Interesting stories. My in-laws live in Hereford - I wonder if they will read this piece.
It must be an amateur writer. The “Chaplin”?
Who writes this stuff? The men may well have been hung, but when referencing execution the term is always always Hanged.
From down in Mexico, the Sonora desert reaches up past Phoenix, and has a very old reputation as a haunted and magical place. Tucson has a magnetic attraction to all sorts of fortune tellers, psychics, etc., one of the largest assemblies of such people in the US.
In pre-historical context, a thousand years ago, there was a major trading route through the area, linking South America all the way to New England. Chaco canyon, NM was the equivalent of Chicago at the time, a major center for trade. Their typical currency was pieces of turquoise, and Chaco had the equivalent of a bank there, with tens of thousands of pieces in the ruins. It has been restored since formal archaeological work began in 1896.
West from there, the trade route continued until it reached the Salt River in Arizona, then turned south, heading to the three great Mesoamerican Indian empires of Mexico at the time.
South of the border, there are still a lot of brujos (witches) and large numbers of allegedly monstrous but mostly invisible entities, some areas so infested with them that the Indians won’t live there.
I don't recall in which book CS Lewis discussed the matter, but he remarked on his dislike for the the terms 'paranormal' and 'supernatural'. He felt they were expressions of human vanity, suggesting that we had a firm grasp on, and were already capable of fully explaining all that was natural or normal.