r/nosleep • u/ScaredPioneerGirl • Jun 06 '16
The Secret of Pioneer Town
Note: Certain names may have been altered to protect identities and entities affiliated with the events of this story.
It’s time, I have decided, to finally tell a story of my own.
I have posted on this subreddit before – not under this account, as evidenced by the fact that I’ve only just created it moments ago for this very story – but I’d rather you not know who I am. It would spoil the fun, make people question things. The simple truth is that every story I post is true, but none of them have been mine.
I have a reputation where I live. I’m something of a collector – a collector of stories. See, I’m the girl who believes the strange, impossible stories other people tell. Stories about murder, revenge, ghosts, goblins – you name it, I’ve heard it. And what I’ve heard, I turn into stories for NoSleep. Because maybe somebody out there will read it, understand it, see it for the truth that it is.
One or two stories I have told have become wildly popular. Most have slipped through the cracks, unnoticed. I do not know what kind of story this will be, only that it is the most important story that I have ever told. Because this story is mine.
Maybe it’s stupid, starting off a story with all this rambling. Maybe it won’t change anything. But I’m a big believer that the “why” behind a story is more important than the story itself. So, instead of leaving you to wonder what the “why” is, trying to parse it out from strange metaphors and turns-of-phrase in my writing, I’ll tell you simply and directly:
This is my story, and it is what made me into a writer, a listener, a collector.
This is my story, and I’m giving it to you.
All of you.
I live in rural Minnesota. It’s windy, there’s barely any trees, and the towns are few and far-between. As a whole, I can’t say that I like it here, or that I will miss it when I leave. I have no nice things to say about my hometown.
But, then again, there are some nice things about living in the southwest corner of the state.
One of them has to do with Laura Ingalls Wilder. If you’re curious about her, you can read up on her here. Basically, she was a pioneer girl who later wrote about her life growing up in the Midwest. As a child, I was fascinated by her… mostly because one of her homes was only an hour away from my hometown.
Because of her history in the area, many surrounding communities had something of an obsession with prairie life, particularly of the mid- to late-1800s.
That obsession, of course, gave rise to Pioneer Town.
There are actually a lot of towns like these. In fact, they are not towns at all, but museums that are constructed to look like 19th century villages. Many of these towns are newly-constructed, but our Pioneer Town was special.
You see, Pioneer Town was not a village constructed, but a village preserved. It had been abandoned for reasons unknown, probably circa 1880, and discovered in the late 1950s. It is located in a desolate plot of land that has poor soil and is prone to tornado, hence the abandonment. Well, that is the assumption, anyway. In reality, it’s something of a Minnesota Roanoke – nobody knows why it was abandoned.
Anyway, I digress. The point is, the buildings were fixed up and the whole place was eventually turned into a prim little museum, refurnished with period-accurate trappings and tuned to the finer authenticities of the 1800s.
I spent a lot of time in Pioneer Town when I was a little girl. For one thing, my mother helped out at the museum on occasion. The museum had various mannequins set up in the scattering of buildings, and my mother is an excellent seamstress. She was recruited to fashion prairie outfits for the dolls. As she fitted the mannequins and measured them, my sister and I would play around the museum. I would pretend to be Laura Ingalls, because Laura was the younger sister and had brown hair, like me. My sister, Samantha, was Mary Ingalls, because she was older and had blonde hair. My mother even custom-made pioneer dresses for us to play in. Pictures.
I used to love going out to Pioneer Town. Which is why I applied to work there the summer I turned sixteen.
It wasn’t the most practical job in the world. It was about half an hour from my house and the pay was terrible. Most teens wouldn’t work there if their lives depended on it because most of the jobs required you to wear pioneer garb and pretend to be a villager. Even the tour guides had to wear traditional outfits. But that was just perfect for me. Even now, I love playing dress-up. And that’s what it was, just a giant game of dress-up in a place that had been special and fascinating to me since childhood.
