Michelle Kane

In 1843, in the town of Enos, Wisconsin, during a particularly difficult winter, the residents were forced to practice what is known as survival cannibalism.

As the frailer among them succumbed to death, the rest received them as gifts from heaven, and they butchered, boiled, and consumed the corpses.

They were thus able to survive until spring.

Their tale could be added to countless others of the genre, except that in Enos, after the spring came…

they kept on eating their dead.

A local custom lasting several decades, the townspeople butchered and distributed the bodies of their dead rather than commit them to the local cemetery.

The practice was not shared or discussed with outsiders, and in town records, the practice was known as rendering.

This continued until the town was folded into Branch County, and under increased scrutiny, the practice was quietly abolished and omitted from official histories.

I came across Enos while researching cannibalism.

They were the subject of a number of references in other documents, but nothing in the way of hard facts.

So, in the interest of uncovering something interesting, I spent several days there, poking around.

The county seat had an understandable lack of information on Enos before their inclusion, and the Enos Historical Society, consisting, as far as I could tell, of three blue-haired ladies with sour faces, flatly telling me the rumors were untrue.

And yet, when I walked the local cemetery, the grave markers stopped in 1842, only to resume in 1871, which the Blue Hair Brigade explained was the result of a suspiciously targeted flood.

I took some pictures.

In 1938, Brighton, Kentucky, a family named Edbert is discovered to be practitioners of homicidal cannibalism.

killing people in order to eat them.

A highly insular community, the practice went unnoticed for untold years until a task force was formed to investigate the disappearances along the State Highway 24 corridor.

and the string of clues eventually led to the Edwards and their 200-acre farm, where they found the very partial remains of over 300 people, mostly bones.

Investigators estimate the crimes went back decades and was thankfully unique to this one family.

The Edwards were all executed, and they became popular boogeymen to use to scare children.