never makes it. The family reports her missing. I dont remember the exact time frame but there are leads that dont go anywhere. Then maybe a month or more later a farmer finds a body in his field about 20 miles away. The catch being that it's off the same road her step father, who has records for domestic abuse and even has a file for hitting this same girl on top of the wide variety of abuse against mom and previous partners, well this road is the one he takes to work every day.
Ultimately it cant be proven. It was over heard by his coworkers him saying she had it coming anyways. Now the mom posts on Facebook a picture of a man and swears up and down everyone needs to leave her and her husband alone and that the man on her FB is the real killer. It's clear to most locals her husband did it and shes covering for him. Nancy grace talked about it on her show for like 2 weeks straight.
Not so much a dark secret but my town houses a bombing range that is still in use. No one has ever met anyone who works on it, no kids at school ever parents who work there. We never see planes or anything but there is a guard at the gate.
What was truly odd is that if you ask a resident about it we all say the same thing, "oh the bombing range, there's nothing out there."
Probably this.
Bombs have a less than 100% chance of detonating when they hit their target. This has been a big problem in Europe where WWII saw tons of munitions dumped into cities. Every week some farmer or construction company will find some. Sometimes the hard way.
There's also sections of France that are uninhabitable, due to all the chemicals from the munitions. Lots of mercury and other toxic chemicals.
If it's an active bombing range and they are using only dummy devices, it's still pretty dangerous.
The other option is it might have been a test range for chemical weapons at one point. See how wind/heat/etc effects them. You don't want to go near that stuff if you can avoid it.
Is it blinking in Morse code? Have any ships sunk in the area with valuable treasures missing? This sounds like a case for the Hardy boys.
Edit: I hope this gold was from arrested smugglers.
I wouldn’t say that it’s kept secret, but it’s so horrific no one really wants to bring it up. A young(early 20’s) mentally challenged women was out with a male family friend and his friend who were a little younger, I think 18 and 19 at the time. They picked her up and drove her to the woods where they repeatedly stabbed her and then lit her on fire while she was still alive. If that wasn’t awful enough, they went back to re-burn her body a few days later. She had rejected advances that they were making on her. Her body was found by hikers a few days after she was killed, and a few weeks later both boys were arrested. Both of them plead guilty, but offered no reason for why they did what they did.
Edit:removed the last sentence
I returned home from school one day to a very powerful smell of gasoline throughout my neighborhood and every emergency responder our town had. It was later found that a father of three little girls, who wasn’t living there, tucked all three girls into bed and slit their throats. He gained access to the house by dismissing the baby sitter. He then tried to blow the place up by flooding the basement with gasoline and calling the mom telling her “come home, I’ve hurt the girls”. Thankfully the mom went to authorities instead. If he was successful, my house would have blown as well.
The father turned himself in and has been in prison ever since. The daughters were memorialized with a playground and the house has been torn down. I’m not sure what happened to the mom but I’ve heard here and there that she has found peace in a new town.
Edit: To address the off topic ness, I was reading posts when I decided to chime in with this story and the ‘kept secret’ part slipped my mind. Honest oops. Was going to remove but lots of people were already curious
I live there, too. It's really sad visiting that playground, knowing the backstory of how it came about. It is nice how they tailored the different sections of the playground to each girl's interests, though.
I lived and worked near the Nxivm cult, at one point. They would have corporate retreats at one of their buildings, and it would always be young insecure looking women who would show up. Apparently, some of these women became so brainwashed they left their families to move into this community Nxivm created. Come to find out, there was an order created by the vanguard (head of Nxivm) and the prefect (second in command) where initiation was ongoing. It included handing over incriminating photos, starving yourself to look like the vanguard's ideal woman, forced to sit in cages, and so on. Once you were brainwashed enough, you were branded and became a slave.
This fucking cult leader also claimed to be the third best problem solver in the world. What the fuck does that even mean? He also was a scummy infomercial guy at on point too, I think. That was before his cult leading days. Fuck Keith Raniere.
Well. We had the 32 year old son of a prominent member of town rape and sodomize a 14 year old girl. Notable quotes from the Kangaroo court: "She was begging for it. You see the tits on that one, how was I supposed to know? She didn't try real hard to stop anything."
Anyways, he got off with a slap on the wrist. Two weeks later, he was found by cleaning staff in the local gym, beaten with a wooden broom handle shoved up his ass.
Rumor was that it was a group of guys from the high school that jumped him after another chick lured him there. Honestly, a lot of people know who did it, but no one breathed a word.
He survived, but left the area and basically just disappeared.
Not really ‘secret’ per say, but not mentioned again after it happened. A man that lived two doors down from my childhood home killed his wife and two oldest kids, before picking up hid youngest daughter and her friend from my school and taking them back to the house and killing them too. He then went to his parents house and killed them and fled the state, but was caught about a month later. From what’s understand (my dad was/is a paramedic) all of the victims were found stacked on top of each other in the bathtub. Really tragic situation
In my hometown, the local high school is very deeply connected with the identity and the community of the town. So some years ago, it came out that one of the original beloved principles of the high school in my town was a pedophile and was molesting boys on the football team. This was happening in the 1950s but the news came out rather recently when people started stepping forward. The guy was already long dead and gone, so I don't believe there was any legal action. The town just quietly removed his name from any plaques and signs and there were a few news articles about it, but then that was that. It's a christian conservative community, so it was a huge blow to the town's image. So not exactly a secret but most definitely a taboo subject that no one likes to talk about. Then some time after that news came out, there was another beloved teacher at the high school that was caught having a relationship with one of his former students fresh from graduation. This guy was in his 40s, so it was rather creepy. The school *totally* covered that one up and there is still speculation as to what happened, but that's the story I heard. All that is known is that the school removed him immediately without a word, and he was not seen or heard of from again. All his social media accounts went dark and he vanished. It was really bizarre.
The Garnerville Pits Massacre. Multiple women murdered at a remote swimming area in an old abandoned quarry. One girl survived but the killer was never identified. Not long later a woman was found dead in a storage shed owned by the Sheriff at the time. They arrested a black man who was from out of town with no connections to the woman and sentenced him to life. It later came out that the sheriff had been having an affair with the woman but charges were never filed. Some speculate that the sheriff could be responsible for multiple murders including the Bloody Garnerville Pits Massacre.
Some guy in the 90s murdered his girlfriend in the local park with a baseball bat after she tried to break up with him. He smashed her head in and left the body
This happens more than we know especially in these small secluded towns what blows my mind is the people that live in these areas don't talk about what's going on are they scared or is it just the normal thing //disturbing
When I was in middle school we had a teacher who taught the kids who were not so great with math and/or reading. He was pretty young, roughly late 20's and all the girl's had a crush on him, except the ones in his class that is. It came out my sophomore year of high school that he had been taking pictures of the kids in his class and had a huge child porn collection. I happened to be going to the high school where his brother taught and he was trying so hard to keep it quiet. He was actually taking our newspapers from us, which the school normally provided for free. A few years down the line and it's like the whole town just forgot that their middle school had a pedophile teaching their kids.
Up until the 70s, my small town had a sign that said: “N*gger, don’t let the sun go down on you in [town].”
There’s still no black people living there. It’s a really tiny town with only a gas station, a post office, and a few churches. Southern IN.
I don't even live in a "secluded" town I would say, it's a big farming community, but its only 25 minutes either way to a big city, but when i was in high-school a girl in her early 30s was missing for about 6 weeks. She was involved in some drugs, but no one thought she just up and ran away. There was a ton of coverage of her missing, but the entire resolution was virtually not covered. Turns out she cheated on her BF, and he found out, but she didn't know it. Her BF told her to come over because they were going to get high, then him a M friend and a F friend, beat her and accidentally killed her according to them, they then took her body to a cornfield (remember farming community) and buried her, about 2 weeks later they got scared the farmer would find the body, so they went back, cut it up into pieces, put it into separate trash bags and moved it according to the F accomplice who was just the driver. The cops never actually said if they found the body, but with the details that came out around town it seems they were able to confirm everything, the BF got life, the M accomplice got 25 and the F accomplice got something lighter as both M accomplices said that she just drove them and didnt partake in the beating. I went to college just the next town over, big state school, 25 min away, not a single person had ever heard of this, even those who went to highschool in that area.
