This is a madeup story meant to be fun.
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It’s always interesting to see how far these stories can go.
In the fall of 1894, something happened in the hills of Newton County, Arkansas, not far from Jasper.
That would go unexplained for decades.
Oswald Benton, 47, and his wife Margarite, 43, disappeared from their remote farmstead without a trace.
There were never any bodies found.
No one came forward as a witness.
The the property sat empty for years, slowly giving in to the forest that was taking over.
There isn’t much paperwork, and what there is just raises more questions.
In the late 1800s, the Ozark Mountains were very isolated.
Families built homes on steep hillsides that were connected to the outside world by narrow wagon trails that were too muddy to use when it rained a lot.
In the northwestern part of Arkansas, Newton County was especially far away.
There were only about 300 people living in Jasper, the county seat.
Most families lived miles apart with thick stands of oak and hickory trees between them and limestone cliffs that dropped off into darkness.
The land itself seemed to make it hard for people to live there with sinkholes and caves, sudden drops and hidden hollows where fog would gather in the mornings and not lift until noon.
The Benton farmstead was about 8 miles northwest of Jasper along a small stream that flows into the Buffalo River and is known locally as Hemmed in Hollow Creek.
The name itself gave away the geography, a narrow valley surrounded by three sides have steep rock faces and the creek runs through the bottom.
In 1878, county land records show that Oswald Benton bought 160 acres for $300 in cash.
On March 14th, 1878, clerk Jeremiah Hoskins wrote down the details of the deal at the Newton County Courthouse.
The property had a two-story frame house built in the 1860s, a barn that needed a lot of work, and a few outuildings that were already falling down.
Everyone agrees that it wasn’t good farmland.
There were rocks and not much soil.
More suitable for subsistance farming than commercial farming.
Tax records from 1878 to 1893 show that the Bentons paid their small taxes on time every year.
This means that they were not rich, but they were still able to pay their bills.
The records show that the number of livestock owned changed from year to year, but it was usually between three and five head of cattle, a few pigs and chickens.
There were very few grain harvests, mostly corn, for eating and feeding animals.
Local records say that Oswald Benton was a man who didn’t say much, but worked hard.
Scott County, Virginia birth records show that he was born in 1847 to a family of small farmers.
He joined the Confederate Army in 1864 and served for a short time during the war.
When he was 17, he joined an infantry regiment in Virginia.
Service records show that he fought in a number of battles in the last year of the war.
But in March 1865, when the Confederacy fell apart, he and hundreds of other soldiers deserted.
There is no record of him ever being charged with desertion because the military machine had stopped working by that point.
After the war, Oswald moved around to Virginia, Tennessee, and Missouri, where he worked as a laborer and sometimes as a minor.
For a lot of former Confederate soldiers, the years right after the war were hard because they had no prospects in a South that had been destroyed.
In 1871, he is listed in census records as a farm hand working for a family named Hutchkins in Tenny County, Missouri.
Marriage records from 1872 show that he married Lucinda Frell in Foresight, Missouri.
She was 19 years old and the daughter of a farmer in the area.
Lucinda died less than 6 months after they got married.
There was never a full record of what happened.
There is no death certificate in the county records.
There is only one piece of evidence that she died.
A short note in the margin of the marriage register that says she died in November 1872.
There was no record of the cause.
There is no record of where she was buried, if she was buried at all.
In January in 1873, Oswald married Margarite Caldwell in Memphis, Tennessee.
She was 22, 10 years younger than him, and the youngest daughter of a riverboat pilot who had died in a boiler explosion years before.
Margarite worked as a seamstress before she got married, according to Memphis City Directories.
She worked at a shop on Front Street that served the families of riverboat captains and merchants.
After the wedding, the couple left Tennessee and spent a few years moving around Arkansas with Oswald taking jobs where he could find them.
Find it, building railroads, cutting down trees, and working on farms.
After buying land on Hemn Hollow Creek, they moved to Newton County for good in 1878.
Choosing to live in such a remote area shows either a strong need for privacy or a lack of better options.
The house they bought was built in the 1860s by a family named Wickham.
The Wick Gems had left the property during the war years and it had changed hand several times before the Bentons bought it.
