Red Dead Redemption 2 is a massive, meticulously designed game. Rockstar Games took great care in bringing this game to life in painstaking detail. It wouldn’t be surprising to see players discover new wrinkles months or even years from now. More than a month after launch, one historian has discovered an allusion to a family of 19th-century serial killers.
Historian and writer Mike Stuchbery stumbled upon this at the Aberdeen Pig Farm. The farm is marked on your map, located southeast of Emerald Ranch. You have to approach the front porch to initiate the mission. A large man named Bray Aberdeen comes out on the porch and asks you to have dinner with him and Tammy, a woman who appears to be his wife.
Once you get inside, you need to go check on Tammy upstairs before dinner starts. At dinner, it’s pretty clear that Bray and Tammy are actually brother and sister. It’s all quite creepy. After you eat dinner, you’re offered a drink from an “Aberdeen family recipe.” It’s strong stuff. The screen turns from hazy to dark, and Arthur awakens in a mass grave near the farm.
Side note: This was the second time we were invited into someone’s house only to wake up in a random spot with less money in Red Dead Redemption 2, so think before you accept invites into the homes of strangers.
Stuchbery, however, returned to the house and connected the Aberdeens with the real-life Bender family. The Benders presided in Kansas in the 1870s. John Jr. and Kate Bender were siblings with a creepy relationship just like Bray and Tammy. In the early 1870s, people went missing near the Benders’ property. In 1873, investigators finally searched the area and found eight bodies in the yard (along with random body parts), which Red Dead Redemption 2 parallels with the mass grave Arthur wakes up in.
The Bender family earned the moniker “Bloody Benders” for their gruesome murders. Remarkably, no one really knows what happened to the Bender family.
Red Dead Redemption 2 is just the latest piece of media to allude to the mysterious killings, joining Neil Gaiman’s American Gods and the TV series Supernatural, among many others.
