Unanswered Questions - January 2021

 

We're back with another round of questions we just can't seem to shake, MMers. Hold on to your hats.

• When did Billy the Bull Moose at the Clarkson Animal Preserve die? And why is he still walking around in the woods?

• Who put the human skull at the top of the water tower in Arundel and for what purpose? Several local witches and warlocks claim it's a component to a deadly spell, but who is the target and when will it go into effect?

• How can you be in two places at once? We don't know, but you might want to ask Tyler Lancaster in Freeport and/or Winslow.

• What has six legs, two heads, and razor sharp teeth? We don't know either but it's terrorizing the farms in Raymond.

• Why did everyone in Beddington have the same dream on the same night? And why were they all walking through that empty temple?

Keep asking questions, MMers. If you have answers to these or any unanswered questions, please reach out to us at malevolentmaine@gmail.com. We'd love to hear from you.

Stay safe out there, Maine!

The Night Jean Massacre

Okay, heads up MMers, today’s story is our darkest, most terrifying report yet. This one comes from Strong, in Franklin County, an old mill town on the banks of the Sandy River, and while none of the individuals involved are still alive, the former sheriff of Strong was willing to share everything he remembers from the case.

Welcome to Strong!

It started when the Happy Sun Folk moved to Strong in the spring of 1967. The Happy Sun Folk, or the HSF as they referred to themselves, were a communal living society. They lived on an old farm their founder, Willem S. Fuller purchased. Their entire philosophy was free living. They worked together to live off the land sharing whatever they had with each other. The HSF believed that anything and everything physical was temporary and transient. It was the spirit or essence that was true. They were ostensibly a collective of artists, philosophers, and free thinkers, but what they really were was a cult.

The Happy Sun Folk

As sheriff Pat Sampson put it, “The Happy Sun Folk worshipped Fuller. He was their father, their husband, their god. If he said jump, the HSF did. If he said fly, they’d do their damndest to do it.”

They were tolerated by the people of Strong, but never really fit in. They mostly kept apart from the townsfolk, and in exchange they were allowed to live their hippie lifestyle up at their farm.

That all changed on the night of October 13, 1968. There were reports of screams coming from the HSF farm, Sunnyville, as the members called it. It wasn’t that uncommon to hear screams though; the HSF was into primal scream therapy and other odd “rituals” that were seen time to time from hunters and hikers who wandered a little too close to the farm by accident. These screams were different. They were more “painful” as the police reports indicated. They “sounded like someone was getting slaughtered,” according to one witness.

The big building

Finally the police had enough of the complaints and drove up to Sunnyville just after 11 pm. What they found was the most gruesome scene Sheriff Sampson had ever seen. We’ll let him describe it. We have to warn you this is quite graphic, so our more sensitive readers may want to skip ahead to the next section.

Sampson: “When we got up there, the farm was all quiet. It was just three of us, me, Bill Dempsey, and Jimmy Coloumbe. Jimmy was a rookie, just his first year on the force, and after what we saw…well, he didn’t make it maybe another month before he up and moved to Florida. Said he got a better job opportunity, but we all knew the truth, after what we saw up at the farm, he just couldn’t do it anymore. As for Bill, well... I guess I’ll get to that in a bit.

"The farm was all quiet and dark, but there was this weird smell in the air. It was like the smell that lingers after a fire. No, that ain’t right. It was like the smell in the air after a lightning strike. Fire and smoke, sure, but it was like the very air itself had been burned. We made our way to the big building. It was an old barn they had converted into their church or meeting hall or whatever. The door was locked, from the outside, which we thought was a little odd, but we’ll get back to that too. We knocked a few times, but no one answered. No one answered anywhere on the farm, but that smell… and something else, seemed to be coming from the big building, so eventually, me and Bill Dempsey kicked down the door. 