People who lived nearby.
People who remembered the Wickham family later told researchers that the house had always been thought to be a little unlucky.
built in a hollow where the morning mist hung around and strange echoes sometimes bounced off the bluffs around it.
One old resident remembered that the Wickchams had left without warning in 1863, saying the place wasn’t right for them, but never saying why.
Another person said that the head of the Wickcham family had complained about not being able to sleep well and hearing strange noises.
This was blamed on the time to being alone and maybe having too much imagination.
The couple lived on the farm for 21 years before they went missing.
They mostly kept to themselves and didn’t talk to their neighbors much.
People who lived nearby said the Bentons were quiet but not rude.
They went to church at the Baptist church in Jasper, but not very often.
Maybe once every 2 or 3 months.
People remembered Margarite as a tidy, quiet woman who didn’t talk much beyond small talk.
One person who lived at the same time as her said that she was.
She looked sad, as if she were carrying some private sadness.
People remembered Oswald as being physically strong, good with tools and animals, but more and more withdrawn in the years before he went missing.
Virgil Kemp, a neighbor whose land was to the south of the Benton property, later told investigators that he had helped Oswald fix a barn in 1891 and thought he was nice, though he didn’t talk much.
Kemp remembered thinking that Oswald looked like a man who was carrying a lot of weight, but he couldn’t have said what made him think that.
He remembered that Oswald worked with such intensity that it seemed like he was trying to get away from something.
Kemp also said that he had seen Oswald’s hands that day, and they were very calloused and scarred, more than you would expect from normal farmwork.
Oswald told Kemp that he had been working on the house’s foundation when Kemp asked about it.
Amos Pritchard, who ran a store in Jasper.
In a statement he gave to the county sheriff on November 4th, 1894, he said that the Bentons had always been regular customers, coming to town every 3 weeks to buy things.
Oswald would come by himself or with Margarite once in a while.
He would drive a wagon pulled by a single mule.
He would trade eggs, butter, and sometimes addressed hog for things like flour, salt, sugar, coffee, and kerosene.
Pritchard kept track of all of his transactions in a ledger, and the pattern stayed the same for years, with visits spaced out.
Purchases of similar amounts every 20 to 25 days.
The last time this happened was on September 12th, 1894.
Oswald bought 40 lb of flour, 10 lb of sugar, 2 lb of coffee, 3 gall of kerosene, and a few other small things like needles, thread, and a bar of soap.
According to Pritchard’s ledger, he paid in cash and trade, just like he always does.
Pritchard said in his statement that Oswald seemed distracted that day, answering questions with one word and then leaving not long after finishing his work.
His behavior wasn’t obviously scary, but Pritchard remembered thinking that Oswald looked tired with dark circles under his eyes and shaky hands when he counted out coins.
His clothes were dirtier than usual, and Pritchard noticed a strange smell coming from them that smelled like wet earth and metal mixed together.
Pritchard also said something else in his statement that didn’t seem important at the time, but would later become important.
At the time, but would later mean more.
Oswald stopped at the door and looked back at Pritchard as he was leaving the store.
It looked like he wanted to say something for a second.
He opened his mouth a little and looked very tired, but then he just nodded and walked away without saying anything.
Pritchard remembered that look, making him feel uneasy, but he couldn’t say why.
When the Bentons didn’t show up in October, Pritchard told a few people in town who came to his store often.
Store Sheriff Clarence Duner was one of them.
He happened to be buying tobacco on October 28th.
Duner asked if anyone had seen the Bentons lately, and no one had.
Still, this didn’t make anyone worry right away.
During bad weather or illness, families in the hills could go months without talking to each other.
That year, October was unusually wet with a lot of heavy rains that turned the wagon trails into muddy channels.
It was very possible that the Bentons had chosen to stay home instead of taking the risk trip to town.
But by the beginning of November, people were worried that the weather had cleared up and families from nearby areas had started visiting Jasper again.
The Bentons were still not there.
Sheriff Duner told Virgil Kemp, who lived closest to the Benton property, about the issue on November 3rd.
Kemp said he would ride over and check on them.
He left on November 4th and got to the farmstead around noon.
Kemp was so upset by what he found that he rode straight back to Jasper to tell the sheriff.
