Looking Back on Grand Junction, Again
what I think the "chicken whackers" might have been, and the forces at work that night
Content warning: sexual violence
Okay, so we’ve gotten the main parts of my beginnings out of the way. We kind of come full circle, back to the period of time in my traveling where this Substack first started, right after Grand Junction and the Chicken Whackers. I was going to totally skip the details of this night. I’ll explain.
I’ve tried to think if I was going to write a post about the Chicken Whackers, what to even write. I’ve tried to sit down and write out the story so many times throughout the past, before this Substack even existed, and could never get through it. I just get this sick feeling in the pit of my stomach. Probably PTSD!
And the fact that it exists on Otherworld, the story in it’s entirety, I feel like it makes more sense to point people to that, because not only is it the story directly from my mouth, it’s done by my favorite podcast and professionally edited, so, like … probably better than I could tell it again anyways?
I know I’ve plugged it several times, but I do have a bunch of new subscribers so I’m referring to the “Chicken Whackers pt 1&2” on Otherworld, the paranormal podcast hosted by Jack Wagner. The first episode is also just about my travels and time spent on the road. We obviously don’t cover everything, but yeah. Episode 2 is what happened that night.
But wouldn’t I be remiss to just gloss over that entire part of my story? I mean, come on. Satanic cults, being secretly snuck up on and videotaped at a train yard, and then stalked through the night as well as some paranormal shit happening?
I don’t have the energy to sit here and go back through the facts from point A to point B. But what I can do, is I can offer my opinion as to what forces I think may have been at work that night. But first, how about a small piece of historical fiction I wrote a while ago to paint a picture?
It was 1921. The sun was high, and it was hot. A man and his wife were driving through town. They were on their way to California, where the man had family. He was Mexican, as was she. People had been giving them strange looks for a while now, they just wanted to keep going, to get far far away from here. They had put as much gas in their vehicle as possible at the last station.
Everything was going fine until the cop saw them. The man looked behind at the single red light flashing, and the arm of a man motioning him to pull over. He did. He looked at his wife. He smiled at her and squeezed her hand, telling her that everything was going to be okay. She wasn’t so sure.
The officer arrived at the window and peered in at both of them. A bead of his sweat dripped down, landing just inside the vehicle. He stood up and asked the man for his papers. The man found his driver’s ID issued in Texas and gave it to the man. He glanced at it and gave it back.
The other papers, he said. The husband and his wife looked at each other. The husband turned back to the officer and told him that they didn’t have any other papers.
The couple didn’t know that it didn’t matter what they did. They had no idea that once they were pulled over, in this valley, it was already too late for them. Maybe if the voices of all the souls buried up those slopes could speak, could’ve warned them, they might have had a chance.
This wasn’t the first time. This was just the first time that this dead person’s story would make it through the years. Would be a little footnote of this budding township, here in this cursed valley.
What he did was give him back his papers and told him to put them in the glove box. And then, as the husband was turned away, was in fact locking eyes with his wife, that’s when he put the gun to the back of his head and pulled the trigger.
The wife didn’t realize what had happened at first, it happened so fast. But he was in her lap. She was covered in his blood. He was dead.
It started like this. Sacrifices committed right by that river junction. Close enough that some of his blood would be in those waters next rain, swirling in the vortex where the great Colorado meets the Gunnison River, where the Utes used to come to trade and pay respects to fallen warriors. A sacrifice taken in hatred. Another step away from the light, and into the darkness …
These settlers that had claimed this valley, it was their dark hearts that fed that ancient power. And something that had been natural, something that had been there for a long, long time, it was beginning to take on a different shape.
It’s more than just hate, it’s something in the way they teach their kids to watch out for those certain others, the way they have space and God and some kind of paradise coming for them and only them, it’s those bones they think they buried deep in the hills, where no one can ever find them, because no one’s coming looking anyway. They think it was the Utes who cursed this valley, that trapped these families between these mountains, little do they know they’re actually digging their own graves, giving over pieces of themselves to this land, this land that they’ve reached out to touch, it grabs right back.
The blood that turns to lye upon the slopes will never be enough to wash this place clean. From the city clerk to the mayor, the whole town of Grand Junction is run by members of the Ku Klux Klan. But here in this valley, they didn’t have to wear any bedsheets at night. They did their killing right under the sun, wherever they pleased.
