I talk about the strange and paranormal in the US state of Kansas including a strange cryptid called Sinkhole Sam, a bizzare UFO encounter and a tragic haunting.

1. April 28,
2020
Mysterious Kansas – Sinkhole Sam, UFO and a Tragic
Haunting
theweeklyrambler.com/mysterious-kansas-sinkhole-sam-ufo-and-a-tragic-haunting/
Kansas is a US state located in the Midwestern United States and is bordered with
Nebraska, Colorado, Oklahoma and Missouri. The state’s name derives from the Kansas
River which is named after the Kansa Native Americans and so is another state with a
deep Native American history. The state capital is Topeka and the largest city is Wichita.
The central great plains, a generally flat area makes up the western two-thirds of the
state while hills and forests make up the eastern third of the state. For climate in the
eastern two-thirds it is humid continental, with cool to cold winters and hot, humid
summers; the Western third of the state is a semiarid climate with hot summers
although less humid and varying warm to very cold winters; the climate of the far south-
central and southeastern area is humid subtropical with hot humid summers and milder
winters and also has the highest precipitation. Kansas can also experience strong
thunderstorms, some of which can produce tornadoes.
1/6

2. 90% of Kansas’s land is used for agriculture with common outputs being cattle, sheep,
sorghum, soybeans, cotton, hogs and corn, the state’s most significant crop is wheat,
growing 40% of all winter wheat. Industrial output also plays an important role in the
economy such as transportation equipment, commercial and private aircraft, food
processing and so on. The state has the 8th highest production of petroleum and natural
gas, although these sectors are declining.
Lake Inman, home of Sinkhole Sam. Image in Public Domain.
But let’s move on to the stranger side of Kansas and see what cryptids and paranormal
stuff that may be hidden here.
One creature I have come across is called Sinkhole Sam which appears to be some kind
of long serpentine-like creature said to have been sighted a few times in lake Inman, a
small lake located in McPherson County near to the city of Inman in Kansas, despite
being a small lake it is still the largest natural lake in the state of Kansas, it is part of the
Mcpherson Valley wetlands, a disconnected chain of marshes, wetlands and shallow
lakes in the county, it used to be much larger but has shrunk over time, with many
shallow bodies that were left being called sinkholes, which is what the creature is named
after. Much of what is left of the wetlands are now preserved by the Kansas Department
for Wildlife, Parks and Tourism.
Local legend has it that Sinkhole Sam may have been a prehistoric creature that
inhabited underground caverns in the wetlands area that were once flooded, but as this
area begun to significantly dry up over the years, one of these creatures, perhaps the last
2/6

3. of its kind, were forced up somehow into Lake Inman where it was sighted a few times.
The first sighting was made by two anonymous fisherman who were at the lake. Another
supposed sighting was made by an Albert Neufeld and George Regehr who said it was at
least 15-feet in length and as round as an automobile tire and one of the men decided to
shoot at the creature but apparently didn’t kill it.
The sightings attracted a large amount of attention and tourism to the area in an
attempt to get a glimpse of this apparent unknown water serpent, but after the first few
sightings nothing else has since been seen of the creature and some believe it could
have since possibly died, ending its species for good.
Where it gets weirder as well was a joke explanation of the creature by an Ernest Dewey
and Dr. Erasmus P. Quattlebaum who said that Sinkhole Sam was something called a
Foopengerkle, apparently one of the most extinct creatures to inhabit the Kansas Plains.
So yeah, it’s basically a joke now.
But who knows, maybe Sinkhole Sam or whatever it is, remains out there somewhere.
Image by Thomas Budach from Pixabay
Outside of Sinkhole Sam though, Kansas appears to be rather devoid of many cryptid-like
creatures seen out in its wilderness and forested areas or anywhere else for that matter.
There have been a few reports of some possible Bigfoot/Sasquatch sightings in the state
and also apparently a sighting of a giant flying creature, some claim to be a Pterosaur,
although it could potentially also be the legendary Thunderbird, but again nothing at all
concrete and hardly enough sightings to really file it in as a common Kansas cryptid and
3/6

