The caretakers and campers of Woodsmoke Ranch believe different things about The Ditch Devil. As they sit around the dying coals and embers of a campfire with their backs to the dark, forested ravines, their instincts tell them what to believe. It depends on whether or not they see a tall shadow peering around a tree. It depends on whether or not the night suddenly becomes too quiet, and too still. It depends on whether or not a prickly, petrifying chill running up their spine prevents them from turning around to see if it is floating right towards them.

Research has provided the following incidents. They come from different sources. They span nearly 200 years. They bear witness to consistent behaviors and settings. The summary found at the end of these accounts provides possible interpretations.
 

  1811

 The oral traditions of The Potawatami Native Americans speak of a spiritual experience in their “old lands.” It is the original source of The Ditch Devil legend. One of the last true Potawatami settlements was in north central Illinois before they were removed to the reservations out in Kansas. In the winter of 1811, a band of Potawatami were camped on the bluffs overlooking the Illinois River. And it was at that time that the great New Madrid earthquake struck in far southern Illinois, shaking the heartland to such an extent that it reached northern Illinois with fury. The Potawatomi were taken by surprise, as they never experienced an earthquake before. They gave thanks to The Great Spirit for keeping them from being shaken right off the bluffs.

However, they once again had to appeal to their God some days later, because Mother Earth was still not happy. Ever since the earthquake hit,  there had been strange weather about half a day’s ride away to the north, right over what is currently Woodsmoke Ranch. It was a permanent cloud formation which boiled, produced small tornados, had crackles of lightning, and loomed above foggy ground. The elders of the tribe decided that it was a spiritual sign and that, as tribal custom commanded, the young braves were given the opportunity to experience the event so they could prove their maturity and wisdom. Their mission was to inspect the area under the strange weather clouds.

 Six braves set out on their ponies with supplies for a couple of days. It was a mild winter that year and the ride across the dry, brown prairie was easy. There was a full moon that week. When they arrived, they found that the area under the strange cloud weather was partly forest and partly scrub brush. As they made their way in, they found that there were many ravines, gullies, and ditches. And all along the bottom of these depressions were open fissures and cracks that had opened deep down into the earth. The braves inspected all along these ravines, noticing that there was heat rising from the pitch-black abyss into the earth. Even more frightening to them was the occasional lightning strike which would go straight into those open fissures and cracks. The braves were excited with their discovery, thinking that they were chosen to witness the powers of The Great Spirit. They decided to spend the night with a sacrificial bonfire to the heavens.

And so as the set, the moon rose. They conducted their spiritual campfire and then prepared to sleep. One of the braves went near the edge of the ravines to call for his dog, but instead gave out a war-cry call to his comrades. They came running to his aid. When they arrived, he simply pointed downward. There, all along the bottom of the ravines. were tall, thin, shadowy figures rising out of the chasms and drifting in a lifeless state. They seemed to congregate in the direction of the passing moon. The shadow creatures did not seem to sense anything around them. The braves watched this in silence for a very long time. Then their leader gave the signal to retreat and assemble back at the campfire.

Once they were back, they were in a state of ecstasy, finding themselves blessed once again to witness a spiritual event. They decided to leave right then and there during the night, as they wished to share their experiences with their families. The moonlight was bright and the winter air was dry. They had a happy, boastful ride back to their settlement on the bluffs.

The camp dogs greeted them as they let out their warrior prayers in the peaceful night. The elders arose quickly and came out with mystified looks on their faces. They knew that they sent the young boys into the unknown. The braves quickly dismounted and boasted of their spiritual experience, and claiming special blessings to their family names. However when the elders heard the whole story, they frantically consulted the tribe healer and priest, who then perform a ceremony over the now confused braves.

The elders knew the boys had a spiritual event, but with the dark spirits. They then realized that the earthquake had opened a passage to hell, and that the boys actually witnessed devils roaming the earth. When this was explained to the young braves, some vomited, others became withdrawn, and one even threw himself over the bluffs to his death saying that he may be possessed. The ones that lived worried that the dark shadows of the abyss may have followed them back to the tribe.

