Author's Note: This is an unofficial sequel to Henderson Horse Farm: 1953 Incident.
Henderson Horse Farm, located outside Tryon in Polk County, North Carolina, had been owned by the Henderson family since the mid-1800s to the incident of 1953. After about a decade of ownership limbo, the farm was bought by one Joseph Rowland (né 1925), who claimed he did "not believe in any hokey tall-man myths".
But Rowland was far more superstitious than he seemed. Daughter Faith Roberts (née Rowland, 1950) recalls the practices which may have led to the relative peace the farm experienced under his ownership:
“The first few years, on June 15th, [Rowland] would sacrifice two animals, either horses or cows, and lay them end-to-end at the grasses over there [i.e. the far end of the cornfield]. The next day, they were gone..."
"One day, he put out two cows as usual, but the next day, they were still there, with a single line of burnt grass to their right. My father panicked for a few minutes before bringing another two slaughtered cows outside. The day after, three were gone and one remained. From that day on, the thing would take three cows or two horses.”
—Faith Roberts
Taking advantage of the peace, "Rowland's Farm" expanded to sell corn and dairy while the number of horses dwindled, but never to zero. Rowland insisted the decision was partially business-related, as dairy and corn sold better than horses, but refused to elaborate on why he still kept horses.
After Rowland's death, the farm passed from Rowland to his daughter Faith, alongside husband Carl Roberts (né 1952) and daughter Breanna (née 1981). However, in 1990, they were forced to sell the farm to a larger corporation, who eventually replaced them with workers willing to get paid less. Once the family had been fired, the company slaughtered the horses and repurposed their bodies to make gelatin and other products.
Soon after the slaughter of the horses, the farm workers began coughing up blood[1]. Many were convinced that a tall, thin man was watching them on the horizon[2]. The cows started escaping their pens, eating the corn, the workers, and each other. The company sent more people to the farm, but they died so quickly and often that it began smelling of rotten flesh. People went missing - well, you could say they were missing, or you could just say that little ferrous droplets were always floating around the farm at this point.
Finally, on June 15th, forty years to the dot after the incident of 1953, Henderson Horse Farm erupted into a bloodbath. The neighbors alerted the police about "an unearthly screaming coming from Rowland's Farm", but by the time the police arrived, the farm was eerily quiet.
Only one in five cows were on the property, and all of them had been roughly vivisected. The cornfield was around 25% full, with many patches of bare earth visible, and every remaining ear of corn had been snapped, trampled, or - and this was the strangest - somehow leached of chlorophyll, their stems bright yellow. Even the weeds on the ground had yellowed. The workers had been mutilated, and they were covered in cow blood and corn sap, so it was impossible to identify them.
One incident was an anomaly, but two was a pattern. The farm lay abandoned for long afterwards.
Perhaps the company should have looked further back in the farm's history. If they had done that, they would have known about the incidents in 1873 and in 1913 as well.