Back in March 1872, a Kansas farmer made a grisly discovery while working on his property.

The body of a newborn infant, wrapped in calico with its little throat cut from ear to ear.

A few weeks later, another decomposed body was discovered just due south of the neighboring town of Oswego.

This time a grown man. Although animals had been at the corpse, it was clear that the victim's

throat had likewise been slashed, in addition to having the back of his head caved in. Skip ahead

to October of that same year, and yet another body was discovered. Same county that the baby had been

found in, and much like the previous victim, this cadaver was suffering from a cut throat and blunt

forced trauma to the back

of his head. And those are just the bodies. Plenty more people in that same area left home never to be

seen again. Take James Longcore, for example. He and his 19-month-old daughter left Montgomery County,

Kansas in the fall of 1872. Mr. Longcourt had recently been widowed and was headed back home to Iowa.

Sadly, neither he or his daughter would make it.

And I could go on and on, Benjamin Brown, William McCrottie, Henry McKinsey, William York.

All of them traveling along the OSH Trail there in southeastern Kansas,

and all of them seemingly vanishing without a trace.

If that's not creepy enough for you, a paper out Oswego published a story during this same

period describing some rather eerie occurrences. Locals claim hearing ghastly screams and moans

coming from the dark prairie and even seeing an ominous wagon speeding across the horizon

and the dead of night.

Hell by 1873, so many folks had gone missing, the travelers began avoiding the trail altogether.

But then again, this was the frontier, and people often went missing when they ventured out into the great unknown. Could it have been hostile Native Americans, maybe roving bands of outlaws,

or was it something far more sinister?

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