For nearly two decades, the county clerk of Hollows Reach, Pennsylvania, carried a secret he never confessed to anyone. In the autumn of 1872, Ozias Thrillfall, a man who believed a town only truly exists when it remembers itself on paper, took a blade to the most important record in the county and cut 11 pages out of its Bible. The pages covered the disappearance of a reclusive man named Lucien Ray, who had lived alone four miles up a mountain since arriving in 1867. Ray had stopped coming into town for supplies and mail in late summer of that year, prompting Sheriff Renton Vale and his deputy, Argyle Penmark, to ride up to his cabin on September 8.
They found the front door unlocked and the cabin strangely orderly. A table was set for one, with a loaf of bread and an open French book. The lamp was empty and the ashes in the hearth were cold. They found a brass key in the ashes, warm to the touch, stamped with a symbol they did not recognize.
In the bedroom, they found a cracked shaving mirror. Both men later reported disturbing encounters with it. Argyle wrote in a deposition that his reflection blinked at him when he did not. In the back room, they found Ray’s journal.
It was written in French and ended on August 20, 1872, with three words: “He has come back. ” After that, the entries stopped. Ray himself was never found. On the ride down the mountain, both horses stopped in the road and stared into the trees, refusing to move for about a minute before walking on of their own accord.
That night, Sheriff Vale wrote a detailed letter to the county prosecutor in Harrisburg, describing everything they had found. The letter never arrived. An empty envelope, with its seal broken, was all that reached its destination. The sheriff’s own incident log was burned in the courthouse stove on October 11.
The following morning, Ozias Thrillfall cut the 11 pages covering August 1 through October 31 out of the county Bible while the courthouse custodian watched. When asked what he was doing, he said: “Some things should not be remembered. ”
The records survived in secret. When Thrillfall died in 1891, his nephew found a leather pouch sewn under his writing chair containing the sheriff’s letter, the deputy’s deposition, a note in French, and a single folded page from the Bible, stained with human blood.
The French note, written in Ray’s hand, asked that the key be burned, the mirror destroyed, and that no record of his name survive anywhere in the valley. Thrillfall had done almost everything the note asked. He burned the log and cut the pages, erasing Lucien Ray from official record so completely that no headstone or birth record exists. But he did not burn the mirror.
He hid it in his attic, and by the time his nephew found it, the crack that had started in Lucien Ray’s cabin had spread across the entire glass, converging on a single point in the center, as if something had pushed slowly from the inside. The nephew weighted the mirror with stones and dropped it into the Susquehanna River. The county Bible, now in Wyalusing County, Pennsylvania, still shows the 11 ridges where the pages were cut away. A card beside it states they were removed by an unknown clerk at an unknown date, a description that is technically wrong on every count.
The documents in the leather pouch were not released to the public until 1947 and sat largely unread for years afterward. Ten of the eleven pages Thrillfall removed have never been found. He took their location to the grave.