(A word of explanation here. Years ago, I pastored a tiny Baptist Church north of Greenville, and in between the church and the fellowship hall, there was a big, leaning elm tree, and next to it was a round concrete slab buried in the earth - the lid of the septic tank, of course. One night at a youth lock-in, one of the kids asked me to tell them a scary story. So we went outside and sat next to the old concrete lid, and I told them a much rougher, simpler version of the tale you are about to read. It was such a hit with the kids that I was asked to tell it at every lock-in for several years thereafter! Trigger warning for sensitive readers, though - some kids die in this story. If that bothers you, read no further!)
THE OLD WELL BY THE CHURCH
A Horror Story by
Lewis B. Smith
“This, of course, is our main sanctuary,” Terry Thornton told the new young pastor – me, that is – on a warm summer day in 1987. “And across the way here is our fellowship hall, which once an Army barracks. Deacon Braddock bought it as surplus after Korea and moved it onto the lot, here where the old schoolhouse once stood.”
I nodded, anxious to make a good impression. I was only twenty-four years old and had been an ordained minister since I was twenty, but this would be my first actual pastorate. Shady Creek Baptist Church was a tiny little country church on a busy highway connecting Fox City to Greenburg, equidistant from both towns, and able to muster about two dozen congregants on a good Sunday. The church had just voted to call me as pastor the previous Sunday, and my wife and I were preparing to move into the tiny, boxlike parsonage next door.
“What happened to the schoolhouse?” I asked.
“Oh, the school shut down around 1930 or so, and when we bought the land here, we used it for Sunday School space – the church had more people back then. Not many years later, lightning struck the old building and burned it to the ground – good thing the wind was out of the south that day, or the embers might have set fire to the church, too.”
Between the two buildings was a huge elm tree that leaned sideways, towards the church, at an angle of at least fifty degrees. Next to it was a circular stone lid lying half buried in the earth, with a rough wooden fence surrounding it.
“Is that the septic tank?” I asked.
Thornton’s face darkened for just a moment, but it might have been the August heat.
“Nope,” he said. “That’s the cap over the old well. Ground’s not too stable around it, so we put the fence there to keep kids away – when we actually have kids coming to church, which hasn’t been lately.”
“That tree looks like it could fall over any second,” I said.
“It’s leaned over that hard since I was a boy,” the sixty-year-old deacon replied. “When I was a wee lad, the firewood box for the old Spider Hill School was shoved up next to it, and the tree – less than a foot around then! - was growing out from under it. That’s why it leaned.”
“Spider Hill?” I asked.
“Odd name, ain’t it?” he said with a wry smile. “You can’t really see it now that so many trees have been planted, but back when all this was plowed up for cotton fields, you could see eight long ridges that branched off on all sides of this hill where the church is. Someone said it looked like a big spider, and the name stuck. But after the bad time, they changed the name of the school. Didn’t do any good though – the school shut down two years later.”
“What bad time?” I asked.
“I was just a boy then, and I went to school up in Fox City,” he said. “All I ever heard was gossip and rumor about what happened. Buncha kids died, somehow, during an ice storm. Miz Anne Driscoll, now she was a teacher at the school back then. I reckon she’s the only one left that knows the whole story. She’s one of our members, but she lives in a nursing home in Greenburg. She’s never been quite right, these last fifty years or so. But they say her memories of everything before that day are sharp as a tack! Now, enough ancient history. Let me show you our fellowship hall!”
Thornton never did bring up the subject of the “bad times” again, and when I casually mentioned it to the older members of the church, none of them would say a word about it – even the ones who had lived in the community their whole lives.
After a couple of weeks, I forgot all about that cryptic remark. Preparing sermons every Sunday, visiting the sick, and trying to grow the congregation kept me pretty busy. The next summer, as the church was preparing to celebrate its fortieth anniversary, I began researching. I planned to write a short history of its founding to hand out at the big homecoming celebration.
