Arkansas Cult Challenge
Colt Williams 5/13/20
. I go to a private college out in the middle of nowhere, six hours from my hometown. About half an hour north of my college there is land inhabited by a cult. If I remember correctly, they called themselves “the Cottites” or something along the lines of that. Pretty much the whole school knew about the cult’s existence but nobody knew much of anything else about it. The town didn’t really care much about them either, as they never really did anything to cause speculation.
. However, college kids being college kids there is this thing we simply call, “the cult challenge.” A challenge that is highly pressured on new freshmen where everyone involved is piled into the back of a pickup truck, then proceeds to drive up to the gate that marks the cult’s territory off the side of a T-intersection. There is a one-way gravel road barely big enough for a truck to fit on that leads straight through the uphill zone with a set of four buildings in the direct middle of the land. There is only one entrance, and only one exit. Once you’re there, the freshman have to jump out, hop the gate, and then run up to the building in which the cult members lived in, and simply touch the wall and run back out. I had done the challenge about three times before with different friend groups and the best way I can describe the experience is: anti-climatic. You never go during the day because it just isn’t scary, and when you go at night they are always asleep anyways. It’s an adrenaline rush but I had never felt like I was in any real danger.
. I had some friends come up from my hometown to visit me for the weekend of my sophomore year and we always enjoyed the thrill of trespassing into allegedly haunted buildings and other things along those lines so I figured they would enjoy the challenge. Similarly to how I had done before, this time with me behind the wheel, we drove up to the gate and stopped. The gate was strangely open this time around, but it didn’t creep us out. My friends jumped out and did the challenge and in unsurprisingly fashion, it felt just as anticlimactic as always. So to spice things up, certainly due to the peer pressure from my friends, we decided that it would be an exciting idea to drive through the entire territory. This might be where you think the story gets exciting but no, it was anticlimactic as always and we decided to drive off.
. We decided from there to take a trip up to the old neighborhood Walmart that was nearby to buy some hot-dogs to take back to the house and cook. It was there that one of my friends realized her wallet had fallen out whenever we had gone to the cult. Being the brave people we were, we drove back up to the land. At this point it was about one in the morning. We drove right up to the main building this time, as we were hoping it fell out when she touched the wall so we could grab it straight away and get out of there.
. We turned the car off and tried to use our iPhone flashlights and make as small of noise and light as possible. We walked up to the building but didn’t see it. Determined to not leave without the wallet, my friend started walking back through the grass to double check. I heard a noise from inside the building, and I whispered to my friends that I had a bad feeling and we should ditch the wallet and leave. We started walking back to the car when three figures ran out straight towards us carrying something in their hands. I assume it was some type of weapon but in the dark I couldn’t tell what it was. Luckily, my body was moving at the first sight of movement before my brain even could get a chance to process what was going on. I took off for my car and my friends got the memo and took off as well. We all jumped in and I quickly turned it on. The idea was to drive out of the exit, but as I saw headlights turn on and two pickup trucks started to pull up on to the road. Realizing that there were more of them who had gone out to the other side of the building, I quickly put my car in reverse and heavily relied on my backup camera to get us out of there. Driving backwards down the road, I had my head ducked down as I expected bullets to be flying through my windshield. The trucks caught up to me fairly quickly as they were more familiar with the road and were driving the right direction. One of them pulled off the road and I instantly recognized that they were going to try to block off the gate and block me in. Through the chaotic screaming of my friends, I stepped on the peddle and turned my wheel as soon as I flew out that gate. The second we got through the gate I hit my breaks and tried to turn at the intersection. The gravel under my car caused me to slide off the road but ended up being a blessing as it helped me turn back to the right direction. I quickly shifted the car into sports mode and took off. They followed me but stopped once I hit the main road. I don’t think I’ll ever have that good of luck in a situation like that again.
. From then on it was actually a fun story to tell, at the expense of the wallet we never found. However, I caught word about a semester later that still haunts me to this day. A couple of high school students from about an hour out of town went missing. Police got word from one of the boy’s friends that they took a trip down to the cult for a thrill ride themselves I am guessing. This led police to investigate the cult, leading to the arrest of all of the members and the land closed off and buildings boarded up. It was later revealed that the cult leader’s wife had passed away and they had her body stored in an ice bath located in the basement, where the leader made the cult followers pray over her body every night and eventually used the two boys as sacrifices in hopes of bringing her back. News articles tried to milk the situation and a little more information came out of it but nothing relevant or worth noting. There’s no telling how long the wife had been dead, but I have this heavy feeling, knowing that it is extremely likely that if we were a second too slow running for my car, it could have been us the police discovered in that basement.