What started as a typical Fall celebratory outing for a church youth group in Lacombe, Louisiana ended as a tragic mystery fifteen years ago that still today baffles local authorities and townspeople. On a farm in nearby Hickory where families and groups go to experience walking through cornfields and picking their own pumpkins straight from the patch, 14 year old Chloe Chandler entered the popular Corn Maze attraction with 4 other teens that Saturday night but she never came out.
As a rule corn mazes are considered harmless Halloween fun, certainly in the light of day but many groups turn out in the hundreds for the extra scare of the night time walk through this particular maze that features walls of intimidating cornstalks seven feet or more in height. Navigating through the maze can be a frustrating proposition especially in the dark, armed with only a flashlight and the shaky support of equally confused companions. Some maze walkers have admitted to being stuck inside for an hour or more before asking for help from a staff guide. Certainly it is still considered the less frightening alternative to another Halloween tradition... the haunted house. It was a choice that Chloe and those with her had made, never knowing that it would end in tragedy. Upon realizing that Chloe was missing from the group, farm employees performed a search of the grounds but came up empty-handed. Church group chaperones panicked. The search soon escalated into a police search and subsequent investigation. As is common in this type situation, authorities suspected foul play even hinting at kidnapping for the intention of rape by a deranged sexual predator. The less sensational possibility of a teenage runaway scenario was dismissed after interviewing Chloe's friends and family. She had never been one to exhibit strange or odd behavior and for all appearances seem to be a normal teen.
So what happened to the previously unremarkable Chloe Chandler? No one really knows for sure but the aftermath of the event is the truly chilling element of this story.
On the first anniversary of her disappearance night-time maze walkers first reported seeing an apparition resembling the form of a young girl following them or in some cases seemingly trying to show them the way out. The descriptions from various encounters are consistent in details even down to the girl's pale features and ghostly clothing. Most people dismissed these reports at first claiming they were concocted by attention seekers, but every year on the anniversary of Chloe Chandler's disappearance similar encounters were reported by night time visitors. The farm owners had no explanation and deny even now of perpetrating some kind of publicity hoax.
The corn maze in Hickory no longer exists. Hurricane Katrina destroyed it in 2005 along with all of the pumpkin patches that were so popular on the farm. Although the farm and pumpkin patches did eventually come back from the destruction in recent years, the maze has never been restored. What remains of the story is an odd epilogue of sorts. Townspeople still wonder what happened to Chloe but assume she is dead due to the other stories surrounding her vanishing. Today the farm owners reluctantly admit to sightings of an apparition of a young girl in the remaining pumpkin patches adjacent to the field where the corn maze once existed. Looking out of their farm house windows they can see it slowly walking down the rows alternately vanishing and reappearing as if its struggling to keep form. Additionally they report that there is a noticeable and observable effect on the pumpkins that she walks near on her night strolls through the patches. In the mornings after these sightings, upon inspection, the perfectly good pumpkins from the previous day would be over ripe and rotting showing signs of mold and blistered decay. When pressed for an explanation the farm owners speculate that if the corn maze was somehow able to "take" Chloe ( a possibility they shy away from accepting) then perhaps her spirit was able to escape when it was destroyed and only remains because she cannot accept what happened to her... a young melancholy spirit still grieving her own death and spilling out that grief on to the fields of a farm in Hickory, Louisiana. What happened to Chloe Chandler was never repeated as far as anyone knows but her story remains on the back burner of local memory and it serves as a reminder of how things in the dark deserve our respect and that our fear may well be justified.
