The Texas Mystery Flesh Pit: Unraveling Its Unbelievable Story

Texas has a long history of creepy tales & it's hard to distinguish between truth & fiction. For many people online, that was the case with one particular defunct national park that opened during the 1970s in West Texas called the Mystery Flesh Pit National Park. What would occur is one the craziest stories to ever come out of West Texas...

What is the Mystery Flesh Pit National Park in Texas?

According to the lore, the town of Gumption, Texas was home to oil workers who found a crater -- this later became home to the future site of the national park ran by the Anodyne Corporation.

In 1979, the United States & the Soviet Union would have a joint exploration to ensure the pit would be safe for future building development. This would later be called Project Freefall.

Shortly after, the Flesh Pit National Park would open to the public. The park was full of amenities & different rooms for guests to stay & the land was full of supernatural creatures deep inside the pit.

The 2007 Incident at Mystery Flesh Pit National Park

Everything was just fine until the Fourth of July weekend in 2007 where the pit...rose from the ground. The creature woke up & caught everyone off guard. The result...well it wasn't pretty.

The story has been covered by various YouTubers like Wendigoon & Curious Archive, who each go into great detail on the history of the park & the tragedy that closed the park.

With a story like this, it almost seems too crazy to be real, and you'd be right. This story is completely fictional -- born from the creative mind of Illustrator Trevor Roberts, who currently lives in the REAL West Texas area.

Where did Trevor Roberts come up with the Mystery Flesh Pit?

According to an interview with Forbes, Trevor got the inspiration for designing the park from looking at a rotting cantaloupe. By taking a stock photo of an open pit mine in South Africa & with a little help from Photoshop, he was able to design the flyer of what the Flesh Pit would look like.

Afterwards, he went on to create incredibly detailed (and believable) posters, flyers & artwork of the city of Gumption, the park itself, the park staff, & the creatures that lived at the Mystery Flesh Pit. You can find all of his artwork on his website & if you watched the videos above, you can see much of his artwork being used when telling the story.

Needless to say, people were HOOKED. So much that there's an entire Reddit page dedicated to the Flesh Pit National Park & there was even a Kickstarter to create an RPG video game dedicated to the story. And yes...there is footage of the game on YouTube, as proven by this playthrough by Markiplier.

It's amazing how much hard work & dedication went into creating the lore for this story. It's also reassuring that it's fiction. Because nothing like this could EVER happen in real life...right?

Get our free mobile app

EDIT: This was originally published August 23, 2023