Village of the Damned

Dubbed "Hell's Half Acre," Decatur is the second most corrupt city in Illinois. It earned its standing as a tough town with more gambling, prostitution and liquor than cities twice its size. Sprawled all around this rotten core were farm towns connected by telegraph and short-hop rail lines. If Decatur was always a wide-open "sin-town," Mt. Zion was always a narrow, isolated back-water where the first settlers died of malaria. Samuel L. Bush was one of 4,000 lynchings to take place in the United States. Is it possible the "haunted soul" of one man possessed the power to stain and curse an entire region?