Okay, so a bit dramatic, I know. But based on real history. In the 1920’s, the town was run by KKK, every single position. And those families never left. There was a Mexican man killed by a cop in a traffic stop. Now, I know that that place is a city, full of people from all different backgrounds. I’m not saying the whole place is evil. But the history isn’t good. Even recent history. Like the 19 year old who went and found a homeless man under a bridge and stabbed him to death, because he wanted to know what it felt like. Or the KKK leaving fliers about not mixing races around valentine’s day, just the year before I ended up there with Grant.
Maybe I’ll do a podcast episode at some point, I don’t know. I’ve been trying to find out more about the “Chicken Whackers” ever since that night. I’ve searched far and wide and come across a few references online. I’ve learned about the city’s history going back to its founding. There is the “Grand Valley Curse” where people say that if you’re born in that valley that you won’t be able to leave, or if you do, you will always come back. People even go as far as gathering dirt in jars from each slope and bringing it with them. I remember on that fateful night I came across a man who had been sleeping in the little breezeway/entry area of a Walmart, talking about how wonderful everyone was, how “they let me stay here, they let me have as many sodas as I want!” and I got a very creepy vibe from the situation. He said “I’ve tried to leave. I’ve gotten a few different greyhound tickets to get out of here, but every time something happens and I’m not able to leave.”
There is a huge river junction, which is what gives the place its name. I’m sure anyone who believes in natural spirits and spirits of nature would recognize that that specific point is a massive energy vortex. Rivers are the arteries of the natural world, and I believe they have an inherent spiritual power. They very literally feed the land and give life to all kinds of beings. When man pollutes rivers, it is a very basic corruption going on, a very clear example of harm we inflict on the world around us, poisoning the veins of the land that carry the water of life. Japanese culture has what people refer to as Japanese animism, where everything does have a spirit, and I do believe that is true on some level. I believe in human spirits, and I believe there is a taxonomy of spirits, a whole world and universe out there of forces that are inexplicable and far beyond our understanding. Everything is alive.
The Ute Natives recognized that entire valley as a place where the spirits of warriors who were killed in battle roam. I can’t say for sure what all we were submitted to that night. At one point it felt as if the land was alive (I have seen others say the exact same thing online, so weirdly specific of a thing to say …) and it was attacking us. I could very easily see how any natural spirits that exist could be negative towards almost all humans. We used to walk the Earth, the Natives knew how to pay respect and ask permission from the land, but we stopped doing that long ago. We killed those people and their ways and their languages and ripped the Earth open and spilled our poisons into its blood. I would be mad too.
At one point it was like I was being attacked for everything I had ever done, every small piece of trash I had littered, cigarette butt I had flicked, or animal I had (inadvertently) mistreated. My mind and soul was under attack.
But there were humans involved also. I don’t know where the paranormal aspect stopped, and the human aspect began … even the way we were being followed felt oddly impossible. I remember trying to walk out of town and turning down one road, and there was a small train bridge above it, and a streetlight on the other side. And beneath the bridge I could see the silhouettes of three figures standing there. It felt as if any moment we were going to be attacked and abducted. Total abject fear.
I think it’s possible that the natural forces there, the energy vortex of the spirits of two rivers mixing to create something new altogether … and then that force being corrupted by the actions of the men that surrounded it. It seemed clear from what I have heard and rumors that some people had been abducted. I remember on my way into Grand Junction there was a billboard about human trafficking (and no not like satanic pedophile elite Qanon bullshit). I think people used the word “satanic” to describe these people because that’s the only thing we have in our cultural references to be able to describe what some of these people do. If people from other cultures came, they would have different words to explain it. And I wonder if there are natives who might really know even further, get closest to the truth through their cultural history.
I don’t know. I did find this guy; I won’t name him here. But he stabbed some guy 27 times and said at some point that he was involved with the “Chicken Whackers.” He refused to testify in court because he thought the police would hurt his family. He had apparent delusions, suffered from bipolar disorder. But not enough to be unfit for trial … not enough to send him to a mental institution instead. The case has been appealed and lost on those exact grounds. I’ve thought about sending a letter to him. Telling him my story and asking him what actually happened. But I don’t know. Some people are afraid to talk about it.
