This newspaper clipping was found in a stack of papers at an estate sale. I’m a collector of lost media, and I often buy stacks of books and papers from homes without much knowledge about the contents. However, this article was particularly concerning. The papers alongside this article were mostly reports of home break-ins, police affidavits, arrest records, and crime reporting. One thing that stuck out to me- when I arrived to purchase the papers, the front porch of the home was littered with cigarette butts. The deceased homeowner appeared to be deeply paranoid, had few guests, and lived alone.
Perhaps there was a reason for her concern.
By Douglas Ray Cleavon
June 2006
Part One: The Interloper
Part Two: The Son
Let me take you to that night.
Early in the evening of June 1st, 1976, Theresa and Gideon Foster went to bed. Theresa had spent the day at home, taking care of the garden and the housework, while Gideon had been leading study groups at the church where he was a pastor. They were both in their mid-sixties and appreciated a good night’s rest. Gideon had been considering retirement but enjoyed helping members of his congregation too much to give it up quite yet, according to friends.
A used teapot and dirtied cups found in the kitchen at their home indicate that before the murders, they had been able to complete their nightly routine without interruption. Theresa suffered from insomnia after the death of their son, Christopher, and often made tea before sleep, to help relax.
The farmhouse the Fosters lived in was far on the outskirts of the town of Tom Soul, Missouri; they’d lived there for decades and enjoyed the peace and quiet that the foothills of the Ozark Mountains provided. Tom Soul was a small town, even back then, and was surrounded by miles of thick, old-growth forest, in which their home was nestled. Perhaps, in the end, this isolation is what made the couple a target.
Sometime late into that muggy summer night, an intruder crept into their home. He must have been silent, making his way through the darkness, avoiding the creaking floorboards of the old, quaint home. Theresa and Gideon slept, as the interloper opened the unlocked front door with a gloved hand, and without closing it behind him, made his way slowly, carefully to their bedroom.
It’s impossible for us to know how long he waited in the dark, watching the couple sleep, before he struck.
Theresa was stabbed first, indicated by the pools of blood found on the side of the bed where she slept. It must have been dozens of times, due to the amount of blood and the comparatively small size of the knife. The attacker plunged his blade deep enough that the mattress was scoured by the blade. Blood spatter was found on the walls and ceiling.
What happened next is unclear. At some point, in the bedroom, Gideon Foster fired the shotgun he kept for self-defense, but failed to stop the assailant. The struggle between Gideon and the intruder continued into the living room, based on bullet holes, and overturned furniture alongside the bare, bloody footprints left by both men.
In the kitchen, the attacker gained the upper hand. Gideon had run out of ammunition. The man, desperate, grabbed one of his own kitchen knives, and managed to pin his would-be murderer’s hand to the counter. Police found a leather glove, pinned to the wooden countertop next to Theresa’s floral teapot. Instead of removing the knife, the intruder pulled his hand away, tearing it nearly in half, and continued his assault.
Gideon’s throat was slit over the sink. The intruder cleaned his knife. He washed his hands.
The clothes the Fosters were wearing were found back in the living room, in the fireplace. They’d been burnt, alongside several photo albums and mail belonging to the Fosters. Theresa Foster’s scalp was found in the fireplace. Her hair had been cut.
Instead of leaving out the front door, sooty, red footprints indicate the attacker broke a window in the living room, which he used to make a hasty exit. The bodies of Theresa and Gideon Foster were never found. Their murderer has never been brought to justice.
***
Tom Soul, Missouri was supposed to be a safe place, the kind of place you could enjoy the charms of a town with a population of only 2,000 people, where you could explore the untouched wilderness without anything to fear other than the animals endemic to the mountains.
“Things like that just didn’t happen back then,” Jack Arliss, the now-retired chief of police, told me in an interview. “Especially not to good, Christian folk like them.”
Arliss was a uniformed officer at the time of the murder and was one of the first responders who reported to the farmhouse for a wellness check that had been called for Gideon Foster. He hadn’t arrived to lead bible study Wednesday morning, and attendees became concerned.