Shady Creek Baptist Church was formed in 1948, when two smaller churches with dwindling membership had pooled their resources to buy the land out on the highway where the current building was located. In an old article about the dedication of the sanctuary, I found this cryptic sentence: “The proposed Shady Creek Church purchased the land where the old Spider Hill School building stands and plans to use the schoolhouse as a fellowship hall and Sunday school building. The school has been deserted since shortly after the bizarre tragedy of 1928 that claimed the lives of so many students. The new sanctuary sits about a hundred feet south of the old school building.”
That line jumped out at me - “so many students.” What bizarre tragedy had occurred on this site sixty years ago? The next time I was in Greenburg, I visited the Chase County Historical Society’s newspaper archives at the library to see what I could find out. The results of my search left me with more questions than answers.
“TWELVE CHILDREN AND TWO TEACHERS PERISH DURING ICE STORM,” read the front page of the Greenburg Herald for January 30, 1928. The accompanying article described how a sudden ice storm had stranded thirty students and three teachers at the school the week before, and then said that only half of them had survived the ordeal – but the cause of their deaths was left unexplained. Had they died of hypothermia? None of the follow-up articles gave a clue.
Next, I searched the microfilm records of the Fox City Mirror. I thought a more local paper might provide a detailed account, but I was disappointed. “FOURTEEN DEAD IN FREAK ACCIDENT DURING RECENT ICE STORM,” read the headline. But what was the accident? The article never said, although it did contain this grisly tidbit: “Grieving parents were informed by authorities that few of the remains recovered were intact, and some of the victims were never found at all. Bits of clothes, flesh, and bone littered the scene as the Sheriff and his men searched for bodies.”
The Bonham Courier suggested that the fatalities may have been caused by a gas explosion, but the author of the article admitted: “The true cause of the deaths of so many young students remains unknown; Sheriff Collins has refused to provide any details, only to say that the children and their teachers were killed in a freak accident that left few remains to be recovered.”
A gas explosion? Then why did the school building remain standing for another twenty-five years, only to be destroyed in a fire? And, if the culprit were not an explosion, then what could have brutally killed twelve children and two of their teachers during that freak ice storm some sixty years ago? That was when I remembered Thornton’s comment about Mrs. Driscoll, who had been a teacher during the incident.
I had been to visit all the church’s members that still lived in the area during my first year; partly to try and coax the backsliders to return, and partly to get to know the sick and elderly who could no longer attend in person. I had paid one visit to Anne Driscoll – she was a thin, white-haired woman who spent most of her days in a wheelchair, scooting around the nursing home to visit with the other occupants. She had greeted me with a warm smile and patted my hand when I visited her. Then she regaled me with stories of the old Pecan Thicket Church she grew up in; it was one of the two congregations that had combined to form Shady Creek forty years before. I decided that I would pay her another visit and try to find out as much as I could about “the bad time” that had struck Spider Hill School sixty years ago.
About a week later I went to the nursing home and found her seated in her room, quietly watching WHEEL OF FORTUNE on television. We chatted for a moment, and then I asked her about what happened at the school in January of 1928. She seemed hesitant to talk at first, but I explained that I was working on my master’s degree in history (which was true) and wanted to get an accurate account of this event from one of the few living witnesses. She finally agreed to talk and told me I could record what she said. I pulled out a small cassette recorder that I had used when interviewing World War II veterans for my honors thesis, and then taped the conversation that followed. What follows is a transcript of her story. I have edited out a few digressions, but other than that, everything you are about to read is the testimony from an eyewitness to an event of unspeakable horror.
I’m the last one of us, you know. I was the only teacher to survive the events of that awful day and night, and most of the boys who survived went off to fight the Japs and Germans and many never came back. The girls I kept track of are all gone, I think – Lucy Day died of cancer three years ago. She used to come visit me, but we hardly ever talked about what we saw – both of us preferred to bury those memories. But here lately, I find myself thinking about it more and more. It’s just so awful, Pastor, it’s hard to hold it in, knowing as I do about the things that lurk in the earth under our feet. Maybe God sent you today, so I could unburden myself to someone before I die.
