''The Strange Case of Edmonson, Kentucky'' by Joe Terrell | MYSTERIOUS DESERTED TOWN STORY

as some of you might have seen the end of November and the beginning of December marks my one-year anniversary on YouTube so in tonight's introduction instead of trying to build up the atmosphere as I usually do I just want to take this chance to say thank you to each and every one of you that's dropped by listen to the stories commented liked and subscribed still enjoying doing this very much so long may it continue well I guess I should still invite you all to sit back and relax with your favorite drink because it's time to listen you on October the 16th 1962 every man woman and child disappeared from the town of Edmondson Kentucky the date is relatively easy to pin down the day before October 15th a traveling salesman named Arnold Johnson passed through the small town in an unsuccessful attempt to sell an exciting new product the bagless vacuum cleaner during an interview with authorities afterwards Johnson said he noticed nothing unusual about Edmondson in the day before the disappearance since he did however remark that none of the housewives he spoke with during his brief stay seemed remotely interested in his product something he finds slightly surprising compared to the response he typically received when demonstrating the vacuum cleaner to similarly sized tales not only did I not sell a single vacuum cleaner and no one even wanted to see the product in action he said during the interview huh if you could get in the door and show the women what the vacuum could do you were guaranteed a sale Johnson chalked up his failure to the apprehension related to the Cuban Missile Crisis we should be gone a day before and had been dominating the airwaves it's hard to sell a vacuum cleaner when you audience thinks there's a possibility they'll be really reactive dust by the end of the week he said Johnson left the town of Edmondson on the evening of October 15 the next town on his sales route Clement was 80 miles away he drove all night and didn't think about Edmondson until investigators from the Federal Bureau of Investigation knocked on his door two weeks later during the early morning hours of October the 17th Randall Pierce a farmer who saw his produce to the only grocer in Edmondson drove into town to discover empty streets and closed storefronts it was eerie his tour the County newspaper later usually at 7:00 in the morning that little town was bustling I thought I'd maybe driven up during a holiday PS lived with his wife and three children on a farm 15 miles outside of Edmondson like most farming families in the early 1960s peers his wife homeschooled their children when they weren't helping their father tend the farm but I couldn't think of any holiday that will close up a town in the middle of October so I started getting a little spooked Pierre said I knocked on the doors of a few houses didn't get any response from them we're out 8 o'clock I realized there wasn't a single soul in Dedham listen shaken and a little disoriented he has returned home to his wife and children he told them what he'd seen or not see in Edmondson and with nationalistic fears of a communist invasion running rampant his wife convinced him to drive to Clement and report what he'd seen to the authorities the Pierce family had no phone at their farm Pierce arrived in Clement shortly after noon and immediately pulled onto the parking lot the local police department he told the authorities what he'd witnessed in Edmondson initially as Pierce tells it his story was met with disbelief and ridicule but after multiple calls to Edmondson spree Steve went unanswered Clements sheriff Jonathan Ambrose gathered a group of men and traveled to Edmondson to investigate Pierce's claims sheriff Ambrose died of lung cancer in 1968 however in spite of being a veteran of both World War two and the Korean War on his deathbed Ambrose said that his visit to Edmondson on October 17th was the most disturbing and haunting experience of my entire life and thinking about the events of that day would still turn the blood in my veins to Iris according to the most recent census 236 individuals lived in Edmondson in 1960 it was a small town nestled between the hills of Western Kentucky named after a captain who had been killed during the Battle of 1812 Edmondson was populated primarily by the ancestors who founded the town in 1825 Edmondson had won public school a grocery store a bank Wells Fargo the hospital clinic to churches Baptist and Methodists and a post office most of the men worked small farms like Pierce or ran a trade Edmonson like most small communities in rural areas was self-sufficient and self-sustaining every two weeks the grocery store would be restocked and the post office would deliver mail every Tuesday for entertainment residents of Edmondson would have to visit Clements or another nearby town on October 17th 1962 Clement chef Ambrose two deputies and the Clements primary physician piled into a squad car and followed County farmer Randall peers back into Edmondson Ambrose carried his service pistol and ordered his deputies to bring their shotguns browning 12-gauge pump actions the physician Allen Kathy was brought along in case of mass casualty event er taken place before he died in 1968 Ambrose recounted the events of October 17th to his older son who transcribed his father's testimony and published it in a men's magazine to little fanfare in 1974 it was a two hour drive from Clement to Edmondson