There seemed to be a soulful wrenching in the tribe that early morning. The women wailed and the children cried. Later in the day, the tribe packed up the camp as fast as they could and moved west along the river to a larger tribal settlement near what is now Ottawa. The Potawatomi, the “people of fire”, took with them a legend that is passed down by their priests from generation to generation as they teach their braves to interpret the good and evil of the world.

 1846

Remnants of old personnel records from the I&M canal project reveal the second documented account of the entity. The I&M canal was built by a hardy group of immigrants in the first half of the 19th century.  As they made progress out of Chicago and past Joliet, the countryside really opened up. One spring day, the foreman of the Irish crew decided they needed a break.  He led his boys off to go hunting in the surrounding prairie. They took the chuck wagon, some dogs, a few horses, and many jugs of whiskey. It was to be a good time to be had by all.

The prairie was bountiful that day. They took all the deer, pheasant, and rabbits they could carry, so they decided to camp in the brushy, forest hollow in what is now Woodsmoke Ranch. They pitched their tents, dressed out the game, and had a great feast. As the fires began to fade, the  foreman decided that they would have to take turns standing guard and tending the fire of their game that was being smoked. He didn’t want the dogs or any wild animals to steal it during the night.

 That evening the moon was about half full, but very bright.  There was some occasional passing cloud cover which made it quite warm for the season.  About halfway through the night, the crew foreman took his turn to guard the meats. After awhile he went to the chuck wagon to get a biscuit for a snack. When he turned back towards the makeshift smoke hut he saw the hunting dogs whimpering and dragging themselves on their bellies away from the nearby ravine and toward the tents. Confused and tired he called to the dogs, but with no response. As they dragged past his feet, he squinted at the opposite side of the glowing fire coals expecting to see a marauding coyote or wolverine. But what floated out of the darkness was the size of a tree trunk.

He froze in fear, as if in a nightmare. The inky, two-dimensional figure was about 10 feet  tall, and a foot and a half wide, with a slight form of a head and torso, and a tapered tail. It floated just above the ground, headed not for the fresh meat, but to the glowing embers of the dying fire. It hovered above the coals just momentarily, darting its tail in between the chunks of wood coals. As if confused, it floated around the fire, and tried once more to find its way to some opening in the embers. In a matter of seconds it quickly floated back out of the firelight glow. The figure was so black, it could be seen through the night, disappearing from tail to head as it descended over the ridge of the nearby ravine.

As soon as it was gone, the dogs started howling and woke the entire hunting crew. Lanterns were lit, guns were produced, and questions flew. They wanted to know if there were Indians or animals after their meat. Even in the yellow glow of their lamplights, they could see that their stiff and silent foreman was as pale as a ghost. They checked the meat to find everything in order. Once they got their boss seated and primed with whiskey, they got the story. They all tried to laugh it off in
 front of each other, but just under the surface, they all sensed something evil about them. In their homeland there were many legends of things in the forest, and this could be just as real in this new land of theirs.

When they got back to the canal project, the foreman told his story as a precaution to others. When they heard of his encounter, they sensed his real terror through the look in his eyes and the tone of his voice. Once it got around, though, the supervisors feared they would lose entire crews of the suspicious immigrants, so they wrote up his story as instigating labor troubles, and fired him.  The canal moved on without him. He returned to the young settlement of Chicago with a deep secret in his troubled soul.
 

1880

By the year 1880, the pioneer farms were well established in La Salle County. Farmers in the Woodsmoke area used the forested ravines as their woodlot. They heard of the supposed haunting of a “gully ghost” in there and just in case, tried not to ventured too far in near the ditches. Over the years, they had slowly harvested the trees until the wood line was close to the ravines. That winter was a damp, chilly one. Farmer Stanton and his teenage son planned to go into the ravines with their draft horses to pull out some prized oak trees they had chopped down that autumn for a new barn. This greatly upset Mrs. Stanton, and the neighbors were all suspiciously unavailable to help with this initial phase of a barn raising.

The day was not very productive. Chains broke, the snow started to melt, and Farmer Stanton  started to get sick. Because of these delays, they had to work right up to dusk. They started off for home as the sun was setting, but in their haste and exhaustion, the father forgot his rifle down in the ravine by their fire pit among the tree stumps. In his feverish condition, he told the boy that he would have to take the lantern and go fetch it by himself.

