This is a scream queen production.

I'm Jen Carpenter, and this is So Dead podcast.

Happy True Crime Tuesday Deadheads.

Today I'm going to tell you guys about one of my favorite Michigan true crime stories.

But I'm going to do things a little differently because there are two very different versions of this story.

And it's impossible to know which one is true because it happened such a long time ago and you cannot trust anybody, basically.

I know which way I'm leaning, but I'll save my opinion until the end.

So let's get into the story of the Dudgeon Swamp Murders.

And one thing that I do want to, real quick, mini disclaimer here,

is that there are going to be some date discrepancies. I went with a source

that I found to be the most accurate most of the time, but if I looked up five different pieces

of information to get a date for one event, I was getting five different dates. So they all happened

around the time frame. The exact date might not be

correct on some of them, but I did my best to snuff out what was correct and what wasn't. Okay,

let's jump into it. White Cloud is located in West Michigan about 50 miles north of Grand Rapids

on the banks of the White River. It's a small town with a population of

just under 1500 that borders the Manistee National Forest, which is over a half million acres

of dense wilderness. Yes, a half million acres. So that means, I wrote ears. That means ears. I meant bears. I forgot the bee. But ears too, I guess that might be a little more scary than bears. Bears, cougars, Bigfoot, the Michigan Dog Man, which that's a whole story that we may or may not ever get into.

White Cloud is known as a trail town for its many hiking trails, parks, and outdoor recreation areas.

But in the early 1900s, it was not the woodsy wonderland that it is today.

The area had been ravaged by loggers and wildfires and was a wasteland of burned out stumps in unfarmable land.

It was actually referred to as Michigan's stump country, which I imagine looked as gross as it sounds.

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