What's that scary old film that told the true story of the American town where everyone went crazy in the 1800s or early 1900s?

It was a documentary from around 2001. It was about Black River Falls, Wisconsin. Can’t remember the name.

Wisconsin Death Trip?

Thank you R1.

YES, thank you R3!

I've never heard of this story. How bizarre. What caused it?

Bad weather devastated the local crops and the cold, bleak winters caused starvation and anguish. Talk of witchcraft and devil worship circulated among the residents. During this terrible period, the seemingly doomed inhabitants of Black River Falls surrendered to suicide, murder, destruction, and depravity.

Blair Witch Project?

Wisconsin Death Trip.

Saw it at The Castro Theater.

Blair Witch was not a true story, nor did it involve a town of people going crazy in the 19th century.

But other than that, r10, I think he’s right.

I am intrigued where can we stream this?

R12, I think this is it, but it may be worth finding the book, too.

Based on an unforgettable book that is sadly out of print - even a Kindle copy costs about $30. Do Kindle books include the photos? This is a picture book and you really need to see the photos alongside the text. See the reviews.

The book is fantastic. The movie is only so so.

If you like this sort of stuff the book is with the money - used start at around 11 bucks.

I submitted a request to my public library to buy the ebook.

OP, I believe you are thinking of "Mayhem in Flyover Country".

The Real Housewives of New York!

Sleepy hollow?

Sounds fascinating. It would make a good limited series.

It actually makes me think it was environmental like something in the water supply.

Pretty sure it's Dyatlov Pass

Gone with the Wind

This thread isn’t about your sex life, r23

I currently live in small town northern Wisconsin and can easily see this happening again. People here are WEIRD. It's a very insular place and if you're not from here, you're not welcome.

R25 Those places are so north they seem more Canadian than American.

[quote]Do Kindle books include the photos?

Yes, if they're in the original book.

I bought a reprint a couple of years ago, paperback, from Amazon. It wasn’t even expensive.

If it’s not there anymore, I’m sure abebooks and other sellers would have it.

It really is quite wonderful!

I just ordered a copy from Abe Books online for a little over $15 including tax. Free shipping, at least in the U.S.

Black River Falls, WI, still exists. The current population is about 3,500. It's in a rural area in central Wisconsin, 140 miles southeast of Minneapolis. The nearest large town is LaCrosse, about 45 miles away. It's not particularly isolated nowadays, but 130 years ago it must have been the back of beyond.

I wonder how the townspeople feel about the notoriety.

OP - you have mischaracterized the book. It’s not that a everyone in a small town “went crazy” - the book, which is a rework of the authors PhD thesis in history, tracks - over a 20 year period - how prevalent what we would now consider mental illness, depression and general despair was in the “good old days” in “salt of the earth, small town, agrarian America.”

The book uses contemporary newspaper accounts, combined with patient histories from the state mental asylum & quotes from two early 20th century novels set in that milieu and era. He weaves a scrapbook of human misery, documenting illness, bankruptcy, suicide, murder, child-mortality and one woman with “a mania for breaking glass” to deconstruct some still powerful American self-mythology about all town rural life and self reliance.

His conclusion. in the afterward, is that the rise of urban life in the early 20th cent was no accident, but a mass rejection of the rural life of the prior century. He’s got a very 70s academic Marxist slant to his analysis, but makes some great points. The main takeaway - it was much better to work as a clerk in a populous city and with the money you earned pay others to make your clothes, cook your food and entertain you rather than be almost completely isolated on a remote farm and have to do EVERYTHING your fucking self.

The pictures that form the spine of the book and make it so haunting are the happy accident that created the whole thing. As a grad student he came across the life’s work of a typical small town’s lone professional photographer. By happenstance hundreds of glass plate negatives that documented the mundane life of Black River Falls, WI over the last decades of the 19th cent had survived intact and ended up in an archive rather than the town dump.

The town’s history was explored at random, the point is that what is unearthed here could, and did, happen in any town. It is an amazing book about the harsh realities of the human condition and the lies we tell ourselves to make it bearable. The movie isn’t a documentary as much as an arty Then & Now that re-enacts episodes from the book and intercuts it with contemporary footage of the town - it’s an ok Art House exercise - a bit student filmy - but it really misses the power, and much of the point, of the book. I have also read a few of the author’s later books and recommend them as well.

