In the high desert of the Trans-Pecos in West Texas sits a little two-thousand-soul town called Marfa.
If you’re the sort of tourist who enjoys visiting art museums, though, you might enjoy the place: for the past few decades, Marfa has been a favored destination for those seeking minimalist art and historical architecture.
Plus, if you know who to ask or where to look, you might just run across the spookiest scrapyard you’ve ever seen.
Strange Rituals Are Seen Being Practiced Here
Updated 2/11/2020 – It’s a dusty little bump on the outer skin of the town, a windblown factory for the creaking of rusted metal as it tries to escape the tireless gravitational pull that has been every junk heap since the invention of the sport.
Few of the people you might talk to in town about it will admit to having been out there, but one often gets the sense that at least some of these people aren’t telling the whole truth.
The occasional local who does talk about it will say the same things as those who are visitors and stumble upon the place: something very, very wrong is going on there.
“First of all,” says one of the few locals who would talk to me about it (and then only after I had purchased a few beers for him at the local watering hole), “I ain’t never seen a place that was weirder’n that damned junk heap.
You got’cher drums playin’ all hours of the day and night, for one; them drums and the weird chantin’ would be enough to drive you batshit by theyselves, but it don’t stop there.”
Here he leaned conspiratorially toward me and whispered, “Animals that go in there don’t come out alive…and sometimes humans don’t, neither.”
Strange Chants Give Way To Bloodcurdling Screams Late At Night
While the idea of human sacrifice may seem dubious, it is quite possibly the chief reason that so few of the town’s inhabitants are willing to talk about the place; there seems to be a genuine fear rippling among them, perhaps the idea that one of them may be next on the list.
My friend with the drinking problem seemed to think that this was the case – he claimed that not only could you sometimes hear people screaming from the location at night, but also that occasionally if you drive by during the day, you might actually witness the owner (a man whose name no one seems to know, but whom everyone agrees is from Sumatra) spreading blood of some variety over the fence posts at the entrance.
“Ain’t natural, what’s goin’ on in there, not much question of that.”
So if you ever happen to be in Marfa, you might enjoy taking in all of the art, the architecture, the scenery.
You might even spot the occasional stereotypical tumbleweed rolling across the street at high noon.
But whatever you do, try to avoid the scrapyard sitting out on the edge of town; going there could be your last mistake.