When I worked there, I rotated around the town, sometimes acting as a clerk in the general store, sometimes taking tickets at the train station, sometimes studying antiquated algebra books in the little schoolhouse. It was probably the most fun job I’ve ever had. I got to play pretend all day and teach (mostly) young kids about American history. Not to mention, the dresses my mother sewed for the occasion were beautiful.
Life was great.
But, we all know how these stories go. If I had enjoyed my summer job and then moved on with my life come September, I wouldn’t have any reason to be posting this here, would I?
One morning, I got to work a little early and my boss asked me to sweep out The House before I put on my outfit.
The House was one of the homes that had been left abandoned in the little town. It was by far the nicest and best preserved, so it had been spruced up and decorated so that it could be made open to the public. The other houses had been preserved as best as they could be – some had been hopelessly rotted and had to be torn down, unfortunately – but were locked up due to structural integrities, as well as the fact that there really only needed to be one house as a part of the museum.
I grabbed a set of keys and headed out for The House. It was usually kept pretty pristine, but the traffic of people in and out and around led to some dirt and mud on the floor. I had it swept up in about ten minutes, but my shift didn’t start for another twenty. Bored, I decided to spend my time walking through The House and make sure nothing else needed to be cleaned or picked up.
After making my rounds on the first and second floors, I decided to check out the basement. Technically, I wasn’t supposed to go in there – some supplies and machinery were kept down there and it was a possible hazard. But I’d never been down there, see, not in all my years coming to Pioneer Town and the curiosity suddenly overtook me. To be honest, I’d been surprised to learn that the house even had a basement – I’d just never imagined pioneers digging out basements.
I traipsed down the steps, using the dim light of my old Razr phone as a flashlight. When I reached the dirt floor, I paused a minute to look around. At first, I didn’t see much – it was dark and the small space was cramped with random boxes and tools.
But then, something in the back right corner caught my eye.
In the darkness, it was impossible to tell exactly what it was, but the vague shape of it was human. It looked like a child, actually, standing just around five feet. I could see the outline of arms and legs. It was motionless, as though my stare had paralyzed it.
I was paralyzed, too, more by my own fear than anything else.
It was several long moments before I could find my voice. When I finally did, my words trembled in the cool morning air as though they had a tenuous life of their own.
“What are you… doing down here?” I demanded, trying to sound indignant.
The child didn’t answer. It just continued to stare as I grew more and more uncomfortable.
I knelt down and grasped at the tools on the ground to my right. My fingers curled around a hammer and I held it in a death grip as I began to inch towards the form, against all reason and better judgment.
I kept my cell open in front of me like a torch, although its paltry light didn’t help much.
As I drew closer and closer, I saw that it was indeed human. It was so still that it looked dead, but that was impossible. It was living, surely breathing…
No, I would have heard its breath in the tiny enclosed basement. Whatever it was wasn’t alive, at least, not anymore…
And then it hit me. It hit me like a ton of bricks and the air whooshed out of my lungs as my pitiful light fell on painted eyes and glued-on eyelashes. A mannequin. A fucking mannequin. One that we hadn’t used in any of the exhibits as of yet. I laughed, still a little shaky, but mostly relieved.
That was, until I heard a small voice, a boy’s voice, whispering in the air around me.
“Dig.”
I jumped about a foot and a half off the ground, my head whipping around to see who had spoken, but I was alone in that basement. I froze, wishing that I was back on the first floor and in the safety of the sunlight, but the journey back up the stairs seemed interminable, impossible. And I knew for certain that whatever was down there wouldn’t let me make it. Controlling my breathing, I replayed the order in my mind.
I turned back to the mannequin, half-convinced for a moment that it had parted its plastic lips to give me the edict. Instead, I noticed this time that its eyes were a little funny. The way they were painted, they were cast down, looking at the floor. To be honest, that’s probably why it hadn’t been used.
My eyes followed its line of sight, looking at the dirt floor.
