Land Spirits: Native and Immigrant, (Wisconsin Lakes Curse), part 4

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-> WISCONSIN LAKES CURSE-OH, AND THE BUGS
Here's one that Dad noted in his journal. We ran across it while trying to figure out what was going on in Oasis Plains, Oklahoma:

WISCONSIN LAKES CURSE
The last Indian who left Lake Wingra (sometimes known as Dead Lake) said that the lake would die. Over the next fifty years, the lake shrunk dramatically, and as the WISCONSIN STATE JOURNAL noted in 1923, "has also become noted for its hidden whirlpools, and for its treachery."
A Winnebago Indian was murdered on Maple Bluff overlooking Lake Mendota. He called upon the lake spirits to curse the white settlers and kill two of them every year. From the same Journal article: "Although this story is a fable, it is nevertheless true that scarcely a year has passed in the history of Madison, but that two whites have drowned in Mendota."
Some fable.

Not that this has anything to do with Oasis Plains, but it's too good to pass up. And what did happen in Oasis Plains was strange enough that we wanted to take our time getting to it.
It was a subdivision like any other subdivision, filled with cookie-cutter McMansions that either one of us would chew a leg off to get out of if we lived there. Not that we're judgmental. While they were still building it out, gas-company worker named Dustin Burwash fell into a sinkhole. By the time his coworker got to the hole and let a rope down, Dustin was dead, and his brain had turned to mush. The coroner called it mad-cow disease, but we've never known a coroner yet who could recognize the telltale signs of a supernatural murder. Takes a professional to do that.
We go looking around the development and meet Larry Pike, one of these self-appointed real-estate visionaries, always going on about how his magnificent cul-de-sacs rose from the wasteland of scrub, and then Larry's son Matt. Typical disaffected teenager, Matt, except he's got a thing for insects. And spiders. The same day, we find out that one of Larry's surveyors had been stung to death by bees the year before-and the next morning, another Realtor in the development buys it in the shower. Killed by spiders.
Right away we think we have this one solved. Obviously it's Matt, right? He's your prototypical vector for a vengeful spirit: an adolescent, unhappy with his family life, interested in stuff that most people think is weird.
Then we find out it's not that simple. Turns out Matt's been monitoring bug populations in the remaining prairie around Zombie Acres, or whatever the development is called-and they're going through the roof. He shows us one example, where the ground is literally roiling with earthworms. It's strange, for sure, but what's underneath is even stranger.
Hundreds of bones, buried in a mass grave.
Serial killer or Indian massacre, those are about the only options. And once we track down Jo White Tree at a reservation down the road, we find out which one. She told us this:
Two hundred years ago, a band of my ancestors lived in that valley. One day the American cavalry came to relocate them. They were resistant, the cavalry impatient. As my grandfather put it, "On the night the moon and the sun share the sky as equals," the cavalry first raided our village. They murdered, raped. The next day , they came again. And the next and the next. On the sixth night, the cavalry came one last time. By the time the sun rose, every man, woman, and child still in the village was dead.
They say on the sixth night, as the chief of the village lay dying, he whispered to the heavens that no white man would ever tarnish this land again. Nature itself would rise up and protect the valley. And it would bring as many days of misery and death upon the white man as the cavalry had brought upon his people. And on the night of the sixth day, none would survive.

From there, we put it together. Dustin Burwash had died on the spring equinox, when "the sun and the moon share the sky as equals." The only guy on the land the previous spring equinox-the unlucky surveyor-didn't make it either.
And we found this out on the fourth day.
That was a long night. We couldn't convince Larry the McMansion King to leave, even though he and his family were the only people left after the other Realtor's spider problem. So we got to the house just as every bug in Oklahoma descended. Through some combination of luck and plain old dogged refusal to quit, we survived, and we kept the Pikes alive, too.
This one had at least a partially happy ending: Larry finally saw the light. Last time we saw him, he was swearing nobody would ever live on that land if he could help it.
So what happens if you get wind of an Indian curse and don't move? You can't break a curse, you can only get out of its way or try to weather it. Back in the 1700s in Illinois, a town tried to weather one. Ever heard of Kaskaskia? Of course you haven't. Here's why.
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