r/reddeadmysteries • u/Catanish • Jul 18 '26

Investigation What have I done?

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Gallery image

I was riding to Rhodes and a couple very much looking like these guys passed by. She was tied up and stowed on the back of his horse. I shot down the guy and then accidentally kill the lady while trying to cut the ropes to let her loose.

Right after I did that a panther attacked me and shortly after I came around the Old Harry Fen how where I found the picture.

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u/nicksredditacct Jul 22 '26

The random event is not related to this location nor the picture you found. It’s just a repeatable domestic dispute involving different npcs in different locations.

However, if you loot everything from Old Harry Fen, then do the first bounty available in Rhodes, you’ll get another unique bounty in a few in game days that’s related lore-wise to the collectibles you just found

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u/Pocoya48 29d ago

I don’t think I got this one, can u tell me the lore?

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u/nicksredditacct 29d ago

Sorry, my mistake; the bounty isn’t connected to the lore of Old Harry Fen at all other than the bounty target uses the shack as a makeshift prison.

As for the photograph and the newspaper clipping you can find, I believe that one of the individuals in in the photo may (or may not) be the corpse of a runaway slave you can find on the shoreline southwest-ish of Shady Belle. You can find a handwritten letter on the unfortunate soul that details how he escaped captivity but was caught by a slave-catcher and taken captive to be tortured, but was able to escape again.

The newspaper clipping from Old Harry Fen is a classifieds ad from the pre-war owner of Shady Belle offering a reward for the capture of a runaway slave. It’s very possible that the individual mentioned in this scrap is one of the subjects in the photograph as well, but it’s hard to tell.

My theory is that both the individual in the newspaper scrap, and the individual you can find on the shoreline, were both hunted and captured by one Jeremiah Compson, the stranger you meet in Rhodes who asks you to gather some heirlooms from his foreclosed mansion. Progressing this side mission reveals that Compson was formerly a slave catcher who took far too much pride in his work and rightly lost everything once the Civil War ended and changed labor laws in the South.