When the boy reached the ridge of the ravine, he could just make out the pulsing glow of the ashes of the fire they made for warmth and cooking that day. Just as he was tying off a rope to help him climb back up the steep, snowy ravine, he saw something moving far down the gully in the thickly wooded forest. It almost seemed like a tree was moving. He turned down his lantern so he had better night vision, as the moon was bright enough.  And then it appeared, skimming the snowy surface in a steady, slow pace; a thin, black figure that was at least 10 feet tall. It made its way to the orange ashes of the fire pit in a manner quite lifeless and indifferent to the world around it.

The teenager had seen many types of wildlife on his farm, but this was nothing of nature. His jaw dropped and his eyeballs turned in their sockets to follow the movement of the entity as it floated over the ashes and then stirred them up with its pointy tail, exposing the pulsing orange coals underneath. It did this for only a minute until it was satisfied that nothing was there as it had thought. It hovered back the same way it came until it was out of sight. The deep black contrast of the ghostly apparition against the snow made it seem like he saw it in plain daylight. At that point a barn owl shrieked, shaking the petrified boy back to his senses.

He stumbled back to his father without the rifle. His zombie expression frighten the seasoned pioneer father. There was nothing to be said….he couldn’t bring himself to explain his behavior. His dad managed to get him home that night, but for many months, the boy was as helpless as a baby around the farm. He still wouldn’t or couldn’t explain that night, and started to have occasional spasms, nightmares, and babbling when he did try to explain that night in the ravines. The father could
obviously see that something horrible had happened to his only son, and he became very distraught.

Mrs. Stanton could no longer stand the crippling effect of the incident on her whole family and discussed the matter with her church minister.  He immediately called for the district bishop to come and investigate the situation and possibly perform an exorcism. When the bishop arrived, he asked to be taken to the ravines where it all began. They walked together along the bottom of the ravine, until they came across a small fissure in the soil that was pitch black.

Almost instantly, the minister and bishop stepped back in simultaneous prayer. These strong men of god were obviously taken aback by the discovery. They pulled the father away from the open crack where he had bent down and had his face right down near it trying to look in. They nodded for him to join in the Lord’s prayer as they lead him away. When they got to the top of the ravine, they told him that evil lurked in that opening; something not of the living and not of the dead. They said  that this most assuredly had something to do with the boy’s condition. They all agreed that whatever the encounter was, it certainly needed a spiritual intervention.

When they got back to the farmhouse, they performed their ritual of exorcism upon him. For whatever the reasons, it worked. He finally came out of his state, broke down, and recalled what he had seen. The family was forbidden to go near the area again, and directed to conduct special ceremonies and prayers in the future. The “exorcism” was secretly entered into the files of the parish records, where this account was found.
 

  1921

The archives of the La Salle County Sheriff’s Department contain yet another reference to the specter in the Woodsmoke ravines.  Seneca, or Crotty Town as it was called in those days, had its share of adventures during Prohibition. One such story involved a peculiar man who lived in a shanty by the grain elevators, in the area of  the railroads and canal. He was known to all as “The Crazy Man of Crotty Town”. He was the one who did odd jobs around the town; the man who “wasn’t quite right.”

One day, fortune seemed to smile on Crazy Crotty when he met up with a hobo who was riding the rails. This hobo knew a sucker when he saw one, and offered Crazy Crotty an opportunity to make big money and fast. The plan was to become moon shiners. The hobo knew the trade, but needed help to set up and operate the still. He asked Crazy Crotty if there was a place out in the country where people wouldn’t go poking around. Realizing the risk, but not wanting to miss the opportunity, Crazy Crotty told him about the ravines in the Woodsmoke area. However, he did not tell him about the legend of The Ditch Devil.

They established a plan and divided the duties. Crazy Crotty cleverly volunteered to do “the risky work”; steal corn and wheat from the grain elevators, bring it out to the still, and return the booze into town to sell it. The hobo would stay out at the still and run the operation. When they first went out there together, they found the deepest, steepest ravine that was covered by trees, weeds, and brush cover. Then they got started by building a home for the hobo. It was just a shack with an outhouse to the side of it. Next they constructed the stills out of junk scrap metal parts. And when they got the first batch of hooch in production, Crazy Crotty went back into town.