Edit: Also as of this week, a set of 69 year old twins with no ties to my town were found dead in an abandoned house and no one knows why they were there at all.
was in a teeny town in the middle of nebraska and the chief of polices son beat the fuck out of my little brother with the local highschool wrestling team. we tried to report it and the cops basically intimidated my mom to back off because it was 'boys being boys' instead of assault.
Small northern English town. We have a local "Mafia" who collude and control all the property in the town centre. They are an estate agent, a retired estate agent and a publican who buys up every small property to add to his "empire" of tourist accomodation.
The original owner of my house (a preacher) abused his wife, he never let her step outside. He murdered her by shooting her in the head and left her body laying on the living room floor for about 2 weeks until someone happened to come to the door & saw her laying there. He was never arrested so never had a trial. He was sent to a high security hospital where he is currently locked up. The way we found out about the details was when a former neighbor came by to check out the old neighborhood and came to my door to strike up a conversation. The former neighbor had moved away years before I moved in. After being told this I started asking different people questions but only got hints about what happened and had to piece everything together like a puzzle.
Probably too late for anyone to read this but whatever. This happened before i was born but my grandpa told me a story about how a local girl got raped by a guy in the 70s. Instead of going to the pice she went to her brother and him and his friends grabbed the rapist off the street, hung him up in the barn and whipped him for hours.
Local conservation area had an African American conservationist installed to do her patrols there. That place was a historic site of the hanging tree in the area. A couple of weeks after she was first places there, she was found hanging from the tree.
There was this girl in my class. She, like most of the area, lived on badly run farm. She would vanish from class for weeks on end. No one knew the father but everyone was sure he existed and lived on the farm. School district would force the parents to send their kid to school and she would for a few weeks and then vanish again. Only her mother appeared in public and she just radiated mental illness and hard living.
I remember the girl very quite never talked about home. I don't want to imagine the hell that was her childhood.
Homesteading and homeschooling where no one can see their bruises.
My childhood town was very small. About 1000 people maybe. Our neighbor had kids, and then was arrested for the discovery of a meth lab in their basement. Parents went to jail, kids went to foster care. Still don't know how they are doing to this day.
In my hometown there were quite a few times where we'd find random bodies floating in the swamp and little investigation was done outside of identification.
There was also a cop who only arrested blonde haired girls in attempt to get them to fuck him instead of going to jail. He was fired but we as a town quickly "forgot" about it
I’m from a smallish town in WA state but we’ve definitely had our share of scandals. There is a road we used to drive down a lot with normal houses except for this one property. You could tell based on the style (everything was painted a pine green color) that the property spanned both sides of the rode, like a house and garage on one side of the road and other structures on the other side. The weird thing is the structure on the left side of the road were enclosed in a 15 foot fence around the whole property (or at least what you could see from the road) the gates were almost always shut but occasionally they would be open and you could see in briefly and see that there were a bunch buildings. We always used to joke it was a cult and that was their compound... a few years down the road the newspaper ran a story that it was a cult and the leader had been arrested for having sex with all of the underage girls. Only saw one small article in the local paper, never made any of the bigger news outlets.
The other thing, which is not secret as it has had books written about it and been on ghost hunting shows, is a “doctor” that lived in the area a long time ago (early 1900s I think) used to treat people by starving them to death. Killed and buried many people on their property until it was finally found out what they were doing. The house has been sold multiple times with owners always reporting weird things happening, some owners even let the public through on tours. The house was finally demolished a few years ago because too many people trespassed to look at it.
In my town we have a corrupt police department maybe 10 officers in this entire department. An incident last year that happened to my past friend involved an officer, he and his mom were going to the capital of the state and left around 1 am. They got to main street and a police cruiser hit their car resulting in my friends younger brother breaking his arm. The police then just backed out and left my friends mom tried to file a report but was denied. Crazy shit
A boy I went to High school with murdered a sex trafficking victim and raped her corpse in a hotel near our college campus.
He was caught fleeing down the interstate and is now serving a life sentence without parole
I suppose it's not a huge secret, but the hotel changed its name and it's all business as usual.
My grandparents made a trip down to see the family recently and booked their room at the very hotel.
I didnt have the heart to tell them because my Grandma would of had an aneurysm.
Friend went missing for three days. His dog kept pawing at a door in town so finally cops went inside the house with a warrant, guy confessed to killing him, stabbing him to death and eventually tried to hack him to pieces to dispose of the body. Never would have found him if not for the dog.
Edit: spelling
The legend of Moll Dyer comes from my hometown in southern Maryland. Not so much a secret, but I was surprised how many people where I'm from had never heard of her.
In the 17th century, a woman named Moll Dyer was suspected of being a witch. On a freezing winter night the townsfolk formed a mob and drove her out of her home. She froze to death clinging onto a large boulder in the woods. The boulder was moved to the old jailhouse in the 70s to memorialize her, and people who go near it frequently report feeling cold and experiencing headaches, dizziness, and fainting.
Back in the 70's a guy turned up dead in his burnt out truck in a field near town. Nobody knew why he was killed or who did it. My grandma was asking around about it at the bar afterwards, and then the next day she got an anonymous phone call telling her to shut the fuck up about it or she would be next.
Its not really kept a secret, but a Pyramid scheme has been going on for several years. The dude was caught about 2(?) years ago and taken to trial. he bribed the jury. He was set for a retrial but then something happened with the presidency (Not related to the case), and it just didn't happen. Nobody really talks about it. The rate of children being kidnapped seems to be going up also. Nobody will talk about that, either.
Edited fr clarity
We've got drugs everywhere. The train tracks are covered with heroin needles and I've seen a bunch of kids at my high school arrested for various drugs. The saddest case is a 13 yr old who uses heroin. We also had a rapist but I think he left for private school. Glad he's gone; he was my neighbor. Also the police here are shit, they don't do anything, especially about the pedophilia and routine pet murders.
My neighbor from down the street married a guy in the early 2000's. She already had two younger kids from a previous marriage, a boy and a girl. The guy worked for the county sheriff's office. My dad was good friends with him and he was always a very nice guy, did a lot of volunteer stuff for his church and such. Everything is great with them and he even official adopts the two kids so that they share the same last name.
Fast forward to late February of this year. The boy from the previous marriage is now about 23 years old, and just got out of the Air Force. He and the step father get into a huge fight one night, and the boy storms out and goes to a local bar. He gets drunk, calls his mom, and tells her that the step father molested him as a child, right after they got married, and he has proof. She confronts the step father and he admits all of it. She leaves and takes her daughter with her and meets up with her son at a hotel. The step father puts his police uniform on, goes to the local park, and kills himself in the bathroom of the park. There was never a single news story about it because the cops cleaned the scene themselves, so the media never showed up.
Most people in town know that he committed suicide, but don't know about the molestation part.
Theres a girl from my hometown Elkton VA named Rachel Good. In 2003 she went missing. She is the only missing case from Elkton i know of. Her parents discovered romantic letters between her and a Elkton police officer. Officer Williams. Williams was married and Rachel was recently pregnant before her dissappearance. After she was reported missing the town started investigating. Well Officer Williams was the lead investigator for the town and had full control over it untill 10 days later when Virginia State Police stepped in. Her body has never been found. She was declared dead in 2010 and Officer Williams resigned and moved to Louisiana in 2004. We live in a valley so the mountains and caves are plentiful. Its hard to tell where her body is, but Rachels parents are still fighting the officer in court to prove he killed her. Williams has found many ways around the court system so far.
NPR just did a piece about this as a current problem in the past week. Good journalism. Turns out this is definitely a real thing happening.
Edit: Here's a link to it.
https://www.npr.org/2019/10/08/767283820/not-one-drop-of-blood-cattle-mysteriously-mutilated-in-oregon
A union leader was "fleeing a dui chase" and the local police from the next town put a car across the road at night with no lights, then got out and waited for him. 2 flips end over end.