It was 1928, and I was a newly married young schoolteacher living with my husband up in Fox City. He worked at the cottonseed mill, and I worked at the school. You have to understand, back then there wasn’t a highway to connect us to Greenburg. One narrow oil-top road, with deep ditches on either side most of the way, overhung by trees in the river bottoms. Since Spider Hill was the tallest rise between Greenburg and Fox City, any time we had a big ice storm the road was shut down. In fact, a couple of winters before, the school was frozen in for three days. They had a big wood-burning stove and plenty of firewood, but those kids got really hungry before the road thawed out enough for their folks to come get them. The school board voted then to maintain a pantry and add a small cookstove so that we could feed the children in the event we got stranded again. Turned out food would be the least of our worries!
It was the well, you see. Our old well, next to the schoolhouse door, had gone dry the year before, so in the summer of 1927, one of the parents brought a big boring rig up to the top of the hill and drilled us a new well. It was about forty feet north of the schoolhouse, next to the woodpile. It turned into a bigger chore than he imagined – he drilled down seventy feet and then hit a void that seemed to have no bottom! But there was no water there, only a horrible, foul odor that he attributed to natural gas. It was strong enough that the guy working the borer got sick, so they covered the hole with a big concrete slab and put a fence around it to keep the kids away.
I noticed something odd after that. All the insects vanished off of Spider Hill. We always had our share of roaches and waterbugs and grasshoppers in the fall, and of course the big old black and yellow garden spiders wove their webs everywhere. But that fall, we saw none of them. Whatever fumes leaked from under that slab seemed to have poisoned them. Turned out, we didn’t need the fence to keep the kids away from the slab, either. They gave the place a wide berth during recess, even though they wandered all over the rest of the schoolyard. I remember asking one little boy why they never got close to the fence, and he wrinkled his nose and said: “That hole in the ground STINKS, Mrs. Driscoll!”
But managing three dozen kids ranging in age from six to eighteen was a big chore for three teachers, so we didn’t give a lot of thought to it. Fall slid into winter, and we went out on Christmas break with light hearts – the kids glad to be away from us for three weeks, and us equally so to be free of them. It was a jolly Christmas that year; poor old Herbert Hoover hadn’t taken office yet, the Great Crash was still over a year off, and the Dust Bowl hadn’t really hit yet. I spent that Christmas with my Charlie and his folks – my Ma was still living but she and I weren’t on the best of terms, and just before I headed back to school, I found out that I was expecting our first child. I was excited for a new year and a new baby, but the girl miscarried in February – and the year, for us, miscarried a month before.
We didn’t have all the fancy weather radars back then, but the old timers had been saying it was going to be a rough winter, and sure enough, we’d already had one decent snowfall in December. But here in North Texas, as you well know, it’s not the snowfalls that shut the country down – it's the ice storms. The sleet and freezing rain started in about ten o’clock on the morning of January 11 and kept going all day – waves and waves of the stuff. A couple of parents came out and picked up their children early, but most folks worked, or else they were already iced in. We’d joked about getting frozen in that fall, but now the real thing was upon us. We had a week’s worth of food in the pantry, and the woodpile and kindling box was fully stocked, so we thought we were ready – and we were, I suppose, for the weather, at least. I went outside at three that afternoon, all bundled up, to see if any cars or wagons were going to make it up the hill to pick up the children, but the road was glazed over with nearly an inch of solid ice, and more falling all the time. No one showed up, so I turned to go inside. I heard something odd as I headed back to the schoolhouse – a long, hard scraping sound, like stone on stone. It struck me as strange, but I didn’t pay any attention to it. I was more concerned about cooking up supper for our little flock.
It was getting dark fast, so Mister Skinner – that was our principal, a good, solid man in his forties, a veteran of the Great War – told the two oldest boys, Alan Macklin and George Arnold, to run out to the woodpile and bring in as much as they could carry. It was going to be brutally cold outside, and those kids needed to stay indoors after dark. Alan was seventeen and nearly done with school, and Georgie, his pal, was only a year younger. Both of them had talked about transferring to Greenburg or Fox City so they could play football, but they lived a bit too far out, and their families didn’t have an automobile.