According to his statement, the house looked empty that same evening.
The door to the front was unlocked and slightly a jar.
He yelled a few times before going in, but no one answered.
The silence was deep, and the only sound was the wind blowing through the bare trees.
Inside, everything seemed to be in order.
Dishes were stacked neatly on shelves, beds were made with military precision, and clothes were hanging in wardrobes, but there were no signs that anyone had been there recently.
The kitchen was covered in a thin layer of dust, table, and counters.
There was no ash or coals in the firebox, so the stove was cold.
A kerosene lamp sat on a side table in the parlor.
The reservoir was empty, and there was a ring of dust around the base.
Kemp noticed other things that seemed strange to him.
It smelled like the house had been closed up for weeks.
But there was more than that.
There was a smell that was damp and earthy that seemed to come from the walls themselves.
He also saw that some of the floorboards near the middle of the parlor looked like they had been moved around like someone had pulled them up and then put them back down.
He saw new scratches on the wood when he looked more closely.
Kemp then looked at the barn and the other buildings.
He found something terrible in the barn.
Two cows were dead in their stalls, and it was clear that they had starved to death.
The smell was too much.
He thought they had been dead for at least 2 weeks, maybe longer.
There was no food in the feed trough, and the water trough had dried up completely.
The Benton’s chickens were gone, either dead or scattered around the forests.
Kemp didn’t look for them very hard because the smell in the barn made him go back outside.
He also saw that the wagon and the mule were still in the barn.
The mule had broken out of its stall and was living off of the grass in the yard.
The wagon’s presence made it seem like the Bentons hadn’t left in a normal way.
Sheriff Clarence Dunar went to the property on November 6th, 1894 with his deputy Rufus Trent and Virgil Kemp.
At the time, Dunar was 53 years old and had been a Confederate soldier.
soldier who had been sheriff since 1887.
He was very organized in his search, going through each room of the house carefully and writing down everything in a small leatherbound book he always carried with him.
The Newton County Archives has an official report that backs up Kemp’s observations and adds more information.
Dunar found a trunk in the bedroom that had personal papers in it, such as a family Bible, letters, and a ledger book that kept track of farm accounts.
The last date in the ledger was on September 10th, 1894.
They wrote down that they had bought seeds for winter wheat.
The writing in the entry was clear and steady with no signs of stress.
Dunar found food in the kitchen that should have lasted for weeks.
There were about 20 lb of flour in a bin and two big jars of dried beans on a shelf.
There were several slabs of bacon and two hams hanging in the pantry.
There was a wheel of cheese on a high shelf.
Dunar thought it was strange that animals hadn’t messed with any of it.
Dunar also looked at the down a narrow staircase from the kitchen to the basement.
The basement was bigger than he thought it would be.
It went well beyond the footprint of the house above.
The walls were made of stone, and the floor was mostly packed earth, but one part looked like it had been dug up more recently.
It was cold and damp outside, and the earthy smell that Kemp had noticed was much stronger here.
Dunar found a heavy wooden door set into the stone wall at the very end of the basement.
He couldn’t get in because the door was locked, couldn’t find a key.
He wrote down that he would come back with tools to break it open if he had to.
There is one more detail in the sheriff’s report that would become very important to the mystery.
He found a single sheet of paper with a few lines written in what he thought was Margaret Benton’s handwriting on a small writing desk in the parlor near the front window.
The note didn’t have a date on it and was written in a script that wasn’t quite right, as if the person who wrote it was in a hurry or under a lot of stress.
It said, “The sound has come back.
We can’t.” I can’t take another winter with it.
O says, “There is a logical reason, but I know better now.” This note was the only direct evidence of what the Bentons went through before they disappeared.
Sheriff Dunar carefully kept it as evidence and put it in a manila envelope with his report.
Over the next two weeks, he questioned neighbors within a 5 m radius, visiting each family individually and taking statements.
The questioning didn’t give us much useful information.
No one said they saw the Bentons after midepptember, and no one said they heard anything strange coming from the Benton property.
No one could explain what the sound in the note might have meant.
One neighbor, a widow named Hester Carmichael, who lived about 4 miles east of the Benton farm, said she had passed by their property in late August while visiting family.
