It was May 25, 1955, and I had never smelled a worse omen in my whole life. Never before and never since. You probably won’t believe me, but I’m old as dirt, so I don’t much give a shit what people think about me these days.
In Kansas, tornadoes are about as common as rain is in Oregon, especially in Cowley County. They’re so common that when a tornado occurs, the locals watch from their front porch or through the windows inside their homes until the very last minute before they run into their cellars, but only if the tornado is almost right on top of them. This was just before the times of those idiot storm chasers, thanks in large part to David Hoadley who started chasing tornadoes a year later throughout North Dakota.
I’ve lived in Cowley County my whole life. I can tell a tornado is coming just by sniffing the air. Most people think I’m just lying, but others call me “the Tornado Whisperer,” which I’ve always found absurd because I don’t whisper to the winds or the atmosphere like some hippy but literally just observe the skyline and sniff the air. I don’t know where this “gift” came from. Maybe it’s from watching my gramps do it, or just from years of experience of living and working on the farm.
I had never regretted having this unexplained ability until that night, because otherwise I would’ve never seen what I saw—I would’ve continued living on in ignorance like everybody else about what really happened that night.
I remember stepping out of my farmhouse late that night to feed my cows, and that’s when I smelled it. I smelled it before I saw it. It was hard to notice at first—smells tend to get lost in the fragrance of manure on a farm. At first, I thought I was just imagining it. There’s no way I was smelling it because I don’t own any chickens, but underneath the thick layer of manure was a hint of rotten eggs. Knowing what I know now, I’d call it sulfur.
And that’s when I saw it.
Just as I couldn’t believe what I was smelling at first, so I couldn’t believe what I was seeing. “Seeing is believing,” they say. Bullshit. If you saw what I saw, you wouldn’t have believed it either. I’m not sure if I still believe it. Sometimes I believe it with the faith of those who believe in anything even remotely paranormal. Other times I treat it with the vehement, irrational skepticism of an atheist. But even then, deep down I know it’s true.
I thought I was just looking at the blackness of the night sky—no stars, just the usual black void of an overcast night. Until the lightning flashed in the distance. It flashed, and I saw the unmistakable black thickness of the mesocyclone of an F5 tornado. I wasn’t alarmed. It was quite a ways off and I was already making plans to watch it after feeding my cows while keeping an eye on it as I fed them.
But then the lightning flashed again, and I saw something in the mesocyclone—giant wings like a bat. Now, if you’re like any rational being in the 20th century, you would’ve thought you were seeing things. I wish that were true in my case. I can see it as clearly as the day of my firstborn son, sometimes clearer than that day.
I suddenly forgot about feeding my cows, and I just stood there watching it. Not like in the past with the mild entertainment and apathy of a Kansan, but with a horrified paralysis. You know how in those horror movies when one of the characters is looking at their future murderer as they slowly walk toward them and they just stand there, paralysed like an idiot instead of running away and you yell at them for being so stupid because they can just run? Yeah, I don’t yell at the TV anymore. That kind of horrified paralysis is a real thing.
I watched it. I watched it as the tornado grew larger and blacker, each occasional flash of lightning giving me brief glimpses of those satanic wings and once, even a beaked head. I don’t know if Satan has anything to do with it, but I don’t know what else to call it.
Then it began to move. The creature never left the tornado; I think it was controlling it. I watched as it wrecked the next town over, Udall, and I swear I could hear echoes of its screeches. If you’ve ever been near a tornado, you know it usually sounds like a freight train, or a low roar. This was nothing like any of those. It was high-pitched, like a massive Pteranodon from Hell roaring as it flew after its prey.
If you were to look up this tornado online, you’d read that it killed 80 people and injured over 200, but every news source—even back then—is remarkably silent about how many people went missing. I don’t know why they never reported it; perhaps somebody way high up in government doesn’t want anybody to know. I don’t know, I’m just a stupid farmer. But there were 100 people missing, and I can’t help but think that the creature was hungry.
The Lutheran Column 