Black River Falls is on I-94 in Wisconsin. I have done the drive from Chicago to Minneapolis countless times in my life and there is a good rest stop and small scenic walkway in BRF, good for stretching the legs on a long drive. I've always thought it was a pretty place to drive through (never ventured further than the rest stop). The river crossing provides some lovely bluff views. I had no idea it had such a creepy history. I will definitely look at it differently this summer when I drive through again on my annual trip back to the US to visit family.

It was about St. Louis and it occurred in 2021.

Don't spoil the fun with your big-city words, R31. We want to the story to be about a small rural village whose residents suddenly went crazy and turned into zombie-like creatures who ate all the babies and then turned on each other, ending in a pile of blood and guts in the town center, with the only survivor being the old woman who lived deep in the forbidden forest who was rumored to be a witch and who vowed revenge on the entire town for hanging her sister, a convicted murderess, some thirty years prior.

R31 - Thanks very much for the deep dive into the social sub-currents of the era! This is pure speculation on my part, but . . .

from watching the YouTube video it seems A LOT of the town population was comprised of immigrants from Northern Europe. My hypothesis is that many of these immigrants probably weren't the most mentally stable of people and perhaps they (or their recent ancestors) were forced to leave cities/towns/villages in Europe because they were trouble-makers or a drain on municipal resources. Basically, the crazy came along with them to the New World.

This a GREAT thread! Thanks for starting it, OP!!

Black River Falls was the inspiration for St. Olaf.

Sounds like Herschel Gordon Lewis’ 2000 Maniacs.

[quote]Sounds like Herschel Gordon Lewis’ 2000 Maniacs.

Fun Fact: Natalie Merchant's old band 10,000 Maniacs got their name from that film, but they screwed up the number. But it stuck.

Is the same person who did an in depth study on the undiagnosed mental illness that was rampant in that period? I think it was a woman though.

Life was harsh, young people died too young all the time, working conditions sucked, and there were no meds for depression or mental illness.

R31. That’s too simplistic and reductive of an explanation. They were many Norther European immigrants - and as the book makes clear they were lied to about the soil fertility in the area as well as the weather - the real estate swindles were compounded by several economic collapses — the Great Depression wasn’t the first time everything went to shit. So many if these poor farmers lost all everything (as well as their children to periodic dypyheria outbreaks) - as the author says — there are often good reasons to kill yourself.

I understand the attraction of an easy explanation, and the author being a 70s Marxist does almost wholly blame capitalism; but that’s a bit closer to the truth than eugenics. My takeaway from the book is that “life is ever thus” - we should never idealize, nor feel we are so much superior to, those who came before us.

Fuck me, read me, get me Bled for days Smile on my rage I'm scarred by age, I bled Bled for days

Wayne

Someone needs to send Ron Johnson on a Wisconsin Death Trip

Thanks OP, and to the documentary title posters, looks like some interesting content.

I'm from NWCT and EVERYONE here is, or was, at some point, obsessed with Dudleytown. Unfortunately there wasn't the same photographic documentations, but still find this kind of history fascinating.

A lot of agrarian, rural areas had severe yeast problems from bad corn or wheat, resulting in some bizarre behaviors, wonder how much that played a part in this story.

As much as I love the campfest that is 2000 Maniacs, am hoping for a bit more realism.

It's on Youtube

What happened in Dudleytown?

I read "Wisconsin Death Trip" a couple of years ago and was impressed by the number of people in 19th century America who committed arson on their own property (I assume to get an insurance settlement). Also the number of people sent to mental hospitals, probably snake pit type places one doesn't ever leave.

R48, It was supposed to be a malevolent ghost town where everyone had died or disappeared under mysterious circumstances (the malevolent ghost town bit was according to the famous charlatans, the Warrens).

I'd gone several times (used to go with friends on Halloweens, scaring ourselves silly) and the creepy things were not supernaturally based. Rather skulls with sticks resembling pitchforks in the footpaths, Ouija boards left in crumbling overgrown ooooold foundations (which were cool to check out). There's a lot of urban legend scary stories, but I believe that's all they are. There's more online and books since I was younger and interested in it, there are a few books of old CT folklore, I'm not sure of titles, but wiki has more to say:

A local rumor that has been frequently shared on the internet alleges the founders of Dudleytown were descended from Edmund Dudley, an English nobleman who was beheaded for treason during the reign of Henry VIII. From that moment on, the Dudley family was placed under a curse which followed them across the Atlantic to America.[7] This curse is blamed for instances of crop failures and mental illness in the village.