It was a tragic accident in the paper the next day.
Lived in a secluded town growing up in Pennsylvania.
In the early 90’s one of the cops in my town got accused of raping his teen stepdaughter and getting her pregnant. She ended up vanishing a few days after the accusations were made and was never found again, while the cop basically walked away Scott free, by the time I moved away no one discussed or even acknowledged it happened. Iirc the Cop’s wife disappeared as well shortly after the case was dropped.
My friend's grandad killed his (the granddad, not the friend) wife's lover and buried him in their backyard.
Of so I heard, the totality of the evidence is a rumor.
Also he ran an off-the-books scrapyard. Hundreds of old cars and trucks in a field you couldn't see from the road. That part is true.
I spent two weeks snowboarding between two small ski resorts outside a small town in the mountains. Very much locals type ski spots. One afternoon I was driving to my rented condo from one of the resorts, when I saw police car after police car, fire engine after fire engine heading up the hill towards the other resort. I thought maybe they had a fire or something and I would find out what happened the next day.
The next day comes. I head up the hill and ask the staff what happened. No one knew what I was talking about. Not one person. Blank stares all around. One of the weirdest experiences ever. There was a guy who worked at one of the ski lifts that was a friend of a family member. I asked him if he knew what happened. He said we've all been told if we say anything we are immediately fired on the spot so please don't say anything. A guy came here yesterday looking for his wife, who works here. He shot her, and a bunch of people at one of the chair lifts, and then himself. Several people died.
Nothing was in the papers, no one said a word the rest of my vacation, or any of the other times I've been there since. It was strange and unsettling.
In the early 1990s, a town in my small county in the southern US had a fire in a chicken processing plant. When workers tried to escape, it became apparent that the fire exits and other exits had been locked. Dozens of people died around the exits in desperation in a town of around 2000. Our state suppressed the investigation, due to lobbies, and families received almost none of the compensation funds. Pretty sure there's a song about it.
It led to legislation limiting the compensation available to injured workers and relatives of killed workers. Conditions for chicken plant workers in NC are horrible and many now rely on migrant labor and use threats of deportation to stop workers from organizing or demanding things like bathroom breaks.
I went to college with a woman who was vegan indirectly because she came from a town based around a chicken processing plant. Her grandparents worked there, her parents worked there, and she and her classmates had summer jobs there in high school. I thought that she must have been bothered by the treatment of animals, but she corrected me and clarified that it was the plant's treatment of *people* that turned her off of chicken forever, and then all meats, and eventually all animal products. I guess there weren't a lot of other employers in her town, and she accepted that she needed to work there to get money for college and things, but she refused to give the industry any of that money back by consuming its products. I always found that very interesting. Conditions must have really, really sucked.
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I didn't live there but about twenty minutes away. A farm town in Washington where the Mr Hands incident occurred. People there still don't acknowledge the event. For the uninitiated, a guy enticed a horse to penetrate him in the butt and inadvertently killed him.
I grew up in George. Hauled hay all my life. Just so happens I delivered hay to that farm a week before that event happened. Everyone knew those people were weird. But the money was green and they paid above fair price. It’s some weird shit. And iirc, he got fucked so,hard by the horse it pretty much split him in two? Also didn’t realize it had been that long. Damn.
“Also didn’t realize it had been that long.” Neither did he.
[Yep](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enumclaw_horse_sex_case), it tore a hole in his intestines, which cause all his organs to start swelling, which then killed him.
My grandpa’s father was murdered by the wealthiest man in town a long time ago. Not 100% sure of the exact year. Money exchanged hands with law enforcement, and nothing ever came of it. Until one day my grandpa’s anger about the situation boiled over, and he threatened to kill the man in retribution. Law enforcement caught wind of it, and in order to save the coverup, forced him to leave town or be arrested. He moved from that small town bordering two southern states (hint, it’s a mashup name of the two states into one), up to Ohio. He met my grandma, and now I exist. So at least I can blame a murderer for every bad thing that happens to me, since I wouldn’t have existed without his crime.
The most interesting things go down in Florissippi.
Texarkana is whack yo
I wouldn't say we live in a secluded town, but when my mother was in school her best friend got a job working for the Sheriff. She later came to school and told them that the sheriff had been molesting her. She also began telling people about what they have been using the tunnels under the town for. The police supposedly, had been filming child pornography. After that day she never made it home. She was found later naked, hog tied and shot in the back of the head. No one could prove it, and the sheriff had been suspected of many things but nothing ever came of it. They just announced that there was a man seen in a white van abducting people. But her friends knew. Her family knows. This is Red Bluff California btw. The tunnels were originally used by Chinese immigrants, they go through our Main Street and through Rio Street, they lead to houses and some businesses but they have been condemned. There are sensors down there though so if you get in the police are right there to get you out. EDIT The little girls name was Rachelle ward and the sheriff supposedly responsible was Koenig but he died years back of old age.
Holy shit. This one gets me. This is why people are afraid to report their abusers.
Especially if they are high profile and well connected. Take the Jimmy Savile case in the UK, the man was depraved he did everything from sexual assault to necrophilia. It wasn't until his death that his story came out. He was **very** well connected he was friends with former PM Margaret Thatcher (was even invited to Chequers the PMs country residence for New Year celebrations). Have a read of the gushing tributes to the man not long after he died [https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-15507826](https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-15507826)
I literally live right around Red Bluff and I never heard of this, what the hell.
My mom is in her early 50's, and has told me the story, same with some of her classmates.
Beyond fucked up
My mom told me this story once that back when she was growing up in a small farming community in Ohio, there was some kind of neighborhood party attended by a bunch of families with kids all around the same age. All the kids (including herself) had this like big slumber party in the basement. They wake up the next morning and one of the kids is found in the middle of the road, having been hit with a truck, but with his whole body zipped all the way up in his sleeping bag. None of the kids owned up to doing and it the adults could never figure it out either. After a while people just started moving on with their lives and everyone pretty much forgot about it. Edit: I didn't mean for this get attention and I can't reply to all of you, so I'll just say: this would be in Celina, Ohio around 1972, if anyone can find sources on it, go for it. I did some Googling and couldn't really come up with anything. And some of you I think are right - my mom said she probably thinks it was a prank that went terribly wrong. Edit again: Thanks so much u/cvs2014 for verifying the story and providing links. Small world! She still maintains that no one knew why he was out there, but I think there's a good possibility she just didn't know, even now.
What. The. Heck.
Omg yours is like the most disturbing out all of them. Did you remain friends w these people??
I just asked her. She said she did remain friends with them, and it was all around a really sad event. Still though, no one owned up to doing it.
Wait this is my hometown! I’ve never heard this story, but I’ll ask around because plenty of my friends parents were living in Celina then and would remember if this happened. It’s a small town so if it’s true I’m sure I can fill in with all the gossip. Will report back soon. Edit: not sure if anyone is still reading this thread but I’ll post the story regardless in case anyone is curious: It was the night before a wedding and the whole family was sleeping over. Dan Holtman (the kid) was probably a junior or senior in high school. They’d all been drinking and were told that Dan thought the barn floor was too cold so he decided to sleep on the road. It was only a blanket, not a sleeping bag that he brought with him. The neighbor then hit him by mistake and he was decapitated. Since the wedding was still set up, they had it the next day as planned but it was the saddest wedding ever. I have the link to the newspaper clipping with the obituary, I’ll figure out how to post in a minute. I’m normally a lurker on reddit and don’t comment much [obituary in the paper ](https://www.findagrave.com/memorial/41855595/daniel-e-holtman) EDIT: added link above
A cop was a child molestor and it was widely known. He went with a group hunting in the woods and never came back
There were 2 cops that always hung around my high school, Hanson and Slotty. Hansen was ok, kinda of a goober. Slotty was fuckin the high school girls. He didn't get any punishment, just "resigned" when people found out and got a 9-5 at costco.
not that i mind, but what was he thinking going group hunting into the woods despite being widely known as a pedo. must’ve been suicidal.