They came back a few minutes later, each with a big armload of wood, and Georgie asked Mr. Skinner who had taken the lid off of the old well.
“No one,” Skinner said. “It’s too heavy for two people to lift, and it was sitting where it’s always been this morning.”
“Well, it ain’t now,” Alan said. “It’s lying on the ground a few feet away, and that old shaft is open as can be. You can smell the reek of it ten feet away!”
“That’s odd,” Skinner said. “I’ll look at it tomorrow. You boys go get another load of wood, and that should hold us till morning.”
The boys headed back out to the woodpile, and Skinner shut the door after them – that wind was howling out of the north and blowing sleet in every time it was opened. Less than a minute later, we heard the godawfulest scream you can imagine coming from the direction of the woodpile. Bessie Goodman, the other teacher, tried to calm the children down as Principal Skinner and I ran out to see what was the matter.
Georgie was already gone. I could see a dark spatter across the ice and sleet that covered the ground next to the woodpile, but in the fading light I didn’t register at first that it was blood. Alan was running towards us, screaming bloody murder, but my attention was fixed behind him, past the woodpile, where SOMETHING was rising up out of the old well.
It was black. That’s all I can say with certainty – it was pitch black, so black that if you looked into it too long, you might forget that light ever existed. As far as shape – it kept shifting and changing. I got the sense that somewhere in it were eyes staring at me, full of hunger and greed, but I could not see them. What I could see were legs – or were they tentacles? It’s hard to say; one moment they seemed jointed like the legs of a spider, then next they were fluid and wriggling like the arms of an octopus. And there were so many of them – more than I could possibly count!
My mind was still processing all of this when I realized Alan’s screams, which had drawn us outside in the first place, had grown louder. One of those black, inky arms had wrapped around his ankle and was dragging him back toward the abomination that was half in, half out of the old well!
I have to give Principal Skinner credit. He charged straight at that thing, no weapon in his hand, determined to save that boy. There was an axe stacked on top of the woodpile – he'd placed it up there to be out of reach of the younger children. Quick as a flash, he grabbed it and brought it down with all his strength on the tentacle that was wrapped around Alan’s leg. I heard this shrill keening – not a scream, exactly, because only humans and animals scream. This thing was neither. But it seemed hurt; Alan stumbled to his feet and ran, trailing several feet of that slimy, severed black appendage from his ankle. I caught him in my arms and saw Mr. Skinner flailing desperately with the axe as four more of those arms wrapped around him. He gave one last scream of defiance as that thing tore him into pieces; the axe went flying and buried itself in the ice in front of us, his severed hand still grasping the handle. I pushed Alan towards the building and grabbed the axe before following him. I had to pry Principal Skinner’s hand off of it before retreating into the school; it was still warm to the touch. After all these years, I can still feel it.
The kids were screaming and crying, and Bessie looked at me with her mouth wide open, trying to form a question.
“GET IT OFF ME! IT BURNS!!” shrieked Alan, cutting off whatever she was going to say. The black, tarry thing looked like some sort of snake or eel wrapped around his ankle, and it smelled worse than anything I’d ever inhaled – the same awful reek that came out of the old well, only much stronger. As I drew closer, I saw that Alan’s ankle was smoking where that ghastly thing was wrapped around it, and the yellowish ichor that it exuded had already eaten through his pant leg and was burning his flesh.
“Hold still!” I snapped, and hefted the axe. I waited until he quit thrashing and brought the axe down hard on the glistening black thing just a couple of inches from his leg. It bit clean through and deep into the floor – I was a strong young woman back in those days! The three feet or so I had cut free began writhing across the floor, leaking that same yellow ooze. I grabbed the poker next to the wood burning stove and scooped the tentacle into the flames, slamming the iron door shut behind it. But the part of the thing that was wrapped around his ankle was burning deeper into his skin, and Alan was screaming in agony. Bessie brought me a knife, and I tried to cut it free, but it was sunk so deep into the boy’s flesh that I couldn’t dig it out without cutting into his leg. Finally, Alan passed out from the pain, and as I watched in horror, the monstrous appendage burned him down to the bone. It had quit moving, but it was fused into his flesh and bone now.