Over the following months, they produced several profitable batches of moonshine. However, as time went on, the hobo began to share his concerns with Crazy Crotty. He said that he saw shadows in the ravine that he couldn’t explain, and thought that the sheriff or special agents were spying on the operation. Crazy Crotty broke into a nervous sweat, but couldn’t reveal what he knew to be the apparition of The Ditch Devil. It would mean revenge on him it the hobo found out that Crazy knowingly put him in harm’s way. Besides, if anything happened to the hobo, the profits would all be his. Crazy Crotty showed his concern by getting hold of a Tommy gun for the hobo to protect their still.

With that new sense of confidence, the hobo continued the solitary operation. Some days later, the hobo decided to stay up all night with his machine gun and try to rub out any spies near his still. He got out his chair, some snacks, and a few of his big cigars. The moon was nearly full, so he didn’t need any light. After just a few hours of no activity whatsoever, the hobo decided to call it quits for this watch. But he decided to have one more of his big stogy cigars before he went into his shack for a night’s sleep. He lit it and was puffing away in peace, soothed by the large, orange glow at the tip. At this time, cloud cover was passing above and blocked out both the starlight and moonlight. He continue to puff on his cigar, making it appear as a pulsing beacon in the pitch of the night. Just then the hobo noticed that creatures of the night were silent. He sensed trouble of some kind, but felt cocky and confident with his machine gun in his lap.

And then there, silently and purposefully coming at him from behind a nearby tree, was a huge, jet-black figure floating above the ground. The towering, lean entity was lifeless and cold. It had a pointed tail at the bottom and some resemblance of a belly and a head. The hobo hesitated as the shock took the air out of him, but then started spraying machine gun fire right into the entity. It had no effect. It kept coming at him, so the hobo started stumbling backward, his cigar falling out of his
mouth to the ground.

He kept moving until he was backed up against his shack. He gasped for breath to scream, but could do nothing but accept his fate at the hands of this ghostly presence. To his relief, the entity stopped about nine feet short of him, right where he dropped his glowing cigar on the ground. The faceless apparition lowered itself until the very point of its tail could reach the glowing tip of the cigar After a second or two of what appeared to be poking and probing at the orange ash, it glided backward the same way it came; a lifeless, two-dimensional form in slow motion. The hobo collapsed in terror.

The next morning, Crazy Crotty was at the general store and overheard one of the local farmers saying that he came for the sheriff to investigate gun fire during the night in the ravines.  Crazy Crotty tried to get the jump on the sheriff and stole a pickup truck to make his way out there first. He got out there to find the hobo in a hysterical state. When he finally got him calmed down, the hobo started to rattle off his story. Crazy Crotty tried to tell him that they had to escape, but he would calm down to realize that they were about to be caught. In all the commotion, neither one paid attention to their surroundings as the sheriff arrived shortly coming up the back way. The sheriff, his deputy, and the farmer hid in the brush and heard the whole story.

They were arrested for moon shining, but everyone agreed that the story of the gully ghost would not be discussed, as it would taint their reputations and scare the locals. If it got out, they would say that the hobo was drinking the profits and was seeing things. Only the arrest record would contain the sheriff’s full, official report
of the Ditch Devil encounter.
 

1960

In the basement vault of the old Rockford armory is a classified file that is both intriguing and embarrassing for the military. The year 1960 saw the escalation of the Cold War. The military was in full ranks and constantly training for a third world war. Even the Reserves were on special status. It was in this time of high alert that there was another encounter with The Ditch Devil.

The nearby town of Marseilles had a large training area for the Illinois Army National Guard. Units from as far away as Winnebago and Cook counties came in for their infantry training. In this case, “B” Company from Rockford was in one autumn weekend for maneuvers and was bivouacked on the far eastern edge of the land. They were there to conduct night time search and destroy operations.

