Nestled in what looks like pristine forest on a map there lies a nightmare. But don’t forget: it’s only one of many, all in the same U.S. state.

Cuyahoga Valley National Park is a fair amount of land, but it’s no park. Under a canopy of imaginary forest there was, for a while, a town. There was even a mill. The Cuyahoga River ran beside the town. In the later 1800s the Eerie Canal rail lined the other side of the river. Boston Mills eventually became incorporated as Boston, Ohio.

In 2016, the federal government razed the last of the structures and homes. Before that, everything was vacant. Residents had long since been forced out of the area, and grasses, weeds and the odd sapling were allowed to take over. Officially there was little the government had to say, but kicking an entire town off their own land was difficult to make look innocent. A park. Right, the people said. They had fought bitterly, but in vain. The town of Boston was unincorporated. No zip code. No nothing.

Almost at once, rumors, then full-blown urban legends, spread across the state and, even worse, the Internet. “Helltown” was born, and the conspiracy theories abounded. Each had the quality of being more gory, evil or terrifying than the last, until ghost hunting amateurs began to explore after dark.

There was a sighting of a Bigfoot. Of course there was. Then came the urbex morons who claimed to have seen and been chased by satanic cultists. In some variants, the “investigators” claimed to have fired shots at their pursuers. After the last of the ruins had been bulldozed, these reports died down. Today, most oddity hunters have forgotten about Helltown. They have no idea what a small and mostly unseen part Helltown had been in the most impressive cover-up in the history of the United States. And a horror story that lives on.

The real story began in the late 1400s. The Knights Templar had supposedly been murdered after a bounty had been placed on them. However it was not known that the Order of the Templars had already grown to such a size that their ranks occupied secret strongholds in every known country, recruiting by unknown methods locals who could walk among the public when foreigners could not. Relic hunters who sought control over the world, they had one true goal: finding an ancient relic that would, if used, eradicate all free will. An end to all violence. They could not foresee that if such a thing existed, and was used, it would end the human race. An end to free will also meant an end to craftsmanship, art, religion, political freedom and everything else that humans need.

Opposed by the  Hashashin during the Crusades, they used armor, weapons and mercenaries to wage overwhelming war against the order of the Assassins. Battles and territory were won and lost. The conflict never ended.

It was up to Viking explorers and one other man to take the next steps. Christóbal Colón, known to modern Western schoolchildren as Christopher Columbus, had come into the possession of a map inked by cartographer Piri Reis in Venice. To protect the map, or atlas, from Templar operatives, an assassin named Ezio Auditore helped Colón hold onto it until his three ships could depart. Colón never made it to mainland America, but he had bigger things to worry about than finding China. Ezio had been pursued by Templars, and gave Colón something to guard with his life. This he did, taking the relic, called an Apple of Eden, to his grave. Having sailed with the Templar cross on his main sails, though, gave them an edge. All they had to do was find and exhume the body to find it.

When the Spanish empire’s naval fleet was decimated, the Templars had taken heavy losses.

Edward Kenway, a man not satisfied with his family life and wanting to do more for them, a man yearning adventure and riches, became a pirate and then an Assassin. His kin would go on to help both sides in the future, but many vessels were to be named in his memory after his ship, The Jackdaw.

During the American Revolution and afterwards, the Kenways and the Assassins played a role, but Haytham was killed by Connor and the family bloodline ended except for its offspring from women who married into other families. Desmond Miles was a result of that DNA mix, and was used in the early 2000s by a Templar organization called Abstergo Industries, then operating as an entertainment venue with machinery which could allow one to live the genetic memories of one’s ancestors. By this time the Apple of Eden along with pieces of Eden were being aggressively hunted for by the Templars. But they never put all their money on that; they used secluded places like Helltown to set up laboratories to actually create clones of assassins with genetic memories intact. But the underground site at Helltown was discovered by urbex and paranormal explorers who video-recorded too much footage for Abstergo to squelch or debunk. The site was abandoned and Helltown was made a part of the park. They sealed every entrance so well that even Homeland Security couldn’t find it. Even lidar could not detect it. Josh Gates came away from one such search with nothing but a red face.

