Emmett Hirsch was a land agent for the Cumberland Timber and Coal Company, a man who spent most of each year on horseback in the hills of eastern Kentucky. Born in Ohio in 1869, he had come south with his family after the Panic of 1873 and had worked the mountain trade in one form or another ever since. He was tall and thin, left-handed, and slow to speak, a man who checked his compass three times before trusting its direction. He was not given to imagination, which made what he eventually wrote in his field notebook difficult to dismiss.
On September 17, 1907, the company sent him into Letcher County, along the Virginia border, to survey a tract it had purchased at auction sight unseen. The parcel was listed in the paperwork as Tract 14, but the men who would later be sent to timber it called it Wolf’s Neck, a four-mile valley wedged between two ridgelines that leaned toward each other like hands about to clasp. The company wanted timber estimates and boundary marks. What Emmett was not told, because there was no written evidence anywhere to give him, was that people still lived in the valley, people who did not know their land had been sold, people who had lived there for as long as anyone in the county could remember.
He arrived in Whitesburg on the eighteenth, exhausted, and took a room at an inn run by a widow named Mrs. Rednour. She fed him and then told him plainly that her father had run trap lines out of Kingdom Come and that they had never allowed anyone to pass through from the Wolf’s Neck side. She said that was all.
Emmett wrote the conversation down verbatim that night. The next morning he set out with a guide named Isham Varney, a wiry man in his fifties who knew the hills as well as any living man. Isham had once reached the mouth of Wolf’s Neck while hunting bear, but he had never entered the valley itself and did not want to. At a fork in the trail on the second day, Isham stopped his mule and refused to go further.
He told Emmett not to walk after a bell rang, not to cross the creek at dusk, not to answer if he heard his name called from outside a door, to keep a candle burning all night, to accept all food and drink offered, and to leave the cover on any mirror in whatever room he was given. He told him not to go past the small building at the rear of the settlement, which would look like a chapel but was not one. He said he would come to the mouth of the valley if Emmett did not return by Friday sunset, but he would not go further than that. Emmett asked if there were people there.
Yes, Isham said. He said Emmett might not see them, but they might see him. Emmett laughed once, a short flat laugh, and Isham did not laugh with him. Emmett turned his mule up the right fork and rode on alone.
The trail narrowed into a memory of a road. The old-growth hemlocks had not been touched in a hundred years. There were no birds. The sound of the creek vanished within half a mile, swallowed by the ground.
Emmett noticed that his mule had stopped sweating despite the climb, walking forward as if being led to a stable it did not recognize but did not much fear. After another hour, the trail bent around a rock outcrop, and the valley opened below him. Seven cabins stood in an irregular ring around a wide clearing with a low stone well house in the center. To the north stood a building that at first looked like a barn, though it had no doors on its long side, only two small doors close together on its short side and a bell hanging under the eaves.
Beyond that, deeper in the trees, stood a low stone structure with a half-collapsed roof, and beyond that, something white that might have been a small chapel without a steeple. Smoke rose from three chimneys. He saw no one moving, but he felt, and wrote down that he felt, that more of them were watching him from inside the walls. A woman came out of the nearest cabin.
She was in her sixties, thin, wearing black with her sleeves rolled to her elbows, her forearms the strongest he had ever seen on a woman her age. She crossed the yard and stopped at a proper distance. “Land man,” she said. He said yes, ma’am.
“We knew someone would come,” she said. “My name is Malvina Coles. I speak for the valley. We’ve prepared a room for you.
”
He asked politely how they had known someone would come. She said they knew when the papers changed hands. He asked how they could have known that, three ridges and thirty-three miles from the courthouse. She looked at him for a long second and did not answer.
In her cabin, the front room was clean and dark. Over the stove hung a small framed sampler embroidered with red thread. It read: Close the Door. The room she had prepared for him had a narrow bed, a washstand, a window facing the well house, and across from the bed, hung on a nail, a half-length mirror covered with heavy dark cloth sewn to the frame.
He asked about it. She said they covered them in every house. He asked why. She said, because.
He let it go. That evening he met three other residents: an old man named Alaric Federman, another named Otis Graw who never spoke, and a younger woman named Perpetua Lyle who watched him closely and looked away quickly when he turned toward her. He counted eleven souls in the valley that first day. He wrote souls, not people.