Local historians have found no genealogical link between the Dudley family of Cornwall and the English nobleman; however, they have noted many other factual inconsistencies in the rumors. The village's decline has instead been attributed to its distance from clean drinking water and soils not well suited for cultivation. One confirmed case of suicide of a village resident took place in New York state rather than within Cornwall.[7][8]

Since the 1990s, police in Cornwall have responded to numerous cases of vandalism. The 1999 movie, The Blair Witch Project, about a haunted forest prompted increased interest in the allegedly haunted village. This increased the frequency of such incidents. The owners of the Dudleytown's property have closed it to the public. Neighbors and the Connecticut state police keep a look out for trespassers regularly, and they are prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law.[7][9][10]

It's a Wonderful Life?

R31, thank you for that thoughtful analysis. It's very well put. A few comments:

1. The author, Michael Lesy, was looking for painful, sad incidents to illustrate his point. While life in BRF was hard in the 1890's - there was a deep depression in America that decade, the worst in our history until the 1930s - there were undoubtedly also happy moments and people - probably most people - living normal, sane lives and going about their business in an un-newsworthy way.

2. Photographs from that era often look "creepy" to us because people didn't smile in pictures. That habit didn't develop until the 1920s. Rather than look stern or happy, the subjects of 19th century photography tend to look blank, which to our modern sensibilities seems creepy.

3. I sometimes enjoying reading old editions of the New York Times. If you have a subscription, you can see a full copy of every issue, complete with ads, going back to the 1860s. Anyway, if you read any issue of the paper from the 1930s-1950s, the period I'm most interested in, you'll find lots of little stories about bizarre happenings, awful crimes, people doing crazy things and the like. I guess my point is that, while life may have been easier in the cities, the concentration of people meant there was plenty of madness, sordid crimes and sadness there, too.

Lesy was out to make a point, namely that the good old days were not so good. The book is deliberately built around that goal. It's not a full, accurate picture of life in rural America, or life in Black River Falls, at the end of the 19th century, and Lesy never intended it to be.

Just how common was it to be buried alive in the 1800s, I wonder.

Here it is

Part 2

Part 3

Part 4

Part 5

Part 6

I bought the book based on this thread. It just arrived!

I know Black River Falls well as I grew up quite close. I’m sure small town Wisconsin and Minnesota were pretty desolate in the 1800s, especially in winter. There is a large Native American population in Jackson County, so there most likely was then too. The settlers were mainly German and later Irish. We would go pick wild blueberries in the pine forests near BRF when I was small.

Now it’s mainly known for their prison and Indian casino. And crazy ancestors.

Magaville, Red State

Didn’t use to be R62. That whole area of Southwest Wisconsin was a Democratic stronghold for decades. I don’t even recognize those people anymore. A combination of drugs and The Cult have changed that area.

Agreed r63. I was thinking of getting a cabin up there on a lake, but ever since Scott Walker that dream died. Such a gorgeous area. Such ugly people.

OP, are you thinking of Wisconsin Death Trip?

Wow. As someone who has been interested in the darker sides of history since childhood, I can't believe I'd never heard of this book or movie before. This is right up my alley. I watched the documentary last night on YouTube. Contrary to what some have said, I did not find the film creepy at all. The stories in it are grim, but there is occasional humor here and there. I thought it was a fascinating, kaleidoscopic view of frontier life in the north and the challenges of living in that time and place in history. Some of the stories are tales as old as time (jilted lovers, suicides, epidemics), but there are some real weird outliers as well. I particularly got a kick out of the cocaine-using schoolteacher who had a fixation on smashing windows. The alleged opera singer/imposter(?) story was also utterly bizarre. The music throughout was lovely, and the black-and-white reenactment footage was haunting and expressionistic—some of it looks like it could have been lifted directly from a Carl Dreyer film.

The book is indeed available on Amazon—I bought it last night, along with the British DVD edition of the film. Definitely something worth owning for me. I am excited to dive into the book. It appears it's more of a picture book with accompanying text. There is a book called "Death Scenes" which has a similar format, consisting of numerous homicide crime scene photos from the early-1900s (it too has text accompanying the photos, providing backstory on the crimes). It is a very disturbing book with images that burn into your memory, but oddly fascinating to thumb through. Like "Wisconsin Death Trip", it too seems to make the case that we as humans tend to romanticize the past, and that there never really were any "good old days" as we'd like to think.