Weird News Throwback: Southern Indiana 2004 Crawdad Crop Takeover

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Turning Corn into...Crawdads?

WLKY dug into their archives for this news story, dating back nearly 20 years ago to 2004. After some significant rainfall, what emerged from the Southern Indiana soil wasn't exactly what was planted. The farmer tending his fields expected to see his corn and soybean popping up from the ground, however instead of were hundreds of thousands of crawdad mounds. The majority of the field's acreage was overtaken by crawdads!

This happened in what seemed like the course of a night, according to the farmer. A scientist visited this Clark County mystery to help shed some light on a very unique and odd event. Dr. McGreggor said that they're Devil Crayfish, almost as if a Biblical plague had taken over farmer George Hallett's crop fields. The classification brought about some laughter, though that is the actual name for the crawdads, also called Red Swamp Crawfish.

The flood waters helped the spread of the crawdads throughout the fields, during a rainy start to the 2004 summer season, according to the visiting scientist. Nearly half a million was estimated at the time of the crop takeover. However, the infestation wasn't a means to the end of the field, and was stated that thanks to the crawfish burrows, the land had gotten a great source of aeration. Crops can be replanted in these instances.

KEEP READING: 40 Real Indiana Towns with Quirky, Weird, and Funny Names

Outside the major cities, the Hoosier state is full of tiny little towns you've probably passed through on your way to one of those cities. Most of them are likely 100 to 150 years old, or older, and have been around far longer than the large metropolitan areas such as Indianapolis, Fort Wayne, South Bend, and Evansville. Typically, they were started by early settlers who found their way to the state and decided to make it home. Eventually, others would join them, and a community was formed. Over time, as the surrounding areas grew, most of them were folded into those areas and governed by the nearest city or county's governing body officially making them "unincorporated," meaning they did not have their own formally organized municipal government.

A scroll through Wikipedia's long list of unincorporated communities in Indiana shows several of them have names that by today's standards would be considered weird, quirky, or just downright right funny. These are my 40 favorities.

Postcards from Indiana's Past Showcase the Weird and Wonderful

Apparently, there is quite a market for old postcards on eBay. I found some really interesting ones, some even have handwritten messages on them. Basically, postcards were the original text message.

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