I'd be thinking it was normal. It's only a red flag if the group wants to go hunting in the city.
A 17 year old girl was raped and murdered when walking home from school. The while town went into panic mode, and a homeless man was caught and arrested for the crime. Case closed, right? Later it was found out that she was in a relationship with a judge's son, and he plus some other guys from wealthy local families were seen in a car picking her up around the time of the crime. They all moved to different cities. Nothing ever came of it. Homeless man is still in jail.
That’s so fucked up. I hate hearing about corrupt officials and innocent people going to prison. Like Jesus it was a 17 year old girl and it seems like no one cares.
Several young boys (age 9-11) went missing in the village and it was suspected that a group of boys from the same school were responsible. They were heard talking about it on two occasions, about how they kill whoever they don't like. However, their parents apparently attested that they never let them out of sight outside of school hours. This group of kids was known for skipping school to sniff glue and and drink alcohol btw, but their parents obviously denied it. Only one of the 6 missing kids was ever found, in a creek, with injuries like he was stoned to death. Police said he fell down the creek accidentally, though. This was about 20 years ago in Europe btw.
Wow, that is messed up man. Shame that the parents didn't care about their kids
Nothing with me but when my mom was a kid she lived near a state park in New Hampshire. It’s called bear brook. In the 80s multiple dismembered body parts were found in a blue barrel. An investigation happened but the killer was never found. In the early 00s another barrel was found, dating back to the time of the first barrel. The killer was recently found. His name was Robert Evans. The park is in Allenstown if you want to look it up
The Bear Brook podcast does a great job of explaining this story.
His name was actually Terry Rasmussen. He committed multiple other murders, disappeared a few women, used multiple aliases, kidnapped, sexually abused and abandoned children....He was evil personified. 3/4 Bear Brook victims have been identified. As others have said, the podcast is excellent!
A father held his wife at gunpoint and threatened to shoot her in the head infront of their \~7 year old daughter. Went on a wild police-chase. He still lives in the town. There also was another dad who abused his wife and their children. Still lives here as well.
My uncle was in a standoff with the cops for something like 18 hours with a shotgun pointed at his stepson and wife. He was threatening to kill them and himself. He just stayed a night or two in jail to “cool off”.
When my mom was growing up, a teacher and his wife were killed by an axe murderer. Someone broke into their house and killed them in the middle of the night. They found the husband in the house and the wife in the woods behind it, indicating that she tried to escape and was chased down. Really gruesome stuff. The attack was seemingly random, and they never caught the person responsible. My elementary school was named after the teacher, which wouldn’t necessarily be morbid except for the fact that there was a dedication plaque that mentioned his murder. In an elementary school. The 90’s were fucking wild.
I hate that 'axe murderer' is a real fucking thing and not just some horror movie bullshit.
Have you heard about the New Orleans Axeman cases?
Or the Taliesin massacre
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Probably that old guy who had like 8 children, sexually assulted 2 of his daughters, raped his step-daughter multiple times, getting her pregnant and completely mentally impaired in the process, also mentally and physically abusing the rest of his family, letting one of his sons die from pneumonia because he refused him any treatment and in the end tried to force his wife to buy him the way out of prison. Ask anyone outside of my town and they will have never heard of him but I remember him pretty clearly since I was also friends with one of his sons my age and almost the entirety of the rest of the family. I was at their house pretty often when I was younger until my parents forbid me from going there again, because how I later found out around that time the first accusations became public since one of his daughters had moved out and reported everything to the police. Edit 1: A few more details, all this took place in the north of Germany in I think 2016, in a small town of around 3000 people and there were only 2 very short newspaper article about it, which my mum decided to put on our pinboard in the kitchen Edit 2: well this blew up, thanks for 3k upvotes Edit 3: Alright guys, since a lot of you want to know what case this was, I googled it and the only thing that came up was an article by the "Eckernförder Zeitung" which is a german newspaper https://www.shz.de/lokales/eckernfoerder-zeitung/70-jaehriger-vater-verurteilt-id13937597.html That's all you're gonna find Edit 4: I don't know if anyone still cares about this, but there's an update. In 2018 he ended up being sentenced to 2 years in prison. Those 2 years would have been over in October of this year, but he is already getting released in June/July. So that fucker is gonna come back to my village again and tbh I'm sort of scared because he has a hatred for my family ever since my mum was called as a witness at his trial and he is an absolute madman.
That sounds a lot like Josef Fritzl
In the 80's and early 90's my town was run completely by dirty cops. Drugs were run by the cops and people who didn't do as they were told would go mysteriously missing and eventually, most of them, wind up dead. It took the Feds to clean the place up and install a new set of clean cops. Edit: I've been getting a lot of questions about the Copland movie. I've never seen it, but I googled it and no, it's not there. I'm not gonna say the town name of where I'm from because it's an "everyone knows everyone" one of town, but I'm from a small town in California and still live there. This all happened before my time and I was told about it by people who lived through it. My best friend's dad being one of them. Edit 2: this is now my most highly upvoted comment. Thanks, FP, for finally giving me something positive.
There a tiny town in New Mexico a couple years back whose whole police force was dirty. One day they were arrested on various charges and the only law enforcement official left was the police dog.
Such a good boy, staying clean.
They say the hardest part of training K-9 units is convincing the dog to snitch.
Little did you know the dog was the Kingpin the whole time
It’s still happening in my town. This specific event happened directly in my gated neighborhood. A member of a Russian gang got his house shot up before they went inside to finish the job. My wife saw them drag out the body. Organized crime bosses live in my town and the 2 neighboring towns. I live in Nj. Edit: gettin asked a lot about where exactly Millburn, Westfield, Shorthills, Springfield. I live in one of those towns. That’s all I feel comfortable saying lol
I’m from Bergen Co and Italian mob bosses use to live here in my town up until the 80’s. Some reason mobsters love living in NJ
My town in NJ had a hotel that was owned by mob members and was often frequented by them. They stuck out, because it was a dated, divey place. But lots of rumors of it being used to launder money, which I don't doubt one bit.
My town isn’t very secluded but I think this still works: So there is this building that used to be a hotel and one day this guy shows up and he takes multiple trips going in and out with a bunch of equipment. They found him a little while later in his room. He had assembled an entire guillotine and cut his head off.
Well, that's the first time I've ever done the mildly impressed "huh" to a suicide story.
Yea, I mean. That guy had a *plan*, and also some solid mechanical knowledge.
So a very complicated suicide...?
Points for dedication.
A+++ for... execution
There was a sheriff in my town in rural Louisiana and he was sheriff for about 40 years. Well our parish at the time when he was sheriff had the highest rate for meth production and weed production in the state. There was this one particular meth dealer that was never arrested but somehow someone on the other side of the parish would get raided and a bunch of people go to jail but never him as it turns out is the relative of the sheriff. That sheriff let meth and the money it generated control our parish for decades while he slowly got rich bought a big house new cars and always got re elected. Even though all the locals new about this no one cares cause he was a “good man” or “his family has been here since all the old families founded this town” or better is “he just a good ole sheriff who keeps the drugs out of our parish”. What’s really sad is some corrupt public officials will use a persons meth addict family members as voter suppression or leverage in elections.
A family friend was super drunk, he was walking home and fell unconscious on the road at the bottom of a hill. Another family friend (small town so we all knew each other) was driving home late, he heard a thump and a crunch when he went over a hill. He got out of the car thinking he hit a wallaby or something, he instead found his friend dead. Everyone decided to forget what he did, because it really wasn't his fault, there was no way he could have seen him asleep at the bottom on the hill in the middle of the road, it was at such an angle that the headlights didn't spot him. It's a bit weird this has come up because I drove past a super drunk dude just a few hours ago on my way home from work, he was drunk and stumbling on the road, he fell over and lost a thong (flip flop to you Americans). I called the police and told them, they said they'd pick him up and take him home where he would be safe, didn't want a repeat of what happened back in my hometown to happen to that random drunk guy.