“I thought he’d just decided to sleep in. The man needed to rest, especially after they’d been caring for Christopher for so long. He hadn’t taken a day off work, the whole time the kid was sick!” Arliss explained.
It was obvious something was wrong once he arrived at the property. Hundreds of flies had made it there before anyone else had, attracted to the carnage left behind, fat little bodies swarming through the door that had been left open in an ominous invitation.
“I didn’t want to walk through the door. It felt sick. Not me, I mean, I was worried, but I didn’t feel sick. The house did. The forest did. Those flies were the only living things around. It was a bright, beautiful morning, and not a single bird was singing. Like all the animals were aware of something I wasn’t privy to.
But we all did what we could. Horrible, horrible way to go. Nobody could’ve seen it coming.”
Not everyone, however, agrees that things were okay in Tom Soul. A neighbor, who was only a child at the time of the murders and who chooses to remain anonymous, told me the Fosters had actually called the police several months earlier, only a week after the passing of their son.
“There was a cave, near the Foster farmhouse,” he said.
Allegedly, the Fosters were used to chasing teens off their property, who sometimes tried to have parties or bonfires in the cave. This was different, he said- something scared them.
“My parents were talking about it, all concerned-like. I didn’t really know why it’d be different than any of the other times high schoolers’d go out there, but they told me I wasn’t allowed to play in the woods no more.
It was a Saturday night, and Mr. Foster saw a fire goin’ in the cave, when he’n his wife were drivin’ back from a movie. So he drops her off at the house and gets his gun, takes the truck back out to the cave to scare ‘em off. I know it might sound harsh, but people can be rough, around here. It’s safe, but if you live somewhere like that farmhouse, you know the police can’t get to you if something happens. Hell, the place was probably a hundred years old, even back then. I don’t even know if they got a phone line.
Anyway, he grabs his gun ‘n goes out there, sees people dancin’ and hootin’ and hollerin’, but doesn’t get a good look at ‘em. He yells and tells them to get off his property, and the fire goes out.
It’s pitch black. His eyes haven’t adjusted yet, and all he hears are people runnin’ around and rustling the leaves. He pulls out a flashlight, ‘n it looks like they all took off. No cars, so the must’ve just run off into the woods.
Mr. Foster goes to the cave to make sure there aren’t any stragglers or nothin’. One time, he chased some kids off, ‘n they just up and left one of their buddies there, drunk as a skunk on the ground. Mr. Foster had to drive the kid the whole two hours to the hospital to make sure he was okay.
He’s shining his flashlight around the cave, and he feels something dripping on him. Figures it’s just moisture, from the rocks, but looks up anyways just to be sure. It’s deer blood.
The carcass is on the floor, near the fire. The guts are all strung up like Christmas streamers.
Calls the police, they show up. Tell him it was hunters. ‘Hunters?’ He says. ‘They didn’t even take any of the meat!’
Mr. Foster rings up my dad the next day, to come stake out the cave. Nothin’ happens. They figure it was a fucked-up joke.
My dad tells me, ‘Whoever is sick enough to do something like that to an animal, is sick enough to do something like that to you. I don’t want you out there no more.’
So I stayed home the rest of that summer.”
Newspaper clippings I retrieved from the Tom Soul library mentioned a brief disturbance at Foster Cave, but information beyond that is scarce. What was informative, however, was my discovery of an article detailing an incident that had taken place about a year previously.
At another home, about ten miles away from the Fosters’ home, an elderly woman was woken in the middle of the night by a scrabbling on her roof. She assumes it is a raccoon or a bird, so decides to ignore it. However, it returns the next night. In fact, it returned every night that week, interrupting her sleep every time. She asked her son-in-law and his friends to trap the animal, so they set out traps with bait, and find nothing. The noise continues.
It’s loud. The woman can’t sleep. Eventually, she decides to scare away the pest herself. What she finds instead, however, is a man. Nude, aside from a handmade mask. He was nude, on all fours, cursing to himself as he scratched around on the woman’s roof. She screamed, and the man looked down. He didn’t say anything to her; the man just stopped what he was doing and bared his teeth in the facsimile of a friendly grin.
