In the second week of March 1939, the town of Low Cross in Aiden County, West Virginia, quietly stopped sending its sick, its dying, and its desperate to the parsonage. There was no meeting, no vote, no single voice saying the thing out loud. The Reverend never asked why. He kept making up the bed in the west room every morning and turning it down every night for the eighteen years he had left, but no living soul from the county ever laid down in it again.
The bed had been there since the parsonage was built in 1899, an iron frame with a feather tick, placed in the west room under the window by a building committee that wrote in its minutes that it was meant “for the strangers of the county and the sick of the parish and any traveler whose need is greater than his means. ” It was charity, plain and honest. And for nearly forty years, the neighbors, the doctors, the sheriffs, and the midwives sent their strays there, and the Reverend of Low Cross took them in. Some died in that bed.
Most walked out of it. And every one of them who walked out walked out different. The Reverend was Thurlo Merl Cass, born in 1878 in Nicholas County, a small, quiet man with pale gray eyes and a talent so unassuming that his own family never named it. He was a listener, the way a stone at the bottom of a well is a listener.
He could sit across from a person for two hours and not speak more than eleven words, and at the end, the person would get up and thank him for the finest conversation they had had in years. He was licensed to preach at eighteen, rode circuit on a borrowed mule, and in 1899 accepted the position at Low Cross Union Church for a salary of $180 a year, plus the parsonage, firewood, and one hog a year. He preached his first sermon on the making up of a spare bed for a stranger. The people came almost from the first night.
In his first year, the Reverend recorded 211 uses of the bed, nearly one every other night. Peddlers and drovers, consumptives and cripples, women in the last month of a pregnancy the doctor said would kill them, children of the poorest families sent down to be washed and fed and prayed over. He kept a daybook, a black leather book with a brass buckle, and in it he wrote down who came, who paid, who was fed, who was buried. He wrote at the end of nearly every entry the same phrase: “I am obliged to them for coming.
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The first sign that something was wrong came in February 1912. A young man named Vestal Bogus was brought in with brain fever, and the doctor said he would not last the night. At about two in the morning, Bogus opened his eyes and thanked the Reverend in a voice that was not his own for keeping the room for him, said he had been coming there for a long time, then closed his eyes and slept. In the morning the fever had broken.
Bogus had no memory of speaking. The Reverend wrote it down. He did not underline it. He wrote that he did not know what to make of it, and he went on.
The pattern repeated over the years. Someone would come to the bed sick or dying, and at some hour between one and four in the morning, that person would say or do something that was not what that person could have said or done, and then sleep, and then wake well, or die peacefully with a look on the face that the doctor described as gratitude. For twenty-nine years, this was the rhythm of the room. The Reverend sat in the chair, read the New Testament, and noted the visits.
He did not go home for his mother’s burying in 1902. He wrote that he could not leave the bed made up if he was not there to keep it. In the summer of 1929, something changed. A woman named Amorillis Dole, who had tried to walk into the river after losing three children, was brought to the parsonage and slept for thirty-eight hours.
She woke, recognized no one, asked only to be taken back to the bed she had been in. When they brought her back, she slept again and woke herself again. The Reverend wrote in the daybook: “The room let her go. It has not that I recollect ever done that before.
I am obliged to it for letting her go. ”
Between 1929 and 1934, the oddities accumulated. A nine-year-old boy with a broken collarbone sat up in the middle of the night and counted to eighty-one, the exact number of people who had slept in the bed that year. A woman recovering from a stroke began thanking aloud a dead cousin she had never met.
A pair of small, warm women’s button shoes appeared on the empty bed one morning, coated in fresh dust, and the Reverend set them under the washbench and never moved them. A smell of hot iron on damp linen filled the room during the small hours and vanished by daylight. A family’s dog, brought to the parsonage with a sick girl, lay on the doorsill all night, shaking, and would not go in the room. In October 1934, Elva Corbin, a twenty-nine-year-old schoolteacher with walking pneumonia, was carried into the parsonage.
On the third night, she woke at two in the morning, sat up too easily, and felt that there was somebody in the room with her, not seen, not heard, but present. A voice spoke in her head, friendly and calm, and offered her things. On the fourth night it offered to make her well. On the fifth, to give her back her mother.
