File:Death on Bloody Gulch Road - Flickr - Bistrosavage.jpg

A little over a week ago my friend Lisa was showing me around her hometown, Dixon, IL. We were headed to a place where she played with a childhood friend who lived at the edge of town bordering a beautiful pasture. It is along a road named Bloody Gulch Road.

I asked her how the road got its name. She told me that the story she heard was that it was from when a convict escaped and killed a transient and hid his clothes under the railroad brigde that passes over the road.

Another story has it that the road got its name in the 1800s when a farm hand killed a Bible salesman with a bat after a baseball game and burried the body in the soil in an underpass created for cattle to move from pastures on one side of the road to the other. The underpass lies in the gulch, whence the name of the road.

A couple of days later a farm boy was driving a herd of cattle through the underpass, but the cattle refused to go under. It had just rained and either a hand or a foot from the body was seen sticking out of the dirt. As the victom was last seen with the farmhand, the sheriff went to the farmhand who was found with the guy's watch and ring. He spent the rest of his life in prison.

A minute or two after she told me the story, we found a pull-out on the road. The pull-out was a short road (15 feet or so) that went to a locked gate. We were going to take pictures of the pasture from there. I opened my car door and put my feet down. In my peripheral vision I saw that I had stepped over something. I looked down and saw about six inches of spinal column that had emerged from the newly melting snow. To my left there were more bones including a femur. Immediately I pulled my feet back inside the car door and said, "Oh my god!" "Look what's on my side of the car." She came around and we stared at the spinal column and other bones. The femur, about a foot long, was a few feet away. There was also a shoulder blade and a rib. On her side of the car was another vertibra that she had not noticed when coming around the car.

Human or animal? I got out and we looked for a skull to try to see what kind of creature the bones had come from. We couldn't find anything, but were unable see well under the car. Finally we moved the car and looked where it had been. We found a bit of deer skin. What a relief!

This picture was taken immediately after pulling my feet back into the car.

A more complete story of Bloody Gulch Road can be found at: