To be honest, Kansas has some intense urban legends to entertain our residents, from the creepy hamburger man (half ghost, half monster) to the Saline River Ghost. We love our campfire tales, and we aren't afraid to come up with new ones as soon as another warehouse becomes abandoned. This particular legend, however, may be the most unsettling in Kansas history. Have you heard of Flowerpot Mountain?
The story of Flowerpot Mountain in Medicine Lodge has been told for decades. It tells of a group of settlers who decided to stay on Flowerpot Mountain back when Native Americans were mostly alone in the area. One of the settlers was a woman who kept a diary of her travels and was hidden somewhere around the location, with a riddle to lead someone back to it.
Generations later, someone solved the riddle and found the location of the diary. It was found buried near a gnarled, dead tree on the hilltop, with nothing around it to mark its place. The dead tree stood facing north with all of its branches, but everything that grew behind it was dead just like the tree.
Reading the diary, they found the woman's account of their travels and the Indians living close by. Out of nowhere, she wrote a short "Indians Hostile," and the rest of the journal was blank afterward. "Historians" investigated the diary's accounts, and it's said that all of the settlers on that trip died at the hands of the locals.
To this day, the original gnarled tree stands in the same spot on Flowerpot Mountain. Though that's pretty creepy on its own, the location has more to it. It's rumored that a cult was active in the area in the late 80's to early 90s.
This cult is thought to be connected to a series of cow deaths in the area, where the cows were found mutilated, their udders sliced clean off. Those udders were then sacrificed in rituals on top of the same hill that the diary was buried and the settlers found their untimely deaths.
Wasn't that creepy? If you're into scary stories, you should check out the 100% real tale of the Bloody Benders, a Kansas family who made murder a business.
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