Dark Night of the Scarecrow

In a small town in the Deep South, the friendship between Charles Eliot "Bubba" Ritter, a large but gentle mentally challenged man, and young Marylee Williams angers some of the townspeople, especially brooding, mean-spirited postal worker Otis Hazelrigg. When Marylee is mauled by a vicious dog, Hazelrigg promptly assumes that Bubba is responsible, forming a lynch mob with three friends: gas station attendant Skeeter Norris and farmer-cousins Philby and Harliss Hocker. Bubba's mother disguises him as a scarecrow and posts him in a nearby field, but the lynch party's bloodhounds sniff Bubba out and the helpless Bubba is gunned down by all four vigilantes. When they learn afterwards that Marylee is actually alive thanks to Bubba rescuing her, Hazelrigg places a pitchfork in Bubba's lifeless hands to make it appear as if he were attacking them. When brought to trial, the vigilantes are subsequently released because of lack of evidence against them (and blatant perjury by Hazelrigg). Marylee recovers from the attack, sneaks out of her room at night and goes over to the Ritter house looking for Bubba. Mrs. Ritter, unable to bring herself to tell Marylee the truth, instead tells her that Bubba has gone away. Later, strange occurrences start to happen as Harliss finds a scarecrow in his field like the one Bubba was disguised as, with no indication as to who put it there. One night, Harliss returns home to find the scarecrow gone, and later, he is found dead in his barn. The men's actions become more sinister, and they start to suspect that Sam Willock, the district attorney, is behind the mysterious events. However, they soon realize that the scarecrow is actually responsible for their deaths. The scarecrow reappears in different fields, haunting the characters until its ultimate target, Otis Hazelrigg, meets a gruesome end at its hands.