The training involved sending one “enemy” platoon out early on Saturday morning to set up a camp, and then send another platoon out to find and engaged them that night. The enemy platoon was lead by a 20-year-old ROTC cadet from Northern Illinois University. He was green, and to compound things, cocky. He promptly  lead them far off course, stating that the other platoon would never get the jump on them, even though that was part of the plan. This error in judgment took the enemy platoon far out of the training area along a creek bed that lead them miles across the countryside, and straight into the Woodsmoke Ravines. The young  lieutenant was impressed with the cover and concealment of the gullies, and ordered his men to dig in for the night just as the sun was setting. As they were setting up their tents, one of the young privates told his sergeant that he had a cousin in the nearby town who told him once that there was some kind of ghost legend in the township north of the bluffs. For divulging such immature information, the sergeant awarded him with double guard duty that night, and ordered him to keep such nonsense to himself. All of the guards were then instructed to set off the ground flares in the other platoon came sneaking up on them during the night.

The rest of the platoon had the last of their smokes, put out their bonfires, and went to sleep thinking that with the bright moon that night, nobody could come sneaking up on them. On the third watch, at about 2:30 a.m., the guard on the northern border went over to a small fire he had hidden behind some large rocks. The flames had died down, so he went over and began to stoke the fire so that the popping embers flew up into the air and the coals glowed to life again. Satisfied with his efforts, he walked back to his post near the flare triggers. Suddenly, his visual scan caught movement up the ravine. Straining his eyes, he thought he could make out a very tall figure, almost as tall as the trees around it.  The guard was excited that he was the first to spot the “enemy” and would be able to light them up for easy shooting. He lost sight of the shadow for a minute as it went through the brush, but it was straight on course to his small fire.

His plan was to set off the flares as soon as they came out of the bushes. At first sight of the shadowy enemy, he triggered the pulsing, white flare in front of a tree at their defensive perimeter. To his horror, it was no weekend warrior buddy, but a floating,  solid black, imposing creature of great height and slender build. The apparently figureless ghost kept on course for the fire pit coals, and in doing so, passed straight through the white-hot flare. Confused and frightened at the same time, the guard started to yell for his fellow soldiers to wake up. In these few seconds of terror, the entity drifted  among the rocks right on top of the small patch of embers and dragged its snake like tail in a stirring motion sending up more sparks. And then, as if disinterested, it floated back into the brush and up the ravine, fading here and there among the tree trunks.

As soon as the others awoke they started shooting their blank rounds and setting off sky flares. It was one of the sky flares that illuminated the entity for all to see as it cleared the drop-off into an even deeper ravine. The gung-ho young lieutenant mistakenly went charging after it, only to let out a blood- curdling shrill as soon as he disappeared into the other ravine. When he returned in a babbling state, there was a eerie, awkward silence in the camp. No one spoke of the sighting, except the quivering ROTC cadet, who swore that he saw a ghost. Back in Rockford, the naive lieutenant filled out an incident report against the captain’s orders, and then filed it in the vault himself in an unmarked folder. Not one of the men ever backed his story, though in their souls, they knew they had encountered an enemy that couldn’t be beaten with weapons.
 

1997

As posted on FreakyLinks.com, this is the most recent encounter with The Ditch Devil that has been documented. The record shows that the weather that Labor Day weekend at Woodsmoke was beautiful. As was customary, there were many back to school celebrations. In this case, a group of five freshman had been celebrating their start of high school. The three boys and two girls were together all that Saturday. They took one last swim in the pool, had a game of softball, grilled cheeseburgers, and then hung out at the pavilion. The big plan that night was to have a dance party at one of the park model trailers. They got a ride into Ottawa and bought all kinds of supplies. They got music CDs, snacks, party favors, glow sticks, all kinds of soda.

They all went back to their families in the late afternoon for supper and then returned to the party trailer at about 8:30. The party went on with the eating, dancing, singing, card games, and all the rest. They had to close down the party at 11:00 pm because of the strict ranch association rules. But those kids still had much more party in them, so one of the boys suggested that they go for a walk and hang around somewhere. Just as they were about to leave, the boy who was hosting the party had an idea. He suggested that they take all of their glow-in-the-dark necklaces, head crowns, bracelets, and sticks with them so they could see each other in the dark. So off they went down the small, quiet streets like beacons in the night. The breeze picked up, the clouds moved over the moon, and the leaves rustled here and there as if the wind itself was taking a stroll through the ranch.