and we all expected a shot in that little town and find nothing wrong except for a drunk police chief who overslept his shift Ambrose said however I couldn't deny the fact that a palatable tension was present in the squad car my two deputies kept fiddling with their shotguns and Kathy wouldn't stop rummaging through his physicians back it was the same type of behavior I observed among soldiers before he was set to launch at big assaults upon arriving in Edmondson they immediately realized something was in fact very wrong Pierson Ambrose parked their cars in front of the grocery store along the Main Street it was just as Pierce had described it the town seemed completely devoid of life Ambrose who personally knew Edmonton's police chief and where he lived decided they should check out his home first the five men set out on foot into the residential neighborhood all the men was struck by the silence it was then that one of the deputies realized that not only were there no people in town there were no animals to speak of yards with fences that clearly meant to keep in dogs were notably empty the men arrived at the police chief's home to find the front door unlocked Ambrose with his gun wrong end of the house first and was followed by his two shot gun toting deputies I don't know what we were expecting to find Ambrose said I honestly thought we'd find a body maybe poisonous gases leaked from the ground at some point during the night and killed off the whole town but I think what we found was worse the police chief's house was empty the bed was made up in the bedroom when the fridge still contained bottles of fresh milk the men were baffled maybe they thought the townspeople had left to attend a large community picnic but as the hours dragged on and the search continued that possibility grew less likely we searched six other houses in the neighborhood after we canvassed the police chief's house Ambrose said it was always the same story the house seemed fine no sign of forced entry unlocked doors and no arguments however a few similarities began to make themselves apparent as the men made their way from house to house for one there was no luggage to be found anywhere in the homes and it appeared as if the majority of the clothing was missing from drawers and wardrobes Pierce the farmer also notice the much of the food left in the pantries and refrigerators were perishable there were no canned goods Ambrose who had just finished reading CS Lewis's the Great Divorce remembered thinking it's as if the whole town is packed up their belongings and bought it at the bus to heaven some of the discoveries were less benign in the backyard of one home the men discovered a dead labrador retriever one of the deputies stumbled across the animal and thought at first it was sleeping the dog was wearing a collar and was loosely chained to a tree in the backyard it was the first animal they'd seen in Edmondson since arriving two hours earlier while the men searched the home Kathy the physician performed an ad-hoc autopsy on the animal rigor mortis had only recently set in indicating the dog had not been dead for more than a day additionally Kathy found raw hamburger meat in the animal's stomach hamburger meat that had been peppered with small white pills the dog had been poisoned in another home they found the words revelation 9:1 scrawled on a bathroom mirror in light pink lipstick the men were unfamiliar with the Bible verse and this led to the next disquieting discovery they could not find a single Bible in the town Edmondson had two churches and it can be deduced that a majority of the township probably attended one or the other in the early 1960s a vast majority of Americans considered themselves Christian and even those who wouldn't consider themselves very devoted could be expected to at least own a Bible however Ambrose and his men couldn't locate a Bible in any of the homes they searched when they inspected both churches they found only hymnals or books of common prayer in the pews except for the poisoned dog during their three hours search of Edmonson they found no signs of violence or struggle every homes interior looked impeccable and running water and electricity appeared to be in working order Ambrose was reminded of the model communities the US Army had built in New Mexico to test the destructive power of the atomic bomb as the Sun began to slip beneath the trees and the men shadows grew longer and dimmer Ambrose detected another palpable sense of urgency ruling among the members of the group it was obvious the men didn't want to remain in Edmonson after sundown Ambrose and and I fell it to us somehow says that if we stayed in Edmonton overnight there'd be another group of men from Clement trying to find us the next afternoon and I didn't think they'd find us before Twilight ended the men loaded up in their cars the two deputies Cathy and Ambrose in the squad car and Pierce in his truck and they all left Edmondson even though they knew the town was empty each man reported a creeping sensation that they were being watched from the darkened windows of the homes they passed on their way out of town we didn't talk much on the right of dr. Clement and I be lying if I said I was driving with any regard to what the speed limits Ambrose sent we had to get out of there at that point I was convinced we'd stumbled across Ground Zero of some new communist weapon system something that could vaporize the inhabitants of an entire town without causing any collateral damage