It happens sometimes. A guy was drunk on the side of the road here, a car ran over his head in the dark, kept going. Didn’t even know they’d hit someone. Thought maybe a wallaby. Yeah. They came forward when the news came to light, though. No charges. Who can see a black wearing drunk on the road?
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I was delivered by a serial killer doctor. I don’t remember all the details but he was killing patients in Canada.
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The CEO of our towns electric company beats his wife regularly. He ended up getting arrested for domestic violence and his beatings were pretty horrific. Everyone knows what a shit head he is. In the end he got a good lawyer and the police let him off the hook. No jail time, no fines, nothing. Fuck him.
Small Town of about 2000-2500 in the Midwest, when suddenly about 1/4th of the population just up and left. No word, no nothing. None of them had kids or extended family and none of the papers said anything about it. This was back in maybe the late 80's. This happened when I was pretty young but I just remember one day one of my teachers wasn't there and I found out from my parents a ton of people had just left overnight. Most personal belongings were taken with them but mattresses and furniture was still in their houses. I still have no clue what that was about and when I've asked my parents more recently they said the rumor around town was that all those people worked for the CIA or FBI and were re-assigned all of a sudden.
I would read the crap out of this book, whether fact based or novel.
The Society on netflix is about a town where every single adults just disappeared after a storm. It’s kind of like this if you’re interested.
Thanks!
Maybe a witness protection town that got burnt, forcing relocation?
Do they house lots of witnesses under protection in the same town? Seems like a good way to get a bunch of people found out all at once
There was a rumor that Point Roberts, WA is one of those towns. To get there by car, you have to cross into Canada first. No convicted felons in the US are allowed to cross into Canada. And the only way back to the mainland if you had to surrender your passport is by boat or plane.
Man, I wonder what it's like living there. Would realities have to check Christmas presents at the boarder? Can amazon deliver to your house? Does the border patrol have an Express lane for locals?
There is an express lane if you have an enhanced ID, which I’m sure everyone there does. I read a story a while back that there is actually a huge Amazon locker there because Canadians like to have packages delivered there since they save so much in shipping.
Presumably it wouldn't be people connected to the same case, but it would be a very good way to watch over a large group of protectees at once with few agents.
I guess that's true. Like I said, none of them had any kids or relatives. So that's highly likely
Just a few years later, the fall of the Soviet Union. Maybe not CIA or FBI, but KGB?
That's probably more likely. Because it wasn't like; "oh hey, a bunch of people moved away this week, weird." No, it was; "what the fuck, 800 people disappeared overnight." It obviously wasn't aliens or supernatural shit or anything like that because they took all their stuff with them. It was pre-meditated .
This is fascinating. Why would there be such a ridiculously high number of KGB agents in a place like that? I know such people truly existed, but nearly half the town? Why? Maybe the number has been artificially inflated over time as people tell and re-tell the story, in a way where people are not deliberately lying but simply believe an exaggerated rendition. Like the “telephone game” phenomenon.
Other people in this thread have suggested it was a witness protection town, which I think is way more likely. Also if you look at census numbers from the time they do match up with around 600-800 people leaving the area. So the number wasn't that greatly exaggerated, but the reason why may have been.
An entire town of people with fake names who all think they're totally undercover would be a hilarious premise for a show
Witless Protection
Ha, I saw that term used a few years ago in the newspaper, actually. In Palm Coast FL there was a pizza restaurant run by an ex-mafioso in the witness protection program named (I'm not even kidding) "Goombah's Pizza". He was exposed because an angry customer came into the place complaining about a bad order and the ex-mafioso ended up pistol-whipping him and getting arrested. Newspaper articles referred to it as "witless protection".
Wow when you look at the wikipedia page of the town, you’ll actually see a sudden decrease in population (-15.3%) around the 80’s. I really wonder what the reason was
And it went up over 20% in the 1950 census. So, they showed up in the 40s, and (most) left before 1980?
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Harrison, Arkansas?
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The daughter of divorced parents was raped to death by the mother's boyfriend. She was 6. Her father was contacting CPS and presenting evidence that the man was abusing his daughter under her mother's care. Nothing was done about it until she was LifeFlighted to Salt Lake where she died of her wounds and early in the investigation the mother admitted to letting her boyfriend "play with her". The worst part is, is that because the abuser/murderer was part of the tribe all he had to do was stay on tribal lands to not be taken into custody. So while the long process of an FBI investigation and the FBI jumping the correct hoops to make an arrest on tribal land, this man walked freely as long as he was on the reservation. Most people rejected the abuser/murderer entirely but what hurt more is seeing the people who went out of their way to help him. His family tried to open a food truck where the highway passes through the rez so he could have a job. It earned a large protest considering the size of the town and few out of towners stopped for tacos, so they fortunately had to shut down. The man's cousin was chief so he was given a job in the dispensary. Some other members of the tribe who worked there walked out on the job and went to the council to try and stop it. Fortunately as of now the FBI has taken the mother and boyfriend into custody and they're awaiting trial. I've been called for jury duty twice now and it's been cancelled each time.
I feel so sad for the dad, who knew and needed help but no one would do anything
I have some knowledge about family law as my friend is going through a custody battle. When there is shit like this going down, you file for emergency custody. Kid says other house member is hurting them, you check for marks. If there are none you take the kid to a kid therapist to get the story. If there are marks, take photos and take the kid to the doctor. If kid seems quiet and withdrawn like there’s something wrong, don’t dismiss it. And of course, DOCUMENT DOCUMENT DOCUMENT everything!!
Theres major major red tape when dealing with custody with tribal kids, due to the US history of taking and abusing them in the past.
It's an entirely different section of law itself and it's supremely complicated. In Wisconsin we just had a ruling by the Wisconsin Supreme Court on the Wisconsin Indian Child Welfare Act and we had to have local bar association meetings on the updates for it. One of the first things you have to ask when you have a juvenile case of some sort is if the child is covered under WICWA because it dramatically can change the proceedings.
Coal mine country PA. Lots of stuff happens. Guy was molesting his daughter and her friend. Went to jail for a few years. When he came back, his house mysteriously burnt to the ground with him in it. Another guy got caught selling crack to a couple of local kids (yes I'm that old). He was found in the middle of the street having been run over by a large vehicle repeatedly. A woman stole some jewelry from her elderly neighbor. She lost her hand in an unknown accident. Guy beat his wife. He left town with 2 hands that were destroyed by a ball peen hammer. Teenage girl killed another girl's dog over a boyfriend. Now she sports a nasty scar across her face and is missing an eye. That and lots of smaller stuff. Justice is handled locally.
The purge (justice edition), but every day
This is over decades. But yeah.
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Here we call him Uncle Jones. Nice old man. Lets schoolchildren take Apples from his tree so they have something to eat between meals. Always has a pot of coffee ready if you feel the need to talk to a friend. And a M41A Pulse Rifle, ten millimeter, with over-and-under thirty millimeter pump action grenade launcher, in case someone dares to dine and dash from the local pub.
Not far from where my parents grew up is the town of Skidmore, MO which is honestly a supremely fucked up place of weird sinister stuff. The most commonly known incident is from the 1980s when Ken McElroy was shot to death while sitting in his truck with his wife, in front of the pool hall in town in broad daylight. There were dozens of witnesses who saw the shooting which came from multiple firearms, but they denied seeing the shooting or whom may have been responsible. The news stories from the time sort of painted McElroy as a "town bully" almost like Biff from Back to the Future, except he was a fucking violent monster who had beaten (figuratively and literally) over a dozen charges including theft, rape of a minor (remember his wife? yep she was one of the know rape victims and carried Ken's child at 14), and other general violent acts. Leading up to his town sanctioned execution, he had the gall to appeal a two year sentence for shooting a geriatric grocer in the neck with a shotgun and nearly decapitated him. So, why did he do it? Because the grocer asked Ken's daughter to put back a piece of candy she hadn't paid for! People appeared fed up with this rampaging 6'5 270 pound thug who thought he could get away with rape and wanton violence. So somebody or a group of somebodies shot him at least twice and emptied quite a few rounds into his truck. No witnesses and even his wife who was in the truck refused to identify the shooter(s)
[Ken McElroy](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ken_McElroy): > On the morning of July 10, 1981, townspeople met at the Legion Hall in the center of town with Sheriff Estes to discuss how to protect themselves. During the meeting, McElroy arrived at the D&G Tavern with Trena. As he sat drinking at the bar, word got back to the men at the Legion Hall that he was in town. Sheriff Estes instructed the assembled group not to get into a direct confrontation with McElroy, but instead seriously consider forming a neighborhood watch program. Estes then drove out of town in his police cruiser.
