Not many people stop off in Tucker, Ohio.

Farmers reaped their fields alone every year without the help of transient workers. Shopkeepers ran their own stores. Children were more apt to grow up and stay put than they were to move off to college.

Years ago, the railroad used to bring with it a sparse, eclectic group of outsiders each year. They would stay for a few weeks and then move on, always migrating westward. Now the tracks are little more than a rusted, twisted landmark of what used to be.

Not many people stop off in Tucker.

Those that do stop by do so no longer by accident, as was the way of the past. Those that enter Tucker these days do it with a purpose, armed with cameras and shiny equipment that seems so out of place in the quaint, dusty little town. The locals regard these outsiders with irritated but well-practiced indifference. Anyone paused mid-street, camera in hand, is apt to be subject to a wide assortment of suspicious glares; dark eyes glimmering moistly with fear and resentment. Not a word is exchanged between town native and interloper.

The residents of Tucker, Ohio, have had a guarded suspicion of outsiders ever since the night the railway stopped running. The night the dark man stepped off the last train that would ever sail its way into the small, peaceful town. He marched his way through town, drank in the local pub, smiled and laughed as the girls of the town danced around a harvesting bonfire.

The locals liked him, but all agreed later that they couldn’t seem to recall what he looked like. His features had melted away in their recollection before he had even turned his back on them.

They liked him well enough right up to the time when he set the town on fire.

There was no one left alive to call for help; fire departments from neighboring villages only came to douse the flames when they saw the impossibly thick black cloud of smoke rising its way up from the distance.

Not many people stopped off in Tucker, but this one visitor had left a lasting impression.

There was long debate about how he had been able to do it. How in a single instant, every shop, every cornfield, every barn and every house had come to be engulfed in a murderous flame. No traces of explosives had been found. It was as if, with a touch of his hand, the mysterious visitor had unleashed the very depths of hell.

The railway was shut down immediately to avoid taking unsuspecting passengers through the gruesome ruin, to an equally gruesome end on the melted and twisted tracks. No highway runs anywhere near the devastated town, which is accessible only by a winding dirt road that is prone to flooding in the springtime.

Tucker remains; a charred, blackened hulk of its former pristine majesty. The quaintly charming buildings are crumpled shells that still stand, pathetically proud. And yet the visitors do come; they come to see the people that once lived there. The people that still walk the streets, their skin charred black, blistered and bubbling. They come to see the people and the smoky, tattered rags that hug their burnt bodies.

They do not walk like zombies, or any of the classic forms of the living dead. They move as if they were alive: flickering in and out of sight; setting up shop in the empty, burnt out stores; reaping charred husks of corn. And they cut their eyes in a most suspicious fashion at any stranger who dares set foot in their damned village.

No, not many people stop care to stop off in Tucker, Ohio these days.