Tod Blunt

Gwendolyn et sa mère

On November 2, 1857, 10-year-old Gwendolyn Porter left her home around 2:00 PM to play with her two best friends, Eleanor Fitch and Margaret Sullivan.
They explained that they had gathered to play a game of hide and seek. However, by 5:00 PM, Gwendolyn had not returned home. Concerned, her mother, Eliza Porter, went to the families of her daughter’s friends to search for her, but neither knew where she was. Worry quickly turned into panic.
Eliza Porter, filled with fear, wandered the streets of the town, stopping carriages and questioning every passerby, pleading for anyone who might have seen her daughter to provide information.
The townspeople gathered, alerted by her despair, and the search began. Men and women scoured every corner of the town, hoping to find a sign, a trace—anything that might explain what had happened.
Sheriff Ezekiel Marsh mobilized several volunteers to search the surrounding areas, even checking ditches and dangerous corners. Despite their efforts, there was no sign of young Gwendolyn.

The interrogations followed. Some claimed to have seen a little girl with blonde hair running quickly past their shop that day, but no one could say for certain
if it was Gwendolyn.
Others reported seeing a mysterious man lurking around town, but the descriptions varied so much that a clear portrait could not be formed.
Worry grew, and with it, rumors. Some whispered that the child had been abducted by a passing stranger, a vagrant, or a traveling merchant.
Eliza Porter, however, refused to give up. She spent hours questioning villagers, scrutinizing every face in the hope of finding a clue, an answer.
But time passed, and the hope of finding her daughter diminished. After a while, a troubling piece of evidence was discovered during the search :
Gwendolyn's doll, named June, was found abandoned near the train station, not far from where it was believed the little girl had disappeared.
The doll, made of cloth and stuffed with cotton, was a typical toy of the era, often sewn by mothers for their children. Its intact state led to the belief that it had not been abandoned willingly.
The investigation continued, and the horrifying and macabre discovery eventually came.

On November 3, 1857, at 6:42 AM, a Reytac station employee, Frank Holloway, discovered the lifeless body of Gwendolyn Porter, 10 years old, in the main hall.
According to reports in the archives, Holloway was so deeply shocked by the state of the corpse that he left the building without saying a word.
When he joined his colleagues on the platform, he was unable to explain anything, merely pointing with a trembling hand at the station's entrance.
His silence and frozen expression immediately alarmed the other employees, who, after entering the building, reacted similarly. None of them could speak at first, all in total shock at the scene before them.
Sheriff Ezekiel Marsh's report, which arrived an hour later, described a scene of unspeakable horror.
The child's face had been torn off, leaving only a gaping, misshapen wound. Her mouth had been crudely stitched with rough thread, a rudimentary method indicating an intention as cruel as it was incomprehensible.
Gwendolyn Porter's body appeared to have been placed there deliberately, lying on her back with her hands crossed over her chest in an almost ceremonial position. At 8:15, the victim's parents, James and Eliza Porter, along with their 4-year-old son Charles, arrived after being informed by a neighbor.
The testimonies collected indicated that Eliza Porter, in shock, tried to enter the building to see her daughter, but the sheriff's deputies had to physically restrain her. The mother collapsed in tears, begging to be allowed to approach the body, but to no avail.
Her son Charles, a witness to the scene, burst into violent sobs, and several witnesses claimed he seemed to understand, in a disturbing way, the magnitude of the tragedy even before anyone explained the exact nature of it. James Porter, however, was the only family member allowed to identify the body.
Escorted by the sheriff, he entered the station where his beloved child's body had been covered with a sheet. When he lifted the white sheet, he was struck by a violent nausea and broke down in tears.
Although he had been warned about the state of the body, nothing could prepare him for the horrific sight of his child so horribly mutilated.
He immediately recognized her by her dress and the ribbons in her hair, the same ones his wife had given her the day before to tie her blonde braids.
According to the sheriff's report, James Porter remained kneeling for a long time in shock beside the body before standing up, his gaze lost, unable to utter a sound.

