S4 Ep26: I Predict a Riot: The Tulsa Massacre
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Happy squatting. Have you ever tried to start a fire from scratch? It's not easy. The wood and the kindling need to be just right. Your ratio of wind to no wind needs to be just right. And sometimes, even then, getting it to catch can take a few attempts.

But when everything is primed, when conditions are right, and maybe with a touch of lighter fluid, the tiniest spark can set the whole thing ablaze.

Welcome to Strange and Unexplained with me, Daisy Egan. I am someone who knows how unjust our system can be, and yet am still somehow shocked when I learn about the depths of the injustice many have suffered under it. And somehow, at 45 years old, just turned 45 on Monday the 4th, thank you, I'm still learning how deep those depths go.

The spark that lit the metaphorical and physical fire was lit in a downtown Tulsa elevator on the last Monday in May, 1921. What exactly happened in that elevator is still debated. The resulting devastation is not, or at least it shouldn't be. After a while, no one cared anymore about the precipitating event because it wasn't really about the two people in the elevator. It never had been.

But here is the spark that lit the fire. 19-year-old Dick Rowland was an enterprising young man who shined shoes for nickels and dimes as he rubbed up against wealthy white businessmen going about their day in Tulsa, Oklahoma, a fresh and thriving city at the beginning of the 20th century. Everyone in Greenwood, the equally thriving North Tulsa neighborhood populated by the city's Black residents, knew that shoe-shining wasn't Dick's only means of income.

Dick was raking in the dollars in dubious enterprises that surrounded the juke joints, the brothels, the jazz clubs, the bars, and the gambling houses in town. Dick's mother, Damie, might not have wholeheartedly approved, but he showered her with things that the fruits of his labors allowed. Anyway, on May 30th, after Dick had delivered some shoes to a client on the third floor of the Drexel building, he'd taken the stairs to the fourth for a quick trip to the segregated men's room.

He then took the elevator back down. When the doors of the elevator opened and Dick entered, he stumbled on his way into the elevator and accidentally stepped on the foot of elevator operator Sarah Page. Sarah shrieked out in pain and then proceeded to whack Dick with her purse repeatedly as the two rode the elevator down to the first floor.

The widely accepted version of the story, because of course there are a few differing versions, goes that when the elevator doors opened on the first floor, Sarah said Dick had assaulted her. Clarence Poulton, a tailor who worked in the building, was waiting for the elevator and rushed to her defense. Dick, afraid of the commotion, took off running and didn't stop until he got home a mile down the road.

This version was accepted, despite Poulton saying Sarah, quote, was not bruised, nor her clothing disarranged in any way, end quote. Another version was that Dick and Sarah weren't strangers to each other and may, in fact, have been romantically involved. It has somehow made it into the record that Dick's mom knew Dick had eyes for Sarah, which I suppose led some to believe the pair had been kissing in the elevator.

Yet another version is that Dick was actually Sarah's pimp. Because, of course. Dick, after all, was known to wear flashy jewelry and wave around more cash than a shoeshine boy should have, so naturally, he was a pimp. Sarah was divorced twice by then, at the young age of 21, and later, the sheriff would tell someone in the local press that her divorce papers suggested she was an unsavory type.

Spoiler alert: they didn't. And by all accounts, she wasn't. Regardless of which story is true, once the elevator doors opened to reveal a white woman and black man tangled up in some manner, it wouldn't matter which story was true. Tulsa was rife with racism, a place very much governed by Jim Crow laws, a city where the Ku Klux Klan was not only accepted but very comfortable operating out in the open.

It was a town full of white people angry and resentful that Greenwood, where black Tulsans had been forced to live and shop apart from them, was evidence of a truth they could not bear. That black men and women were as ambitious, capable, gifted, resourceful, and successful as they were. In some cases, they were more so.

That's because in 1921, Greenwood was a 35-square block of flourishing prosperity. A boomtown full of Black entrepreneurs, doctors, lawyers, accountants, shopkeepers, and empire builders who, deprived of being able to compete equally with their white counterparts, did just fine where they were.

They did this despite Jim Crow laws, working their way around obstacles intentionally placed in their way that made things like obtaining loans or sourcing materials very difficult. The town was dubbed the Negro Wall Street by Booker T. Washington when he visited, and of late as the Black Wall Street. It was, in 1921, the largest concentration of Black-owned businesses in the country. And that did not sit well in White Tulsa.

