Albion, NM – A Little Slice of Heaven, Right Here on Earth!

Population: 5000

Mayor: Jim MacEntosh

City Council: Hap Dougan

                        Clark Albus

                        Alessandra Montenegro

                        Sheriff Adam Tate

Today, Albion runs itself as though it belonged in another time. The politicians are honest and care about the citizenry. Almost everyone knows everyone else. Children go off to college in Albuquerque or beyond. The local high school football team has never lost a game since 1956. A Catholic church - headed by Father Michael Granville - and a Baptist church – shepherded by Reverent Greg Holme - operate in harmony, working together to Shepard the soul of the town.

Part of this can be attributed to the unique nature of Albion. No other town, anywhere in the world, has the same degree of supernatural occurrences. Every person who has lived in Albion has seen some manifestation of the world beyond our own, be it UFO’s, ghosts, faerie lights…or worse.

Prior to 1960, most of the experiences could be called benign, though some were clearly malevolent in nature; hateful dead raging against the living, black riders circling the outskirts of the town on horses with flaming hooves and other nightmares have their place here too. It is because of this that Albion has recently decided to discourage outsiders from settling, and why they have no “box stores” within town limits. It is too hard to explain the occurrences, and they have no desire to deal with the media flood that announcement of proof would bring. Instead, they accept this as normal and go about their lives.

Since the 1950’s, the number of occurrences has almost tripled, with malevolent experiences rising to equal the benign.

In addition to supernatural malignance, Albion has seen its share of mundane evil as well. It is the site of three serial murder sprees in the last 50 years, the most famous of which made national news. In 1967, Edmund White, a 47 year old stonemason in charge of renovating key structures of town to meet modern standards of safety, murdered 30 transients and sealed their bodies in the stone foundations of 10 buildings around Albion. He was caught setting the last body as the cornerstone to the mansion being built for the Montenegro family on White Cliffs. His trial was a sensation, a madman proclaiming with utter calm that the murders were necessary, the Blessed Virgins told him, and that by laying the bodies to rest in certain locations, it would keep Albion strong.

Edmund White was tried and sentenced to the death penalty, but died the next night in his cell, his body found crammed under the cot, bones broken, organs ruptured as though he had been forcefully shoved into the tiny space his body occupied. His face, however, caused three guards to quit, and never work in a prison again. The face of Edmund White bore an expression of such abject terror that none of those who saw it have ever been able to describe it.

In 1984, Albion again was visited by a serial killer. 5 children disappeared while coming home from King’s Way Elementary and there were no leads. The town was gripped with terror at the thought that the demonic worship that had been so sensationalized with the McMartin preschool events had come to Albion. King’s Way was the subject of a severe series of trials, with teachers and administration all being questioned by a private panel of the town’s City Council members. No-one knew anything about the missing children. Then, Deputy Mike Waltham, a young deputy fresh out of school on a routine circuit of the town, got flagged down by Maggie Peale, a trailer park resident and apple grower, who claimed that there was an odd smell coming from a neighboring trailer. The trailer belonged to Jacob Lattimore, a 29 year old drop-out, miner and known dope head. When Deputy Waltham entered the trailer, he was assaulted by the smell of flesh and waste, and found furniture piled in the living room haphazardly. A couch, a table, a mattress and bookshelf, all piled together against one wall. The bedroom door lay open, and within was the source of the smell. Deputy Waltham says that he found Jacob, sitting on a pile of bones, gnawing the flesh from a femur and looking at the wall. The walls were streaked with blood, waste and ink, and when Jacob turned to look at him, Waltham swore that Jacob’s eyes were glowing like a cat’s at night. He shot and killed Jacob Lattimore, claiming the man charged him on all fours like a raving beast, and left town to join the Army. He was killed during operations in Syria a few years later and brought home to be laid to rest in Albion Memorial Park and Cemetery.

The last group of murders was actually classified a mass murder and took place in 1993, and is as yet unsolved. During the summer of 1993, a diary was discovered - hidden at the Albion Public Library - that detailed a group of high school students involved in the worship and veneration of something called the Drowned Goddess. In the weeks prior to the discovery, 7 high school students - two from Albion, the others from Silver City and Socorro - were found in the New Mexico desert, dressed in bizarre costumes, their lungs filled with water. The water bore traces of algae and microscopic life forms common in the Wolf Lake Reservoir, hundreds of miles away. These deaths have yet to be solved, but have been deemed an unsolved murder by local law enforcement due to the improbable presence of reservoir water. The author of the diary has never been found.

Despite these three major occurrences, Albion has an amazingly low crime rate.

Not everything, however, is terrible. Albion is home to one of the most lucrative silver mines in America, a seemingly bottomless vein of raw silver waiting to be pulled from the earth. In addition, the Albion Gold apple is known far and wide as one of the sweetest, most succulent apples on the market, and its unique coloring – golden hue, but glossy like a Red Delicious – help it stand out among its peers.

In 1968, Alessandra Montenegro, a young professor of Archaeology, settled into the mansion atop White Cliffs, and brought with her a large influx of cash after deciding to base her organization, the International Women’s Society, in Albion. The Society, a non-profit organization devoted to the betterment of women worldwide, has “been at the forefront of efforts to raise Middle Eastern women out of the patriarchal bonds which have enslaved them for so long.” Government subsidies to the organization have been recirculated into the town by Ms. Montenegro, and over the last 40 years this has led to the birth of a bustling artistic and literary community as well as revitalizing the downtown area with new buildings and shops. Ms. Montenegro, while focusing on Greek and Roman archaeology, has recently been seen delving into the supposedly Anasazi cave dwellings in the hills to the south-west of town and the strange standing stones to the north-east.

In recent years, Albion Medical Center was rated one of the best medical centers in the nation, as well as one of the safest places to raise a family.