Urban Legends

North Dakota: The Gates of Hell

Abandoned towns are generally creepy, and North Dakota has an abundance of settlements that were all but abandoned after the railroad boom. Tagus, though, takes the cake due to the little fact that people believe that it once housed a Lutheran church that doubled as a hotbed for Satan worship. Legend is, it burned down, but if you stand in just the right place, you can hear the screams of the damned bubbling up from hell itself. There are also reports of hellhounds, glowing gravestones, and a ghost train. Vandals and revelers have made the few people who call Tagus home very wary of visitors, and lord knows that the combination of a rumored portal to hell and extremely unwelcoming locals in a small town is boilerplate horror-movie fodder. The Satanism business dates back to the Satanic Panic of the '80s, though Tagus been spooky since its founding in 1900, and ever since the late '80s -- when hundreds of high-schoolers turned up for a vandalism-intensive Halloween party were run out of the ghost town -- visitors have been met with extreme skepticism. The city's last church burned to the ground in 2001.