From the Forbidden List of Leads
Subject DDE11212, The Gravel Pit
James Conner returned from the war in the fall of 1945 with a deep tan, a desire to put the past behind him, and the notion to do something with his folks’ property, a decent tract of land near a small town not too distant from Bismarck, North Dakota. The land had never been very good for crops, but that was fine with James. He had another plan in mind. He had been a combat engineer, and he’d become exceedingly skilled in reducing coral and lava islands into gravel and dust, and then leveling them out into airstrips.
On the eastern edge of the property, edging up against a little babbling river, was a low hill. In fact, this was the terminal moraine of one of the ancient glaciers that scoured the country in the distant past. Like a titanic bulldozer, the glacier had scraped up the earth and deposited it here, and it remained there long after the glacier had melted away. James' plans hadn’t involved the top soil, but what was lying underneath. There were none of the mineral wealthy you typically think of when it comes to mining, no gold or coal. Nor would there be any oil shale, that fracking technology would be decades away. No, the money here was all in gravel
Gravel has a lot of uses, the most important being used in roads and other concrete products. All you need to do is dig it up, wash away the soil, and with simple milling processes, sort it into the appropriate sizes per the customer’s need. You needed to use and maintain heavy equipment, but James knew that like a back of hand, plus the government was selling plenty of it as surplus.
The Conner Gravel Quarry, everybody just called it the gravel pit, quickly proved successful. For a few years, James was the richest man in town, and at its height the pit employed a dozen men with generous wages. The biggest boom was during the Eisenhower years, when the country was laying down highways and interstate freeways all over the country. Yet every boom has its bust. A lot of people had gravel deposits on their properties, and so many people got into it, production soon outstripped demand, and the bottom fell out. Jim would end up laying off his workers, and shutter the entrance gate of the gravel pit in 1959. He’d still tool around in his bulldozer now and then. He’d help acquaintances with their gravel driveways, and supply pea gravel to the local playgrounds and such, but he never had the drive to start a new business. Besides, he was enjoying a very early retirement, and all of his former workers had found good jobs.
At the end, when closed, the pit was a massive open wound in what had once been rolling prairie. A great v-shaped trough had been dug out, almost like a canyon from an old western, leading back away from the little babbling river. In places cuts were made into the canyon walls, creating sharp vertical cliffs, fifty feet high or so. In some of the wider cuts were great piles of well sorted gravel, ranging in size from large stones down to sands of various grain sizes. It was all product that hadn’t sold. James had kept his employees working even as the market collapsed, just in the hope that it might come back.
In 1962, three boys disappeared from the little town outside of Bismarck. Jonathan (10), his little brother Nicky (7), and their next door neighbor, Ronny (9). The town had been the sort where on nice warm summer days, boys could run out their door after breakfast, and go running off on their own to play with other boys, sometimes coming home for lunch at one house or another, and make their way home by dinner. At the very least they’d call if they were having dinner at a friend’s house. At any rate, they’d always make it home before dark, usually after the sun was down but while there was still a golden and turquoise light on the western horizon. When the boys didn’t show up after dark, calls were urgently placed to the parents of all the local boys. By two hours after proper dark, the night full of stars, the police were called. After two days, the FBI. No sign of the boys, not even a hint, was ever found. At first, relatives were interrogated, especially strange uncles who lived alone. Later, various ex-cons living all the way over in Bismarck were interrogated. Again, no clue.
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In the summer of 1963, another boy went missing. Two more in the summer of 1964. Again, there was never even a hint. The people of the town weren’t familiar with the term “serial killer,” though part of their minds were afraid of the vaguely formed concept. The parents would never find closure.
The problem was, it was a strange phenomenon that was fairly widely understood, and feared, in a different context among the people of the Upper Midwest. It was a terrifying scenario, but was feared by agricultural workers, people who worked in grain mills and grain silos which could be found everywhere, from Montana in the west, to Missouri the south, to Pennsylvania in the West.
You see, when you have large gravel, big pebbles, a person of any proportions and weight can walk right up the pile, and not even notice a problem. If the pebbles are very small, that is to say sand, the same thing occurs. It’s a mostly solid mound, and a person can walk right up a sand dune. However, there’s a very strange exception. If a mass of pebbles or gravel is just the right size, just the right shape, say perhaps it’s been specifically milled that way, then a human being won’t be able to stand on it. No, they’ll just sink right in, the gravel will part as they sink through, and the gravel will fill in above them, swallowing them. If a person were to try to walk up a large pile of such gravel they will immediately notice the danger after a step or two, and then fall backwards out of their predicament to safety. However, if they are standing on a low but steep cliff, and they see below them a pile of such gravel, they’d have no idea of the danger they faced. It would appear just a soft cushion for a big fun stunt. Jump off the cliff and land in a big safe cushion of soft gravel. It didn’t look that much different than the pea gravel at the playground anyway.
The parents of the missing boys had all passed by fifty years after the last boy disappeared. The gravel pit would have been unrecognizable to people from the past. Rain and snow and wind had reduced the whole thing to low humps, barely recognizable as hills, all along a little babbling river. Bismarck had never been a big city, but it had grown, particularly after the boom of the oil shale rush. Still, a housing development had been built over the site of the old gravel pit. Lots of middle class homes, mostly owned by commuters who didn’t mind the drive, but preferred the slightly lower costs of living.
The people of this housing development had a problem. They would wake up gasping for breath in the middle of the night, sheets soaking wet, with the terrible sensation of being smothered, unable to breath. They’d all go to their different doctors, and all be misdiagnosed with sleep apnea. Their cpap machines would fail to give the victims relief. There are official government agencies designed to recognize clusters of outbreaks, like the EPA and the CDC. Except they're designed to recognize clusters like cancer, or listeria. There are no official agencies trained to recognize the ghosts of little boys who smothered to death under piles of gravel.
Booms are followed by busts. The fracking industry has moved on, and the housing development by the little babbling brook has seen better times. Most have moved out, and the houses themselves are in a terrible state. They sort of look like a whole neighborhood of haunted houses. Yet it’s the earth below that’s truly haunted.