The poor woman screamed all the way to her car, and the man just smiled as she drove away. She returned, police in tow, and the man was gone. All that was left were marks on her roof, like he had been scraping the shingles with his nails. Included in the article was a rather nasty sketch by the witness herself (figure 1).
He was never identified.
When I discussed it with Arliss, he dismissed the incident as a prank, claiming, “Kids got bored back then. Didn’t have much to do other than fool around and scare old people. ‘Course, difference now is that I’m the guy they get a kick out of bothering.”
I took the article, along with the picture, to a historian and folklorist at the University of Missouri, by the name of Dr. Malcolm Fisk.
He looked puzzled at first, until I explained that I had found the article in Tom Soul.
“Ah,” he said. “That makes sense. This is a weird little myth that never really took off. They called him the ‘Demon of Tom Soul.’”
“Why haven’t more people heard of this?”
He shrugged, “After the Foster murders, people stopped reporting sightings. But for almost an entire year, the townsfolk were terrified of this guy. They never actually saw him do anything violent, but as you can imagine, he was deeply unsettling. Especially to a bunch of sheltered small-towners. I think if they kept seeing him, or the town was bigger, he’d have captured more of the collective conscience, a la Mothman. But it didn’t. Maybe he was just too… I don’t know. Too much? Even without that.
After the old lady saw him, a younger woman, Lacy Jones, who lived in Tom Soul proper told the police she saw the Demon in the local grocer.
She was about six months pregnant at the time, and shopping for some fresh produce for the week. While she was browsing, she heard a giggle from nearby. She didn’t see anyone near her, and couldn’t tell where it was coming from. So she goes back to looking for food.
Then she heard a voice go ‘psssst,’ followed by the giggle again. High-pitched, a man’s falsetto. Still, nobody is there.
Then, something wet brushes her ankle. She looks down, and the Demon is underneath the produce cart, with just his head sticking out, wearing that mask with the little striped horns, and he’s licking her ankle. Lacy is frozen in fear.
‘Hey, psst, hey lady,” he whispers. The mask has a hole at the mouth, and she sees he doesn’t open his teeth when he talks. Just keeps them bared. Only opens them to stick out his pale, fleshy tongue and lick her ankle, again.
This broke the hold the shock had on her, and she stomps on his face, hard. He giggles. She shouts for help. Just about everyone in the whole town comes running to help, but nobody can find him. Police chalk it up to pregnancy hormones making her anxious.
The Ozarks have a lot of caves. Lots of old mines, too, long out of use. Miles and miles of underground caverns, each of them connected to the next. Even back in the 70’s, it was a pretty hot spot for spelunking.
A few weeks after the incident in the grocery store, a group of college students travel to Tom Soul to explore some of the cave systems. They were avid cavers, experienced from traversing other, well-traveled caves, but wanted to try their hand at being the first to map one just a short trip away from the Foster property.
There were four of them, all young men. One of the students stays behind, to act as a lookout, since the cave they chose was on federal land. It was illegal, what they were doing, but I suppose that only added to the appeal.
Three go in. They’re careful. Spelunking, especially in an unknown cave, is incredibly dangerous, but for most of this trip they’re lucky. It’s fairly open, according to what they said later, and they made it at least a half-mile before coming to a squeeze.
A squeeze, to spelunkers, is a part of a cave system that is so tight you are unable to walk through, or even crawl through, really. It’s more of a shimmy, pressed flat against the ground, with the roof of the cave pressed so close above you that oftentimes you can barely pull yourself forward. Hundreds of pounds of rock above you, and in a ‘wild,’ unexplored cave, like the one these students were exploring, the floor might drop off in a life-threatening fall at any time. Incredibly dangerous.
They chip out a little bit around the squeeze, and they send the smallest guy first. One of them has the foresight to tie a bungie chord around his ankle, and he goes in.
In a squeeze that tight, it looks like he’s being eaten by the earth, but he squirms his way through the tunnel. Bit by bit, he disappears.