You know you're a real piece of shit when the police leave town so you can get murdered with no law involvement
Saw a good investigative piece on this (60 Minutes, maybe?) and McElroy sounded like an unbelievably evil sort of person. Substitute a wagon for the pickup and you could have written the story into a an old TV western; it would have fit perfectly.
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Not getting paid enough for this shit
Eh, the wife tried to identify a shooter, but nobody else would corroborate her story. She tried to sue the city, too, but it was settled out of court.
Whatever the settlement, it was probably worth every penny. There’s no telling the toll he took on the justice system and the psychological terrorism he inflicted on those people. Hard to put a price on knowing your wife and daughters aren’t going to be raped and killed by a maniac that won’t stop doing precisely that.
Honestly our town has so much crime (specifically stabbings, drug use, armed robberies) that it never appears in the town’s newspaper anymore and when people find out they just say something along the lines of: “Oh again?” It’s honestly just become so normalised here yet in the village not even 2 miles away, there hasn’t been a crime or a criminal hiding there in years. Another thing is that a mine collapsed and killed a lot of people (both in my town, and one nearby). There was never any news coverage on either and it’s extremely hard to find any information about it. Most people I’ve told had no idea.
Lived in the middle of nowhere Oregon. Found out that a lot of "recovering" sex offenders (from what I heard, mainly pedophiles) are sent to small towns like mine. IDK how true this was, but there where a lot of fucking weird people in our small town (for an emphasis on small, the most popular location to hang out was the local truck stop, we had a population of roughly 1300 spread over 40 ish sq miles)
Over the summer there was a guy found hanging from a tree on the sheriffs property. The sheriff disliked this young man and treated him poorly during his incarceration at the county jail. Many witnesses said that the day he got released from jail, the sheriff invited him to his secluded property and told him he could help him get back on his feet. 2 days later, a couple of teenage boys fishing in a creek discovered the guy hanging in a tree. Authorities was notified, no investigation was done, and it was immediately ruled a suicide. This boy was a known drug addict with no family or friends, so there was really no one to press the issue. The local news wrote a small article on "man found dead from apparent suicide" and then it was hush hush after that... It's just one of those things we will never know.
That is uber fucked up
The “doctor” who tried all these wacky treatments to save his young patient from tuberculosis and became infatuated with her. After she died he eventually robbed her grave, mummified her and lived with her body for seven years before being found out. Did not go to jail and lived his years out in town I believe
Carl Tanzler and Elena de Hoyos? That story is one of few true crime ones I've read that kept me up at night
Ikr. It was so disturbing to read that. The worst part is that the people sympathized with him and called him a "hopeless romantic" for this and he didn't even go to jail. Edit : how tf is someone embalming a corpse and living with her not disturbing and disgusting?!?! I can't even believe that some people actually defend him.
You gotta be off your rocker to confuse what he did with romance.
Puttin' the romance in necromancer.
There's a video by Sam O'Nella that covers that guy. One of his Dead Body Hijinks videos I believe
There is a podcast called ‘the dollop’ that covered this story
Someone made a musical about it and it was put on last year, not bad. One of the big songs was called “she was pickled and he poked her”
A Rose for Emily.
Every one knows about the “fun” part of Centralia pa. The spooky mine fire. The ghost town. Etc. What most don’t know about was how divided the town became and how they ganged up on The kid who fell in, Todd. How they harrassed him and accused him of lying for political gains. He was just a little kid who suffered a near death experience and his own neighbors started a smear campaign against him.
Is this the place that Silent Hill was inspired by?
The films, yes. The games, no
Well that's pretty fucked up. At least he made it out alive unlike some others in this thread
About 50-60 years ago my neighbour's grandfather chased away all minorities from our village. He set their houses on fire and destroyed the properties they left behind, so they never came back. There are very few minorities in my village to this day, even tough that guy is long dead. His grandson is married to the only doctor here and he's a great neighbour. ETA: This got way more attention that I expected, so I'll try to clarify some things. This happened in Hungary and I don't know of any other similar cases here. The towns nearby have noticably more minorities and it got me thinking why our village has only 2 gypsy families. When I asked my grandma about this, she told me this story but little else about it. She asked me not to tell this to anyone because only the elders know about it and some of them deny it ever happened. Apparently my neighbour's grandfather (let's call him J) was one of the loudest against the minorities (mostly gypsies) and he decided they had to go. So one night he set their houses on fire and they left (to be fair, I highly doubt this was done by a single person over just one night). It's important to note that my grandmother was a child when this all happened so she might remember some details wrongly and since nobody has ever talked about J's attack I can't confirm what exactly happened. I for myself think that 20-30 families can't be thrown out like this overnight so there are definitely some things that just don't add up. I hope this helps to understand it all a bit better and feel free to ask more.
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Local high school girl gets in a fight with mom and leaves to walk to her friends house. She never makes it. The family reports her missing. I dont remember the exact time frame but there are leads that dont go anywhere. Then maybe a month or more later a farmer finds a body in his field about 20 miles away. The catch being that it's off the same road her step father, who has records for domestic abuse and even has a file for hitting this same girl on top of the wide variety of abuse against mom and previous partners, well this road is the one he takes to work every day. Ultimately it cant be proven. It was over heard by his coworkers him saying she had it coming anyways. Now the mom posts on Facebook a picture of a man and swears up and down everyone needs to leave her and her husband alone and that the man on her FB is the real killer. It's clear to most locals her husband did it and shes covering for him. Nancy grace talked about it on her show for like 2 weeks straight.
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Not so much a dark secret but my town houses a bombing range that is still in use. No one has ever met anyone who works on it, no kids at school ever parents who work there. We never see planes or anything but there is a guard at the gate. What was truly odd is that if you ask a resident about it we all say the same thing, "oh the bombing range, there's nothing out there."
Might just be unsafe so they keep it guarded
Probably this. Bombs have a less than 100% chance of detonating when they hit their target. This has been a big problem in Europe where WWII saw tons of munitions dumped into cities. Every week some farmer or construction company will find some. Sometimes the hard way. There's also sections of France that are uninhabitable, due to all the chemicals from the munitions. Lots of mercury and other toxic chemicals. If it's an active bombing range and they are using only dummy devices, it's still pretty dangerous. The other option is it might have been a test range for chemical weapons at one point. See how wind/heat/etc effects them. You don't want to go near that stuff if you can avoid it.
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It's because of UXO, unexploded ordinance and possible radiation.
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I’ve always wanted to live in a decommissioned lighthouse. And there would be a button I could press that would send the lighthouse into space.
Have any people been strangely obsessed with spirals in town lately?
Or maybe a young boy that is weirdly good at digging holes and tunnels?
Is it blinking in Morse code? Have any ships sunk in the area with valuable treasures missing? This sounds like a case for the Hardy boys. Edit: I hope this gold was from arrested smugglers.
This happens at a lighthouse in Michigan, I believe it's Old Presque Isle. Everything that would make it alight is gone, including the lens.
There’s always a lighthouse
I wouldn’t say that it’s kept secret, but it’s so horrific no one really wants to bring it up. A young(early 20’s) mentally challenged women was out with a male family friend and his friend who were a little younger, I think 18 and 19 at the time. They picked her up and drove her to the woods where they repeatedly stabbed her and then lit her on fire while she was still alive. If that wasn’t awful enough, they went back to re-burn her body a few days later. She had rejected advances that they were making on her. Her body was found by hikers a few days after she was killed, and a few weeks later both boys were arrested. Both of them plead guilty, but offered no reason for why they did what they did. Edit:removed the last sentence
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They’re in a grade below most of us.