but even then I knew that story didn't completely add up after the men arrived back in Clement they agreed that Ambrose would contact the federal government in the morning none of the men expressed any interest to return to Edmondson that night Ambrose retrieved his family's Bible from their study and flipped to revelation 9:1 and the fifth angel sounded and I saw a star fall from heaven unto the earth and to him was given the key of the bottomless pits I didn't know what to make of that Ambrose said the next morning Ambrose reported what he'd seen in Edinson to the governing authorities in Frank thought things began moving very quickly after that while the rest of the world was transfixed by the escalating tensions between Cuba in the United States the FBI sends an investigative team to investigate the disappearances at Edmondson fearing a communist plot or as Ambrose had suspected the use of a powerful new weapon the FBI shut down access to Edmondson on October 19th 1962 The Strange Case of Edmondson made its way into a few local papers but it was a story that was always buried behind the pages of international news because much of the town's inhabitants were ancestors of the people who founded the town there weren't too many relatives inquiring about the status of their loved ones the roads that passed the read Monson there were very few were rerouted around the town the FBI finished their investigation in 1967 but by then no one really cared about Edmonson anymore in between the towers disappearance in 1962 and the FBI's final report on the incident the nation's attention had been distracted by a number of earth-shattering events the assassination of President Kennedy the burgeoning civil rights movement and the u.s. is involvement in Vietnam unfortunately the result of the FBI's investigation was sealed and deemed confidential as the decades progressed nature began to overtake Edmonson Kentucky no attempt was made to rebuild or resettle the town Edmondson soon became a little-known historical footnote in Kentucky's history while many of the structures collapsed due to exposure a handful of homes and one of the churches remained standing intruded by thick vines and a thriving deer population in 2002 the official report from the FBI was made public after a local historian placed a Freedom of Information request Dennis Miller president and sole member of the Edmondson Historical Society learned the FBI officially declared the reason for the town's spontaneous abandonment as fears related to the possibility of nuclear annihilation and unexplained that Miss farik phenomenon led to a panic induced dispersal of the town of course that reasoning was Miller said the report doesn't even mention the fact that none of town's people had ever been accounted for there were no reports of atmospheric phenomenon by anyone in the area however by then a new theory had emerged regarding the fate of Edmonton's inhabitant it's a theory that began circulating after two self-proclaimed backyard adventurers stumbled upon a hatch in the basement of the abandoned First Baptist Church of Edmondson the mammoth cave in Kentucky is the world's largest known cave system at least 400 miles have been mapped and some scientists estimate there could be another 600 miles that are unexplored and have never been seen by human eyes as of 2016 26 entrances into the cave have been discovered and in 1981 one of those entrances was discovered in the ruins of Edmonson Kentucky during the late 1970s the abandoned ruins of Edmonson attained a cult status among backpackers and hitchhikers in the area with the roads leading to Edmondson in disrepair getting to the abandoned town is extremely difficult but every year intrepid amateur adventurers and curious locals would make the trek to one of the country's greatest but forgotten unsolved mysteries 19 years after the disappearances hikers Emilio Stevens and Julie Paige parked their vehicles 30 miles outside the edges of the forest that surrounds the abandoned Township and began their Trek to Edmondson we'd visited edmondson two years before that day Stevens said to a scientific journal afterwards it's creepy as hell it takes about a day and a half to reach the town from the trailhead and when we get there you really don't feel like sticking around most hikers pass through it or chem hell of a night on the outskirts that a November Julie and I plan on staying overnight in the church I think it was more about testing our nerves than anything else the church stevens is talking about is the First Baptist Church of Edmondson it's the largest structure still standing in the town the grocery store and Methodist Church collapsed in the late 1960s we arrived in Edinson around nightfall on a second day Stephen said Juli wasn't feeling too hot and it was beginning to sprinkle we set out ten in the center of the church armed and prepared for our night I could tell it was going to be a miserable night the roof will have the church leaked and a lot of pews have been destroyed by vandals and raccoons as they settled in for the night Stevens and Paige both couldn't shake a creeping sense of dread even though they had hiked into Edmondson before they both felt unprepared for the degree of uneasiness they were experiencing around midnight however the exhaustion got the better of the two of them and they fell asleep two hours later Stephens awoke to a loud cracking sound I first thought it was thunder but then the floor slander'd we were fine Stephen said there's