A strange trend will start in America in the next few years: Small-town festivals. These will start out saturated in Americana, including American flags and men dressed as Uncle Sam. But they will quickly become idiosyncratic, as locals start to recreate their regional history, or local legends, or small-town heroes.
These festivals will vie with each other for national attention, especially as reality television turns its attention to these towns and starts to reward them for uniqueness. Area-specific foods and dances will develop, as well as regionally specific styles of dress and decoration. Towns will even develop their own ritual events, sometimes borrowed from history, sometimes invented.
In some places, these seemingly harmless rituals will turn violent, and sometimes even deadly. Sometimes this will be through accidents, with people drowning in lakes or falling off cliffs. (rpmgreatermilwaukee.com) But there will be a few instances where members of a small town will deliberately torture or even kill someone, ritualistically, carried away by their town’s weird culture.