To say that White Tulsa was waiting for an excuse to rumble is not much of a stretch. Tensions were high, it seems, solely because Black people were thriving. Most historians don't wrangle much about what happened in the elevator, though they dutifully note that no sexual assault could have reasonably taken place as the ride from the fourth to the first floor would hardly have been long enough.

Elevators were not quick, but neither were they leisurely modes of transportation that would allow one to accomplish an impromptu rape. Though, of course, sexual assault can mean much more than rape. In that time, it's entirely plausible that him simply touching her inappropriately could have been labeled rape without much pushback. He also could have inadvertently touched her when he tripped in order to keep himself from falling, and she could have perceived it as a sexual assault.

And yes, of course, we should believe women. But Sarah herself refused to press charges, and, in fact, never surfaced to even talk much about what happened that day. If she'd explained what happened that day, we would weigh that quite heavily. But she never did. In truth, though, nobody at the time much cared what happened to Sarah Page in that elevator. Sarah became a symbol. Whether or not she had any real beef with Dick didn't matter.

White Tulsa could now justify doing what they had likely been waiting for for a while: lay waste to Greenwood homes and businesses owned by the Black folk who lived there. And of course, to the folks inside those homes and businesses. Strangers, we have a brand new sponsor. Mint Mobile is here to rescue you from your overpriced premium wireless plan.

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Additional taxes, fees, and restrictions apply. See Mint Mobile for details. When Dick got home, he frantically told his mother, Damie, she had to hide him. But nothing happened. Things were rather surprisingly quiet. Nobody knocked on the family's boarding house door, demanding to know his whereabouts.

Maybe it was a false alarm, they thought. Still, Damie wanted Dick to lay low, but Dick, thinking perhaps the coast was clear, went out and was pretty quickly spotted by the cops and hauled to jail where he used his one phone call to ask his mom to get him an attorney. The sheriff, Willard McCullough, promised Dick's mom that Dick would get a fair trial and that he'd be safe in McCullough's jail because he personally would see to it that he was.

Though why the sheriff thought he had any control whatsoever over the kind of trial Dick might get is a mystery. Maybe he was just trying to allay a worried mother's fears. He also told her that nobody really believed Sarah Page's story, so it might all blow over pretty quick. I'm not sure why this guy seemed to have it out for Sarah, but he really didn't like her. Anyway, Dick's mom got him a well-respected white lawyer who would later rise pretty high in the state political leadership,

and was, as almost everyone except those who were black knew, a Klansman. There's your fair trial, I guess. It would have been difficult, I suppose, to find a lawyer in Tulsa that wasn't affiliated with the KKK. Around Tulsa, nearly every white man was associated in some way with the Klan. Either they were Klansmen, and or they knew and didn't seem to care that Klansmen ran the banks and businesses they frequented.

Many had been involved in acts of mass terror and individual lynchings. According to multiple sources, including Wynne Craig Wade's "The Fiery Cross" and "Death in a Promised Land" by Scott Ellsworth, Tulsa wasn't alone here. The nation was dripping with the blood of its black citizens, murdered by angry mobs without so much as a verified charge, let alone a fair trial.

including black men who had served this country in the Great War only a few years earlier. They too were not immune from hate. As many as 75 residents of Greenwood had fought for this country and come back to something that was a far cry from equality. Which may also explain why some people in Greenwood were over being nice and complacent. That's the thing about living under tyranny. It's only so long before people are sick of it.

Some folks in Greenwood had talked openly with each other about how they would not now lie down and be run over. They would stand their ground. That when the day came when the line in the sand was crossed, those who crossed it would sorely regret it. But nobody knew that moment had come. Not yet. Not even the Tulsa Daily World, the newspaper of record in the city, made mention of the alleged assault in its May 31st edition.

In Tim Madigan's The Burning, the Tulsa Race Massacre of 1921, he wrote, quote, It could very well have been an accident, as Rowland had claimed.

that the case against Rowland would be prosecuted was uncertain, and at that point his incarceration was as much for his own protection as anything else. End quote. His incarceration was for his own protection. Then somebody somewhere decided to blow apart the small slip and fall and make it into a referendum of those people.

The Tulsa Tribune newspaper reported the Drexel elevator incident, framing Dick as furtive in his planned attack on the woman, who they described as, quote, an orphan who works as an elevator operator to pay her way through business college, end quote. As if being an orphan somehow makes an attack more egregious, but also, she was not an orphan.

