In 1915 a workman named Leo Verbulehn was digging a cellar under an empty farmhouse near Niagara, North Dakota, when he struck human bones close to the foundation. Before the digging was done there were six skeletons. Every skull had been crushed, and at least two of the dead had broken legs. There was no trace of clothing, and the bodies seem to have been buried naked. Someone had pulled three stones out of the bottom of the foundation to make a trapdoor into the crawl space, and had covered the graves with black dirt and red clay.
The house had belonged to Eugene Butler, who had died two years earlier in the state asylum at Jamestown. He was born around 1849 in Royalton, New York, near Buffalo, one of three sons of Ephraim and Rebecca Butler, and had come to Dakota Territory around 1882 and bought a farm of 480 acres at Niagara. He never married, lived alone, avoided his neighbors and went out only to do business in Larimore. Each summer he hired farmhands to work the land.
Over the years he showed signs of mental illness. He saw things, said invisible people were chasing him, and around 1906 began riding his horse at night, screaming at the top of his lungs and frightening the neighborhood. As a public nuisance he was committed to the North Dakota State Hospital in Jamestown, where he was afraid of the invisible figures and of cameras, which he believed would suck out his soul. His doctors saw no violence in him. One of them, A. W. Guest, remembered a small, gallant man who loved the hospital dances and fell desperately in love with one of the nurses. He died there on October 22, 1913, and relatives buried him in Middleport, New York. The farm was divided among them with the help of an attorney, W. E. Houpt, and it was their workmen who found the bones.
At first it was suggested that five of the skeletons were two women, perhaps housekeepers, and their children, but no one in the county remembered a family going missing. The authorities then said all six were young men, one of them between fifteen and eighteen and another with a crooked nose. None was ever identified. The likeliest explanation was that they were drifters Butler had hired as farmhands, men whose disappearance nobody would have noticed, and it was suggested that he had killed them because he feared they would steal the money he kept lying around the house. Crowds came out to see the site. Deputies boxed the bones and took them to Sheriff Art Turner's office, and some were later stolen, probably by souvenir hunters. With Butler dead before the bodies were found, there was never a charge, a trial or a verdict.