Lenora

Lenora was recovered from a farmstead outside Omaha, Nebraska in 1953, after what locals still whisper about as “the Harvest Accident.” A young girl had been playing in the barn while her father worked the combine. The machine jammed, and in the panic to free it, the girl slipped beneath its blades. Nothing was left but a scrap of her pink ribbon… and Lenora, sitting upright in the grain bin, untouched, her porcelain face flecked with blood.

The farm was abandoned within weeks. Neighbors said they saw lights burning in the empty house at night, machines starting themselves, and husks scattering across the yard like children’s toys. Lenora was found again years later, passed between families who could never keep her for long. Every owner tells the same story: the sound of grinding metal at night, the choking scent of diesel and dust, and the faint cries of a child calling for help.

When left unattended, Lenora shifts her position. Sometimes she faces windows overlooking fields. Worst of all, some owners have woken to find her seated on their chests, her cracked porcelain lips whispering about “the blades” and “the blood in the grain.”

The final report came from a family who inherited Lenora in 1978. They had left her in their mudroom overnight after finding her in an old trunk at a farm auction. At 2:13 a.m., the father awoke to what he described as “the scream of a combine running through the house.” He ran to the mudroom, only to find corn husks littering the floor and Lenora seated in the corner, her porcelain dress soaked as though with oil.

His wife later testified she heard their daughter crying upstairs, yelling, “Daddy, the blades are here, the blades are here!” But when he entered her room, the girl was sound asleep — yet streaked with cuts across her arms and legs, thin and neat as if carved by sharpened steel.

The father recorded one more detail before abandoning the home the next morning: Lenora’s cracked porcelain lips were wet, and smelled faintly of gasoline.