4. they certainly aren’t localized like Sinkhole Sam is, with sightings of giant flying creatures
and Bigfoot-type creatures being reported in various states across the United States of
America.
So now we shall move on to a UFO encounter as well as a paranormal haunting. There is
one very interesting UFO encounter that happened near to a city called Delphos in 1971,
happening on a secluded field a teenager called Ronald Johnson encountered a bright
glowing object, so bright in-fact that it blinded the boy while looking at it. Johnson was
out with his dog at the time, who was described as being uncharacteristically calm and
quiet despite the otherworldly phenomena that was taking place.
After a short while the blinding object begun slowly moving away and as it does the boy
is able to start seeing his surroundings again. After the encounter the teenager and his
dog ran back home and frantically told his parents to come and look for what he saw,
although they didn’t have to move far as the object, now much higher in the sky, was
making a pass over near to their house, enabling the teenager and his parents to see it,
after this the teenager takes his parents back to the main area where he first
encountered the object and found a strange glowing ring on the ground below where
the UFO had been.
The mother, who was curious, bent down to feel at the strange misty glowing ring and
touched it, leaving a powdery residue on her fingers, soon after this her fingers begun to
go numb and she experienced tingling sensations in the tips of those fingers. A nearby
broken tree limb also had the same glowing residue on it, both on the area it broke off
from and on the broken branch on the ground.
Meanwhile the mother had ran back to the house, grabbed a polaroid camera and took a
photo of the strange luminescent ring on the ground, of which the photo still exists to
this day, perhaps being some of the best evidence of a UFO encounter to date, although
of course it has its skeptics.
Soil samples taken from this ring have been tested and found to be resistant to water
and glow in the dark and it contained high concentrations of calcium oxalate, an organic
compound found naturally in plants and of which is corrosive and dangerous to life if
swallowed. Skeptics have said that the ring was in-fact a naturally occurring growth of
fungus known as a fairy-ring and has nothing to do with a UFO, but some biologists have
dismissed this theory as fairy-rings should not be resistant to water and that they do not
glow in the dark.
Two weeks after the UFO incident Ronald Johnson suffered from sore eyes and his dog
also went blind in one eye and Johnson’s mother would experience persistent numbness
in her fingers for the rest of her life.
4/6

5. Atchison, said to be the most haunted town in Kansas. Photo by Tim Kiser from Wikimedia. CC
BY-SA 3.0. Source.
Next up is the haunted segment and we shall be checking out the town of Atchison,
famous for being the most haunted spot in the state of Kansas and has become quite
the tourist attraction due to that as well, with many haunted tours being offered to
visitors.
Many who have visited and those who live there have attested to the town being
haunted and sightings of ghosts, pictures and videos of ghostly phenomena are not
uncommon, with many claiming to have got some kind of unexplained paranormal
evidence, either documented or not. There are two places in the town that are seen as
some of the most haunted, which is the Sallie House and the McInteer Villa.
We shall check out the Sallie House, an old white frame house constructed at the turn of
the century, the front of the house was used as office space and rooms for medical
examinations for a doctor that lived in the house with his family. The house got its name
from a 6-year-old child, who had on one day be brought to the house by a distraught
mother, due to the child suffering severe adnominal pain. The doctor diagnosed the
child with appendicitis but believe it was at an advanced enough stage where they could
not wait long enough for the anesthesia to take full effect, and so the doctor begun
cutting into the child in an attempt to be quick, putting the child into even more pain.
After a while the painful screams of the child ceased as her body went limp and pale and
then soon died on the operating table. That incident has many believing that the child’s
ghost now haunts the house and has caused some quite scary activity and seems to
have a particular hatred of men, perhaps believing the doctor was torturing her and was
the reason her death.
A family consisting of a husband, wife and their baby moved into the house in 1993.
Soon things would start becoming unsettling as their dog would growl at seemingly
nothing, more so near to the nursery in the house, perhaps which was attracting the
ghost of young Sallie. The activity though would eventually pick up and even become
violent with unexplained fires breaking out and a series of physical attacks of seemingly
5/6

6. paranormal origin focused on the husband. This man would become a sort of conduit
used by the spirit, often objects around the man would move off their own accord and
the man reported feeling scratching against his chest and abdomen. These physical
attacks never afflicted the wife or baby, only the husband.
Tourists and paranormal investigators have reported strange things as well, such as
electrical equipment failing to work in the house, full batteries draining suddenly, moving
objects, feeling of being touched and unexplained cold spots. Some visitors have even
claimed to have been physically scratched or bruised by an unknown force. Guide dogs
of visitors that have also been allowed in the house have also barked for no reason at
things and some have refused to go into the house’s nursery room.
So, there you have it, another shorter one but interesting nonetheless. Next up we will
be doing Oklahoma.
Thank you for reading this post, if you have any queries please Email me, you can find
my Email in the Contacts & Community section. Please also follow The Weekly Rambler
on Twitter and Facebook which you can access through the buttons at the bottom of this
website. You can also use the social media buttons under each blogpost to share with
your family, friends and associates. You can also subscribe to Email notifications at the
right-side of this website to know whenever a new post goes up (you can easily
unsubscribe from this at any time through a button in each Email notification), or
alternatively you can use an RSS Feed Reader. Please also join my FB Group The Weekly
Ramblers Readers Group where readers can more easily talk with each other and also
with me whenever I am on, you can also find it in Community.
6/6