In an editorial that ran the same day, the editor of the Tribune called Dick, quote, "...one of those bad Negroes," end quote, and one of the, quote, "...lowest things walking on two legs," end quote. It's likely the Tribune's opinion of Dick, aside from just being plain old racist, was informed by the police, which the Center for Public Secrets thinks may have been feeding them false information.

The Center for Public Secrets is an outfit run by ordinary, concerned Tulsans whose mission is, quote, to provide Tulsans access to the hidden and neglected history of our city through events, content, and as a public forum for discussion, storytelling, and creativity, end quote.

The Tulsa cops had never liked Dick. He was far too flashy, too well-dressed, and too popular for their liking. His shoe shine stand was just across the street from Gustafson Detective Agency, a shady group headed up by the chief of police himself, John Gustafson. The agency specialized in infiltrating and breaking up so-called leftist and labor groups and had helped usher at least one man into a lynching.

Why not usher Dick into one? Here was their chance. They put a bug in the Tulsa Tribune's ear. And they would not be blamed for inciting the riot to come. That'd be on the Tribune's shoulders. And the Tribune seemed all too ready to take on the burden, reporting that Sarah, quote, "...noticed the Negro a few minutes before the attempted assault, looking up and down the hallway of the third floor of the Drexel building, as if to see if there was anyone in sight."

A few minutes later, he entered the elevator, she claimed, and attacked her, scratching her hands and face and tearing her clothes. Her screams brought a clerk from Renberg's store to her assistance, and the Negro fled." So, when the Tribune out-and-out said a lynching was due, it was time to find your pals and buy some rope and go find where the sheriff was hiding the fiend.

This is what happens when regular folks see themselves as deputized by the powers that be, whether or not they legally are. See, the use of lethal force under so-called stand-your-ground laws, for instance. Dick Rowland could see the crowd forming in the streets outside the courthouse and jail. The Tulsa police commissioner advised getting Dick out of town post-haste.

McCullough, still sure this was too insignificant to matter much to the mob, decided to wait on doing so. Which is an interesting choice given that he'd decided to put Dick in jail for his own protection. Holding a man in jail, I would imagine, hardly sends a message to a growing mob of angry citizens that he's innocent.

Then the crowd began to chant for the sheriff to hand Dick over. They made it clear they were not asking, but demanding that McCullough hand the young man over to them. McCullough was adamant Dick was going nowhere. Meanwhile, over the railroad tracks in Greenwood, the word spread that Dick Rowland was in serious trouble. Men there gathered their guns and began to talk about how they too would go to the courthouse and have the sheriff release Dick safely to them.

It was getting so loud and angry in the streets of Tulsa that author Madigan reports a white friend of a black bus driver drove to his home in Greenwood to offer him and his family a safe haven in the country until all this blew over. The bus driver had to be convinced it was the best course of action. It would turn out to be the right decision. Others decided it was time to fight.

According to trial testimony, as the afternoon grew warmer that day, black men made speeches and exhorted the unconvinced to take up arms. Some even interrupted folks watching a movie at one of the two black-owned movie theaters, taking the stage to challenge the audience to get off their duffs and join the fight to save Dick. The town seemed to be all in, despite so many having so much to lose.

Greenwood, with its 15 grocery stores, two of its own newspapers, four drug stores complete with local pharmacists, two public schools, a library, four barbecue and chili parlors, and 13 churches, was a singular American achievement. And they had built this beautiful thing.

To be clear, there were quite a few thriving black communities in the country at the time. Oddly, many in Oklahoma, but none, it seems, as financially prosperous as Greenwood. Make no mistake, the businesses and homes in Greenwood were just as nice as the ones over in the white part of town.

The owner of the Dreamland Theater even owned two other theaters outside of Greenwood. The hotel, built by John B. Stratford, was as elegant and refined as you'd find anywhere. They had a tea service. Perhaps it was just my educational experience, but it seems every time we were taught about non-colonizing populations, we were made to understand that they lived in some kind of primitive, less developed way.

All the pictures in the history books from this time suggest Black Americans lived in shacks or farmhouses in various states of disrepair. Somehow, Tulsa's Black Wall Street was missing from my textbooks. In fact, almost all successful Black figures were, with the exception of George Washington Carver, Harriet Tubman, and Martin Luther King, who was most definitely not murdered by his own government.

Some were less gung-ho to pick up arms and storm the proverbial castle. Notably, over at the Gurley Hotel, O.W. Gurley tried to cool some brows. He said he thought they all needed more information and got another like-minded fellow to go with him. What Gurley and his pal found over at the courthouse was Sheriff McCullough standing in the breach, explaining that the white population would have to kill him first before they'd get to Dick Rowland.