She thought it was strange that the house looked dark and quiet for a weekday afternoon.
She didn’t stop to look into it, though.
Another neighbor, a farmer named Ezra Mullins, remembered running into Oswald Benton on the trail near Jasper in early September.
They said hello, but that was it.
Later, Mullins told the sheriff that Oswald looked tired, like a man who hadn’t slept well in days.
His eyes were hollow and his skin was pale even though it was summer.
A third neighbor, a woman named Judith Perkins, said something that she hadn’t thought was important at the time.
In the middle of in August, she was walking near the line between her property and the Bentons when she heard a sound coming from their house.
She said it was a low hum or vibration that was hard to hear, but kept going.
It made her feel uneasy, but she didn’t know why.
She kept going without checking it out.
When Sheriff Duner asked her to describe the sound more clearly, she had a hard time finding the right words.
“It wasn’t like anything natural,” she said.
“Not wind, not something else, not animals or water.” The investigation took less than a month.
Sheriff Dinar’s job made it hard for him to do his job.
There are no trained investigators, no forensic tools, and no way to do a modern missing person’s search.
On November 10th, he went back to the Benton property with tools to break into the locked basement door.
He found a narrow passage behind the door that led back into the hillside.
The walls of the passage were made of stone, and the floor was made of dirt.
It was about 6 ft high and 3 ft wide.
It was dark and cold, and the smell of dirt was even stronger here.
Dunar walked about 20 ft down the passage before his lantern started to flicker.
He saw marks on the walls that looked like they had been made by tools.
At that point, he was starting to feel more and more uncomfortable in the small space.
So, he decided to leave and come back with better gear and more men.
But when Dunard told the deputy and Virgil Kemp about his plan, both men said they didn’t want to go through the passage.
Kemp said he didn’t want to do anything else to do with the Benton property, that there was something wrong with the place.
The deputy, who was usually calm and collected, said he didn’t like being in the basement and didn’t see any reason to look around more if there wasn’t any evidence of a crime.
Dunar decided that the Bentons had probably left their property on their own after realizing that he wouldn’t get much help with a more thorough investigation.
In his report, he did say that it was very strange for them to leave all their belongings behind.
The the case was pretty much over by December 1894.
No one lived at the Benton farmstead.
Arkansas law at the time said that the county could take over abandoned property after a few years if the owner didn’t pay their taxes.
The Newton County Court tried to find any mistakes, but they couldn’t.
In 1895 and 1896, ads were placed in local newspapers asking for information about the Bentons or any living relatives.
No one stepped up.
The property was put up for auction in March 1897.
The sale drew.
Not much interest because the land is far away and not very good.
A timber company in Springfield, Missouri, bought it for $100, which was much less than what it was worth.
Logging crews cut down the trees in a planned way over the next few years.
They took apart the house and outuildings to get the lumber.
Records from the timber company show that some workers refused to go into the basement of the house because they said it made them sick.
The foreman finally told the basement.
filled with rubble and the door locked before the house was torn down.
By 1900, there was no sign of the Benton homestead on the surface.
Only foundation stones were left scattered across the hillside.
People forgot about the case for years.
In rural Arkansas, families sometimes just disappeared.
They might have moved west, died in a cabin that no one knew about, or just walked away from their problems.
There were a lot of stories like this in the Ozarks, and the Benton case wasn’t very interesting at the time.
It was written down in county records and then put away where they sat next to hundreds of other old administrative papers from the 1890s.
If it weren’t for the interest of a graduate student named Horus Vining, the case might have stayed hidden forever.
Vining was studying how land was used in Newton County for his master’s thesis at the University of Arkansas in 1952.
He was mostly interested in how the timber industry changed the land between 1880 and 1920.
While looking over old county records at the he found Sheriff Dunar’s report on the Benton disappearance at the courthouse in Jasper.
The mysterious note left by Margarite Benton piqued his interest, especially the part about a sound that couldn’t be explained.
He started looking into the case, hoping to find out more about it as a possible side project for his main research.
Vining spent a few weeks in Newton County during the summer of 1952 talking to old people and looking through archives.
His research was never officially finished or published, but his notes are still around, and after he died, they were given to the university library.