"What I saw stays with me to this day. I’m 89 years old and I’ll be the first to admit my memory ain’t what it was, but this is something that’s still just as clear as the day I saw it. The Happy Sun Folk were all in the meeting hall, all of them, we later confirmed that. Every single one of those hippies was locked in their own hall. And there was a bonfire burning in the middle of the room. It had been big, but by the time we got there it had burned down low. It was throwing an eerie red light all around the room. Maybe that made it worse, maybe that made it better, but I tell you, before we even saw the HSFers, I was already scared to the dickens.

"They were all there, like I said, all scattered around the room like they had been tossed there by a strong wind or something. They had been torn apart, and when I say torn apart, let me ask you, have you ever seen a man eat a chicken? Like ripping the wing bones apart, or tearing the leg off the body? It was like that, like someone, something, had just come in there and torn those poor bastards to shreds.

"There was blood everywhere, up and down the walls, the floor was sticky with it. Flies had already started to settle down to their feast. And that smell, it was worse inside the big building. It was that same burnt smell, but mixed with the blood of course. There was something swampy about it, like that rotting smell. I know this isn’t doing it justice, but it’s the best I can do. It smelled wrong; it smelled evil. And there, on the far wall, someone had written in blood two words. They’re seared into my mind and I wish for the life of me I could have made sense out of them. Someone had written, ’Night Jean’ in their own blood.”

Pretty gruesome, right? We warned you. But the story isn’t over. See it turns out that one of the HSFers, a young woman named Sandra Carmichael was still alive, despite some pretty serious injuries. While the officers secured the building, Sandra reached out to Officer Dempsey and clutched his leg. 

She only said a few words before she died right there in Bill Dempsey’s arms.

“There’s something beyond” she said. “We called to it and it came. Eyes like lost stars. Hair - oh God, I think it was hair, let it be hair, black and gray and hanging over its face. It moved. It moved in impossible ways. The Night Jean. We didn’t know. We didn’t know. Forgive us.”

Could this be what the HSF saw?

There were no foreign fingerprints on the bodies, anywhere on the big building, or anywhere on the farm that the police could find. There was no evidence of anyone being at Sunnyville that night aside from the members of HSF. Police found no footprints, tire marks, no weapons and no blood anywhere outside of the big building. In the end, the most brutal and horrific homicide in Maine history had to be labeled an unsolved mystery. The police offered their best guess at the time - that one of the members had gone insane and attacked the others before killing himself - but that couldn’t explain the savagery, the torn limbs and severed heads. In the end there was no explanation that made any sense, so everyone did their best to simply move on.

“Poor Bill,” Sheriff Sampson told us. “That girl dying in his arms, hearing her last words. It got to him. He was never the same after that. Two years later he put his service pistol in his mouth and pulled the trigger.”

The case of the Night Jean Massacre was never officially solved and remains a cold case to this day, but Sampson has a theory, one that’s grown in his mind in the five and a half decades since that awful night.

“I think they were doing something up there, something they shouldn’t have. Maybe there are things we’re not supposed to understand, creatures that exist beyond our universe. Maybe that crazy cult opened a portal or whatever and let something in, something that didn’t like our world, that hated its very existence. They called themselves the Happy Sun Folk, but they let in the night, and I think it killed them.”

Stay safe out there, Maine.

The Ghost Pig

 Okay, MMers, this one's a bit of a cheat, but it was too good to pass up. As you know, we're really focused on the paranormal and unexplained here in Maine, so when this story first crossed our inbox we weren't sure we wanted to use it - not because of the content, but because of its location. After much internal discussion, we agreed to make this one exception. So without further ado, we bring you the Ghost Pig of Effingham, New Hampshire.

The Ghost Pig

Effingham is a small town just over the Maine border. Boasting just over 1,400 people, the town was actually incorporated back in 1778. The story, which we heard from John Darling, author of the the book, The Wind Beneath the Eaves: An Oral History of Southern New Hampshire, involves Martin Leavitt, the grandson of the town's founding father in the year 1775. 

