In the god-free surveyed the scenery, one overcast November after noon in 1991, as she drove

out of the little Wisconsin town of Elkhorn along Geneva Street. Passing under Highway 12,

the road took her out of town through gently rolling farm fields, peppered with patches of woodland,

the trees were leafless and a faint mist rose up from surrounding patches of scrubby marshland.

The fields which had been full of corn, soybean and hay, only a couple of months earlier, were barren

to, now nothing more than stubble. Located in southern Wisconsin, just north of the border with

Illinois, the four-mile stretch of two-lane blacktop that stretched off into the distance was little

more than a country lane. Bray Road was a typical slice of what some Americans call fly over country,

seemingly no different from the myriad of rural byways that crisscross the American

heartland, named after a family of homesteaders, the fifth generation descendants of the original

braid brothers still farmed in the area, it seemed the most unlikely of settings for a paranormal

encounter, you're listening to one explained and I'm Richard McLean Smith.

Back in the autumn of 1991, Linda Godfrey was working as a reporter on a local newspaper,

The Woolworth County Week. A decade earlier, she'd moved to Woolworth County with her husband to

raise their two boys in this seemingly tranquil rural setting. Since then, Godfrey had turned her

hand and news reporting, writing and drawing the occasional cartoon for the weekly paper.

45 miles southwest of the city of Milwaukee, the county seat of Elkhorn is the epitome of small

town, bucolic America, so much so that in the late 1950s, the Ford Motor Company had commissioned

water color artist Cecil Johnson to paint six images of Elkhorn for its company magazine

to reflect the hometown image it wanted its brand to embody. But over the last few years,

reporter and writer Linda Godfrey had become aware of a less cozy undercurrent

to life in that part of rural Wisconsin, that had been whisperings of satanic cult activity,

...