Tulsa's Hex House: The Basement Discovery, 1944

In October of 1944, police opening a locked hatch beneath 10 East 21st Street in Tulsa uncovered two windowless concrete cells, each containing a mattress, a bucket, and nothing else. Locals called it Carol Ann Smith’s Hex House, because every neighbor swore her servants wore blank stares and never left the property for years. Searchers found richly detailed ledgers tracking every penny Smith spent, along with dozens of strange carvings in the storage room walls-symbols linked to old European hex rituals. The answer: Smith kept two women locked in those cells, convinced through psychological terror that she controlled their fate with curses, and they obeyed her for seven years before the police dragged them out into the daylight.