Down the Wellenton road

Local Lore

It only took a single word for the deed to be done, and mere seconds after it was spoken, off went her head. As it tumbled down the crowd which had gathered around the sight could only stare in disbelief. There were no sounds of victory, nor sounds of sorrow. Only shocked faces of citizens who had witnessed a horrible crime. For this was not an execution they had witnessed, but a murder. Which would be followed by many more. First, it was the lady of the house, then the lord, and only a few days later nearly the entire family had been slain at the hands of these unknown assailants. The only one who would prove to survive these attacks was the lady's daughter, Selene Wellenton. 

After witnessing firsthand the massacre of her family, she swore vengeance on not only the ones committing the acts but the town as well. Indeed, she also blamed, in part, herself for these hideous acts. She spent her days and her nights in hiding, deep beneath the home which she had spent her entire life, searching for a way to make everybody pay for the crimes they had committed. Until one day, she finally had, and she then cursed the town and all of its inhabitants. Or so the story goes, at least.

After that day, when fire rained down from the sky, the town was destroyed, and with it any evidence of the girl, or her family's lineage. A new town was thus built upon the ashes of the old one, and new people moved in. But the curse persisted. Every year, one person who lived in the town would turn up missing, and later be found in the surrounding woods, barely recognizable. There was never a pattern, nor a motive. Indeed it seemed entirely up to luck as to who would go missing. But without fail, no matter what the townsfolk tried, someone would inevitably wind up dead. Despite this, nobody ever left the town. 

Nobody quite moves in, either. The legend of the town certainly keeps new people away, though it also draws in its a fair share of tourists. Many call the legend a hoax, some say it was merely fabricated to increase tourism in the area. Then something changed. More people started to go missing, more than just once a year at least. The number started to increase, slowly but exponentially. And that's why I'm here. My father is a writer for an online magazine that chronicles the weird and unexplained mysteries of our world, and that's likely the source of my desensitization of such matters. When you start to study the unnatural, you come to realize most of the time it's nothing more than a neverending list of false truths, and outright lies. 

Nevertheless, despite my own skepticism, the increased disappearances make the town a hot topic in certain social circles. So, my father decided to move us into the town to study the strange occurrences more closely than what would have been possible in our small Orlando apartment. The moment I was starting to get settled in, make friends, and start to understand my surroundings, we were already back on the road, heading towards the small town, located across the country in Utah...

... the town of Wellenton.