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Ballard, Utah

Ballard, Utah is the small, mostly Mormon desert farming town beside Sherman Ranch where the task force investigates in The Walkers in Skin, a town where nothing works and whose people are quietly replaced by skinwalkers until it stands empty and its school burns.
Type Location (town)
Aliases Ballard
Region Utah, southeast of Salt Lake City
Government Ballard town government (Mayor Wilford Hiram)
Status Abandoned and dark (as of Walkers 09)
First appearance Walkers 02

Description

Ballard sits in red-rock desert. Andre describes it as a town of a few hundred people, "500 people... maybe a thousand", yet surprisingly complete: a high school, a courthouse in a converted former church, a general store, a church, a diner, a bar, and mostly double-wides with a few wooden buildings. Even the sheriff's station is a double-wide (Walkers 02, Walkers 03). The locals mention often that most of the town is Mormon, which matters later when the missing are counted (Walkers 03, Walkers 06).

Everything in town is slightly broken. A general-store customer tells the team "The ranch is weird, but that's the county" (Walkers 02). The bartender Maggie lists about thirty blackouts a year, four new school computers that never worked, and a smell at the high school (Walkers 03).

Notable places within

History of events there

Arrival. The team meets the town through its gossip. A general-store woman blames Mayor Hiram and "the goddamn busybody" Deborah Wells for the community center, and mentions a man who drove an hour for treatment after shooting off half his foot (Walkers 02). Bigelow knows that Ballard's water contains live sperm and high arsenic (Walkers 02); see Ballard water contamination.

First oddities. Sheriff McDermish agrees to file the exhumation paperwork but warns the judge may stall it (Walkers 03). Maggie says the people who might earn a college degree keep disappearing, and that Wells's community center was built on bulldozed Pueblo ruins despite a protest (Walkers 03). Walt Murphy grumbles about the Mormon-dominated council (Walkers 04). Mayor Hiram visits the team in Roosevelt, crunching lemon candies (Walkers 05).

Emptying out. By Walkers 06 City Hall has been abandoned for days or a week, the grocery has a single clerk, the diner has three patrons instead of ten to fifteen, and traffic has stopped. The sheriff reports over half the school absent and houses empty, then flees the state. A "homeless" man bites Huell, though the clerk says Ballard has no homeless (Walkers 06). See Disappearances in Ballard and Sugar clues.

The night of the gym. The phones go down and the town is eerily quiet; the gym fight ends in a fire (Walkers 07). In a private exchange with Rita, who is now playing the duplicate Andrew, Andre says the Skinwalker faction has "suborned about 60%" of the town (Walkers 07).

A dead town. As the team drives through town the next morning, the school is pretty much burned to the ground, nobody is out, and there is a bad mood in the air (Walkers 08). The team finds the mayor was taken over months ago, and concludes Ballard is "a dead town" while Roosevelt is mid-replacement. The only road out is blocked at the bridge. Dante proposes using Ballard's radio station and its backup generator; according to the recap that opens Walkers 09, the team later carried a generator there and called the National Guard (Walkers 08, Walkers 09).

Finale. In Walkers 09 the convoy drives back through totally abandoned Ballard toward the ranch and the community center. The community center collapses into a sinkhole over the stranded skinwalkers, and the ranch farmhouse is launched toward Roosevelt.

Inhabitants

Mayor Wilford Hiram, treasurer and school superintendent Deborah Wells, Sheriff McDermish and his son Bud, the bartender Maggie, and the ordinary townspeople who are gradually replaced. See Skinwalker faction.

Trivia

  • In Walkers 02 Andre calls the trip from Salt Lake City to the ranch "almost a three-hour drive", but in Walkers 06 he places Ballard "an hour's drive" southeast of the city. The episodes never reconcile the two.

Appearances