This is an automated archive made by the Lemmit Bot.
The original was posted on /r/highstrangeness by /u/nah_Im_just_pathetic on 2025-06-14 21:12:48+00:00.
I found this story online and to me it sounds literally like a creepypasta, totally made up. But it’s so little known that it hasn’t the virality of a creepypasta. No info online. The few sources that report this story are usually copy and paste one of the other. I repeat, it’s strange to me that a creepypasta gained so little momentum. What do you think?
On the morning of June 18, 1947, the tiny farming village of Broughton Hollow, Arkansas became the center of one of the strangest linguistic events in modern history. All 412 residents awoke speaking a language they had never learned. Even more disturbing, it was a language long considered extinct — Kamassian, once spoken in Siberia and believed to have vanished around 1850.
Children recited complex Kamassian poems with no prior exposure. Elderly residents spoke of dreams filled with “ice temples” and “singing bones.” When linguists arrived, they were stunned. Not only was the entire town fluent, the language had started to evolve. New grammar structures appeared that matched no known language. By sunset, when segments of speech were recorded and reversed, the playback revealed flawless Gregorian chants in Latin — another language none of the villagers had ever studied.
Panic spread quickly. On June 20, the military declared the area off-limits and sealed off Broughton Hollow. The official explanation was “mass hysteria,” but that did little to explain the linguistic precision, or the eerie transformations occurring in real time. A declassified 1952 memo hinted at something more: “Subject: B.H. Contamination. Recommend permanent sterilization of site. The words are spreading in the soil.”
The village was eventually abandoned. No official records exist of what happened to the residents. Today, the ruins of Broughton Hollow remain untouched, slowly being overtaken by nature. But travelers who stray too close report hearing whispers from old wells, always in Kamassian, always repeating the same cryptic warning: “The ice is coming.”
Whether it was a mass psychogenic episode or an unexplained phenomenon lost to secrecy, the Tongues Incident remains one of the most unsettling linguistic mysteries ever buried by history.