In the days that followed, Gwendolyn's disappearance plunged the village into a climate of mistrust and fear. Every resident scrutinized their neighbor with suspicion, fearing a monster might be hiding among them.
Patrols intensified around the train station, but no new leads emerged. Soon, suspicions fell on Ambrose Whitaker, the village elder.
He was known for his obsession with the station, a place he considered sacred and where he constantly warned people not to go.
His strange behavior and incessant warnings led some villagers to believe he was involved in the child's murder. However, Ambrose Whitaker's alibi was confirmed by his own granddaughter, Mary-Ann Whitaker, who was about 60 years old at the time.
She testified that she had spent the entire evening and night with her grandfather, and although he was in good health for his 101 years, his advanced age made it impossible for him to have been involved in the affair. Investigators questioned employees from the station construction site, passing travelers, and even vagrants. No one knew anything, and the only tangible clue remained the pretty rag doll that belonged to the girl.
Day after day, Eliza Porter descended into madness, returning to the site, searching every corner, and shouting her daughter's name in the hope that she might answer. Her pleas echoed throughout Reytac, and the sheriff and his men often had to intervene to calm her. Then, a month after the disappearance, an unexpected event reignited the investigation. A station worker had discovered a tiny piece of fabric wedged between two floorboards. It was identified by Gwendolyn’s parents as a fragment of the dress she had worn the day she disappeared.
Eliza Porter saw this as a sign that her daughter was still alive and trying to call out to her. Between 1857 and 1861, the town of Reytac continued to be the site of a series of unexplained disappearances and deaths of children, followed by the systematic discovery of the victims' bodies at the village train station. After the first well-documented case of Gwendolyn Porter, initially considered an isolated event,
seven-year-old Betty Lewis was found lying on a bench in the station’s waiting room. Later, Jezabel Miller was discovered sitting against the west wall,
her hands resting on her knees in a natural posture. The disappearance of Isaac Law followed shortly after. His body was found at the foot of a small shelter,
his scarf still tied around his neck, as if someone had placed him there with unsettling care.

As the months passed, more victims were discovered at the station. Meg Brown was found curled up under a bench, her fingers tightly gripping the fabric of her dress, without any sign of fleeing. Terrence Colmann was identified standing against a wall, in a posture resembling prayer.
Over the years, the deaths continued.
Julius Anderson was found with his legs crossed against the east wall of the station, as if he had sat down to wait.
Christopher Baker was discovered on a pile of coal.
Mandy Flanagan was leaning against a trunk, her back stiff, her posture resembling that of a doll.
Caroline Mitchell was found at the foot of the ticket booth, her head tilted as if frozen in anticipation.
Finally, Colin Farnsworth, the last recorded victim, was found on a bench, hands clasped, a fine and unexplained mark visible on his wrist, a detail absent from the other children.

In addition to young Gwendolyn Porter, ten other dead children were found between 1857 and 1861.
In response to these events, the residents of Reytac took various precautions, barricading their homes and forbidding children from approaching the station. However, these measures had no effect :
the disappearances continued, and the bodies invariably reappeared at the station.

On April 9, 1861, a fire broke out in the middle of the night.
Eyewitnesses described an extremely rapid spread of the flames, which seemed to burst spontaneously from the ground before engulfing the town of Reytac and spreading throughout the village.
Several residents tried to flee, but the exits were already blocked by fire, which spread systematically through the houses. By morning, Reytac had become a field of charred ruins, a graveyard of rubble and burnt bodies, with the Reytac train station miraculously untouched.

Only five people survived the disaster. None of the survivors could explain how they escaped the flames or identify the origin of the fire.
Several of them, however, expressed their belief that the destruction of the village was not an accident.

In the days following the fire that reduced Reytac to ashes, many experts – historians, anthropologists, and architects – investigated the tragedy in hopes of understanding its origin.
While some hypothesized an accident, others focused on the deeper circumstances surrounding the construction of the village station,
suspected to be the starting point of these unexplained events.

Research conducted in the archives of San Francisco and Los Angeles revealed a forgotten past : long before the arrival of settlers and the founding of Reytac in 1823 by American businessman Abraham Reytac, this land had belonged to the Cahuilla, an indigenous tribe who considered the area a sacred place.
Spanish missionaries had already mentioned in their writings the existence of an ancient sanctuary where rituals were performed to honor the ancestors and guide the souls of the dead.

Accounts from the early 19th century reported strange phenomena in this desert region.
In 1812, explorers noted that the Cahuilla refused to enter the area after sunset, speaking of distant songs carried by the wind. In 1823, a Spanish officer, José Romero, claimed to have heard children's cries in the night and discovered a warning engraved in stone, the meaning of which remained unclear.

When the construction of the Reytac station began in 1857 on these ancestral lands, the few remaining descendants of the Cahuilla warned local authorities of the danger of disturbing the site.
Their warnings were ignored. Shortly after, accidents began, followed by a wave of disappearances, mysterious deaths, and finally, the blaze that destroyed the village.

Today, this dark series of events is known as the Curse of Gwendolyn Porter, a shorthand many have adopted over time, as many people associate the tragic death of Gwendolyn with the beginning of what became a succession of misfortunes, although the poor child was not at fault.
Although no tangible evidence has ever been provided to confirm these theories, the connection between the desecration of a sacred site
and the tragedies that struck Reytac remains a troubling question, still debated by researchers who reference it.