These notes are a useful record of what he found out and the people he talked to.
Vining talked to a number of older people who lived in Jasper in 1894, but most of them were very young at the time.
Vining talked to one woman, Ida Thorne, in July 1952.
She was 81 years old at the time.
She was 23 years old in 1894 and lived with her parents in Jasper, where her father worked as a blacksmith.
She remembered hearing her parents talk about the case after the person went missing was found.
She said that there had been rumors about something being wrong at the Benton farm even before the disappearance.
Her father said that Oswald Benton had come by in the summer of 1894 to fix a wagon wheel and looked very upset.
Her father had asked if everything was okay, and Benton had answered in a way that made it sound like some debts couldn’t be paid with money.
Calvin Strad, another older resident, was 15.
1894 was the year he was born.
Vining talked to him in August 1952 when he was 73 years old.
Straoud told a story that he said he had kept to himself for years.
He said that in late 1895, about a year after the boy went missing, he and some other teenage boys from Jasper went to the abandoned Benton property on a dare.
At that time, the house was still standing, but it looked like it hadn’t been taken care of.
The boys had heard things about the property and wanted to see it for themselves.
They first looked around the house and found it to be very similar to what Sheriff Dinar had said.
Had said, “The furniture is in place and your things are safe.” But they found something scary in the basement.
There were wooden planks on one part of the floor that were arranged in a rectangle about 5t by 3 feet.
Curious, Strode and one of the other boys pulled up one of the boards.
They found an opening under it, not just a shallow hole, but a deep one that went down into the dark.
They dropped a rock into the hole and listened.
It seemed like a long time before the stone fell.
They heard it hit the bottom with a hollow sound that bounced back up.
This made it seem like the opening was at least 15 or 20 ft deep, maybe even deeper.
What happened next was even more disturbing.
They heard a noise coming from below as they looked into the hole.
A low hum or vibration that you can barely hear, but is definitely there.
One of the boys said he felt it more than heard it, like a tightness in his chest.
The smell coming from the hole was strong.
It was a mix of wet dirt and something else, something organic and bad.
They were scared and quickly put the plank back and left the property, running most of the way back to town.
Straoud said they promised each other they wouldn’t tell anyone, partly because they were afraid of getting in trouble for going where they weren’t supposed to, and partly because they didn’t want to think about what that hole might mean or what might have happened there.
Vining tried to find the location of the old homestead using Straoud’s directions and old survey maps.
But by 1952, the forest had taken back all of the land.
He spent a lot of time.
They looked for days in the area and finally found some scattered foundation stones on a hillside that looked down on a creek that was blocked off.
However, nothing else could be seen on the surface.
The timber company had completely cleared the area decades ago, taking away not only the wood, but also any buildings or trash.
Vining drew a map of what was left of the foundation and took measurements.
His notes include comments on how strange the stones are set up.
They suggested a building with a basement that was much bigger than usual.
For a farmhouse from that time, it went far beyond the house’s footprint.
The most important thing Vining found during his research was a group of letters he found in the archives of the Newton County Historical Society.
The estate of a Memphis woman named Iris Caldwell gave the letters to the society in 1931.
After she died, her family went through her things and found letters from her younger sister Margarite, the same Margarite who had tied the knot with Oswald Benton.
The family gave the letters to the historical society in Arkansas instead of keeping them because they knew they were connected to the strange disappearance case.
The letters are from 1880 to 1894, which is most of the time that the Bentons were on the farm.
Vining got permission to look at these letters and spent a lot of time copying down important parts.
The letters give us the clearest picture of how Margarite was feeling during those years and show a the atmosphere in the house getting worse over time.
Margarite writes about farm life in a straightforward way in the first letter she wrote between 1880 and 1885.
She writes about the weather, the crops, how hard the work is, and how often she goes to town.
The tone is neither very happy nor very sad.
It’s just a woman writing to her sister who lives far away about her daily life.
One letter from November 1882 talks about being alone without any complaints.
She says that they don’t see many people and that their closest neighbor is more than 2 mi away.
Most days she doesn’t mind being alone, but sometimes she wishes she had a woman to talk to.
A letter from April 1884 talks about how Oswald worked.