nothing more disorienting than waking up in a tent and experiencing the sensation of free fall the floor of the church it collapsed in the middle of the night flinging Stevens and Paige into an as of yet undiscovered basement luckily both Stevens and Paige survived the fall without any serious injury we were both pretty shaken frankly a little banged up Stephen said but in all the time we'd spend in and around Edmondson we'd never heard for baseman in the Baptist Church we knew we'd found something no one else knew about armed brethren their flashlights Stevens and Paige set about exploring the decrepit basement the room hidden beneath the floorboards of the church was small and appeared to have been carved into the bedrock beneath the building's foundation Stephen said there wasn't much to see it looked as if the room had been used to store extra tables and chairs presumably for after church socials but then they found the hatch page founded in the far corner of the basement Stephen said it was set flush against the floor of the basement then it was made of four thick wood planks and the hinge it had been bolted into the bedrock on the left side the door had one of those old-fashioned drum ring handles Stephens gripped ahold of the drop ring handle and after several tries wrenched the hatch open a square of Darkness stared back up at him Paige activated and dropped a glow stick into the shaft the pale green glow of the stick stopped about five feet from the mouth of the hatch well we had to go down there Stephen said it was probably 3:00 in the morning we for sure as hell one I'm gonna get there to sleep Stephens tied a climbing rope to his back pant loop and dropped down through the hatch Paige stayed above and meted out the rope as Stephens progressed into the darkness at the bottom of the shaft a passageway opened to my left pointing West blurred it was obvious by the minute I was traveling through a cave tunnel and that it was not man-made Stephen said eventually the tunnel tightened and Stephens found himself crawling on his hands and knees the roof of the passageway scratched his back and his hand has began to get rubbed raw by the caves rough floor I'm not claustrophobic but it started getting pretty tight Stephen said I began to worry about not being able to turn around and get back to the hatch but I started to hear some coming from up ahead of me I should have been freaked out but at that point I figured I'd gone too far to just me aloud after 15 minutes of crawling Stevens was straining to push his shoulders through the ever-tightening passageway but the eerie noises emanating from ahead drove him deeper into the cave however his adventure came to an abrupt end the passageway ended at a pile of rocks Steven said each Rock looked to be about the size of my head and they completely blocked any further spelunking I could hear the noises clearly now I could even distinguish words and phrases but my journey was done however right before the passageway terminated at the cave-in Stevens found a couple of objects he put them in his jacket and began backing out it took him 30 minutes to back up out of the tight passageway when he made it up out of the shaft to him back into the church's basement to a relief page he took out the objects and inspected them I'd found a pair of eyeglasses like old fashioned readers glasses and a woman's shoe with the heel missing Stephen said it didn't mean anything to us at the time Stevens and Paige hiked out of Edmonson earlier next morning battered and spooked when they reached their car they immediately headed into Mammoth National Park and reported what they'd found to a park ranger in the investigation that followed it was determined that Stevens and Paige discovered an entrance into an unmapped portion of the mammoth cave system unfortunately geologists determined that the cave-in that had stopped Stephens progress was at least 100 feet thick unless they used explosives there was no way to investigate further however it was the discovery of the cave entrance coupled with the objects that Stevens found that held disturbing implications for the unsolved mystery of the disappearances in Edmonson 20 years prior historians dated the eyeglasses and the woman's shoe to the late 1950s or early 1960s most historians and geological experts are now in near unanimous agreement about what happened to the inhabitants of Edmondson Kentucky in 1962 driven by fears of a first strike by Cuba during the Missile Crisis and religious fanaticism the people of Edmondson sought refuge in a secret labyrinth cave system underneath their town unfortunately a cave-in perhaps triggered by their panicked influx through the tight passageways trapped every man woman and child deep underground it's deeply unsettling when you realize that at the time sheriff Ambrose and his men were exploring the town that everyone they were searching for was probably about 400 feet underneath said Sam so a ranger at Mammoth National Park if they had fresh water and food and if the cave had a clean air supply some experts believe that the people of Edmondson could have survived for at least six months underground I think it's a pretty good theory Stephen said but it still doesn't explain what I heard that night the reason I dropped down through that hatch and crawl on my hands and knees for 15 minutes it doesn't explain the singing I heard while I was crawling down there I clearly heard voices singing a hymn calm down found Dennis Miller started the Edmondson