In memory of the tornado which swept across the area on March 18, 1925, area author Todd Atteberry has released Tracing The Scars Of Hell: Wandering The Path Of The Tri-State Tornado of 1925.
On March 18, 1925, at 2:32 p.m., the Tri-State Tornado struck Murphysboro, Illinois. A minute or so later, 238 people lay dead or dying.
The tornado dipped from the clouds in Missouri, then crossed the entire state of Illinois before disappearing in the skies over Indiana. Over the next 210 minutes, entire towns were destroyed, others were crippled and never regained their former glory. 695 people lay dead or dying, and over 2,000 were injured.
For the the last several years, Todd has traced the route of the Tri-State Tornado, looking for the scars it might have left that survived over the past century. “What I found was a horror show. People lived through something out of Dante’s Inferno, witnessing scenes seldom seen this side of Hell.”
Having first heard of the tornado from family members that were alive at the time and who simply referred to it as “the big one,” the author was surprised to find out just how big it was, and that it passed about a mile from the family home where he still lives today. Traveling just over sixty miles an hour, and averaging about a mile wide, meant in a minute’s time it could wipe out a town. There were cases where the tornado would kill a mother on one side of the path, and her child on the other side of the same rotation.”
“Usually I write about the history of folklore and the supernatural, so I wasn’t expected to be blindsided while researching this book. But in reality, there are no happy endings in the story, so by the time I found myself in the Indiana portion of the path, I realized I was scarred as well, though it happened way before my time.”
The book is full color with 144 pages, and includes over 70 images both historical and modern, media accounts from the day and the story of the author’s own experiences with tornados and from along the route of the storm.
“Usually I write about the history of folklore and the supernatural, so I wasn’t expected to be blindsided while researching this book. But in reality, there are no happy endings in the story, so by the time I found myself in the Indiana portion of the path, I realized I was scarred as well, though it happened way before my time.”
The book is full color with 144 pages, and includes over 70 images both historical and modern, media accounts from the day and the story of the author’s own experiences with tornados and from along the route of the storm.
“There are still lessons to be learned from the storm. Numerous schools were destroyed with a great loss of life in the storm of 1925. Across the street from my house is a school built a few years later, with concrete walls a foot thick. The trend today is to cut costs when building a school. But in that era, the reason why you want your kids protected by a wall of concrete was still fresh in their minds.”
The book is available from Amazon and from the author’s website, www.witcheryart.com
Todd’s photography and writing have appeared in The New York Times, The Boston Herald, BBC, The Guardian, CNN, MSNBC, Huffington Post, Broadway World, Country Living Magazine, House Beautiful and Good Housekeeping. Past clients include: The Daughters of the American Revolution, The Civil War Trust, Plimoth Plantation in Plymouth Massachusetts, History Press, Historic Hudson Valley and the Old Dutch Church of Sleepy Hollow.
This is Todd’s second book relating to southern Illinois, having released The Haunted History of Southern Illinois, The Folklore, Backroads & Graveyards of Little Egypt in 2021. Todd is also the author of Haunted Travels in the Hudson River Valley Of Washington Irving, A Year On Walt Whitman’s Long Island, and later this year, The Haunting of Long Island.
Todd’s photography and writing have appeared in The New York Times, The Boston Herald, BBC, The Guardian, CNN, MSNBC, Huffington Post, Broadway World, Country Living Magazine, House Beautiful and Good Housekeeping. Past clients include: The Daughters of the American Revolution, The Civil War Trust, Plimoth Plantation in Plymouth Massachusetts, History Press, Historic Hudson Valley and the Old Dutch Church of Sleepy Hollow.
This is Todd’s second book relating to southern Illinois, having released The Haunted History of Southern Illinois, The Folklore, Backroads & Graveyards of Little Egypt in 2021. Todd is also the author of Haunted Travels in the Hudson River Valley Of Washington Irving, A Year On Walt Whitman’s Long Island, and later this year, The Haunting of Long Island.
