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.