Cold Case Files: A series of bizarre findings outside of Bentonville in 1978 fueled speculations about occult activities

In the summer of 1978, a quiet farm on the outskirts of Bentonville in Benton County, became the center of local speculation about occult activity. A worker named Steve Ferguson was hauling rocks from old Doc Compton's property when he noticed a crude structure hidden among the briars and trees: native fieldstones stacked like a low fireplace or altar.

In the center sat a cow skull, and the surrounding rocks bore painted symbols and inscriptions. One message, scrawled in white letters, read "Zyto's wrath is upon you."

A sergeant from the Benton County Sheriff's Department translated some of the markings as references to an ancient sorcerer named Zytho and words meaning "good" and "bad," drawn from the Theban alphabet sometimes associated with modern witchcraft practices

.Ferguson reported the find, and deputies investigated. A few weeks later, he discovered a second similar site nearby. This time it included a plastic human skull, candles, a large knife, and more symbols. The discoveries coincided with a string of unexplained animal deaths in the area.

From late 1977 into 1979, northwestern Arkansas saw dozens of reports of cattle and other livestock found with eyes, tongues, reproductive organs, and other parts removed in what appeared to be precise cuts. Blood often seemed drained from the carcasses. State police logged thirty-nine such cases statewide between April 1978 and September 1979, with many clustered around Bentonville and nearby counties.Lieutenant

Don Rystrom of the Benton County Sheriff's Department and other investigators examined the scenes. In one instance near Bentonville, tests on a mutilated cow revealed traces of PCP, mescaline, and santonin in the bloodstream, substances linked to hallucinogenic or dissociative effects. Photos from the sites showed crude stone altars and cow skulls placed nearby.

A physical anthropologist from the University of Arkansas, Jerome Rose, reviewed the evidence and stated that the mutilations were consistent with attempts to practice witchcraft.The combination of painted stone altars, ritual-like arrangements, and the animal deaths fueled rumors of a secretive group involved in occult or satanic activities. Local law enforcement presented findings at a 1979 multi-state meeting on cattle mutilations, including slides of the altars and the inscribed warning about Zytos. No large-scale cult was ever confirmed, and no human victims or direct ritual murders tied to these sites emerged in Benton County.

Around the same period in the region, a separate and more tragic case unfolded. In April 1978, a small religious group that had lived in the Rogers and Springdale area of Benton County fled after facing child abuse investigations. They relocated to a remote campsite in Newton County near the Buffalo National River. There, four members were charged with the first-degree murder of three-year-old Stephanie Alana Hall (also reported as Bethany Allana Clark in some accounts), whom they believed was possessed or "anathema."

The child's death involved extreme abuse driven by the group's fanatic beliefs. Some members faced trial, with convictions in certain cases, though the episode shocked the state and highlighted dangers of isolated extreme religious practices.The Benton County incidents drew national attention, including a June 1978 New York Times article describing the altars and their link to the mutilations.

Theories about the animal deaths ranged from ritual acts to natural causes like predation and decomposition, scavenger activity, or even drug-related human involvement. No definitive explanation resolved the cases, and they contributed to early anxieties that later fed into the broader Satanic Panic of the 1980s. The stone altars and mutilations remain among the more puzzling local mysteries from that era in northwestern Arkansas.