Roundhouse Stories: The "Soggytown" Project

[under construction]

"Soggytown" Anomalies

Why..?

did the original WTRR roundhouse burn to the ground the night of April 8, 1944?
have so many children - some researchers suggest as many as 15, mostly young boys - vanished from the area around "Soggytown"?
did J. Edgar Hoover order a special investigation of authors Thorton Burgess and Patrick Gordon, and direct agents of the FBI to pay particular attention to any reports of "talking animals"?

The "proper authorities" - local and federal law enforcement, scientists, even congressional investigators - have had their chance to provide the public with an explanation of these questions, and of those recent events in Oregon's Willamette Valley (during the months of March and April, 1994) which culminated in the apparent "re-burning," before hundreds of witnesses, of a structure which burnt to the ground in 1944. These various investigations, together with a tremendous number of amateur efforts, have delivered almost nothing in the way of convincing explanations. Already, it is common to hear claims that a cover-up is underway, and it seems that as time passes more and more potentially anomalous events are being reported in connection with the second burning of the so-called "Soggytown Roundhouse," including a well-documented history of hauntings and spectral visitations at the site of the Roundhouse's ruins. However, it is hard to determine how much of the activity attributed to the site is the result of a sort of "Soggytown mania" in the occult and conspiracy communities: alleged sitings of cattle mutilation, unmarked helicopters, sasquatch-like beings, crop circles, UFOs, satanic ritual activity and the like having multiplied remarkably in the region since the "fire." And the recent discovery of what appears to have been some sort of prison or internment camp in the immediate vicinity of the Roundhouse site has only fed the fires of various groups claiming the events are part of secret weapons testing by a UN- centered world government.

In the midst of all of the speculation, the "Soggytown Project" has been established in the hope of cutting through to the center of this enigma, and determining what in fact happened. Because of the complexitiy of the story that is already starting to emerge, we have chosen to approach the recent events in the context of the very rich, odd history of "Soggytown." The region has, as several generations of children well know, a history of producing compelling narratives - Rover Books author Patrick Arthur Gordon lived in, and wrote about, the small town for several decades - and local residents have been gracious enough to offer their contributions to that legacy for use in our project. You can expect to find a wide variety of texts here, many of them from the Patrick Arthur Gordon Collection in the Archives of the Oregon State University Library and the private collection of Shawn P. Wilbur, who has been engaged in research into "Soggytown anomalies" for more than ten years now and has been an inestimable help in bringing this project to the WWW. Our task has been to attempt to draw them together, using HTML (Hypertext Mark-Up Language) based links, so that researchers can pick their own paths through the archive as it grows.

Our archiving attempts are in their early stages. We beg your patience as we attempt to sort and scan the various documents.

- The "Soggytown Project" Collective