Nightcrawlers

18

…And from the upper Midwest comes this elusive and interesting tidbit. Apparently, in Bayfield County, Wisconsin, a most unusual body washed up last summer in the Namekagon River near the town of Haymarket. The body was badly decomposed and had probably been in the water some time, but appeared to be that of a man or something like a man. Sheriff’s deputies and locals that fished the strange cadaver out claimed that it was horribly deformed and subhuman. Its left leg and right arm were missing, and it had been badly worried by fish and local wildlife, but Mr. John Ponce of Haymarket said, “It wasn’t exactly what I would call human… its face was just plain awful and the bones sticking through the flesh were like no bones I’ve seen before.” Ponce went on to say that its face was large and irregular, eyes set in deep, bony hollows and jaws exaggerated to horrible extremes. Officials said the body was merely distorted from decay and gases, but Ponce does not agree. “Now and again,” he said, “some remains’ll turn up in these parts and they’re just horrible to look upon. Whatever they’re from, they’re not men as such.” The entire episode brings to mind a set of bones discovered in Bayfield County some fifteen years previously… bones that were odd and elongated with a skull that was squat and bestial. Bones that local officials claimed must have been those of some sideshow freak, though others claimed that it was from a member of some unspeakable troglodyte race that inhabits the region…