The Haunted Traveler Vol. 2 Issue 1

argument did not exist for destroying the paper before it
damaged his reputation.
Destroy it before it hurt...
Destroy...
His leaden fingers moved slowly, as if in a dream.
Alphonse Thompson, a minor federal official, came the region
on a fact-finding mission in 1874, as the first American
settlers entered that wilderness country. He found the abhorrent
Indians gone, disappeared, probably wiped out to the
last man, woman and child. Reports garnered from friendlier
tribes failed to shed much light on the disaster, nor was he
able to verify whether the Mad Ones were slaughtered by
vengeful enemies, or—as was plainly stated by several eminent
neighboring tribal authorities—they destroyed themselves
in a cataclysmic orgy of murder and suicide. The latter
theory, while realistically unsound, Thompson considered
quite seriously (evident, since he took such care to gather the
information), and the fastidious scribe offers his interpretation
of a religious motive. The Mad Ones, he says, worshiped
a horrible deity which demanded gruesome sacrifices and activities
on the part of its faithful. This monstrous god brought
insanity and violence to the Indians, whose oral traditions
dimly recalled an earlier age of peace and benevolence. How
they came to worship such an evil being is unknown, but
once the religion had fastened itself upon them the tribe was
locked forever in a continual state of fear and bloodshed. The
reign of terror ended with their downfall, though subsequent
settlers generally avoided the region as somehow unsafe, or
haunted. Vorchek’s recent study presents the unlikely claim
that genuine—
Neil stopped. Enough; the paper appalled him, the
labor involved constituting a drain of his energies, a waste
of his potential. Rapidly, without thinking, he slammed keys,
blanked out the digital document, saved the emptiness. He
felt an unusual sense of accomplishment. Rising stealthily,
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