Layla Hassan used stolen Abstergo equipment and evaded the Templars while investigating Bayek, one of the last Madjays of Egypt, a contemporary of Cleopatra VII and Julius Caesar. Bayek and his ex-wife Amunet founded the order of the Hidden Ones, the very beginning of the Assassins. No one knows what happened after that, or how they evolved into the Hashashin, but the first true assassins were Bayek and Amunet. Layla went from Egypt to Greece and recovered the spear of Leonidas I, who died with the 300 at the Battle of Thermopylae. DNA from two of his descendants could be used, and she learned that during the Peloponnesian War, Kassandra of Sparta was a genetic ancestor of Amunet. Kassandra won the Staff of Hermes and it granted her immortality. With her whereabouts unknown, she spent two thousand years fighting against the Cult of Comos’s next totalitarian iterations including the Templars and fanatics of Nazi Germany in World War Two. As her native Greece was occupied by Himmler’s SS, Kassandra organized resistance operatives and tormented superstitious Nazi relic hunters. A very good and compassionate woman, she nonetheless had fun assassinating top commanders and dumping their bodies into the Aegean. When the tide took them out to sea only to bring them back to the beaches weeks later, blackened, bloated, bitten by crabs and rogue fish, it truly spooked the troops. This was true guerilla warfare, psy-ops and biological combat not seen since Alexander and Genghis Khan.

By the last months of the war, Kassandra of Sparta was no longer playing by any rules. Only hers. She had watched her brother die, having felled him herself, and she remembered the monster he had been turned into. She fought like he had. She missed out on the fall of Berlin, but she did have the pleasure of tracking Mengele down in Argentina. She hung him by his wrists and tortured him for days before abandoning him to the dogs.

She was next seen in the 1990s in Raccoon City, Ohio. Infiltrating the Abstergo cloning facility, she beheld horrors such as Greece itself could not rival. There were freaks back then. The Gorgon, the Minotaur, the Cyclops. All defeated by her, earning the Staff for herself. But in Raccoon City? It sickened her. People with skin falling off, sloughed as they robotically walked, a stench worse than Athens during the plague in 430 BCE accompanying them.

A mansion and underground labs were ground zero but whatever was causing the condition soon escaped into a downtown area.

It was Kassandra who stopped that plague at first, but a man of no honor named Wesker found new ways to keep it spreading. Travelling south, it found its way into Silent Hill, West Virginia. In Springfield Ohio, it began heading north. The victims of the virus became, literally, dead and rotting. Dying, yet they could not actually die. The only way to kill these things was with shotguns and submachine guns. The government moved in. West Virginia and Ohio were battle zones. The CDC, the Army, Army reserve, and Army National Guard went in with flamethrowers and grenade launchers, tanks and Bradley fighting vehicles.

In 2010, it was believed that the nightmare had ended. It was premature. It took years, but the mysterious condition popped up again in 2023-24 when immigrants were spotted in Springfield Ohio eating feral cats and stealing dogs out of people’s yards, and eating them alive. Ravenously.

You don’t believe me?

Ok. Ask Donald Trump.

He saw it. On TV. And he knew they were immigrants.

Haitian immigrants.

Don’t vote for that moron. He’s a Templar, a traitor. And Templars are idiots and racists and liars and fascists.

See Donald run. For president; he can’t physically run.

See Donald eat. French fries, Big Macs, and beautiful chocolate cake.

See Donald drool. Donald’s brain is dying.

Watch Donald turn into a zombie.

Perhaps the process has already begun.

The Zombie Apocalypse may be real after all, eh?

Maybe keep the kids in the house on Halloween night. Springfield ain’t that far away from Helltown. Or the White House, or Hangar 18…

Did you really think I was going to let this one go?