At dinner he asked about the buildings behind the cabins, the small chapel at the rear. Alaric set down his spoon. “That building is not a church,” he said. He said it was something old, there when his grandparents first came to the valley.
“We do not go past it,” he said. Emmett asked if anyone did. Alaric said, “Those who go past it do not come back to ask the question. ”
He asked about the well house.
Malvina said they did not take water from the well. He asked what it was for. “It’s for the well,” she said. That first night, the bell under the roof of the barn that was not a barn rang seven times, slowly, like counting.
In the hours before dawn he woke half awake and thought he heard, from somewhere across the clearing, a second bell answering the first, softer and farther away. He was never certain, later, whether he had dreamed it. In the morning he went out with Alaric to survey the boundary. On the western ridges, at what should have been the corner of the tract, he set up his level and took a sight.
The needle on his compass would not settle. It drifted back and forth about ten degrees without stopping. He tried a second compass from his bag. The same behavior.
Alaric watched with a patient expression, as if he had seen many men reach this hour of the day. “Has anyone ever come up here with a compass? ” Emmett asked. “Yes,” Alaric said.
“And what happened? ”
“They never worked,” Alaric said, as if stating a fact of the region, like the road descending after the bridge. Emmett tried to establish the boundary with a topographic sight. From the hill, the well house, the building with the bell, and the closed stone structure were not arranged as they appeared from below.
He took measurements three times and got three different readings, each wrong by a different margin. He wrote in his notebook: This tract cannot be surveyed. Then he crossed it out and wrote below in smaller letters: This tract does not wish to be surveyed. He crossed that out too, but it remained legible, and those who later read the field notebook were able to read it.
They passed the low stone building on the way back. It had no door, only an opening, too dark to see inside. A smell came from it, not foul, not cold, like spring water but strange, like water that had never seen light. Emmett took a step toward it.
Alaric put a hand on his shoulder, light, almost polite. He said, “Please don’t. ” Emmett did not. Later that afternoon, sitting in Malvina’s front room, he tried to draw a sketch of the settlement from memory.
He drew the well house, the seven cabins, the barn that was not a barn with its bell, the closed stone structure. Then he stopped because he realized he could not remember whether the small building at the rear had windows. He went outside to look. Three windows on the side facing him.
He went back inside. He tried to draw them. He drew two. He went out again.
Counted. Three. Returned. Drew two.
He set the pen down and wrote in the margin: I cannot hold the number of windows in memory. I cannot hold it on the page. That day he also asked to see the cemetery. It held twenty-two stones, all rough limestone, no names, no dates.
Some bore a single letter carved near the top: K, or R. Some bore a small crescent cut above the letter. They were arranged, he saw when he stepped back, in the same rough ring as the cabins below. Seven stones on the outer ring, then inside that, another ring of seven.
And in the center, one stone alone, taller than the others by about a hand’s breadth, with no letter at all. The ground around it was slightly depressed, as if something had settled beneath it. It was faintly warm on its western face at three in the afternoon in October, when the air on the hill was cold enough to see his breath. He wrote all this down.
He wrote: I do not want to know what these letters mean. Below that, in smaller handwriting: But I think I know what they mean. On the third day, Malvina took him to the smallest of the seven cabins, which she said had been used by the men who came before him. On the table lay a ledger book, bound in dark green cloth, cracked from being opened.
He recognized the Cumberland binding. The entries were written in many hands over what he estimated at thirty-two years. Each entry began with a name and a date. Ansel Kirkpatrick, June 1875.
Willard Chesterson, October 1893. Cyrus Foyle, April 1896. Robin Pettit, September 1899. Harmon Cleary, August 1902.
Josiah Enfield, May 1905. Beside some names, a K. Beside others, an R. Beside a few, both.
By the end of the afternoon he had deduced that K meant kept and R meant returned. He did not yet know what the words meant. Most of the entries were survey notes, distances, boundary data, timber estimates. Some stopped mid-sentence.
Ansel Kirkpatrick’s record ended with: The land will not permit an accurate reading. Cyrus Foyle’s ended with: My chain is a foot shorter than it was on Tuesday, and I do not know why. Willard Chesterson’s ended with: If anyone reads this, I have chosen to remain in the valley, and my choice was free. His name was among those marked K.