Back at home, though, people found Gurley's account hard to believe. His friends called him a liar. Guns were pointed at him. Rage bubbled, and Gurley knew what was coming, unsure if he'd even live long enough to see it. The clan had done some calling around and got other not-so-local folk to join the herd.

Nevertheless, McCullough didn't back down. Aroused by the growing clamor, he got a friend, Ira Short, to come stand with him in defense of the courthouse and Dick. Soon, a small contingent of armed Greenwood men got in their vehicles and drove the short distance to talk to McCullough. But first, they had to negotiate past the 500 or so white people gathered in place near where Dick Rowland was jailed.

The crowd was, for the most part, not carrying weapons, so they surely felt outgunned when the Greenwood contingent drove up. And, as I'm sure you can imagine, that did not help de-escalate the situation. But they edged away from the loaded rifles and listened.

McCullough and his deputies stood at the top of the stairs of the courthouse, ready to meet the Greenwood bunch. It took a while, but the Black elders were eventually convinced that short of burning the courthouse down, no one was getting to Rowland. The men got back in their cars and returned to the other side of the tracks.

But seeing the men so armed, the white crowd decided it was time to do the same. Many in the crowd headed straight to the National Guard armory to get rifles and ammo. They were stopped at the gate by the man in charge. He raised his weapon and told them they were not going anywhere and they were not taking anything from inside the armory. In a crowd that wants control, nobody wants to hear no. And they'd been told it twice now.

And so, angered anew, they swept back to their homes and farms and got what firearms they had available. They then looted anywhere that had guns for sale—firearm stores, sporting goods stores, pawn shops.

Tim Madigan wrote, quote, End quote.

Some of the young men in Greenwood were no better at tamping their enthusiasm for a fight. They drove their cars into town, taunting those gathered. People exchanged ugly words and called each other all the names they knew to call them. And then, around 10 p.m., things took a bad turn.

It was dark now, and people were riled up. Somebody in Greenwood heard a rumor that the white crowd was moving in on the courthouse. The rumor mill had it wrong. The white people were moving on the armory. But when the grapevine is a seething mass, facts can get mixed up pretty fast. Also, at that point, honestly, potato, potato.

The folks in Greenwood thought Dick was done for, so the men, many with army-issued guns they'd brought home from the war or with hunting rifles, once again drove into town to see what was happening. McCullough tried to head this incursion off at the pass, again having trouble explaining that all was well and Dick was not in immediate danger.

According to multiple interviews conducted by journalists and authors who spoke to eyewitnesses, this exchange set in motion the calamity that ensued. As the Greenwood contingent were headed back to their cars, an older, short white man asked O.B. Mann from Greenwood, "'N-word, what are you gonna do with that gun?' McCullough stood on the steps watching."

"'I'm going to use it if I need to,' O.B. responded. "'No, you give it to me,' the short old man said. "'Like hell I will,' O.B. told him." The old man made a move to take the weapon from O.B., and O.B. moved to avoid that, and the gun, or some gun, discharged."

Nobody knows who or which side fired the first shot, but hell was unleashed, with people running for cover, dodging the hail of bullets that rained down in the Tulsa night. The old man was the first to die. Pretty soon as many as 20 joined him. The Greenwood crowd had somehow managed to get back into their cars and drove back to what they hoped was safety.

McCullough then ran back to stand in front of the jail cell, which held one Dick Rowling, shoeshine man who had accidentally stumbled his way into history.

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The spark was now lit and the kindling was quickly catching. Chased to the tracks, gunfire was now coming from all angles and the white Tulsa crowd, deeply outnumbering those they'd encountered from Greenwood, began in earnest to show who was boss.

And the police did not help. Well, that's not entirely accurate. The police did help by joining the White Throng. A Tulsa cop shouted at a man on the street, get a gun and get an N-word.

Now, let me dispense quickly with what happened in the ensuing few hours as houses were burned to the ground and combatants did what they do, fight and die. Which is not to say that innocent bystanders didn't perish as well. They did. Of course they did.

Sometime after midnight, women and children in Greenwood were forced from their homes as the white mob broke windows in homes and, using handheld torches, put them to use against living room curtains, which burned fast and spread. As they fled their burning homes, they were shot at. Likewise, when they tried to fight the fires that were gobbling everything in sight.

