The Legend

On October 31, 1887, the Durand Circus Train, coming from lower Alabama, crashed in Atkins, Iowa. More than 40 circus people were killed as they slept in their pull cars. All of the animals on board were killed as well. In those days, most people who joined the circus did so because they had no family and nowhere else to go. Therefore, it was nearly impossible to identify the remains and send them home to a proper burial. All of the mangled clowns, midgets, and other circus freaks were buried at the site of the crash – in a cornfield now belonging to Scream Acres.

A few of the clowns survived but suffered from depression after the loss of their carnival friends. Some even tried to conjure the spirits of their lost friends by performing seances. During that era, a Ouija Board was used to perform these seances.

Two days after burying the victims of the Durand Circus Train Crash, Dr Andrew Christensen, the town’s Undertaker, performed one of these seances. It had previously been whispered around the local townsmen that Dr Christensen practiced in the Dark Occult. Well, something went wrong (or right) that night, and a horrible demonic presence was brought into the town and its freshly-dug graveyard in the cornfield. Dr. Christensen suffered a horribly painful death that night.

Small headstones, marked “Unknown”, were erected in the cornfield graveyard to mark the burial sites of the nameless circus people. These markers were torn down by the town’s clergy in the mid 1900’s however, to try to make the people forget the tragedy and the curse.

Since that horrific train crash in the Dry Creek near Atkins, Iowa, it is said that the land, and all those who visit there during the days of late October, are cursed. It is said that the spirit of Dr. Christensen has been resurrected at The Reaper and is the caretaker of all the lost souls. After Dr. Christensen’s seance that night, all of the surviving clowns’ souls turned dark and sinister and were condemned for all eternity.

But it is what lurks in the corn…the most Evil and Unspeakable Darkness that roams during the Autumn Solstice. The Korn Stalkr and his Evil Minions roam about, looking for their next victim – to feed off their fear, to raise the dead, to roam and take victims back to the Slaughterhouse and drag their carcasses into the black soil of the cornfield.

Train Wreck October 1887

Cornfield Graveyard