Something in the Clouds

One of the reasons Frank Halny's mall failed was that the road to the mall went directly through the Strange Mist. There's something inside the cloud that sits in a little valley a few miles north of Main Street, but no one has really seen what it is. Its not so much deadly as just terrifying. Oh sure, people have died in The Mist, but usually from something like a heart attack or a car accident, due to being frightened so badly. Smart folk avoid it altogether.

Teenagers (and sometimes the recently deceased, because becoming a ghost has a lot of the same side effects as puberty) will sometimes dare each other to go to the center of the cloud. But they rarely make it very far. Fog is like that, you lose your way and things seem bigger and stranger then usual and you end up turned around and back where you started. If you're lucky. If you're not so lucky you might actually come across whatever it is that lives shrouded in all that fog, and most who have that experience end up catatonic for a few days or weeks, and can't coherently remember anything once they're better. If the fog spits you out in the woods to the north, well... thats a whole different situation for a different day.