Historical Society in 2001 to raise awareness about the town and the mystery surrounding it he was 12 years old it really is a 20th century Ronald Miller said referencing the New England colony that disappeared in 1590 and there's no reason why we shouldn't be able to figure out what happened Miller lives in Clements and on his days when he's not researching Edmonson he runs a small pawn shop many people would consider Miller's fascination with Edmondson to border on obsession but when they learn about Miller's personal history with the area he begins to make sense during a family camping trip in 1997 Miller's father and mother went missing after making camp in the wilderness three miles north of Edmondson Miller who was seven at the time was with them when they disappeared we camped often and we used a big tent for the three of us Miller said that night we went to bed around 9:00 after cooking hot dogs I woke up around 1:00 in the morning and realized my parents weren't in the 10 anymore and the front flap was open Miller spent two days alone in the woods never straying far from the campsite in case his parents came back after sustaining on hot dog buns and marshmallows he was discovered by other campers passing through the area after searching the area for two weeks the police officially concluded that I've been abandoned in the woods by my parents Miller said but that's not true my parents love me and never doubted that if they had abandoned me why didn't they take their car it was found untouched at the trailhead after the investigation closed Miller spend the next decade of his life in and out of the foster care system driven by a desire to protect his parents reputation and validate their love for him Miller began reviewing historical records in libraries and did a sweep of the police records in the surrounding areas some might accuse Miller of attempting to connect unrelated dots but some of his data and findings are shocking to say the least for example the three counties that border the location of Edmondson have a missing persons raped 17 times higher than similarly sized counties in the United States it's an area we sometimes refer to as the Kentucky triangle said FBI agent Brittany Hooper head of the state's missing person division for some reason a lot of people seem to disappear in those counties some of the disappearances can be attributed to caving accidents the vast swathe of fun mapped wilderness and the recent bloom of meth operations in rural areas also Stevens wasn't the first person to report hearing strange voices and singing in and around the mammoth cave systems some people consider mammoths National Park to be the most haunted park in the United States there have been dozens of accounts of people hearing strange noises in the woods and caves since the 1970s as well as sightings of a tall humanoid like creature called the black demon according to unrelated local law geologists and historians dismiss menu these accounts after Stephens told authorities he'd been following the voices of singing as he made his way through the passageways expert cavers were quick to point out that even if he had heard people singing it could not have come from behind the caved-in rocks the cave-in was far too thick for sound to penetrate also because mammoth National Park sits on top of the mammoth cave system it's not unreasonable to assume that a lot of the strange noises and voices are a result of sound bouncing and echoing throughout the caverns caves are after all notorious for their disorienting acoustics but Miller has a different theory a theory has macabre as it would be revelatory if it turned out to be true I think some of the trapped people of Edmonson is still alive Miller said I think they're down there in an unmapped portion of the cave system and have chosen to stay below it's been about 70 years since they went in which means the first generation has probably died off and there's an entire second or third generation that only knows life underground as for the disappearances Miller has an answer for that as well I think they've found other exits and every now and then they come out and take people haikus Driftless campers and locals Miller said I think that's what happened to my parents and it was happening years before they were taken and it continues today on his off days you can find Miller searching the forests around Edmondson and the outskirts of a mammoth National Park for additional entrances into the mammoth cave system he carries a GPS locator rappelling gear multiple flashlights and a colt 45 automatic pistol for some reason they don't want to be seen - Millicent I don't know what they do with these people they take but I know what it takes to maintain an underground society it requires food and a fresh gene pool I don't like thinking about what that meant from a mom and dads but even if the truth is ugly at least I'll know and maybe I'll be able to do something about it in spite of being armed as soon as the Sun begins to slink behind the trees Miller makes sure to abandon his search and head back to his vehicle you'll never find me spending the night in those woods again Millicent [Music] [Music] thanks for taking the time to drop by and watch this video you know what it make me a happy doctor hitting that like button leaving a comment and subscribing to my channel go on I've got plenty more stories to tell you

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Length: 39min 0sec (2340 seconds)

Published: Wed Dec 14 2016