It was about 12:30 am when the girls said that they were tired and wanted to go back. The problem was that they were far away from the party trailer, nearly at the northwestern edge of the campground. When they realized it would be a long walk back, they agreed to sit down for a while. The boy who was hosting the party said that there was an abandoned park model nearby. The story goes that the very first owners “didn’t have a good feeling about the place”, never came back, and were unable to sell out either. Through the stifling darkness, the exhausted teens started up the street. The trailer was located at the top of a small hill, at the end of a court, with empty lots on both sides it. The location was heavily wooded. It seemed strange that these lots weren’t all bought up and used by people. It had all the charm of what Woodsmoke is supposed to be. In addition to the remote location from the pools and pavilions, the lots were all backed up to a very steep ravine,  requiring expensive staging to set up and build around the larger park models. Beyond this ravine were acres and acres of scrub trees and bushes on private
farmland.

The boy who knew of this place said that kids hung around here all the time because the people never showed up and it is far away from the rest of the campers. He led them down the gravel driveway, glow sticks above their heads, until they got onto the deck and walked around to the back patio. Just as they turned the corner, the Woodsmoke Security pickup truck pulled into the court. The Ranch Association knew that on a busy weekend, there would be some loitering at “the old Foslar place.” Quickly, they hid their glow sticks and silently pressed up against the back of the trailer. A spotlight slowly passed across the front yard and then shut off. In the blackness, the tail lights of the security truck could be seen as it wheeled back down the court. The girls burst out giggling, having been thrilled by the close call.

There was no backyard; the large, wrap-around deck actually had to be built right out into the ravine. A large picnic table was near the edge by the railing. The kids all sat down with a sigh of relief. Just then, the sky cleared to exposed the nearly full moon and for a second the moonlight and passing cloud made a surreal dance of
shadows with the trees and brush directly below them in the ravine. The wide gaps in the floor decking made it possible to see the steep drop off. The forest was alive with the sounds of nature; owls hooting, crickets chirping, raccoons scampering. There were few mosquitoes at this time of year, so the setting was perfect.

As they sat around chatting and resting, one of the boys said he had an idea: put all of the glow sticks in the middle of the picnic table and make a fake campfire. And this they did. The glow necklaces went down first, then they propped the glow sticks against each other like kindling. It had a real effect, and they were pleased with their creation. The fading green and red chemical lights gave the effect of coals and embers in an ebbing fire. They went on talking and laughing around their glow-fire. But just as someone was about to suggest that they head on back, one of the girls who was from the city told everyone how beautiful it was out in the country- not a sound to be heard. And in fact, all of nature around them was silent. The clouds had long since covered the moon. The breeze had stopped. The stifling night closed in on them with their backs to the unknown and unseen. They were  barely able to see the features of each others faces at the table. One of the boys who lived on a farm, told everyone that this silence was rare, only happening when there was a predator on the hunt nearby, like a coyote or wolverine.

At this, a boy and girl who had been holding hands and snuggling both felt Goosebumps break out on each other, followed by a cold sweat. You could almost sense the spine-tingling reaction in the small group. The party host, voice cracking and trying bravely to move slow, got up and said that everyone should follow him back out down the driveway. The others agreed and got up, not even bothering to retrieve their faint glow sticks on the picnic table.  Just as they stood up, one of the girls who was sitting at the end of the picnic table grabbed the boy’s arm next to her and started to dig in her nails. When he turned to see what she was doing he saw her head turned sideways toward the ground. There, through the cracks of the floor, they saw something slowly shifting back and forth under the deck; something so inky, pitch black, that it could be seen in the normal darkness of the night. The boy started to mumble as he forcefully grabbed the girl’s arm and in a weak, slow motion began to pull away. In doing this, he stepped right on the foot of his already anxious friend, who let out a frightened yelp.