Emmett turned to the last written page. There, at the top, in his own hand, was written: Emmett Hirsch, September 1907. Beside the name, no mark. Only the space where a mark belonged.
He sat looking at it for what he later described as a long while. His handwriting. His initials at the end. He had no memory of ever writing there.
He closed the ledger and asked Malvina plainly what the marks meant. She said kept meant stayed, and returned meant went home. Then she said, “But not everyone who returns home is the one who left. ” She looked at him steadily and did not blink.
That third night, the bell rang twice, about a minute apart. After the second ring, he heard his own voice from outside the cabin, calling his name. Emmett. Twice.
He did not answer, did not move. Then from inside the room, behind the covered mirror, a fifth voice, his own, spoke his name again. He did not turn his head. He watched the candle flame until the sky turned gray.
In the morning he decided to leave. The mule was gone. He walked the trail out of the valley, and it brought him back to the clearing. He tried again.
Same result. He tried the other trail along the creek. Same result. He sat on the stone edge of the well house, looked at his hands, and saw them trembling.
Alaric came and sat beside him. “They need you,” he said. “We need you. There were nine families here.
Now there are only three. The thing we watch does not care for these accounts. It was set to nine. It requires nine.
We have held it at three longer than we should have, and it is beginning to hunger. When it hungers, it begins to look down at Whitesburg. It is not something you want looking down at Whitesburg. ”
Emmett asked what would happen if he did not stay.
Alaric was silent for a long time. Then he said they would let him go. They would not stop him. The mule would be at the mouth of the valley when he looked for it.
But something would go with him. Not something bad, not something good, just something. He would not all descend to Whitesburg. Part of him would remain in the valley whether he willed it or not.
Emmett thought about Louisville. He thought about the woman he had meant to write for six months and had stopped answering because he had nothing to say to someone who wanted to read him. He decided he did not have the nerve for what he briefly considered. He said he would go down.
Alaric nodded. He told him to walk to the head of the trail at sunset when the bell rang, not to look back, not to answer if he heard his name, not to stop for any reason. Isham would be at the saddle. And he gave him one last instruction: in Whitesburg, in Louisville, for the rest of his life, never stand long before a mirror.
Cover it if he could. If he could not, look at it directly and then turn away. Do not search for a face that was not his own. He would see it anyway.
But not to search for it. At sunset the bell rang a single long note. Emmett walked across the clearing and did not look at anything. He walked up the trail and did not turn back.
He heard his name called once, halfway up. He heard, twice, a bell that should have been behind him but seemed to be moving away through the trees on his left. He did not stop. At the top of the side trail, the trail bent, and this time it did not return him to the valley.
The mule was there, saddled, its reins looped over a branch. Isham was at the saddle with a lantern, looking at his face. Neither man spoke. Isham took the mule’s reins and led him back to Whitesburg.
Emmett slept eighteen hours. When he woke, he wrote in his field notebook for four hours without stopping. He never opened it again. In Louisville, he filed a report recommending no work on Tract 14.
He noted the presence of residents, that their claim was older than the surveyor’s knowledge of the title, perhaps older than the title itself. His supervisor, Halston, read the report, laughed a short laugh, and sent a crew two weeks later. It was a crew of thirteen men. When they reached the mouth of Wolf’s Neck, they found no trail leading up.
They found a rock fall across where the side trail should have been. They walked the perimeter of the valley for three days looking for a way in and found none. They returned and told Halston that whatever Emmett Hirsch had seen up there, they themselves had not been able to see. Halston, loyal to the company to the marrow, wrote in his own report that the tract was too rough to work, and that Emmett Hirsch was, in his opinion, suffering from a nervous exhaustion common to men who spend too much time in the mountains alone.
Two men from that crew refused to work for Cumberland again. One of them, a chain carrier named Josephus Boyd, told his wife the night he came home that they had all heard a bell ringing in the woods on the second day. Not from the valley, but behind them. He said it was walking, moving through the trees along the road they had just come up.
Emmett kept his job for another year. He was quieter than before. He accepted no field assignments. He asked for the mirror to be removed from his room and stored in the basement.
