The Belled Buzzard of Adamsville, 1878

In 1878, townsfolk in Adamsville froze each night at the sound of an iron cowbell echoing across the fields, long after every herd was locked away. Witnesses described a giant black buzzard circling the churchyard, a rusted bell knotted cruelly to its neck. Each time someone heard that clanging, a neighbor was dead by morning. Newspapers started tracking its route as bodies followed the ringing from farm to farm. Some swore they saw scorch marks wherever it perched, and poultry found scattered like they’d been dropped from the sky. Farmers tried shooting at it, but said no bullet ever slowed it down, only made the clapper ring louder. The sheriff himself called it a death omen, but nobody could ever catch it. The sightings stopped as suddenly as they began, and all the town ever found was the shredded straps of a cowbell hanging in a dying oak by the graveyard gate.