On the sixth, to let her teach her children forever. On the seventh night it offered to be the thing at the schoolhouse door when the fever came for her pupils, to turn it back so that not one of them would die. She nearly said yes. A cough from the sleeping Reverend broke the moment, and she closed her mouth.
The voice said it would try again another time. She walked out on the sixteenth of October and went home. On the wagon ride, she made two rules for herself: she would not hear her own first name spoken aloud if she could help it, because the voice had never learned her name, and she would never sleep in a room where the bed faced a window, because the voice had come in with the moon. She lived by those rules for fifty-six years.
She never returned to the parsonage, and she once told her father she would rather die at home than go back. In the winter of 1934, Dr. Ora Beichchum, who had been sending patients to the parsonage for years, sat in the Reverend’s kitchen after Elva Corbin went home and wrote in his notes that he no longer believed the room was safe for a certain kind of person. By 1938 he had begun keeping his patients at home or in his own clinic.
In February 1939, he wrote to a colleague in Charleston that he had come to believe the good work done at the parsonage was being done at a cost he had not consented to. His friend wrote back with one short piece of advice: stop. The Sexton of Low Cross Union Church, a man named Furby Tras, had known about the room since 1903, when the dying sexton before him told him that there was a thing in the west room, old and patient, neither good nor evil, that had come up out of thin ground when the church was built. Furby was taught that on certain nights, when the thing decided to take instead of keep, a person outside the parsonage had to stand in the yard, face the road, hold a pitcher of spring water in both hands, and speak the names of his own dead out loud without a gap.
Furby did this seven times in thirty-six years. He never told the Reverend. He believed the Reverend was not to know about his side of the work. On the ninth of March 1939, Furby’s niece, Isme Tras, twenty years old, pregnant and bleeding, was carried down the Salt Lake Road to the parsonage.
Her fever had come with the bleeding, and she had lost the child on the floor of the cabin. Dr. Beichchum was bedridden with pneumonia. There was nowhere else to take her.
Furby laid her in the bed himself and told the Reverend he was going to be in the yard. For three hours he stood in the dark with his back to the parsonage, holding the pitcher, speaking the names of his dead into the road in the order they went. Sometime around three in the morning, exhausted, he heard his own mouth say a name without his meaning to: “Isme Tras. ” He heard it and knew what he had done.
He had put her name in the road in the order of his dead, where the guest could hear it. By then, it had already entered the room with what it had come for. In the morning, his niece was alive. The bleeding had stopped, the fever had broken, her color was coming back.
She smiled at him and thanked him and asked him to take her home. But the smile was not her smile, and the voice was not her voice. Four people saw her come out of that parsonage door, and none of them said anything. Within a week, without a single word spoken aloud, the town stopped sending.
Isme Tras stayed with her uncle for six years, speaking to almost no one. Every night she slept with her head facing east and a small tin cup of spring water on the floor beside her, filled fresh each evening and poured out before dawn. Furby said she was keeping herself. In 1945 she married a widower named Verlin Alt and moved to his farm in Nicholas County.
She raised his two children, and she never told him what had happened to her in March 1939. She never slept without the cup of water by her head. She lived to be ninety-two, and when her stepchildren went through her effects after her death, they found fifteen tin cups wrapped in oilcloth in her nightstand, and under them a folded sheet of paper with a list of sixteen names in the order they had gone. The sixteenth was her own.
The Reverend wrote one final entry about the west room on the twelfth of March 1939: “Miss Tras has gone home. It is finished. I am obliged. ” He never wrote of the guest or the bed or the visits again.
He kept making the bed every morning and turning it down every night for eighteen years, but no one from Aiden County ever used it again. He died alone in 1957. The trustees found the bed made up, and under the washbench in the hall sat the pair of small buttoned shoes with their fresh gray dust. The parsonage was sold in 1968.
The bed was moved to a shed that burned down in 1979, and the iron frame was later cut up for reinforcing rod and poured into concrete footings under a few small buildings in the eastern part of West Virginia. If you ever find yourself in one of those buildings at three in the morning, and the room grows warmer than the thermostat can explain, you will know what to think of it.