In the summer of 1909 he moved to a small room on Fifth Street where there was no mirror in the sitting room or the bathroom. His landlady later wrote that he never once looked at a window at night, always drawing the curtain first. In the fall of 1912, his sister came to visit from Ohio. She later wrote that he received her at the door, sat with her at the kitchen table for two hours, made her tea, asked the proper questions about her husband and home, and did not look her directly in the face a single time during the visit.
When she rose to leave, he said, “Forgive me. ” She did not know what he was asking her to forgive. During that visit, he stopped speaking mid-sentence, went still, and tilted his head slightly to the left as if listening to something on the other side of the wall. After about a minute, he blinked once and finished the sentence he had stopped.
She asked what he had heard. He said, “Just the house settling. ” She wrote that his house had made no sound at all the entire time she was in it. As she was leaving, she looked back at his kitchen window.
He was standing very close to the glass, watching her go. She wrote that there was no reflection in it. Not of him, not of the kitchen behind him. Nothing.
She tried to convince herself on the train back to Ohio that the light had been wrong, that the glass was a strange kind, that she was tired. She wrote that she could not convince herself of any of those things. She did not return. Emmett kept writing in a field notebook he carried in his coat pocket.
After his death, his sister gave those pages to a physician named Norbert Craddock, who was working on a short study later published in the Lexington Medical Journal on what he called Appalachian dissociation episodes. Craddock noted that Emmett had spoken in his last two years of feeling that part of him had never returned to its proper place after his time in the hills in 1907, and that at certain hours of the early morning, he felt that this part of him was being counted. Craddock underlined the word counted. He described one visit where Emmett stopped mid-sentence, looked at the corner of the room, and did not move for eleven minutes.
When he began speaking again, he started exactly at the word he had stopped on, as if no time had passed. Emmett Hirsch died on March 3, 1915, at the age of forty-six. The cause of death listed on his certificate was heart failure. He was found in his room on Fifth Street.
The candle beside his bed was still burning. His hands were folded on his chest. His notebook lay open on the table. The last entry, in his hand, was dated March 2 and contained these words: They are counting me now.
At some point that night, the mirror in the sitting room of the house was covered with heavy cloth and fixed with six iron nails. The landlady swore she had not done it. No one else had a key. Between 1910 and 1954, the Cumberland Timber and Coal Company sent four more agents to Tract 14.
Their names, in the order they came, were Robin Pettit the Second, nephew of the man in the ledger, Silas Ballance, Corwin Hedgepeth, and in 1954, a man named August Vennimore. All four returned. All four filed the same report Emmett had. All four died of heart failure between the ages of forty-four and forty-seven.
In each of their rooms at the time of death, the mirror was covered. Robin Pettit the Second died in 1922 in a company house in Harlan, Kentucky, age forty-seven. Silas Ballance died in 1931 on a train, after a sudden stillness settled over him in the last hour of his journey. He had been reading a newspaper.
The conductor said he folded it carefully in half, set it on the seat beside him, closed his eyes, and did not open them again. The conductor also said the mirror at the end of the car was covered with black cloth at some point during that final hour, and no one could explain why. Corwin Hedgepeth died in 1947 in a boarding house in Lexington run by a niece of the very landlady who had rented Emmett Hirsch his room. The niece kept a diary and wrote that Mr.
Hedgepeth asked her at dinner whether she heard a bell. She said no. He nodded as if she had confirmed something and said, “All right. ” He went up to his room, closed the door, and sat in the dark, as far as she knew.
In the morning he did not come down. The last of them, August Vennimore, left a written account that was included as an appendix in a later edition of Craddock’s study. He wrote that he went up to Wolf’s Neck alone in 1954, and that when he arrived, only two people were in the valley: a woman named Malvina Coles and an elderly man named Alaric Federman. He wrote that they looked exactly as Emmett Hirsch had described them forty-seven years earlier, not a day older.
He wrote that they told him they needed one more person. He wrote that he refused. He wrote that Malvina walked with him to the head of the trail and told him at parting that he was the last they would send out. She said they would hold out as long as they could, and they were sorry for what would happen when they could not.
He wrote that on the way down, he heard the sound of a bell from somewhere behind him and slightly to the left, moving through the trees. August Vennimore died of heart failure in a rented room at the age of forty-six. The mirror in the room was covered by a hand no one saw.