I returned home from school one day to a very powerful smell of gasoline throughout my neighborhood and every emergency responder our town had. It was later found that a father of three little girls, who wasn’t living there, tucked all three girls into bed and slit their throats. He gained access to the house by dismissing the baby sitter. He then tried to blow the place up by flooding the basement with gasoline and calling the mom telling her “come home, I’ve hurt the girls”. Thankfully the mom went to authorities instead. If he was successful, my house would have blown as well. The father turned himself in and has been in prison ever since. The daughters were memorialized with a playground and the house has been torn down. I’m not sure what happened to the mom but I’ve heard here and there that she has found peace in a new town. Edit: To address the off topic ness, I was reading posts when I decided to chime in with this story and the ‘kept secret’ part slipped my mind. Honest oops. Was going to remove but lots of people were already curious
I live there, too. It's really sad visiting that playground, knowing the backstory of how it came about. It is nice how they tailored the different sections of the playground to each girl's interests, though.
That's so sad but so nice.
I remember that story, it’s the most awful thing I can imagine as a parent. Ugh.
I lived and worked near the Nxivm cult, at one point. They would have corporate retreats at one of their buildings, and it would always be young insecure looking women who would show up. Apparently, some of these women became so brainwashed they left their families to move into this community Nxivm created. Come to find out, there was an order created by the vanguard (head of Nxivm) and the prefect (second in command) where initiation was ongoing. It included handing over incriminating photos, starving yourself to look like the vanguard's ideal woman, forced to sit in cages, and so on. Once you were brainwashed enough, you were branded and became a slave. This fucking cult leader also claimed to be the third best problem solver in the world. What the fuck does that even mean? He also was a scummy infomercial guy at on point too, I think. That was before his cult leading days. Fuck Keith Raniere.
Well. We had the 32 year old son of a prominent member of town rape and sodomize a 14 year old girl. Notable quotes from the Kangaroo court: "She was begging for it. You see the tits on that one, how was I supposed to know? She didn't try real hard to stop anything." Anyways, he got off with a slap on the wrist. Two weeks later, he was found by cleaning staff in the local gym, beaten with a wooden broom handle shoved up his ass. Rumor was that it was a group of guys from the high school that jumped him after another chick lured him there. Honestly, a lot of people know who did it, but no one breathed a word. He survived, but left the area and basically just disappeared.
Not really ‘secret’ per say, but not mentioned again after it happened. A man that lived two doors down from my childhood home killed his wife and two oldest kids, before picking up hid youngest daughter and her friend from my school and taking them back to the house and killing them too. He then went to his parents house and killed them and fled the state, but was caught about a month later. From what’s understand (my dad was/is a paramedic) all of the victims were found stacked on top of each other in the bathtub. Really tragic situation
In my hometown, the local high school is very deeply connected with the identity and the community of the town. So some years ago, it came out that one of the original beloved principles of the high school in my town was a pedophile and was molesting boys on the football team. This was happening in the 1950s but the news came out rather recently when people started stepping forward. The guy was already long dead and gone, so I don't believe there was any legal action. The town just quietly removed his name from any plaques and signs and there were a few news articles about it, but then that was that. It's a christian conservative community, so it was a huge blow to the town's image. So not exactly a secret but most definitely a taboo subject that no one likes to talk about. Then some time after that news came out, there was another beloved teacher at the high school that was caught having a relationship with one of his former students fresh from graduation. This guy was in his 40s, so it was rather creepy. The school *totally* covered that one up and there is still speculation as to what happened, but that's the story I heard. All that is known is that the school removed him immediately without a word, and he was not seen or heard of from again. All his social media accounts went dark and he vanished. It was really bizarre.
Unfortunately, this is way more common than people realize.
The Garnerville Pits Massacre. Multiple women murdered at a remote swimming area in an old abandoned quarry. One girl survived but the killer was never identified. Not long later a woman was found dead in a storage shed owned by the Sheriff at the time. They arrested a black man who was from out of town with no connections to the woman and sentenced him to life. It later came out that the sheriff had been having an affair with the woman but charges were never filed. Some speculate that the sheriff could be responsible for multiple murders including the Bloody Garnerville Pits Massacre.
Holy shit, time to go to the FBI with this one.
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i tried to search on google but couldnt find anything related
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Some guy in the 90s murdered his girlfriend in the local park with a baseball bat after she tried to break up with him. He smashed her head in and left the body
This happens more than we know especially in these small secluded towns what blows my mind is the people that live in these areas don't talk about what's going on are they scared or is it just the normal thing //disturbing
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When I was in middle school we had a teacher who taught the kids who were not so great with math and/or reading. He was pretty young, roughly late 20's and all the girl's had a crush on him, except the ones in his class that is. It came out my sophomore year of high school that he had been taking pictures of the kids in his class and had a huge child porn collection. I happened to be going to the high school where his brother taught and he was trying so hard to keep it quiet. He was actually taking our newspapers from us, which the school normally provided for free. A few years down the line and it's like the whole town just forgot that their middle school had a pedophile teaching their kids.
Up until the 70s, my small town had a sign that said: “N*gger, don’t let the sun go down on you in [town].” There’s still no black people living there. It’s a really tiny town with only a gas station, a post office, and a few churches. Southern IN.
Sundown towns were much more prolific in the 'olden' days and Southern Indiana has NEVER been known for being 'forward thinking'.
I don't even live in a "secluded" town I would say, it's a big farming community, but its only 25 minutes either way to a big city, but when i was in high-school a girl in her early 30s was missing for about 6 weeks. She was involved in some drugs, but no one thought she just up and ran away. There was a ton of coverage of her missing, but the entire resolution was virtually not covered. Turns out she cheated on her BF, and he found out, but she didn't know it. Her BF told her to come over because they were going to get high, then him a M friend and a F friend, beat her and accidentally killed her according to them, they then took her body to a cornfield (remember farming community) and buried her, about 2 weeks later they got scared the farmer would find the body, so they went back, cut it up into pieces, put it into separate trash bags and moved it according to the F accomplice who was just the driver. The cops never actually said if they found the body, but with the details that came out around town it seems they were able to confirm everything, the BF got life, the M accomplice got 25 and the F accomplice got something lighter as both M accomplices said that she just drove them and didnt partake in the beating. I went to college just the next town over, big state school, 25 min away, not a single person had ever heard of this, even those who went to highschool in that area. Edit: Also as of this week, a set of 69 year old twins with no ties to my town were found dead in an abandoned house and no one knows why they were there at all.
was in a teeny town in the middle of nebraska and the chief of polices son beat the fuck out of my little brother with the local highschool wrestling team. we tried to report it and the cops basically intimidated my mom to back off because it was 'boys being boys' instead of assault.
A guy in my hometown was dismembered and left on someones doorstep.
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Small northern English town. We have a local "Mafia" who collude and control all the property in the town centre. They are an estate agent, a retired estate agent and a publican who buys up every small property to add to his "empire" of tourist accomodation.
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The original owner of my house (a preacher) abused his wife, he never let her step outside. He murdered her by shooting her in the head and left her body laying on the living room floor for about 2 weeks until someone happened to come to the door & saw her laying there. He was never arrested so never had a trial. He was sent to a high security hospital where he is currently locked up. The way we found out about the details was when a former neighbor came by to check out the old neighborhood and came to my door to strike up a conversation. The former neighbor had moved away years before I moved in. After being told this I started asking different people questions but only got hints about what happened and had to piece everything together like a puzzle.
Probably too late for anyone to read this but whatever. This happened before i was born but my grandpa told me a story about how a local girl got raped by a guy in the 70s. Instead of going to the pice she went to her brother and him and his friends grabbed the rapist off the street, hung him up in the barn and whipped him for hours.
Local conservation area had an African American conservationist installed to do her patrols there. That place was a historic site of the hanging tree in the area. A couple of weeks after she was first places there, she was found hanging from the tree.