“Forgive me, boy,” I said, and swung the axe twice, severing his leg bones just above the place where the thing had burned through the flesh. I used the ash shovel to throw his foot and that horrible thing wrapped around it both into the fire. One of the boys handed me his belt so I could use it as a tourniquet on Alan’s leg – farm kids were tough back then! Remarkably, though, that stump hardly bled. Whatever that yellow fluid was that bled out of the severed tentacle, it had effectively cauterized the wound.
About this time little Sue Evans called my name. She was standing on tiptoe looking out one of the windows.
“Missus Driscoll, there’s something black moving around out there!” she said in a hushed tone.
I opened my mouth to tell her to get away from the window, but before I could get the words out, the glass shattered and one of those horrible appendages wrapped around her and yanked her outside so fast that she didn’t even have time to scream or yell or anything. We found her lower leg in the woodpile the next day.
By now all the children were screaming, and everyone had fled to the far side of the schoolhouse. The light was fading fast, but you could still see that awful blackness as it passed in front of the windows on the south side of the school. About ten minutes after it took Sue, one of those tentacles came reaching in through the broken window, curling around and lifting its tip into the air as if sniffing for us.
“What is that thing?” asked Bessie breathlessly.
“Hell if I know,” I said. “It came out of the well.”
“I don’t like it!” squealed Ellen Green. “Sue was my friend!”
As if it heard us, that appendage reached across the schoolhouse for us, stretching out longer and longer. Ellen and the other little girls screamed, and the boys – there were four of them left – moved in front of them to shield them. That awful black arm seemed to reach the limit of its reach a few feet in front of us, and then I saw the end of it split open, revealing a yellow maw ringed with glistening black teeth!
It was as if all the courage I had displayed in the last few minutes suddenly was drained out of me, and I found myself backing away, shrieking louder than the kids. That was when Bessie reached out and grabbed the axe from the floor beside me and charged at that thing.
“STAY THE HELL AWAY FROM MY KIDS!” she shrieked as she swung the axe in a mighty arc. The tentacle, or leg, or whatever it was, veered away from her, but she still caught it a glancing blow, gashing its surface. Yellow goo spattered down, smoking and burning where it hit the floorboards. The appendage withdrew towards the window, and poor, brave Bessie went after it, swinging the axe and screaming words that a proper young lady wasn’t even supposed to know back then! She caught up with it a few feet from the window, and with a downward swing managed to pin the awful thing to the floor. She planted her foot on it to yank the axe clear, and when she did its free end wrapped around her ankle. She cried out in pain and shock and drew back for another swing to cut her leg free.
That was when another tentacle came shooting through the window and wrapped around her neck, so quickly and powerfully that her defiant cry was cut short – and a second later, her head went flying off her shoulders! A third tentacle wrapped around her waist, and her poor body was hauled out through the broken window flopping like a bloody rag doll. I watched in horror as the remaining appendage flexed and wriggled until it pulled the axe loose. Then it felt around on the floor until it found poor Bessie’s head, wrapped around it, and dragged it through the window.
It was silent for a while after that, just the sobbing of the younger children and the calmer voices of the older boys and girls as they tried to soothe them. The awful realization set in that I was now the only adult left, and that all of these boys and girls were depending on me. I think that realization scared me even worse than whatever that hellish beast prowling around outside did.
The night that followed was so awful I’ve blotted most of it from my memory. That thing circled the school building all night, and one by one the windows were broken out as those hellish tentacles reached in to snag another victim. I managed to retrieve the axe, and two of the older boys lashed knives to the end of broomsticks. Lucy Day, bless her brave heart, only twelve years old – she got a toilet plunger, wrapped a curtain around one end, and set it ablaze. Whatever that thing was, it didn’t seem to like fire. She fended off those tentacles with her makeshift torch a half a dozen times that night.
But the thing, whatever it was, was clever. It would move away and wait for someone to get within ten feet of one of the windows. Every hour, it seemed, another child disappeared. An hour or so before dawn, Alan regained consciousness, and he grabbed at his missing foot and started keening, not exactly a scream, but not a groan either.
