In the autumn of 1887, residents of the small Appalachian town of Ashmont Ridge, Virginia, began reporting a series of disturbing and inexplicable events. Tools went missing, a fence post was pulled from the ground by what appeared to be sheer force, and strange sounds were heard at night. The incidents were initially dismissed as gossip, but they soon escalated. Martha Hollings, a 34-year-old widow living alone on the outskirts of town, became a central figure in the ordeal.
Four years earlier, her husband Roland had died in a logging accident. Martha, a skilled seamstress, had continued to live alone in the house they had built together, a decision that drew quiet criticism from the community. In late October, Martha began experiencing strange phenomena at her property. She heard a slow, deliberate scraping sound against the outside of her house in the middle of the night.
The next morning, she discovered fresh, horizontal gouges in the wood near the kitchen. The marks were smooth and deep, seemingly made by something metal dragged with considerable force. Similar incidents were reported across town. Abe Mortimer lost three sheep that vanished from a securely latched pen without a trace.
One Sunday morning, Reverend Josiah Blackwood arrived at the church to find every one of the heavy oak pews turned to face the back wall. The church had been locked, and he held the only key. Martha’s own property was increasingly targeted. Her clothesline was cut clean through, a wooden bucket was found placed upright on a stump over 100 yards into the woods, and her garden gate was found unlatched on multiple mornings.
One evening, someone knocked on her door three times. When she opened it, no one was there. She reported the incidents to Silas Pembroke, the general store owner, who told her she was not alone. Four other households had reported similar occurrences, and Clara Jennings, a recent widow, claimed she had seen a figure standing at the edge of her property on three consecutive nights.
The situation intensified when Martha heard slow, deliberate footsteps on her porch shortly after midnight. She then heard a loud, aggressive scraping sound moving along the side of her house. The door handle rattled, and she could hear rasping, unnatural breathing on the other side. She stood with a rifle aimed at the door until dawn.
The next morning, she found large, muddy footprints in the yard. They circled her house completely before heading deep into the woods, where they ended abruptly with no sign of where the person had gone. Over the following two weeks, the incidents became more aggressive and widespread. A barn door was found ripped from its hinges and thrown 30 feet into a yard.
A well was contaminated with an unidentified dark substance. Several families packed up and left town in the middle of the night. Dogs refused to cross certain invisible lines, and horses balked at the main bridge out of town. Sightings of a tall, unnatural figure at the edge of the woods became more common.
On November 8, Martha saw it for the first time, standing between two pines approximately 100 yards from her garden. She described its proportions as wrong, with arms hanging past its knees, and she felt a powerful sense that it was watching her. The following night, the entire town heard a sound that lasted over an hour. It was a rising and falling cry, unlike a scream or a howl, that seemed to echo through the mountains with a rhythm resembling attempted speech.
The next morning, the townspeople gathered at the church for an emergency meeting. Sheriff Thomas Grady admitted he had no explanation for the events. Martha addressed the crowd, stating that the figure she saw was not an animal or a person, and that she believed it had been watching them with a purpose. During the meeting, an elderly man named Ezra Voss, who lived on the North Ridge, entered the church.
He warned that he had recognized the pattern of events, saying it had happened before. He recounted that in 1843, a widow named Elizabeth Carmichael had disappeared under similar circumstances, and that the disturbances had stopped the day after she vanished. Voss claimed the events occurred in cycles of 44 years and always ended with someone disappearing. He stated with certainty that this was not a coincidence, but a recurring pattern.
The meeting broke up in chaos, with some residents preparing to leave and others fortifying their homes. Convinced she was the target, Martha decided not to wait. On the evening of November 10, she packed supplies, including a rope, matches, a knife, a hunting rifle, and ammunition. She left a letter on her kitchen table explaining her intentions, then walked into the woods.
She followed the path of the mysterious footprints deep into the mountains. After about an hour, she found a perfectly circular clearing of bare, packed earth. In the center was a carefully arranged pile of objects reported missing from town over the past two months. Among them, she found a piece of fabric from her own dress that had disappeared from her clothesline.
She heard a footstep behind her and turned to see a tall, thin figure at the edge of the clearing. It stood over seven feet tall with elongated limbs and a head tilted at an unnatural angle. Most disturbingly, its face was entirely featureless, with no eyes, nose, or mouth. Martha fired her rifle at the figure multiple times.
Each shot struck its chest, and each time it recoiled slightly but did not fall. When the rifle was empty, she dropped it and ran. The figure did not chase her but followed at a slow, deliberate pace. She tripped and fell in the darkness.
When she rose, the forest was silent. She then heard the rasping breathing directly behind her. The figure spoke her name, a sound of layered, unnatural tones. It told her she was alone, like it.
When she asked what it wanted, it said she had been chosen. The figure pointed through the trees toward the lights of Ashmont Ridge. When she turned back, it was gone. She returned to town by dawn and told Silas Pembroke what she had experienced, reporting that the figure had spoken to her and claimed she had been chosen.
The townspeople argued over whether to leave. Martha, however, felt her fear burn out into determination. She spent the following days learning everything Ezra Voss knew about the 1843 disappearance. She realized the figure had been conditioning her, isolating her, and preparing her to be taken.
On the evening of November 15, Martha walked into the woods again, carrying only Roland’s knife. She went to the clearing and stood in the center, waiting through the night. At midnight, the figure emerged and approached her. Martha told the figure she had come willingly and that she was choosing it, rather than being chosen by it.
She reached out and touched its chest. In that moment, she found herself in a vast, empty darkness, where she understood the figure existed in a space between things, feeding on loneliness and isolation. Instead of fear, she poured her memories into the contact, including her grief over losing Roland and the emptiness she had felt for years. The figure screamed in agony, and the darkness shattered.
When Martha found herself back in the clearing, the figure was gone, and the pile of objects was collapsing. She returned to town the following morning and told Sheriff Grady it was over. The incidents stopped immediately. The animals calmed, and the oppressive atmosphere that had hung over the town lifted.
Life gradually returned to normal. Martha Hollings lived in her house for 36 more years. She died in her sleep in 1923 at the age of 70. After her death, her journals were discovered, filled with decades of her precise handwriting.
Many entries described hearing something still waiting in the quiet moments, and a lingering connection to the darkness she had encountered. The final journal entry, written the day before she died, reflected on that night. She wrote that she and the figure had not been so different, two solitary things connected across the void. She stated that she was not afraid of it anymore, and she wondered if she would see it again when her time came.
The journals were destroyed by the church’s new reverend, who considered them too disturbing and suggestive of mental decline. However, a few people had read them before that happened. They reported that the later volumes contained hundreds of drawings of a faceless figure standing at the edge of the trees, and in some, a smaller human figure standing beside it, reaching out. Ashmont Ridge was abandoned in 1942 and was reclaimed by the forest by 1960.
Today, visitors to the ruins occasionally report a feeling of being watched and have, on rare occasions, reported seeing something tall at the edge of the trees.