She says that he is always working on something.
He has been making the root seller bigger this spring, saying they need more room to store vegetables.
Most days, the work keeps him busy from dawn until well after dark.
She thinks it’s good that he finds meaning in work, even though she doesn’t see him as much as she would like.
like.
However, the tone starts to change in letters written after 1890.
In a letter from February 1890, Margarite says that Oswald has been in a bad mood lately, snapping at her over little things and spending a lot of time alone.
He won’t talk about what’s bothering him, so she doesn’t know.
He has started working in the basement at strange times, even at night.
In the dark, she wakes up and hears him moving around below.
The worry becomes clearer in a letter from March 15th, 1892.
Margarite says that Oswald has been working in the basement again, making it bigger by digging deeper into the hillside.
He says he needs more room to store the root crops, but the space he has made is way too big for that.
He works there at strange times, like at night.
She asks him what he’s doing, but he tells her not to worry.
The sound of his shovel hitting the stone keeps her up all night.
She can’t sleep because she knows he’s down there digging for reasons she doesn’t get it.
She writes in July 1892 that she hasn’t been down to the basement in a while.
Oswald would rather she not go into that part of the house.
He put a heavy door at the bottom of the stairs and locks it all the time.
He says it’s to keep animals out, but she doesn’t hear any animals down there.
She hears other sounds late at night, like a low hum, but when she lies in bed, it makes her chest vibrate.
Oswald says it’s just the wind in the rocks, but that doesn’t sound like wind.
It goes on and on in a rhythm, like breathing.
The letters get more and more worried as 1893 goes on.
Margarite writes in October of that year that Oswald has changed in a big way.
He hardly ever talks anymore.
He spends more time in the basement than outside.
When he comes out, his clothes smell like wet dirt and something else, something metal.
His hands are always dirty and the dirt seems to stay on his skin forever.
He says everything is fine and that she is thinking things up.
But the sound is real, not in her head.
There is a low vibration that seems to come from under the house all the time now.
At night, it’s worse.
She sometimes thinks she can feel it in her bones.
A letter from December 1893 shows that things are getting worse.
Margarite says she tried to get into the basement while Oswald was in town.
The door was locked as usual, but she found the key in his desk drawer.
She doesn’t know what she thought she would find, but she had to see what he has been doing all these months.
For all these months, the stairs go down farther than she thought they would.
There is a long passage at the bottom that goes back into the hillside.
The walls are made of rough stone, and the air is cold and wet.
There was another door at the end, but she didn’t go that far.
It was much louder down there.
It wasn’t just a vibration.
It was a low, steady tone that made her feel dizzy.
She quickly left, locked the door, and got a new key.
She hasn’t told Oswald that she went down there.
Margarite talks about symptoms that are physical.
For months, she hasn’t been able to sleep well.
The noise is always in her head, even when she’s awake.
There is a lot of pressure behind her eyes.
Oswald doesn’t seem to be bothered.
Or maybe he’s just gotten used to it.
She asked him again what he was doing in the basement, and he got mad and told her to mind her own business.
They hardly ever talk to each other anymore except when they have to.
The house feels heavy.
Margarite writes in June 1894 that she is starting to be afraid of Oswald.
Not that he would hurt her directly, but that something has gotten a hold of him.
He doesn’t seem like the same man she married anymore.
His eyes look empty, and when he looks at her, it seems like he is looking through her at something else.
She has thought about leaving and going to Memphis to stay with Iris, but she doesn’t have any money and doesn’t know where she would go.
She feels like she can’t get out.
The last letter in the collection is from August 30th, 1894, which is less than 2 weeks before the last entry in the farm ledger.
It is short and very deep.
Upsetting.
Margarite says she is worried about their safety.
Oswald isn’t eating anymore.
Every day he gets thinner.
He goes to that place every night and doesn’t come back until morning.
There is no one else there, but she can hear him talking through the floorboards.
The noise is so loud that she can hardly sleep.
Even when she’s tired, it fills her head and drowns out her own thoughts.
She has begged him to leave this place, sell the farm, and move to town.
But he won’t.
He says he can’t go now, that it’s too late, and that he has things he needs to do.
She doesn’t understand what he means.