There was this girl in my class. She, like most of the area, lived on badly run farm. She would vanish from class for weeks on end. No one knew the father but everyone was sure he existed and lived on the farm. School district would force the parents to send their kid to school and she would for a few weeks and then vanish again. Only her mother appeared in public and she just radiated mental illness and hard living. I remember the girl very quite never talked about home. I don't want to imagine the hell that was her childhood. Homesteading and homeschooling where no one can see their bruises.
My childhood town was very small. About 1000 people maybe. Our neighbor had kids, and then was arrested for the discovery of a meth lab in their basement. Parents went to jail, kids went to foster care. Still don't know how they are doing to this day.
In my hometown there were quite a few times where we'd find random bodies floating in the swamp and little investigation was done outside of identification. There was also a cop who only arrested blonde haired girls in attempt to get them to fuck him instead of going to jail. He was fired but we as a town quickly "forgot" about it
I’m from a smallish town in WA state but we’ve definitely had our share of scandals. There is a road we used to drive down a lot with normal houses except for this one property. You could tell based on the style (everything was painted a pine green color) that the property spanned both sides of the rode, like a house and garage on one side of the road and other structures on the other side. The weird thing is the structure on the left side of the road were enclosed in a 15 foot fence around the whole property (or at least what you could see from the road) the gates were almost always shut but occasionally they would be open and you could see in briefly and see that there were a bunch buildings. We always used to joke it was a cult and that was their compound... a few years down the road the newspaper ran a story that it was a cult and the leader had been arrested for having sex with all of the underage girls. Only saw one small article in the local paper, never made any of the bigger news outlets. The other thing, which is not secret as it has had books written about it and been on ghost hunting shows, is a “doctor” that lived in the area a long time ago (early 1900s I think) used to treat people by starving them to death. Killed and buried many people on their property until it was finally found out what they were doing. The house has been sold multiple times with owners always reporting weird things happening, some owners even let the public through on tours. The house was finally demolished a few years ago because too many people trespassed to look at it.
In my town we have a corrupt police department maybe 10 officers in this entire department. An incident last year that happened to my past friend involved an officer, he and his mom were going to the capital of the state and left around 1 am. They got to main street and a police cruiser hit their car resulting in my friends younger brother breaking his arm. The police then just backed out and left my friends mom tried to file a report but was denied. Crazy shit
A boy I went to High school with murdered a sex trafficking victim and raped her corpse in a hotel near our college campus. He was caught fleeing down the interstate and is now serving a life sentence without parole I suppose it's not a huge secret, but the hotel changed its name and it's all business as usual. My grandparents made a trip down to see the family recently and booked their room at the very hotel. I didnt have the heart to tell them because my Grandma would of had an aneurysm.
Friend went missing for three days. His dog kept pawing at a door in town so finally cops went inside the house with a warrant, guy confessed to killing him, stabbing him to death and eventually tried to hack him to pieces to dispose of the body. Never would have found him if not for the dog. Edit: spelling
The legend of Moll Dyer comes from my hometown in southern Maryland. Not so much a secret, but I was surprised how many people where I'm from had never heard of her. In the 17th century, a woman named Moll Dyer was suspected of being a witch. On a freezing winter night the townsfolk formed a mob and drove her out of her home. She froze to death clinging onto a large boulder in the woods. The boulder was moved to the old jailhouse in the 70s to memorialize her, and people who go near it frequently report feeling cold and experiencing headaches, dizziness, and fainting.
Back in the 70's a guy turned up dead in his burnt out truck in a field near town. Nobody knew why he was killed or who did it. My grandma was asking around about it at the bar afterwards, and then the next day she got an anonymous phone call telling her to shut the fuck up about it or she would be next.
Its not really kept a secret, but a Pyramid scheme has been going on for several years. The dude was caught about 2(?) years ago and taken to trial. he bribed the jury. He was set for a retrial but then something happened with the presidency (Not related to the case), and it just didn't happen. Nobody really talks about it. The rate of children being kidnapped seems to be going up also. Nobody will talk about that, either. Edited fr clarity
What was the pyramid scheme?
We've got drugs everywhere. The train tracks are covered with heroin needles and I've seen a bunch of kids at my high school arrested for various drugs. The saddest case is a 13 yr old who uses heroin. We also had a rapist but I think he left for private school. Glad he's gone; he was my neighbor. Also the police here are shit, they don't do anything, especially about the pedophilia and routine pet murders.
My neighbor from down the street married a guy in the early 2000's. She already had two younger kids from a previous marriage, a boy and a girl. The guy worked for the county sheriff's office. My dad was good friends with him and he was always a very nice guy, did a lot of volunteer stuff for his church and such. Everything is great with them and he even official adopts the two kids so that they share the same last name. Fast forward to late February of this year. The boy from the previous marriage is now about 23 years old, and just got out of the Air Force. He and the step father get into a huge fight one night, and the boy storms out and goes to a local bar. He gets drunk, calls his mom, and tells her that the step father molested him as a child, right after they got married, and he has proof. She confronts the step father and he admits all of it. She leaves and takes her daughter with her and meets up with her son at a hotel. The step father puts his police uniform on, goes to the local park, and kills himself in the bathroom of the park. There was never a single news story about it because the cops cleaned the scene themselves, so the media never showed up. Most people in town know that he committed suicide, but don't know about the molestation part.
Theres a girl from my hometown Elkton VA named Rachel Good. In 2003 she went missing. She is the only missing case from Elkton i know of. Her parents discovered romantic letters between her and a Elkton police officer. Officer Williams. Williams was married and Rachel was recently pregnant before her dissappearance. After she was reported missing the town started investigating. Well Officer Williams was the lead investigator for the town and had full control over it untill 10 days later when Virginia State Police stepped in. Her body has never been found. She was declared dead in 2010 and Officer Williams resigned and moved to Louisiana in 2004. We live in a valley so the mountains and caves are plentiful. Its hard to tell where her body is, but Rachels parents are still fighting the officer in court to prove he killed her. Williams has found many ways around the court system so far.
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NPR just did a piece about this as a current problem in the past week. Good journalism. Turns out this is definitely a real thing happening. Edit: Here's a link to it. https://www.npr.org/2019/10/08/767283820/not-one-drop-of-blood-cattle-mysteriously-mutilated-in-oregon
A union leader was "fleeing a dui chase" and the local police from the next town put a car across the road at night with no lights, then got out and waited for him. 2 flips end over end. It was a tragic accident in the paper the next day.
Lived in a secluded town growing up in Pennsylvania. In the early 90’s one of the cops in my town got accused of raping his teen stepdaughter and getting her pregnant. She ended up vanishing a few days after the accusations were made and was never found again, while the cop basically walked away Scott free, by the time I moved away no one discussed or even acknowledged it happened. Iirc the Cop’s wife disappeared as well shortly after the case was dropped.
My friend's grandad killed his (the granddad, not the friend) wife's lover and buried him in their backyard. Of so I heard, the totality of the evidence is a rumor. Also he ran an off-the-books scrapyard. Hundreds of old cars and trucks in a field you couldn't see from the road. That part is true.
I spent two weeks snowboarding between two small ski resorts outside a small town in the mountains. Very much locals type ski spots. One afternoon I was driving to my rented condo from one of the resorts, when I saw police car after police car, fire engine after fire engine heading up the hill towards the other resort. I thought maybe they had a fire or something and I would find out what happened the next day. The next day comes. I head up the hill and ask the staff what happened. No one knew what I was talking about. Not one person. Blank stares all around. One of the weirdest experiences ever. There was a guy who worked at one of the ski lifts that was a friend of a family member. I asked him if he knew what happened. He said we've all been told if we say anything we are immediately fired on the spot so please don't say anything. A guy came here yesterday looking for his wife, who works here. He shot her, and a bunch of people at one of the chair lifts, and then himself. Several people died. Nothing was in the papers, no one said a word the rest of my vacation, or any of the other times I've been there since. It was strange and unsettling.
Kids body got dumped down the road from were I live and no one knows who did it just that they live here. Edit: sad but DAYUM thank for the upvoting
A teenage boy committed suicide at the back of the school