Vanished!

The last known photo of the boys.

Back in 1935, two boys set out on their bicycles. They took camping gear, some food, a map, and the appropriate tools to service their machines. It was a brisk autumn evening when they kissed their mothers goodbye and set off down the long dirt road that led out of town. They each got a hamburger at the corner diner at the edge of town and stopped long enough to have this, the last known photo of them, taken.

About a week prior to their ill-fated trip, Johnny Lockjaw and Clyde Loveless listened to a radio program that told of the mysterious Changawang. The Changawang is a long-fabled creature much like a loup-garou, or werewolf, but it differs in that it completely erases all traces of its victims after it has dined upon their misfortunate flesh. One account given by the only living soul who had survived the attack of the Changawang, also said that as it prepared to eat him, it worked itself up into such a state of arousal that the victims laugh themselves to death at the sight of it. This further angers the feared Changawang, and fuels its desires and hunger. He survived only by his personal lack of a sense of humor.

Did Johnny Lockjaw and Clyde Loveless anger the bloodthirsty Changawang and find deadly levity in its aroused state? We may never know.

To this day, though, late late at night, sometimes one can make out the sounds of uncontrollable laughter ebbing and flowing in the wind coming from the woods at the edge of town. Johnny? Clyde?

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Hester Begoris holds a Ph.D in folklore and taffy-making from the University of Maxwell House.