She doesn’t know what’s going on in this house, but she thinks they’re in danger.
Please understand that Iris and the others did not choose what comes next if she does not hear from them again.
This letter was found among Margaret’s things, still sealed and never sent.
His research on Vinnings was cut short when he died suddenly in March 1954.
The university’s records say that he died in his sleep when he was 31.
The official, the reason was cardiac arrest.
His thesis adviser said that Vining had become more and more obsessed with the Benton case in the last few months of his life, often working late into the night.
Vining had a journal with him that he had used to write down dreams about the case.
In a note from February 1954, he said that he couldn’t stop thinking about what Calvin Stout had said.
What had Oswald Benton been doing down there? The case might have ended there, but in 1961, Dale Pritchard, a forest ranger, made a finding.
While surveying timber boundaries, he saw a dip in the ground of the forest, which made him think that a structure had fallen down below.
He looked into it and found the remains of a stone foundation that were partly visible.
He found a narrow passage inside that led into the hillside.
It looked like the structure was the remains of a basement.
In August 1961, Pritchard told the county about what he had found.
Historian Ununick Thatcher, who was looking into how people settled in the early days, saw the report and was interested.
County of Newton.
In July 1962, she went to the site with a group of volunteers.
The Benton basement was the structure that fell down.
The passage went about 30 ft into the side of the hill.
In the end, they found a room that was completely carved out of limestone bedrock and was about 8 ft square.
The chamber was empty except for deep cuts in the stone and markings on the walls.
Some looked like symbols or patterns that were meant to be there.
They found a small pile of animal bones in one corner that were too old to tell what they were.
For sure.
There were long, straight scratches on the floor that looked like something heavy had been dragged over and over.
The dark stains on the stone floor could have come from something living.
They found a small iron ring embedded in the wall at chest height near the entrance to the chamber.
It looked like something had been tied there.
A few people on the team said they felt sick after going to the chamber.
Nausea, headaches, and a deep sense of unease.
One volunteer said he heard sounds from the first day and didn’t want to come back.
Further into the hillside, Thatcher finished her research without figuring out what the chamber was for.
A logging crew working nearby heard a noise in the fall of 1962.
a low hum or vibration that sounded like it was coming from below.
Several crew members heard it at different times.
There were different descriptions.
Some people said it sounded like a farway engine while others said it sounded like a deep musical note.
A geologist said that water moves underground in the limestone carst system that lies beneath the area.
Even so, the crew stayed away from the area because of the explanation.
In the end, the timber company left that part of the forest.
In 1967, Dr.
Raymond Keller, who taught history at Arkansas State University, set up a formal archaeological survey of the site.
His team confirmed that the basement had been made much bigger than usual, which took years of work.
They thought that Oswald Benton would have had to take out about 30 cubic yards of limestone to make the passage and chamber.
They found in the room pieces of rusted chain and small metal things that could have been buckles or other fasteners.
Toward the end of the excavation, they made the most important discovery.
They found a metal box in a corner of the main basement area where it was partly buried under fallen timbers.
There was a leatherbound journal belonging to Oswald Benton inside, safe from the elements.
A lot of the pages were damaged, but some of the text was still readable.
The first entry that could be read was from April 12th, 1892.
Benton wrote about making the chamber bigger to certain sizes.
He said he had told Margaret he was making storage, but the real reason had to stay a secret.
Someone had made it clear that secrecy was important.
It was necessary for the deal to work.
A note from June 1892 said that the room was 8 ft by 8 ft and 7 ft high.
The job was very tiring.
There was a note from July 1892 that talked about vibrations that had started.
Benton heard a low hum from the stone at night.
Margarite had seen them too, but she seemed more upset.
This seemed to be normal, showing that things were getting better.
An entry from October 1893 showed that the chamber was finished.
Someone had looked at the work and liked it.
Benton was reminded of the deal that certain benefits would be given after the work was done.
Financial stability, freedom from debt.
Entries from 1894 got worse and worse.
Someone had come back in March and they were more demanding.
It was getting close to the time when the deal had to be done.
Benton knew what he had to do, but he wouldn’t admit it.
There was never a chamber for keeping things.
Benton wrote in May that he couldn’t sleep.