When this happened, everyone in the group turned to see what the commotion was about. What they saw froze them in their tracks. There on the floor about six feet away from the end of the picnic table, the flat-black form began to rise through a crack in the decking. It had something like a head, and was about two feet wide. When it was about halfway up on the deck, and already six feet high, the group bolted to the end of the trailer. In the rush, the boy and girl couple stumbled in the dark and fell. As they gained their bearings and were about to get to their feet, the saw the 10-foot tall, black entity hover up higher, and then begin to float towards them, directly over the picnic table. They both froze and screamed, expecting to be some kind of victim of the creature. However, it stopped right above the  “glow-fire” they left behind. Just inches over the glow-fire, its pointy tail dipped down and started to poke down in between the glow sticks. It touched the lean-to creation and they all toppled down. The tail then flicked at the sticks, sending them off the picnic table as the faceless entity floated over the deck railing, and then
 slowly sunk straight down into the ravine.

As soon as it was out of sight, the couple spun around back towards the driveway to see the silhouettes of the others hiding around the corner of the trailer. They all ran screaming and hollering at the top of their lungs all the way down the court and onto a main road. An elderly couple was up late watching TV, heard the screams,  and called Woodsmoke security, who eventually found the teens running down the street towards the well-lit ranch office, sobbing and exhausted. The teens told  them exactly what the had seen, and said that they should warn everyone to stay away from the old Foslar place. The management, security, and realty broker humored them and sent them on their way, and then quickly convened to a secret meeting. The next day, several campers who had also heard the commotion the night before came to office to find out what had happened.  They were told, “It was all just some typical teens having one last fling before settling in for the school year….you know how it is with kids..…go on back now and enjoy the peaceful, carefree surroundings of Woodsmoke Ranch.…..”
 

Author’s Summation:

The New Madrid Earthquake of 1811 shook the earth so violently that it opened a chasm along the bottom of the Woodsmoke ravines. This narrow fissures went clear down towards the center of the earth. It opened into a cavernous chamber where a colony of primitive, plasma entities had been existing for millions of years near the molten core of the planet. The deep chasm caused an imbalance of the magnetic and chemical environment on the earth’s surface. The resulting energy conflict immediately created a sustained, localized weather phenomenon of boiling clouds, fog, small tornados, and lightning.

Days later when the moon was bright, the physics of the universe were such that it lured the plasma entities to the earth’s surface. Once on top, they would hover in a congregation just above the ground and slowly turn to follow the path of the moon, as if by magnetic force. Once the moonlight became weak, they would slip back down into the chasms and return to their colony. On those rare occasions, when the moon shown in daylight, they would rise to the surface, but not leave the fissures.

When the second New Madrid Earthquake hit a month or so later in 1812, it closed the very chasms it opened. The weather phenomenon ceased and all seemed back to normal in that region. But the timing was such that one of the entities was trapped on the earth’s surface. The lone Ditch Devil found its way into one remaining crack that didn’t seal up all the way to the surface. The remnants of this chasm was about three feet long, 1 foot wide, and went down about 80 feet to the limestone bed. To this day, the fissure exists hidden under thick, thorny scrub brush.

When the moon is more than half full, the plasma entity is once again lured by that strange lunar instinct. Once the ditch devil is on the surface, it is attracted to anything that resembles its home, the molten cradle of inner earth. Hence, the sightings by campfire coals and embers, where it unsuccessfully tries to find its way back to its natural habitat.

The plasma entity goes by many names, such as “gully ghost”, “plasma phantom”, and “chasm shadow”, but “ditch devil” stuck because the lifeless, black specter scares people and they usually say that it was seen floating in a ditch.

They say that if you see it coming or lurking behind trees, just put out all light sources, or get away from them. No one has reported being threatened or harmed by it. Witnesses agree that the size, silence, and lifelessness of the entity is what petrified them, and not a sense of aggression or harm.

Scientists theorize that it is some type of primordial life form that began in a state of plasma. Somehow it could not evolve as all other life forms do and became stuck  in the embryonic phase as it exists today. On the other hand, religious leaders have full faith that it is an evil presence, sent by the Lord to test “the lukewarm.” Finally, and most importantly, those Woodsmoke campers who have experienced that prickly, petrifying chill running up their spine while sitting by a fading bonfire say that your instinct will tell you when it is close..….

 Chaos Comment -  WOW ! Watch those evening bonfires people !