Martin Leavitt on his farm, 1775

Martin Leavitt was the third son of Moses M. Leavitt. He was a meager pig farmer living in the shadows of his more successful father and brothers. When the British troops came through Effingham (then known as Leavitt's Town) they demanded quarters from the locals. Many of the citizens reluctantly agreed. The commander of the British troops insisted that Leavitt slaughter his prize pig, Rufus, to feed his men. Leavitt refused, he had raised Rufus from a baby and he knew the pig very well could change his fortune. The commander threatened to burn Leavitt's far to the ground, slaughter his entire stock, and seed the earth with the pig's blood. 

Eventually Leavitt conceded, but before he did, he cursed the British. "Eat this pork and its owner will never leave you," were the words he was reported as saying. Some claim he mixed his own blood with the pig's to make a charm, some say his words were more of a jest than a serious hex, but the story seemingly ended there. 

Until it didn't.

For the next two centuries stories of the ghost pig began circulating out of Effingham. Multiple reports claim to have seen or heard the beast outside the area where Leavitt's pig farm once stood. One report from a hiker claimed that while, "walking in the woods, I suddenly heard a deep, grunting sound. There was the sound of the ground being trampled and bushes snapping. Whatever it was, it sounded huge, like the size of a compact car. I turned around, trying to find where it was coming from. All I saw were tusks the size of my arm and two burning red eyes." The hiker ran for his life and when he finally turned around again, he was alone. 

But the stories don't end there. People have reported trampled trash barrels, ransacked gardens, and smashed open camps. The ghost pig seems like a mutated, giant form of Rufus. He has been known to charge people, causing them to be injured leaping out of the way, before disappearing. At least two victims have claimed to have actually been trampled by Rufus, and a third victim appeared at the hospital with gore wounds from the beast's tusks. The one thing all of the stories have in common is the rage of the creature. 

Local citizens have embraced the story oft he Ghost Pig. There's Ghost Pig Brewery over on Route 25. There's Rasta Rufus Dispensary, even a statue dedicated to Martin Leavitt and the Ghost Pig int he center of town. 

Ghost Pig Brewing Co, Effingham, NH

"He's a hero to us," said Wayne DeWinter, the owner and head brewer at Ghost Pig Brewery. "We all heard the stories of Rufus growing up. A lot of us have seen or heard him. When I was thirteen, walking through the woods behind my parent's house with Bobby Taylor and Mike Smith, we heard him. He doesn't squeal like a pig on tv, He grunts and snorts, real scary stuff. We just ran, man, but we knew it was him. We knew."

If you're ever in Effingham, stop in for one of DeWinter's IPAs (that's India Pig Ale) or a Ghost Pig Porter, just make sure if you hear anything in the woods, you run away. You don't want to come face to face with the Ghost Pig of Effingham.

Stay safe out there, Maine (and New Hampshire)! 

School's Out

Listen up, Believers! Some readers in the Southern Maine region have informed me of something we need to pass on to you. Supposedly there's an abandoned school hidden in the woods somewhere between Sanford and the New Hampshire border. The story goes that there's a ghost that haunts the old school. It's supposedly the spirit of the old PRINCIPAL. No one really knows who this guy is and no real records of him can be found, but he's had a HAND in several reported hauntings in the area.

Two of our loyal viewers confirmed this is real. They even sent along some pictures of the old school. It's quite a hike into the woods, but if you're up for an adventure, you can find it. They reported that the air inside the old principal's office felt cold, and they heard an eerie laugh float through the abandoned halls.  

Be aware, as is always the case at Malevolent Maine we are not responsible for any bodily or spiritual harm that may come from your visiting any of the haunted sites we report on. You're entering at your own risk and any possessions, hauntings, or emotional damage done is on your own head. Please, stay safe out there, Maine.

Abandoned school in Southern Maine

MMer, Dan (Last name redacted) claims he felt a presence in this classroom.

"This is where we heard that creepy laugh," says MMer, Susan Crennel.

Video Game Virus?

Happy New Year, MMers! We hope your holidays were happy and bright and you haven't broken your New Year's resolutions yet. We've got a bit of an interesting one for you today and it involves video games. This one came to us from Bill in Camden. 

