The Revenge of Mrs. Barbara Ellen

     Woodside, located within the narrow confines of the Turkey River gorge annually steels itself for its week-long June ordeal. Three days before it begins, a strange apprehensive longing creeps in among the inhabitants. They become jittery and anxious. People, desperate to leave town, burst into sudden rampages of hysteria in the main street. Suicide attempts are not umcommon but strangely none have ever been successful. Plans made months in advance to leave town are abruptly cancelled with little or no reason. Autos breakdown in the street and are discovered to be missing parts. The missing parts turn up later at the owner's home.

     Then, it begins. On June 15 at midnight, delivery trucks arrive-seemingly unbidden. Cargos are unloaded and distributed to every house and residence. At dawn, the cooking begins. Long aluminum troughs and benches are neatly deployed downtown. At 8 am, the entire populace gathers round these troughs for what becomes a disgusting animalistic frenzy. By June 23-midsummer's eve-it is suddenly over. Bewildered and dazed, townsfolk stumble around, quite stuffed.

     Behavioral psychologists from the University of Emmetsburg, and a distinguished behavioral scientist from Georg von Podebrad College have all dismissed the annual events in Woodside as "collective dementia" and "manifestations of race memory fragments" and "plain weird".

     But all have ignored the essential historical fact: paranormal powers have been at work.

     On June 15, 1922, Mrs. Barbara Ellen (called "Madam Ellena"-which she insisted be pronounced "Ma-dawm E-lay-nya") arrived in Woodside. She had been invited to town during a syposium on the Occult in Chicago by Natalie Wyzewkowski. At that time, Madam Ellena had been causing a stir in Occult spheres, joining an inner circle of friends which included the legendary Houdini, Landon Bothwell, the shadowy translator of the Vandal rune spells at Brundisi, and Otto Hollinger, de Sadéan devotee and respected Egyptologist. A medium of consumate powers, her impatient temperment and intellectual fastidiousness cowed believers and nonbelievers alike. Fluent in sanskrit and ancient greek, she had authored a major paper debunking the theory of Aryan ethnology. She met Natalie Wyzewkowski at the conference and the two became fast friends. Whether fate or destiny, Wyzewkowski invited Madam Ellena to spend the week at her mother's home in Woodside and then to give a dinner talk on early Christianity at the local Lutheran Church. Madam Ellena accepted.

     Natalie's mother, the iron-willed Christine Angeline Wyzewkowski, was a lutheran woman able to quote more Gospel than her minister and posessing little tolerance for her daughter's "hocus pocus". It is still said her disposition made lemons sweeter by comparison, and curdled milk yet in the cow. According to local legend, when her prodigal daughter wired that she was returning from black doings in the big city with a friend, Mrs. Wyzewkowski's bitter glance corroded an entire train to its rails.

     Thus, this enchantress of warmth and hospitality greeted Madam Ellena for her long week's stay at her door.

     The feud between the two women festered all week. By Saturday, open hostilities between the two women teetered on a knife edge because Madam Ellena insisted on using Mrs. Wyzewkowski's kitchen to create a covered dish of her own. Again, according to local legend, Mrs. Wyzewkowski's howls of rage carried for miles. At her daughter's incessant pleading, Mrs. Wyzewkowski finally relented by leaving the house and Madam Ellena was allowed to conjure her dish in Mrs. Wyzewkowski's Holy of Holies.

     Madam Ellena's delicassy featured hamburger, cheese, and hash browned potatos rolled and cut into stubby logs (which she called 'tater-tots). It was served with a crimson colored gelatin desert filled with marshmellows. At the church, Mrs. Wyzewkowski declared it to be an evil concoction and that she and her "good, christian friends were unable to endure such stuff!" Madam Ellena heralded the dish as a triumph her host's "wretched and stagnate offal". Wyzewkowski countered with an epithet involving "billious eastern whore"; Madam Ellena with "lard-flanked ox". Wyzewkowski's friends indignant shouting reigned for the next couple of minutes until Wyzewkowski screamed "We'd rather endure eating this hog slop than one more minute of you!"

     Whereupon, Madam Ellena smiled a broad, malicious smile and said "And so you shall." Taking a handful of gelatin desert, she held it aloft and muttered something wholly unintelligible to those in the room. With a shriek, she dropped the gelatin onto the floor, left the building and shortly left town. A few days later, an outraged, teary-eyed Natalie Wyzewkowski departed as well. Neither ever came near Woodside again.

     The following year, the inhabitants of Woodside found themselves helplessly plunging drewl-slathered mouths into long feed troughs they themselves had set up downtown. There, they gorged themselves in a round-the-clock insatiable hoggish orgy on tater-tot casserole and jello-with-marshmellows salad.

     It has continued for 74 years to this day.