The legends lurking in the Great Plains landscape are not necessarily pretty things. Considering again the stories gathered from my students at North Dakota State University, I should warn you, they are a bit grisly.

For instance, "About 10 miles east of Linton," we are told, "there is a house which everyone within a 30-mile radius has come to know as the Grogan house. During some fall or winter the wife of this family went crazy for some reason.

"The wife killed all the animals on the farm, killed her two children in the barn, killed her husband and put him behind the oven, and then went back out to the barn and hung herself.

"It was always a big thing to go out to this house on Halloween night or some other spooky night. There are some stories that on nights such as these the oven will shake and the house will creak constantly and noisily."

"I grew up in a small town in North Dakota," writes another informant. "When I was in high school, there was a legend about a 'lost bridge.' When you went over this bridge, a half man, half wolf would run beside your car. If you stopped, then it was going to kill you.

"Supposedly a girl by herself one night was having problems, so she stopped and the half man/half wolf attacked her."

Bridges are the crystallization points for many legends. Over at Bathgate there is the legend of the June Bridge, where an old lady "fell or jumped off," the contributor says. "The people in that town refer to it as the June Bridge, because that was the name of the old lady who fell off the bridge there."

Abandoned houses, of course, also are lodestones for legends. There's that one just outside Tuttle, "an old abandoned house that still stands just outside of my uncle's land," my correspondent says.

"It is told that a group of college students from Minnesota started a cult and moved to this abandoned house so no one would know what they were doing. When they left Minnesota there was a spree of kidnappings that are linked to them, but they were never able to investigate because the authorities could not find them."

The cult members worked around for farmers, until someone got suspicious and came to the old house. Hearing screams, he rushed inside, but found only bloody handprints on the walls. "No one ever saw the students or the kidnapped children again."

These legends make the old story of the Kindred Lights seem a little tame, but it's a venerable story, and I have new information on this phenomenon, courtesy of a well-placed informant. Well-placed 5.3 miles southwest of Kindred to be precise: "Let's just say the old abandoned farmstead is right across the pasture from my house."

"I was never one to believe in such things until one night," she writes. "I was looking out the window about five years ago and I could see these lights in the top of the big barn. I shut off all the lights in the house and just looked at these weird lights. They came on for like two minutes and then went out. There is absolutely no electricity over there because I have been over there looking around a lot when I was younger.

"I have seen the lights twice and have lived across from the barn for twelve years. I have also heard local people say they have seen the Kindred Lights. All I know is it is pretty freaky. I met two girls that live in the same dorms I do, and when they found out I was from Kindred, they immediately asked me if I knew of the Kindred Lights, because their moms had seen the lights.

"The Kindred Lights has a sad ending, though. The barn was tore down and burnt two years ago and some people built a house out there."

I suspect the legendary lights are not extinguished. Somewhere they shine tonight.

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Source: Tom Isern, (701) 799-2942, isern@plainsfolk.com
Editor: Rich Mattern, (701) 231-6136, richard.mattern@ndsu.nodak.edu