The Hex House Murders of Tulsa, 1944

In October 1944, police pried open the door to 10 East 21st Street in Tulsa and found two women chained in the basement, malnourished but alive, with strange runes carved into the walls. The house’s owner, Carol Ann Smith, greeted officers upstairs with calm politeness, as though nothing unusual was happening below. For nearly seven years, neighbors believed Smith was a kindly widow who simply kept to herself, while the lights in the house never turned off, day or night. Downstairs, food scraps and burnt wax littered the floor, and the women whispered stories of rituals, sleep deprivation, and the nightly recitation of prayers they didn’t understand. The authorities pieced together handwritten letters from victims, describing how their paychecks, movements, and even meals were entirely controlled by Smith, who rarely left the property. Even the women’s families thought they’d vanished for good, until a single missed rent payment led the landlord to call police. Only then did Carol Ann Smith reveal she’d convinced two grown women to submit to her by threatening them with curses-promising that disobedience would bring death by supernatural force. The strange runes in the basement were her doing, copied from old occult manuals seized by police.