In December 1927, a nun named Sister Bernardine Vel walked down two flights of stone stairs at St. Ansine's home for foundlings. She opened a locked iron door set into the floor of a small room the sisters called the punishment cellar. She closed something that had been open since 1889.
She did this alone. She did this at night. She did this after four years of watching six children vanish out of the same locked room, one by one.
Each child had been placed there in the week before they disappeared. Each had been chosen for that placement not by the sisters, but by another child.
That child was a boy of nine named Timothy Oid Hesk. He had gone into the punishment room in October 1923, been left there overnight, and come back up in the morning changed in a way none of the sisters could name and none of them wanted to describe on paper.
Timothy was orphaned at three. He had lived at St. Ans since he was four. When Sister Bernardine finally understood in the autumn of 1927 what he had been doing to the other children in her care, she wrote one sentence in her private notebook that a researcher named Ralph Fusk, who read the notebook in 2008, has never been able to get out of his mind.
She wrote that the plug in the cellar floor was the mouth, not the door. She wrote that the thing on the other side of it had learned Timothy's rhythm and was waiting for him to feed it again.
Three days after Sister Bernardine went into the cellar alone and did whatever she did to close the plug, she was dead. Her death certificate lists pneumonia.
The last two pages of her private notebook described two full days of coughing up a fine dark grit. She said it was not soot, was not coal dust, and had a smell she recognized from the third cellar underneath the punishment room.
Timothy Oid Hesk was adopted out of the orphanage three months later, in March 1928, at the age of 14, to a Pittsburgh family. They lost track of him within two years. He was last verified as alive in Cleveland, Ohio, in 1931.
He would be 111 years old today.
What Sister Bernardine wrote about the third cellar, the punishment room, Timothy, and what came up through the iron door on the night of October 11, 1923, sat inside a diocesan filing cabinet in Erie, Pennsylvania, for 41 years before anyone read it. It has been read by fewer than a dozen people in the century since.
St. Ans's home for foundlings sat on a low ridge above the town of Kendale, Pennsylvania. It was three stories of dark stone and red brick with a slate roof, a small chapel on the east end, a walled kitchen garden on the south, and a wooden porch running the length of the north face.
The building had not been built as an orphanage. It was built in 1852 as the Kendale County Hospital and served as such for 37 years. In 1889, a state inspection determined it was structurally unsound in a particular way the state report did not describe.
The hospital closed. The building sat empty for three years. Then in 1892, the Sisters of St. Joseph acquired the property for one dollar from the county, on the condition that the county retain oversight of the deed and that the property be used for the care of orphaned children.
The sisters moved in that spring. They cleaned the wards and painted the walls. They set up dormitories on the second and third floors, a schoolroom and kitchen on the ground floor, and used the upper cellar for storage of coal, canned goods, potatoes, and smoked meat a local farmer donated every autumn.
The upper cellar was a good cellar, dry and well ventilated, faced in cut sandstone. It had been the hospital's storage cellar before them and served the orphanage in the same capacity for 56 years, until St. Ans closed in 1948.
Below the upper cellar, however, there was a second cellar. And below the second cellar, there was a third.
The second cellar was reached by a narrow wooden stair descending from a hinged trapdoor in the floor of the upper cellar. The stair went down about nine feet.
At the bottom was a small stone room, 15 feet by 12, with an eight-foot ceiling faced in the same cut sandstone as the upper cellar. It had one iron cot with no mattress and one small high window at the top of the west wall, no larger than a book.
It had a heavy oak door with an iron bolt on the outside and no handle on the inside. The sisters used this room from 1892 to 1948 for correcting children who had broken rules they considered serious: fighting, stealing, repeated disobedience.
A child sent to the punishment room was left there for a single night. The bolt was drawn from outside. The door remained shut until first light. In the morning, one of the sisters would come down, open the door, and bring the child back up to breakfast.
This was the punishment room. The sisters called it that in their letters and in their formal records, and the older children called it that too. It was not a secret.
By the standards of 1923, it was not an unusual practice at a Catholic orphanage in rural Pennsylvania. Corporal punishment in schools and children's homes was routine. Solitary confinement of one child for a single night in a small stone room was considered mild.
It was cold and frightening, and it was intended to be frightening, but it was not in 1923 considered abuse. The researcher Aldus Ren, who spent 17 years on this material starting in 1968, was careful to note this. He did not defend the practice. He noted only that by the standards of its own time, the punishment room was not in itself the horror.
The horror was underneath.
Beneath the floor of the punishment room was a fitted iron door. It was set into the stone floor about six feet from the north wall, in the exact center of the room's east half.
The door was small, about 20 inches on a side, square, iron-worked and set flush with the flagstone so that it did not protrude and could not be tripped over. The door had a ring in its top face, iron folded flat so it lay flush too.