As it turns out, this tunnel was shaped like a funnel. The further he goes in, the smaller it becomes. He’s flat as a pancake, using just little kicks from his feet and knees and pushing himself with the tips of his fingers to inch along. It’s exhausting, but he’s excited, flush with adrenaline.
Somehow, in his scoot through this death trap, he bumps the flashlight on his helmet into a rock, and it breaks. His friends can’t realize this, because the light was already blocked by his body, and he knows if he says anything, they’re urge him to come back. So he doesn’t, because he’s convinced there’s a larger cavern opening up ahead.
Why? He can feel a slight breeze blowing in his face. Warm, wet air.
He keeps going. It’s not even tall enough for him to turn his head straight, so both sides of his face are getting scraped up. He’s sweating, and thirsty, and is very, very desperate for his arms to get free enough to turn on his space flashlight and grab the water bottle he brought with him. But he doesn’t turn around yet. The air is picking up.
He notices something. The air. It smells like cigarette smoke.
He stops. Listens. Someone is down there with him.
It wasn’t a breeze at all. It was someone facing him. Breathing.
Someone was already in the cave system. They had been with him, down in this crushing dark, matching him inch for inch.
Backwards.
He yells for his friends to pull him back, and they start yanking on the rope tied around his feet, but his shoulders are wedged so tightly that he’s stuck. He’s crying, and the heaving of his breath is slowly sliding him further down the gentle slope of the tunnel, pulling him closer to whoever has been his dark twin during what has quickly become a life-or-death situation. His friends are unaware of the stranger, but they are acutely aware that if he is stuck, it may be impossible to get him out of the cave alive. One of them leaves to alert the friend on the surface to call emergency services.
In the tunnel, the college student is trying to move backwards, but the ground in front of him is tilting at a more extreme angle, and he is unable to do anything other than do his best to stay in place. He’s shaking, from exertion just as much as he’s shaking from fear.
The Demon is in front of him, so close they could be kissing. Every cry, every prayer, every plea for his life the college student makes, the Demon copies. It’s mocking him. False sympathy. Sing-songy.
‘Please! Please don’t hurt me,’ the student is begging. Part of him is trying to convince himself it’s just a hallucination, from being trapped without oxygen.
The voice that answers makes this very, very hard.
‘Ooooooohhhhhhh,’ it moans, almost sexual. ‘Pleeeeaase!’ The p is enunciated with enough force that the student can feel spit on his face. ‘Pleeease don’t hurt meeee!’
It laughs.
‘Hey kid,’ a gruff voice, now. ‘Want a smoke?’
A rescue crew shows up at the cave. Law enforcement is there, too, miffed, of course, but they aren’t going to let the student die. They attach a mechanical winch to the bungie, tugging him with more power than his friends alone could manage.
He walks away. Scraped up, sprained ankle, claustrophobic for life, but alive. He tells a local paper about his story, but the consensus is that the college students made it up in a weird attempt at reducing their sentence for criminal trespassing.
Not too long after he checks himself into a mental hospital. Tells the doctor he keeps getting sleep paralysis. Keeps seeing things, at night. Well, one thing, specifically.
A man in a black and gray mask, with eye holes and a hole for the mouth cut out. Little floppy horns on the side, little tassels that bounce when he moves. It comes to him when he’s in bed. Watches him, with black eyes that shine like beetles. It sticks a finger in his mouth, probes at his gums, pushes it right up against his uvula, makes him gag. The finger tastes like cigarettes.”
Dr. Fisk cleared his throat, then puts two glasses on the table. From somewhere under his desk, he produced a bottle of whiskey. He poured us each a drink.
“I don’t want you to think I’m some kind of conspiracy theorist, Douglas. There’s just something that always struck me about that college kid.
He never actually said he saw who was down there with him. His light was broken, you know? Sure, the Demon would be a convenient, creepy story to tell a judge, but you’d think getting stuck in a cave for that long would be enough of a sob story.
The college kids were from out of town, though. They wouldn’t have seen the article in the paper. But the description- the dream he told the psychologist about…” he took a long sip from the glass.
“If he was making it up, how did he know what it looked like?”