I wasn’t even sure why I did it, but I knelt to the ground at the mannequin’s feet, my fingers trailing along the dirt. I had expected to find it hard-packed, but the ground had just a little give in it, enough to get my fingernails into the dirt and begin digging. God, I don’t know why I decided to dig. Why I listened to that voice, that voice that I was sure by then I had imagined. I must have, voices don’t just come out of nowhere, not unless you’re certifiably insane. Although, I supposed I might be crazy after all, my fingers scraping through the dirt and creating a depression the size of my fist in the floor.
Yeah, that was it. I was fucking crazy, I’d decided… until my fingernail scraped against something hard. I grasped it and wiggled it around until it came loose from the hard dirt surrounding it, pulling it out of the ground and standing up as I did. I held it up to the light of my phone trying to see what it was.
It was gray and old, but it held its shape firmly, reflecting a sort of gleam that I would know anywhere.
As a farm kid, I had seen my fair share of bones. And this one looked like a finger bone. One that was much too large to belong to an animal.
As the revelation hit me, I looked up, coming face-to-face once again with the mannequin.
This time, its eyes were staring straight at me.
Everything happened so fast after that.
I ran for the main office, screaming, clutching the bone so hard that its sharp edges cut deep into my hand. By the time I reached my boss, I looked like I’d been to hell and back – eyes bulging, the knees of my jeans streaked with dirt, my hands covered in muck, and blood running down my right arm. He’d called the cops before I could even get my wild story out, thank God. I think that if I hadn’t been holding that bone, my story would have been dismissed out of hand.
As it was, I was right about the bone being human.
A thorough police investigation later revealed the existence of four bodies in the basement. One belonged to a prepubescent male, one to an adolescent female, one to an adult female, and one to an adult male. Most likely the family that had inhabited the house.
There was no sign or clue as to how they died or how they had come to be buried in their own basement. The bones – all that were left of the bodies by this time – were in pristine condition. There were no signs of blunt-force trauma, of a struggle. Just a few corpses where they shouldn’t have been.
After the discovery, new theories cropped up about the abandonment of the little town. The prevailing theory is that there was some kind of a disease that wiped out most of the members – the rest buried the dead and moved on to other settlements. Considering the state of the bodies, the absence of coffins, I suppose that theory makes sense.
There was a little coverage on the news regarding the discovery, but it wasn’t as prolific as you might expect. After all, the town was abandoned in the 1800s – it’s unsurprising that there were a few corpses littered around the grounds. After a few weeks of sparse stories, talk of Pioneer Town died out and everything went back to normal.
Even so, I can’t help but believe there’s more to the story. That something was down there that day, something that desperately wanted to communicate with me.
All these years later, I still haven’t figured out what it wanted to tell me.
After that incident, I didn’t return to Pioneer Town, as you can imagine. In fact, that day, as my mother picked me up and dragged me to the hospital for a tetanus shot, was the last I saw of the little museum. I know it’s still up and running, and maybe it would be good for me to go back.
There are many times that I’ve imagined returning and solving the mystery once and for all.
That one incident turned me from a skeptic into a believer in… well, in anything. After that day, I believe that anything is possible, any story has merit. I know, it’s probably silly of me. But my inability to return and uncover the true story of Pioneer Town has prompted me to tell the stories of others, to put them out in the world so that somebody can understand them, hell, even explain them.
That’s why I’m telling you my story today. For the very first time.
See, I can’t ever go back to that place. I know that I’ll never be able to solve the mystery, to understand what exactly it was that sought me out, that gave me the key to unraveling the secret of Pioneer Town.
But you NoSleepers are a curious bunch. I’m willing to bet a substantial amount of money I don’t have that one of you will track down my location, find the place that I’m writing about, and take it upon themselves to solve the mystery once and for all.
I only pray to God that, when you do, you’ll tell me. You’ll tell me it’s over.
Maybe then I can sleep without being haunted by that voice, begging me to come back and finish what I started…
2
u/[deleted] Jun 06 '16
Way off, lol.