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Pro tip: the chalk outline in my old hometown square is gone now, and I want to know where it went | Conspiracy Debates - Librear

jamieburns•6d ago

Pro tip: the chalk outline in my old hometown square is gone now, and I want to know where it went

I grew up in Salem, about 40 minutes north of Boston, and there was this chalk outline on the sidewalk outside the old courthouse for as long as I can remember. My dad told me it was from a case back in 1974, a guy who supposedly fell from a third floor window while in police custody, and someone kept redrawing it every time it faded. I went back last weekend for the first time in maybe 8 years and it is just flat gray concrete now. No outline, no tape marks, not even the little stain that used to be there. I asked the guy running the coffee shop on the corner and he said the town power washed it all off during a cleanup project 4 summers back. Here is the part that bugs me though. When I was a kid there were 3 different versions of what happened that night depending who you asked, and now nobody under 30 even knows the outline existed. Feels like the story got erased right along with the chalk. Does anyone here know how to pull old police reports from small towns like that, or am I chasing something that was never really confirmed in the first place?

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foster.dylan5d ago

I ran into the same wall with a thing in my own town, a plaque that vanished off a bridge, and what worked was going straight to the town clerk's office instead of the cops. Small town clerks keep everything, meeting minutes, old news clippings, sometimes even letters from people complaining about stuff like a chalk outline being redrawn. Ask for the record request form, it's usually one page and they can't really say no to a public record. The police report from 1974 might not even exist anymore, a lot of departments tossed old files or lost them in moves, but the clerk can tell you if it's gone or just buried. Also try the local library, they often have old newspaper runs on microfilm and that's where the three versions of the story probably started. If the town power washed it away without any public talk, that alone tells you something, because towns don't usually spend money on stuff nobody cares about.