In the third extra episode on Patreon on Otherworld, Jack interviews a woman who grew up and was homeless there from a young age and knew about the Chicken Whackers. She even knew a family that sold drugs that she thought was part of them. Jack gave me her number, and we’ve talked a bit. We were going to video chat at some point but the last time I asked she never texted back.
I’ve gone deep on this. I will say, there are two instances I came across online that gave me the chills. The first one was a guy who was homeless and maybe traveling a bit, and he was camped in the woods outside a truck stop in the area. He said he heard screaming, and he went to look, and a group of adults in “silk suits” and masks were r*ping a boy and one person was videotaping it. He said they noticed him but didn’t do anything about it, and he ran from the area. He called his friend who was a local and his friend told him that those were the Chicken Whackers. I heard one more similar story from a different person on Reddit who said their friend came across the same scene around a bunch of storage units in the middle of the day. A group of people r*ping a woman and one person videotaping it.
The night they came for us at the railroad tracks, I saw a man who had a video camera pointed at us. There was some I think red light on it that was kind of big, I think it was for infrared or night vision. I remember exactly what he looked like, because I could see his face in the backlight of the screen on the camera. He was smiling, and he had long strands of stringy hair. He was mostly bald, with just a few patches of hair here and there that went down around his face. Creepy as fuck. And the similarity with the video camera …
A local homeless guy not far from there that we talked to after we got away said that he knew who they were and that they “kill people while they are r*ping them in the *ss.” Something about making sure their victims die in the most agonizing way in order to do whatever kind of “sacrifices” they were doing, if you can even call it that. Maybe they’re just producers of the most highly sought after snuff films, part of some human trafficking and black market that can’t even be comprehended. But to this day that similarity of the video camera … the fact that they had one pointed at us … gives me the most fucking chills out of anything about that night when I think back. I mean, the paranormal stuff does too, but that specific human element, knowing we might have been part of some possible snuff film that just didn’t work out.
That entire night it felt like something was trying to separate Grant and I, or get me to leave him behind. At one point I became disoriented and wanted to sit in the grass, like it was calling to me to just rest … but Grant kept us moving. Another point, when we were almost out, I turned around and Grant was walking backwards, back into the downtown area. When I turned him around, he wasn’t even capable of speech. He couldn’t answer to anything, I don’t even know if he knew what was happening. That was one of the scariest parts, because I had felt similarly at one point. Like something was trying to break us, and if it could separate us, it would be able to take us out more easily. I also remember being very obvious about the fact that we had a knife from the beginning, so who knows what small things might have kept us safe that night. I know when I was at my worst, when the mental and spiritual attack was so bad that I felt I was going to have to find a way to kill myself before experiencing another minute of it, I called on my Grandma Wanda who had passed away, and it immediately got better. I wasn’t a spiritual person at all back then, so I couldn’t think of anything else to call on, or any god. She was the first thing that came to mind, she was a deeply religious person, but I think also deeply spiritual.
There have been many drug arrests and a few linked to human trafficking, but never anyone arrested linked to the “Chicken Whackers.” But you hear so many people talk about them who have been around the drug scene or on the streets or in jail. Many people attribute paranormal elements to them. They are known for a kind of psychological warfare.
So what do I think? I have no idea but like I was saying, I do think it is possible that whatever natural forces are at play there, that they may have just taken on the energy around it. Something that perhaps at one point was neutral or an earthlier spiritual force may have taken on the energy of the men around it, and the thing they have done. Maybe at some point someone realized this, and they built up their own god and made sacrifices to it. The cult is thought to have started in the 90’s. Or maybe it inadvertently happened. There could also be angry human Native spirits at work around there, so maybe that is another force at work. I don’t believe they are worshipping Satan. It’s something even older than that, if they can even call it worship. It wouldn’t be the first time humans had taken something good and warped it, maybe even exploited it. Just like we are capable of polluting rivers with chemicals, the people around it polluted the power of that river junction with their hate, they corrupted the energy of it through their actions and murders and ideology, preaching fear, poisoning the well of energy.
Just some thoughts. I wasn’t planning on writing this, but it did feel weird to just skip over it. So, yeah. If you haven’t heard those interviews, go check them out for complete context and the full story of what happened that night.