“It burns,” he moaned. “There’s something in my blood, Miz Collins, I can feel it! It’s moving around in my body and it hurts everywhere it touches!”
I tried to comfort him, but there were too many children who needed me. After a few moments, I had to run across the room to help Lucy fend off one of those tentacles – so I didn’t see Alan start dragging himself towards the front door until it was too late. I didn’t realize what he was doing until I felt that icy north wind at my back.
“What are you doing?” I screamed as I ran to drag him back inside. He was trying to stand on one leg, pulling himself up by the beam that held up the awning over the door.
“It wants me,” he said. “I can hear it in my head. It says it’ll make the hurt go away. I can’t stand the pain anymore!”
“Get back in here, you stupid clodhopper!” I yelled – I was furious at him for opening the door and putting us all in greater danger than we were already in. But before he could open his mouth to reply, three of those tentacles came shooting out of the darkness and carried him off. He screamed for a long time before falling silent. Dear Lord, that poor boy! I’ll regret those last words I said to him till the day I die, Pastor. He deserved better than to die being insulted by an adult who was supposed to protect him.
Dawn finally came, and that black thing retreated, sinking back into the well as the sun cleared the horizon. The thick coat of ice and sleet was stained red with blood, and body parts were scattered all over. It was ten degrees on the thermometer outside. Twelve children and two adults were gone, and the survivors were a sobbing, exhausted huddle of pathetic humanity.
I knew one thing – I had to get them out of there. It was January, days were short, and if that thing came out again when it got dark, I wasn’t sure any of us would survive. So as soon as it was bright enough to see, I gathered the children up and we hit the road. It was still coated with ice, and slicker than owl spit, but we steadily made our way northward, down into the South Sulphur bottoms and up the hill towards Fox City. There was a big farm about two miles away, on the other side of the river, and we got there by mid-morning, our clothes torn and knees bruised from slipping and falling on the ice, the smaller children half dead with exhaustion, but we had made it.
Farmer Grissom, a sturdy old soul who was related to half the county, listened to my story in disbelief at first. But as he took in those terrified faces and the bloodstains that spattered our clothes, he realized that something horrible had indeed happened. He let us warm up, and his wife fed the starving children as many eggs as she could cook up.
“If what you say is true, I need to get the children into town,” he said. “The truck can’t handle this ice, but my tractor can. I’m going to put you all on my hay trailer and take you up to the sheriff’s office. I have a telephone, but the lines are down from all the ice. Get warm, and bundle everyone up – it’s going to be a long ride!”
It was five miles to Fox City, and his tractor would have made the trip in under an hour with normal conditions. Chugging along over the ice, it took nearly three hours. We huddled together for warmth under a pile of blankets and bedspreads Mrs. Grissom had pulled out of the closet for us. The children were beginning to recover themselves, and a couple of them even tried to sing songs as we bounced along the road.
I related the whole story to Sheriff Collins – he was my daddy’s cousin and had known me since I was a girl. The older children all backed up what I told him. I’ll give him credit; once he realized we were sincere, he moved quickly. The air was already warming, and by nightfall it was above freezing. He called as many as he could, and by dawn he had a posse of two dozen good men assembled. Jesse Jones, owner of the only gas station in Fox City, had filled about six barrels – fifty-five-gallon drums – with gasoline, and had them loaded in the back of his truck. The sheriff told me I should remain with the kids, but I was determined to see that thing killed, and told him so in no uncertain terms. My Charlie was one of the posse, and he tried to talk me out of going, too – but I put my foot down. My friends and students were dead, and I wanted vengeance, pure and simple. I also knew that thing would haunt my dreams forever if I didn’t see it destroyed.
So about ten o’clock in the morning, we set out – a string of cars and trucks, driving south from Fox City, through the river bottom and up the hill. Everything was still as we left it the previous morning – scattered bits of people lying, half frozen, scattered across the schoolyard, the rapidly melting ice fading from red to pink. Several of those men, I think, hadn’t believed me up to that point, but they did now. A couple of them lost their breakfast as they saw the horrors we’d fled from.
