Late 1800's. It was a good blistery morning when the shipment of beef arrived. It was just before the Christmas holiday so extra quarters were ordered. The young apprentice was not happy about this as his boss Jerry Horton would never offer to help him carry these all downstairs to the meat locker. Mr. Horton had a reputation in the village as being a very hard man to work for.
He had a bad back which put him in a daily state of chronic pain & this in turn made him mean as the devil. Most of the daily work was put on the apprentice.
This morning there was an unfortunate accident, a very large & heavy quarter of beef caused the apprentice to tumble down the stairs to his death. The fall had snapped his neck. Mr. Horton immediately panicked as thoughts flew through his mind. Everyone knew how he treated the apprentice & of his temper toward the young man. Things got so bad even the young mans family frowned on his position there. He wondered if the young mans family would think that his temper perhaps caused this accident to happen.
This was the very moment that Mr. Horton's madness escalted to a higher level. He was not going to chance being the accused in this horrible incident. Even if he tried to explain the truth....based on what people knew of how he treated the apprentice......I mean who knew what the outcome would be.
So in that moment of madness it caused him to haul the young mans body to the back of the meat locker behinds quarters & quarters of beef hanging on hooks. He closed & locked the door & was left to figure out what to do.
A few hours went by after the young apprentice should have returned home from work. When confronted by the Father of the apprentice, Jerry acted his usual rude ay by demanding that as soon as the young man was found he was to report to work. His suggestion, as the Father continued his inquiries, was that the boy was highly unhappy with his job & perhaps he left to find a more rewarding apprenticeship.
Even tho Jerry put on a cool, calm face he was under much pressure, money was becoming a problem & without a good cash flow, replacing his inventory was getting harder. He was now running very low so he decided to take action. The next night he went down to the meat locker where the apprentice lay & worked diligently carving up a part of the apprentices left leg. He packaged it in butcher paper & took it home. That night he roasted the leg & ate it. He was shocked to find that the leg tasted quite a lot like beef but it had an additional sweetness to it.
The next morning he arrived at his shop & eagerly butchered & displayed the rest of his grusome offerings. Customers started to flow in & were excited about the wonderful looking cuts of beef & before you knew it most of the apprentice was packaged & sold.
Jerry wondered what the next day would bring - would his customers agree that the meat had an unusual sweetness to it. In they came, claiming that the beef was scrumptious & in turn buying up the rest of it & going on their way. But this couldn't last.............or could it!
Jerry found himself in a serious dilemma. What would hapen if he could not supply his customers with more of this scrumptious beef. Perhaps his customers would go to his competition trying to find this delicious delicacy. Well, he could not let that happen so he had to find a way for these gruesome cuts of meat to continue to be in his meat case.
When the last pieces of sweet meat went out, Jerry came up with a new plan to keep his new improving business going. Perhaps he never realized how evil he could be but we were about to find out. Each night after he closed the shop, he would make his way over to the large railroad yards just a short distance from his shop. He would be on the lookout for hobo's. They were always hungry. He would offer them a meal in exchange for some small jobs. He would lure them back to his shop & there he would feed them a hearty meal. Little did they know it would be their last meal. They would eat the meal that would drug them & they would pass out. Jerry would sit patiently & watch them doze off.
When the vagrant was out with no hope of recovering, Jerry would bring out his knives & cleavers & hack the poor man up while he was out. He would work all night making precise cuts & neatly arranging the pieces in his case for sale the next day. Pretty soon, word got around at the hobo camp of the disappearance of some of these men, they knew something was going on but who would listen to them. Soon the camp emptied & Jerry once again found himself without his fresh scrumptious meat.
Now the most drastic of his deeds was about to fall into place. The local children were mysteriously disappearing. It was not an easy task for Jerry......drugging the hobo's was much easier, but these little ones put up quite a fight & at his age, it was hard to handle them. What made this so dastardly was that with the 1st childs murder came even greater reviews of Jerry's scrumptious meats. The now constant flow of customers exclaimed that this was by far the most succlent pieces of meat they have ever tasted. So Jerry, now reaching a certain level of insanity continued to provide more & more of the sickening stock.
Eventually the local people were suspecting that the recent disappearances of the local children had to be happening with someone that lived in the town. Between analyzing the few pieces of evidence they had & also a strong push from the family of the apprentice that disappeared - a bold group of town people gathered together one night & decided to break into Jerry's shop & have a look around for themselves. A search was done from top to bottom of the butcher shop & there in the very same meat locker where the apprentice met his demise, a completely shocking array of packaged body parts & the remains of a 7 yr. old child hanging from a meat hook were found. Everybody was in shock!
Storming out of the shop & making their way to the home of Jerry they broke open the front door & dragged Jerry out onto the front lawn where they butchered him with his own cleavor. The final blow with the cleaver severing his head. Right there in the town they buried his head across the road from the cemetery.
I have mentioned before in telling the story of the Collins Family property that......new sub- divisions go up all the time....who of its new residents look into the local history. How do you know the history of the land you are building your house on.
And so......after the slaughter of Jerry & the burying of his head, his remains were buried in the cemetery across the road from where his head was.The locals put a stone on his plot with one word on it...."BUTCHER". Problem is ...it has not remained there. Jump ahead now to 2008. For sometime now local residents claim that the body is moving closer to the head. In fact the grave has mysteriously moved twice since his burial. It moved from the north side of the cemetery to the middle, & now to its current site along the main highway.
Is it only a matter of time before the butchers body returns to its unbutchered state - rejoining its head across the road?
There are local skeptics who came up with all kinds of means that there are logical explanations for this grave moving, but really none of these reasons make sense. Unbelievers claim its purely coincidental. These days the local area is beautiful....small farms with riding stables, trails, nature hikes.......a very tranquil place. But don't wander to far off the beaten path because that yields a distinctly different feeling leaving you with one thought.......Has the body reached its head yet? |
