In the winter of 1887, a respected lumberjack in northern Michigan discovered a strange symbol carved into a fallen pine tree. Within days, his camp owner vanished without a trace, and the man spent the rest of his life investigating a pattern of disappearances that he believed were connected. Virgil Moss was 34 years old and known as the best tree faller in the northern territories. He had worked in logging camps across Michigan and Wisconsin for 15 years without a major mistake.
That winter, he was assigned to Taggart’s Mill, a camp operated by Cyrus Taggart about 12 miles northeast of Kalkaska, Michigan. The camp employed 70 men who lived in a rough timber bunkhouse and worked in dangerous conditions daily. On January 24, 1887, Moss and a younger coworker, Otto Lindgren, were working in a section called the deep cut when they found a carving on a fallen pine. It was a circle roughly eight inches across with 12 lines radiating outward, each ending in a smaller circle.
The carving appeared old, with darkened edges from years of exposure. The next day, the pair found a second carving on a standing tree. This one was fresh, with sap still bleeding from the cuts. They had been the only people working in that section.
Later that day, Lindgren reported seeing a tall figure in dark clothing standing between the trees watching them. He saw nothing when he looked again. That same evening, an older French-Canadian worker named Lucien Broussard told Moss about a camp 30 miles north that had been shut down in 1879 after three men disappeared in a single week. Broussard said the disappeared men had all been working in a section of old-growth pine called the hollow.
The following day, Moss went to the deep cut alone. He found 11 more carvings, all fresh, all following a rough line heading northwest. The trail led him to a clearing about three miles from where he and Lindgren had been working. In the center stood a circular structure made of logs, about 12 feet tall, with no door or opening.
Every log was covered in the same symbol. The logs were unnaturally cold to the touch. Moss also counted 47 trees around the clearing, each marked with deep cuts at chest height. The snow around the structure was undisturbed.
He left the clearing, noting its location in his notebook, but believed he was being followed on the walk back. The next morning, Taggart was missing. A crew member said he had seen Taggart heading north toward the deep cut before dawn, carrying a rifle and a pack. Taggart had gone alone.
Moss and Lindgren went to find him. They followed the fresh carvings to the clearing, where they found Taggart’s footprints in the snow. The tracks led directly to the base of the structure and stopped. There was no sign of where Taggart had gone.
They then heard a voice from inside the structure. It was Taggart calling for help. Moss climbed to the top and looked inside. He later said the interior was not hollow but impossibly deep, like a bottomless well.
The walls were dark and seemed to pulse. Far below, he could see Taggart standing in a faint glow, staring upward with a blank face. Moss also reported seeing other figures standing in the darkness beyond the light. Moss climbed down and told Lindgren they needed to leave immediately.
As they ran back through the forest, they heard the breathing sound grow louder and what seemed like numerous footsteps behind them. They saw nothing when they looked back. That night, Moss and Lindgren packed their gear and left the camp while the other men slept. They did not return.
Taggart’s Mill shut down in the spring of 1888 after five more disappearances in two weeks. Authorities investigated and found nothing. The land was sold, and the area was left to grow wild. In 1891, Moss heard of a similar case in northern Wisconsin, where three men had vanished from a logging camp near Medford.
Survivors described carvings on trees, circles with 12 radiating lines. Over the next six years, Moss tracked reports of disappearances at logging camps across Michigan, Wisconsin, and Minnesota. He claimed to have found 11 structures across three states and noticed a pattern: the number of cuts on trees around each structure corresponded to the number of men reported missing from the area. He said the 47 cuts around the structure in the deep cut matched 47 men missing from camps in northern Michigan over 20 years.
Moss came to believe the structures were traps designed to draw certain people into the woods. He said he recognized some of the figures he had seen standing in the darkness as men who had disappeared years earlier. In the fall of 1897, Moss stopped investigating. He settled in Bemidji, Minnesota, and worked as a night watchman at a grain mill.
He did not talk about what he had found. On the night of December 14, 1901, Moss walked out of his boarding house and disappeared. He was 48 years old. His room was found empty, his belongings untouched.
The case was closed without explanation. Three months later, a trapper named Sven Halvorson reported finding a clearing about 20 miles northeast of Bemidji with a log structure covered in carvings matching the symbol description. By the time authorities arrived, the clearing was gone. Halvorson insisted he had seen it, but no one believed him.
In 1903, a logger named Oscar Jorgenson found a notebook buried in the snow near Park Rapids, Minnesota. It belonged to Virgil Moss and contained maps, sketches, names, and dates. The last page contained a single sentence: “They are not gone. They are waiting.
” The notebook was lost in a fire in 1907. In 1932, historian Margaret Caldwell found references to Moss while researching logging camps. She published a paper in 1934 on the history of Taggart’s Mill, noting that five men from the 1887 season, including Cyrus Taggart, were listed as missing. In 1968, graduate student Daniel Carr found Caldwell’s paper and traveled to northern Michigan to investigate.
He found a clearing with a structure matching the description. He took photographs and measurements, then climbed the structure. His car was found on a logging road about 15 miles northeast of Kalkaska on June 12, 1968. His camera was in the car, but the film was missing.
He was never found. In 1991, a hiker named Rebecca Soto reported finding a clearing matching Carr’s notes in the Huron-Manistee National Forest. She took photographs from a distance and left. When she returned a week later, the clearing was gone.
The Forest Service told her she must have been mistaken. No official explanation for the disappearances has ever been established. Reports of similar carvings in the upper Midwest continue to surface, but none have been confirmed by authorities.