Dispatches

Welcome to Midnight Dispatches. Tonight, the Frankenram. A cloned hybrid sheep, loose in the mountains of Montana. Nobody knows where it is. Nobody knows if it is alive.

In October 1869, a dig on Stub Newell's farm near Cardiff, New York, uncovered a ten-foot gypsum figure.

In December 1869, George Hull confessed that he had carved the figure from Iowa gypsum in Chicago and buried it in November 1868.

In February 1870, a court ruled that both the original figure and P.T. Barnum's copy were fakes. The original is now at the Farmers' Museum in Cooperstown.

Midnight Dispatches: strange but true stories, told after midnight.

Two young lovers, a table in Old Mesilla, and a tale that does not agree with itself. Told, never settled. New stories at midnight. midnightdispatches.com

Deep in the pines at the base of Mount Elden outside Flagstaff, Arizona, stands a grave that got too big for the truth. The sign beside it tells a murder story: in September 1877, a mule skinner shot a little boy dead over spring water, and a posse killed him for it. But research by John Westerlund and Beth Wilson, great-great granddaughter of John Elden, found the murder was never part of the family's own stories. The family was real. The grave is real. The murder is pure fiction, a tale that grew step by step from a small grave in the pines into print, books, magazines, and a trail guide. The real story is quieter: a baby boy who died just after birth and was buried here before the family left Flagstaff for California in late 1884.

The grave is still there. The sign still tells the murder story.

Midnight Dispatches: strange but true stories, told after midnight.

Tiles pressed into the asphalt in about two dozen cities, reading: TOYNBEE IDEA, IN Kubrick's 2001, RESURRECT DEAD, ON PLANET JUPITER. Examined, never endorsed. New stories at midnight. midnightdispatches.com

Tod Browning's Freaks (1932), the film that put real sideshow performers on screen and paid for it.

Chupacabra sightings around Phoenix, checked claim by claim.

Margery Williams, 1922. A horror story in a christening gown: what it costs to become Real. Verdict: 9.4.

The archive ends here. The road starts now.

February 1855: a hundred miles of single-file hoofprints in fresh snow. Overnight. No witnesses.

Two green-skinned children walked out of a Suffolk field in the 1100s, speaking no known language.

In 1977, a telescope in Ohio heard something from Sagittarius. It never repeated.