In the PBS American Experience documentary Going Back to T-Town, Rosa Skinner remembered what the night was like. She was a small child then and said the whole thing reminded her, quote, of Sodom and Gomorrah in the Bible, end quote. A little before 2 a.m. on June 1st, city authorities got the signatures necessary to ask the governor of Oklahoma to send in troops to quell what they called a Negro uprising.

The National Guard arrived and quickly marshaled the Tulsa police and the white mob into pseudo-peacemakers. Of course, peacemaking wasn't on anyone's agenda at that point. Instead, they erected roadblocks that blocked black egress from the town. They pulled people out of beds and houses and beat them savagely. They rounded up many to be sent directly to the convention center in a makeshift holding cell for an undetermined internment.

Mabel Little, a young mother at the time, remembered that two boxcars of soldiers arrived by rail into the midst of the fray. She said they told her they, quote, came to help them, end quote. They asked the women of the town to get into the boxcars so they could be taken to safety. But Mabel was no fool. She replied, quote, no, we want to go with our husbands. If you are going to kill them, kill us together, end quote.

Badly outgunned, the black population that was actively fighting was, by dawn, fighting an overwhelming force that had them outnumbered ten men to one. White people cheered as black bodies were tied to the backs of cars and dragged through Tulsa. And then some white men got a hold of a machine gun and brought it to Greenwood.

And now it was just a complete besieging. A biplane flew low over Greenwood and dropped kerosene bombs. The people of Greenwood were bombed from above. A manuscript found in 2016 written by John Hope Franklin, an attorney who lived and practiced in Greenwood, gives an eyewitness account of the bombings.

Quote,

Officially, the city's death count was 36. The Tulsa newspapers put it at 100. The Red Cross put it at 300. Usually, reports from the ground are more accurate than any coming from officials. Only 26 death certificates were ever issued for those who lived in Greenwood. In addition to the homes that were destroyed by fire, so too were 242 Black-owned businesses.

Also lost that day? Untold generational wealth, never able to be conferred on to the following generations. The burning, the looting, the rounding up of 6,000 black Tulsans, and the rage continued unabated all the next day as wave after wave of white Tulsans decided to see what these people had accomplished and revel in systematically destroying all of it.

Martial law was eventually declared throughout the city. By Wednesday, as Greenwood continued to smolder, the chief of detectives told the Tulsa World that, quote, Did he mean that if police hadn't lied to the press, or if the press hadn't lied to the people, where did the blame begin?

On June 4th, the Tribune wrote an editorial titled It Must Not Be Again. In it, Greenwood is labeled a cesspool of iniquity and corruption. That's a direct quote, except for the part where they called Greenwood N-word town. I am never not aghast. Sheriff McCullough had done what he'd promised by keeping Dick Rowland out of the hands of vigilantes.

In mid-June, jurors indicted Rowland for assault and attempted rape, but the case against him collapsed mostly because Sarah Page didn't press charges and there was no evidence that a crime had been committed. The Tulsa World reported that. The Tulsa Tribune did not.

Some say McCullough may have smuggled Dick out of Tulsa after that. Some say he might have made the stuff up about Sarah Page because he wanted to help Dick's case. The Chicago Defender, one of the earliest black-owned newspapers read primarily by those who were black, wrote later that it felt like the riot was not spontaneous at all, that the specific buildings targeted were not such a random affair.

that the whole thing was too methodical and too successful to be anything but charted out even months or years in advance. The vigilantes had maps with them, the defender wrote. They had foreknowledge. Maybe. Could be. It's not an outrageous claim, but it changes nothing.

The Washington Post reported in 2021 that it's likely Dick died in a wharf explosion some 40 years later, though Google tells me his name didn't appear on the list of dead there, and a relative says he lived until maybe even 1979. As for Oklahoma, well, it doesn't come off all that well in the aftermath. As far as white Oklahomans were concerned, and apparently all the history books I had in school, the whole thing never happened.

It's like that old philosophical query that asks if a tree falls in the forest and no one is around, does it make a sound? If a massacre happens and no one acknowledges it, did it ever really happen? Some have termed it the Great Forgetting.

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Who did the forgetting? Who didn't? Was White Tulsa afraid that the statute of limitations for murder was never going to expire? Maybe. Were they embarrassed by it? Ashamed? Horrified, even? Maybe a few were, but even later, when given anonymity, some said they'd do it again. Had to be done, you know.

