Finding the All-Too-Human Truths Beneath the Surface of the Midwest’s Strangest Stories
B.J. Hollars | Midwestern Strange: Hunting Monsters, Martians, and the Weird in Flyover Country | University of Nebraska Press | 2019 | 208 Pages
As a child of the late 1980s and early 1990s, I was enthralled by books like Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark and the Goosebumps series. I loved shows like Are You Afraid of the Dark? and the short-lived Eerie, Indiana. But nothing compared to Unsolved Mysteries. Robert Stack said that perhaps I, too, could help solve a mystery, and I believed him.
Just prior to Netflix relaunching Unsolved Mysteries this year, I started re-watching episodes from early in the Stack era. Now, in my mid-30s and at the start of a professional academic career, I confess that some of the thrill is gone. I’m nostalgic for the show, no doubt—those graphics, that theme song—but I can’t help looking past the production to focus on the people involved in each case. So often they’re family members of loved ones who vanished or died as children. Sometimes they’re witnesses to or victims of events that can’t or at least haven’t yet been explained. There’s often a hurt there that I wasn’t aware of as a child viewer. Occasionally there’s a desperation to believe—and to be believed—that makes me feel uncomfortable, maybe even exploited.
At the same time, it seems all too evident that, for the most part, the supernatural-themed stories I enjoyed so much were being told by “eye witnesses” having as much fun telling outrageous lies as I did listening to them.
Reading Midwestern Strange: Hunting Monsters, Martians, and the Weird in Flyover Country, I feel I’ve found a kindred spirit in author B.J. Hollars, an English professor at the University of Wisconsin—Eau Claire. Over the span of nine chapters (Hollars frames them as “cases” and divides them into three sections: “Monsters,” “Martians,” and “The Weird”) Hollars traverses Midwestern folklore ranging from the Mothman of Point Pleasant, West Virginia to the runestone of Kensington, Minnesota.
Hollars’ scholarly instincts and empathetic treatment of the people and places behind the stories distinguishes Midwestern Strange from other books about mythic creatures or UFO sightings. Indeed, one of the author’s primary themes is the concern that he, like many of the small-town Midwesterners at the center of these unexplained events, will not be taken seriously by his peers. With each case, Hollars reveals that those who find themselves in the weird world of the uncertain risk being stigmatized and outcast from the very communities to which they’ve drawn attention.
On the other hand, considering the tourist industry that’s helping sustain places like Rhinelander, Wisconsin (home of the elusive Hodag), Hollars also suggests that the legends often come to outweigh the truth in ways that have positive effects. Because the stories are ultimately what matter, the places come to matter, too. As someone who grew up just outside of Waco, Texas, well before the current phenomenon that is Chip and Joanna Gaines, I can tell you that not every small town benefits from its association with a monster (see the 2018 miniseries Waco for example). But many of the places Hollars visits during his investigations have fully embraced the lore, as evidenced by the many photos of public monuments and celebrations included throughout the book.
More importantly, there is something about the way Hollars engages with the people he researches and interviews that somehow makes a story about receiving pancakes from the crew of a UFO seem genuine and wholesome in that way so much of the U.S. imagines small-town Midwestern life to be. Readers from other regions of the country (or, maybe, the galaxy) will encounter characters who seem to be the salt of the earth, even though some of them might have fabricated hoaxes about visitors from another planet. That isn’t to say that Hollars shies away from ugly realities when they exist: his recounting of the propensity for violence in the originator of the Hodag hoax, Gene Shephard, is a sobering reminder that the deepest complexities at play in these unexplained phenomena are often found in the motivations and shortcomings of very real people.
And this is the most important takeaway from Midwestern Strange: yes, stories matter most because of what they have to tell us about ourselves and the world around us, but finding these truths often requires us to look well beyond generally accepted narratives. This is especially true in cases involving the strange or supernatural, where there can be great personal and professional consequences based on whether or not you accept or challenge these narratives. Over the span of the book, readers witness once-respected members of small communities lose social standing, and promising scholars scorned by the academy. Sometimes these falls from grace are self-inflicted, but sometimes, Hollars suggests, the fallout from unexplained events unfairly scapegoats well-meaning people who may have been duped; or, worse, people who were telling the truth.
Published in 2019, a year before we found ourselves living in a seemingly never-ending episode of The Twilight Zone, Midwestern Strange is a call for open-mindedness and critical thinking. Hollars is certainly not advocating the easy acceptance of every conspiracy theory we would otherwise scroll past, but neither is he suggesting that we should immediately reject every story that doesn’t neatly fit within the frames through which we see the world.
With each case file, Hollars writes with a blend of healthy skepticism, earnest empathy, and cheeky playfulness such that I, like Fox Mulder, want to believe; not in aliens or monsters or shadow governments, but in the power—and absolute necessity—of critically engaged storytelling .