Newly Unearthed Diaries from 1892 Detail Chilling Encounters with a Man in Red Offering ‘Meals’ to Children at Fairs Across the Midwest
By Clara Olsen – Bohiney Magazine Investigative Reporter
DES MOINES, IA — A leather-bound diary discovered in a boarded-up root cellar behind a defunct Lutheran orphanage has reignited interest in a long-whispered piece of Midwestern horror: the legend of the original Ronald McDonald.
The journal, attributed to nine-year-old Greta Almquist of Ottumwa, Iowa, documents her family’s summer tour of traveling fairs in 1892. One repeated entry mentions a peculiar tent with a hand-painted sign that read: “The Happy Meal – For Good Children Only.”
Greta describes a “man with red sleeves and a painted-on smile too big for his face.” He gave her a paper box “that smelled like cold soup and wax.” Inside was a hard bun, a slice of meat that “tasted like secrets,” and a wooden doll “with its eyes on the wrong side.”
What began as quirky childlike rambling became deeply troubling. In later entries, Greta writes of hearing the toy speak at night, of friends who went into the tent but never came out, and of her parents being “too busy dancing” to notice.
Historians reviewing the diary note the consistency with archived accounts from at least five other counties. A 1937 police log from Galesburg, IL even references “red paper boxes” recovered from an abandoned rail car near a fairground.
The wooden toys were turned over to the Smithsonian in the 1970s under the label “Anonymous Rural Americana.” They remain in storage. Greta’s diary, however, now sits under glass at the Midwestern Museum of Cultural Curiosities—with a placard that reads: The Original Happy Meal Wasn’t Happy.