The cops and the National Guard said they were just trying to make sure white Tulsans weren't killed in the riots, not mentioning that the riot was not in white Tulsa or that they had any concern for black citizens. Who told the Tulsa police they had carte blanche to kill citizens? Who told the Tulsa Fire Department they could not respond to fire calls? Names could have been named, but were not.

In an American Civil Liberties Union podcast, At Liberty, historian Hannibal Johnson explains that, quote, Oklahoma schools didn't mention it, and the nation didn't do much better, as there was never a national reckoning, an apology, or even, really, acknowledgement of culpability.

By the time the dust had settled over Greenwood, as many as 300 people were dead, thousands injured, 1,250 homes were destroyed, along with most commercial buildings in Greenwood, causing what would today be $27 million in property loss claims, most which were left unpaid. Not to mention the erased success that 11,000 people who lived in Greenwood had fought years to attain.

We call that generational wealth. And if that weren't enough cause for generations of sorrow and endless national shame, the whole thing was then just kind of swept under the historical rug, such that legions never even heard of it. I certainly never did in my racially diverse New York City public school education.

Tulsa, on the cusp of being a well-regarded city in the 1920s, said Johnson, did not want this unfortunate civic shame to be put on display. This kind of PR would definitely be bad PR and would make Tulsa look very unwelcoming to all those who might want to move there and build companies or invest in its future.

The Black community, on the other hand, had some well-deserved post-traumatic stress, along with the fear that it could happen again, or that their children would be afraid to try to succeed, but now also had less of a foundation upon which to succeed.

They didn't want to burden their children with the horrific story, said Johnson, who chaired the Education Committee of the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre Centennial and is heavily involved in developing the curriculum that is now required to be taught in Oklahoma.

In 2020, the city of Tulsa began excavating the Oaklawn Cemetery site where remains of those who perished in 1921 are believed to have been buried in unmarked graves. Their locations were never recorded. So far, more than 120 graves have been located, with DNA collected in 30 sets of remains. Some of the skeletons show evidence of gunshot wounds, others of burns.

Three of the sets of remains have been linked directly to the massacre, with their identities clearly established. C.L. Daniel, a World War I veteran, Reuben Everett, and Eddie Lockhart. The work is ongoing. But reestablishing Greenwood will be impossible.

That was not because the 1921 survivors of the massacre hadn't tried to rebuild. They had, but the insurance they had bought had not paid out per their contracts, using the excuse that they were not insured against what they termed a riot. Over the years, white Tulsans have moved north into the land its white forebears had destroyed. The need for investment to rebuild, it seems, has gone ignored.

The powers that be wouldn't own up to what had happened or save what was left. After some misguided urban renewal, an interstate highway bisection, the active suppression of Black-owned businesses, and half a century of redlining residential districts, what was once 35 blocks of lively Black commerce is now represented by only half a block of businesses.

What happened that Monday, the next to last day of May in 1921, in a downtown Tulsa elevator is still debated. But if it hadn't been that day in that elevator, it likely would have been another day someplace else. The spark that ignited the Tulsa massacre was Dick Rowland tripping on his way into an elevator operated by a young white woman who, for whatever reason, decided he had violent intentions.

But if it hadn't been Dick, it could have been any other black person existing in a white space where they were unwelcome. Emmett Till, Hayes and Mary Turner, Jesse McLaren, Trayvon Martin, George Floyd, or any one of the nearly 3,500 black people who were lynched in this country, according to the NAACP.

In August 2024, Tulsa Mayor G.T. Bynum created the Beyond Apology Commission. The point of that? To offer more than sorry, he said, to start thinking about meaningful reparations. Let's hope, for all our sakes, that finally happens. Next time on Strange and Unexplained...

In November of 2011, a family moved into a house in Gary, Indiana and got more than they bargained for. What started out as a run-of-the-mill haunting quickly became a case for the Department of Child Services. But proving there was any abuse happening would be a tall order when the demons made themselves known to the medical staff, police, and the DCS caseworkers themselves.

Strange and Unexplained is a production of Three Goose Entertainment with help from Grab Bag Collab. This episode was written and researched by Amy Wilson and me, Daisy Egan, with sound engineering by Heather Eagle Ears Wilson. If you have an idea for an episode, head to our website, strangeandunexplainedpod.com and fill out the contact form. I will write back.

For more amazing content, join us at patreon.com slash grabbagcollab, where for just five bucks a month, you get all the Grab Bag exclusive shows, and for eight bucks, you get those, plus Amber Hunt's Crimes of the Centuries and Strange and Unexplained early and ad-free.

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