How many hours did we spend on this baby?

In 1991 Nintendo released the Super Nintendo Entertainment System in North America. It was a massive hit. Many of our readers have fond memories of Mario, Yoshi, Zelda, Donkey Kong, Final Fantasy, and many other classic video games. At the time, most games were still developed in Japan and then imported here in America. While we got plenty of the major games, there were still a number of games that never made the transition over to the US, including Final Fantasy V, Shin Megami Tensei, and Tales of Phantasia. Most of the time this happened because it wasn't financially worth it to import the games, but in the case of Dark Hour: Story of a House there was a far different reason.

Dark Hour was developed by an independent programmer, something unpopular at the time. In fact, so the rumor goes it was developed by one man, Mita Shuji, a former employee of Nintendo.. The story goes that Shuji made twelve copies of the game to share with developers at Nintendo. No one would ever talk about their beta testing of the game, but officials at Nintendo refused to give the copies back to Shuji. Several employees who played the game swore they would never speak about what they had witnessed, but did claim to feel sick afterwards. Dizziness, fatigue, nausea, and fainting were all common side effects. Reports even indicated that several of the people who played the game suffered from chronic headaches, mood swings, and general fatigue as much as six months after playing the game. In the end, Nintendo confiscated all twelve copies and destroyed them. 

Except, according to the rumors, there was a secret thirteenth copy that Shuji kept for himself. He mailed this to a random gamer in America, from a list of name she pulled from Nintendo Power magazine subscribers. According to the internet, this unnamed gamer received the game in the mail and assumed he had won a prize. He popped the game into his Super Nintendo and started to play Dark Hour: Story of a House. The game was in Japanese, of course, and he couldn't understand much of it, but he found he couldn't stop playing the game. 

He spent hours playing it, neglecting much of his personal life. He went to work, came home, and started playing Dark Hour. He stopped showering, stopped eating. He was wasting away playing the game. And when he wasn't playing the game, he was working on translating it. Remember, this was in the day before the Internet had really taken off, so this gamer, who the online community has named DGZ - Dark Gamer Zero (or sometimes just Gamer Dark) did most of this translation the old fashioned way, learning Japanese and painstakingly translating each line of dialogue.

We imagine it looked close to this.

No one really knows what Dark Hour is about. Most claim that the game starts in an abandoned house. The player wakes up and has to make his or her way from room to room. That's where the stories differ though. Some versions of the legend say that each room of the house gets more and more disturbing until the final rooms are so sinister that the player can no longer stand it. Other versions of the story claim that each room gets bleaker and bleaker, more simplified, more white space. By the end of the game the player is faced with the void and is left questioning how the house is any different than their own lives.

Either way, the stories all agree that the game only truly ends when the player is driven mad. The stories claim that DGZ finished his translation and made twelve copies of the game. He put these in the mail to twelve random people, then he went home and killed himself. 

What could get worse than this?

Whatever happened to the twelve English copies of Dark Hour is unknown. The story goes that each person who plays the game to completion is driven insane. Rumors have circulated for years that eight of the physical copies of the game cartridge have either been confiscated or destroyed. Each cartridge was labeled with a Japanese character for numbers 1-12. Only cartridge 三  (#3), 八 (#8), 九 (#9), and 十二 (#12) still exist. Several sources claim the game has been uploaded to the dark web, but a cursory (and really cursory; you never know what you will find - or what will find you - on the dark web) search did not turn up any hits. Still, the rumors persist that it can be found, played, copied, and shared if one truly knows where to look.

How does this game induce sickness and madness? Why would Shuji create a game to do this? And what is it really? What do players see in those final screens? Those are unanswered questions we may never discover the truth of. Video games are meant to be a fun source of entertainment, and for as much as some choose to rail against the violence in these games and their corruption of the youth of the world, it appears that is only true of one game: Dark Hour: Story of a House.

Stay safe out there, Maine!