Someone knew things about his past, Lucinda, and what happened in Missouri.
His own choices had him stuck.
Benton wrote in July that he had told someone he couldn’t do it.
His wife was Margarite.
The answer was that he had no choice.
They built the chamber.
If he didn’t do his part, both would be taken.
The last entry that could be read, which was from September 5th, 1894, said that the agreement had changed.
At first, Margarite would go into the room and the door would be locked.
Benton would get paid and then leave.
But now they told him he knew too much.
Both must go into the room.
Both need to be locked inside.
If he fought back, it would just take longer.
The stress was too much for Margarite.
The room was ready.
They would not come back after they went in.
Dr.
Keller spent a lot of time looking over the journal.
It made it seem like Benton had been forced to build the chamber by threats and money.
This was planned by someone.
But who? And what happened to the Bentons? The >> the journal ended with Benton thinking that he would have to go into the chamber soon, but no bodies were found.
Keller talked to older people one last time.
Arthur Bowden, who was 87 years old, remembered his father saying that Benton had borrowed money from someone outside the county in the early 1890s.
Ethel Simmons, who was 79 years old, remembered her grandmother saying that Margarite had been seen in Jasper in late August 1894, looking scared and trying to get to the sheriff’s office, but was stopped by.
Oswald, Clara Murphy, who was 91 years old, gave the most detailed testimony.
In late September or early October 1894, before anyone knew the Bentons were missing, she and her husband drove by the Benton farm at night.
They heard a low, steady hum coming from the house that seemed to vibrate in the air.
Clara’s husband wanted to look into it, but Clara felt a strong sense of fear and told him to keep going.
She also said that in the weeks after the disappearance was, she sometimes saw lights on the abandoned property late at night as if someone were inside with a lantern.
But when neighbors looked during the day, they didn’t see anything wrong.
In July 1967, Dr.
Keller finished his digging.
His final report said that the journal entry strongly suggested wrongdoing, but there was no physical evidence that proved it.
He made plans for the chamber to be permanently closed with concrete.
The entrance was filled in and the area was allowed to grow back into a forest.
The case has never been officially solved.
Over the years, more and more information came to light.
In 1973, a researcher found Missouri court records from 1871 that showed Oswald Benton had been accused of stealing livestock, but was found not guilty.
The case file had testimony that made it seem like he had been with men who were doing illegal things.
In 1981, construction workers in Springfield, Missouri, found papers hidden in a wall of a building.
One of them was a ledger from the 1890s that had an entry about someone with initials that match Benton’s and the note that the final settlement is still pending.
A journalist found references in 1995 to a con artist who traveled through Arkansas and Missouri in the 1890s offering to pay farmers to build certain kinds of buildings.
There were a few missing persons cases that were loosely linked.
There is still not much that is known for sure.
Oswald and Margarite Benton lived on a farm in Newton County, Arkansas that was far away from other people.
From September 5th to September 12th, 1894, they stopped doing everything they normally did.
They left their things, and a note about a noise that was too loud to bear.
Later, a journal was found that suggested Oswald had been following orders from an unknown person to build an underground chamber for unknown reasons.
No bodies were found.
There was no proof of a crime.
The noise that supposedly bothered the Bentons has never been fully explained.
Some people think it came from a normal place.
Streams that flow underground, wind patterns, and low frequency vibrations.
Some people think it was all in their heads, a shared false belief affected by being alone and stressed.
Some people think it was exactly what the journal said it was, a planned event made by the people who built the chamber.
The main question is still what the chamber was for.
Why would someone pay a farmer to dig up that area? The iron ring set into the wall and signs of restraint point to something bad.
But without any physical evidence or clear testimony, any conclusion is just a guess.
The Benton case is still a a historical mystery, is a story that has been preserved in bits of writing that leave more questions than answers.
Two people lived in a far away place, went through something that made them desperate, and then vanished without a word.
The letters and journals make it clear that both Oswald and Margarite were very upset in the last months of their lives.
It didn’t matter if the distress was caused by a threat from outside, by mental health problems getting worse, or by something else that wasn’t fully understood.
The result was the same.
Two lives ending in mystery with only echoes and questions left behind.
