The sexton of a small Ozark Hills burying ground in the 1880s encountered something that made him chain his own gates shut, and a ledger from that graveyard survives today in a county museum. An old man who lived near the town of Salow Bend claimed the dead were asking a question, and that the answer the ground gave was “later. ”
Alfus Crew had kept the burying ground atop a hill called Mullen Knob for almost 30 years. He was a practical man who said the dead were the easiest neighbors a man could ask for, because they never asked to be let out.
Only one man, an ancient local named Zeb Holt, refused to laugh at that joke. Holt once advised Crew to keep the edges of that hill and let the middle keep itself. The hill’s oldest grave belonged to a man named Ephraim Mull, who had cleared the land and, according to one account, asked to be buried at the edge, facing outward to keep watch over the country he had opened. Another story claimed Mull had spent his last winter digging a ring around the hilltop, filling it with iron and salt to hold something back, and that he died with his tools still in his hands.
For 48 years, the center of the burying ground remained an empty oval that no one ever dug in. That changed in the autumn of 1889, when Crew went up the hill on a Monday and found Mull’s gravestone missing from the western edge. He discovered it standing upright in the center of the ground, with a fresh-cut date carved into it: the very week that was just beginning. Crew brought the local reverend, Otis Puit, to see it.
Puit insisted the stone had always stood in the center and that the empty patch had always been at the edge, directly contradicting Crew’s lifelong memory. The following night, Crew went to speak with old Zeb Holt. Holt told him the stone was asking who was next, and that old Mull had been holding the gate for nearly 50 years and was tired. When Crew asked what happened to the one who said yes, Holt replied: “Nothing happens to them.
That’s the mercy of it. Nothing ever happens to them again. ”
On Tuesday, Crew found the gates chained shut with his own lock, even though the only key had never left his pocket. After digging a grave for a woman named Drusilla Vette, he noticed some of the older stones had begun to lean slightly, all of them toward the center.
On Wednesday, the grave he had dug for Drusilla had been filled back in, tamped down, with his canvas folded neatly on top and an old, rust-eaten chain laid across the mound. Crew dug it back open and found something inside that made him stop, cover it with earth with his bare hands, and become sick over the fence line. On Thursday, the reverend gathered the doctor, a stone cutter, and Crew to investigate. The stone cutter examined the fresh date on Mull’s stone and found the cut was new, but the dirt packed into the bottom of the letters was old, settled the way dirt settles over decades.
The doctor, a skeptical man named Lucius Maffey, looked at the stone himself, then walked to the fence and would not face the others. He later told only one person what he felt when he put his hand near the coffin: that something on the other side was pushing back. The four men dug down to Mull’s coffin and found the wood sound after 48 years, with no rot and no smell. None of them could bring themselves to open it, so they put the earth back and left the stone where it stood in the center.
The stone cutter left the region and never returned. The doctor tore the pages of that week out of his ledger and never replaced them. On Friday, Crew found a third line cut into the bottom of Mull’s stone. It was not a year.
It was the single word “later. ” That night, he chained the gates himself for the first time. On Saturday, he went back up the hill in the dark and found the gates open, the chain lying sprung in the grass, and the Mull stone back at the western edge, where it had stood his entire life, with only the original 1841 date, worn smooth. As he knelt there, Crew heard the sound of a spade digging in the center of the ground, though no one was there.
He stood and said aloud: “Not yet. ” The digging stopped, and a voice from the empty air agreed with him. It said: “Later. ”
Crew tended the burying ground for another 11 years and never spoke of that week.
When he died in 1900, he asked to be buried in the bottoms beside Drusilla, as far from the center of the hill as possible. The town stopped burying on Mullen Knob after that, and the hill was eventually abandoned as the town of Salow Bend faded away. The story survives because of Crew’s ledger, which is displayed in a glass case at a county museum. Between the Friday and Saturday of that week, in handwriting pressed so hard the pen tore the paper, is a single line that is not a name or a date.
It reads: “The center is paid up. The rest of us are owed. He keeps the books now, and I keep the gate. ”
The grandson of one of the women who sat with Drusilla Vette later told the story to a descendant, saying that the gates on Mullen Knob still lock every autumn for the same week.
He claimed they are found chained shut with a lock no one has the key to. His final words were that the thing pays its debts slowly, but in its own time: later.