Mr. Jones backed his truck up to the old well, and one by one, he tipped those barrels of gasoline over so that the fuel drained into the old well. Half the men stood nervously by with shotguns and pistols, while the others fanned out across the schoolyard, gathering up all the body parts they could find.
There was no sound, except for the low voices of the posse, and the south wind whistling through the treetops. One by one, the barrels of gasoline were tipped over and poured into the well, over 300 gallons by the time they were all emptied. Still no sound came from those foul-smelling depths. The Sheriff grabbed a road flare from his car and lit it.
“Reckon you boys better stand back,” he said laconically, and after everyone had moved back, he lobbed it into the old well and quickly retreated.
There was an enormous “WHOOOMP!!” as that gasoline exploded, and the whole top of the hill shook. Clods of dirt and rock went rocketing into the sky. Then, as the sound of the explosion faded, another sound – a horrible, unearthly screeching that caused grown men to fall to the ground and cover their ears. It grew louder and louder, and then a massive, flaming THING exploded out of the well.
It was wrapped in flames, and I never did get a very good look at its true form. I could see those horrible legs, or tentacles, flailing in all directions, scattering burning drops of fluid everywhere. The thing paused for a moment on the hilltop, quivering and keening – and then from all around it, guns opened up – shotguns, pistols, rifles, whatever men had brought with them. The thing tore through one side of the ring they had formed around it, killing two men who stood in its way – their bodies grasped in flaming appendages and ripped in half – and then it sped down the hill at an unearthly speed, down toward the South Sulphur River, which was out of its banks from the rainfall we’d had earlier in the week.
One man, Russ Davis, who had been very close to the well, shrieked and passed out as the monstrosity made its escape. While the bodies of the two fallen men were lifted into the sheriff’s truck, he regained consciousness and began screaming again. I can still hear the words he cried out echoing in my mind:
“That face!! Dear God, when the wind blew the flames aside for a moment, I saw its face! Its skin was black and scaly and slimy all at once, but that thing was wearing Principal Skinner’s face!”
Davis never was right after that, and he took to drinking heavily. His wife left him – because, she said, his nightmares were so bad neither of them could ever sleep for his screams. Two winters later, during the next bad ice storm we got, he put a shotgun in his mouth.
As for the monster that had taken so many lives during that awful night, it was never seen again. They followed its trail of yellow ichor and soot down to the river, and found several charred limbs or tentacles it had shed during its flight. But nothing washed up downstream, and nothing like it has been seen here in Chase County since.
What was it? I will never know. Something that didn’t belong in this world, if you ask me. How it got here, and how long it slept in the ground before that boring machine woke it up, I don’t know that, either. But I am sure it didn’t belong here - and I just pray there is nothing else like it lurking in the earth under our feet.
As for the well, they poured several tons of rock and concrete down it, and then capped it off with the sturdy cement slab that seals it to this day. There’s never been the slightest hint of any of the things we saw, or heard, or smelled around it that night – not in sixty years. But I still won’t go anywhere near it. Because . . . I keep thinking, Pastor, what if that thing laid eggs down there? How many years would they incubate before they finally hatched?
Mrs. Driscoll was very tired when we were done talking, and I thanked her for her time and her candor. She seemed very relieved that someone else was finally carrying the burden of the terrible knowledge she’d borne alone for all those years. That fall, she died peacefully in her sleep, and I had the privilege of preaching her funeral service.
I’ve listened to that recording several times through the years, and even tried to find other witnesses of that day, but the few who were still alive from back then refused to talk about it. I stayed at Shady Creek as pastor for fourteen happy years. Eventually, I took another church job and moved away from Fox City and Spider Hill – although no one calls it that anymore.
But I ran into my successor as pastor of Shady Creek last week, and when we began swapping stories about our experiences there, he said something that rattled me very badly.
“I think a gas line has ruptured outside the church,” he said. “Every time I get near that old concrete slab, the smell is strong enough to knock you over!”
A gas line. Dear Lord, I thought, let that be all that it is.