In 1892, when the sisters were first shown the punishment room by the outgoing hospital administrator, they were told verbally and without any accompanying paperwork that the iron door in the floor was not to be opened. It had not been opened since 1889. Whatever was underneath it was not something the diocese was prepared to describe on paper.
The sisters did not open it for 31 years, from 1892 to 1923. No one at St. Ans opened the iron door in the floor of the punishment room.
Children sent there sat on the iron cot, looked at the small high window, and spent one night alone in a small stone room while the sisters slept upstairs. The iron door in the floor was, so far as the children knew, just a piece of the floor. It had a ring on top, and the ring was a curiosity, but the door had been there before the sisters and before the children.
Neither did any of the sisters who arrived after 1912 know what it was. The verbal instruction had been given to Mother Vitilene Cork in 1892, and Mother Cork died in 1931 without writing it down and without passing it to a successor.
What was underneath the iron door was by 1923 no longer known to anyone at St. Ans, only that the door was there and was not to be opened. And below the iron door, though no sister then living knew this, there was a third cellar.
The third cellar was known to Ren from a partial diagram folded into the back of Sister Bernardine's private notebook, drawn in lead pencil between October and December of 1927 and labeled in her own handwriting as the room the plug seals.
The diagram is not to scale but is precise about relative measurement. Ren compared it against surviving architectural plans of the 1852 hospital building at the state archive in Harrisburg. The plans do not show a third cellar.
The third cellar does not appear on any surviving plan of St. Ans, of the Kendale County Hospital, or of any prior structure at the ridge. But per Sister Bernardine's diagram and per the 1889 state inspection report, Ren found the third cellar was there.
It was reached by a shaft below the iron door. The shaft dropped seven feet through fitted pale gray stone, jointed so tight that Sister Bernardine wrote in the margin of her diagram that she had brought a butter knife with her on her one and only descent and had not been able to insert the blade into any joint she tested.
The shaft ended at a small room. Sister Bernardine estimated the room to be 14 feet north to south, 10 feet east to west, and five and a half feet at its ceiling apex, which was gently arched. She had to stoop.
The room was faced entirely in the same pale gray stone. The floor sloped very gently from all four walls toward a shallow circular depression at the exact center of the floor. The depression was about 18 inches across and three inches deep, dressed to the same precision as the walls.
Running around all four walls at chest height, unbroken, including across the shaft opening she had entered through, was a continuous carved band of marks in an alphabet Sister Bernardine did not recognize. She counted the marks twice from opposite corners to check her arithmetic.
She wrote that the band contained 307 distinct marks before the sequence began to repeat. She wrote that the marks did not resemble Latin, Greek, Hebrew, Aramaic, or any of the church languages she had studied in her novitiate, nor the German and Polish scripts she had seen at St. Ans on immigrant family letters.
She wrote that she believed the marks were older than any language she knew of, and that the belief was not based on any evidence she could name, but on the way the marks looked at her when she looked at them.
Ren is careful to note that Sister Bernardine was not a woman given to fanciful description. She was, by every account of every sister and priest and physician who knew her, precise, calm, direct, and unromantic in her observations of the children in her care.
Her notebook does not read as the record of an imaginative or hysterical mind. It reads as the record of a woman who was trying very carefully to describe something she did not have the vocabulary to describe.
Sister Bernardine Vel was born in 1886 in Reading, Pennsylvania, to a Lutheran father and a Catholic mother. Her father died of an infection when she was seven. Her mother raised her Catholic.
She entered the Sisters of St. Joseph at 18 and took final vows at 22. She taught grammar school in Scranton for eight years. Then in autumn 1915, at age 29, she was transferred to St. Ans, where she remained until her death 12 years later.
She kept a private notebook. This was not unusual. Many sisters of her order kept private notebooks of their spiritual observations, prayers, and reflections on the children in their care. The notebooks were personal property, not read by superiors, not part of any formal record.
When a sister died, her notebook went either to her family or to the diocesan archive, per her wishes. Sister Bernardine had no living family in 1927. Her mother had died in 1921. Her only sibling, an older sister, had entered the same order and died of influenza in 1918.
When Sister Bernardine died in December 1927, her notebook was placed in a small wooden chest along with her other personal effects, and the chest was transferred to the Diocese of Erie. The following spring it was cataloged as the personal papers of a religious sister, 20th century, filed with similar materials from other deceased sisters of the order.
It sat there unread for 41 years, until 1968, when a young researcher named Aldus Ren came to the archive with a general interest in Catholic institutional care in Western Pennsylvania and asked to see the personal papers folder as part of his survey.
Ren found the notebook by accident. He was working through the folder alphabetically, and Vel fell late in the sequence. By the time he opened the small red leather cover and read the first sentence of the first entry, he had been in the archive six days and had read personal papers from 23 deceased sisters.
The first sentence of Sister Bernardine's notebook was written on the 17th of December 1923, two months after Timothy Oid Hesk had spent his night in the punishment room. She wrote that the boy had come out of the room in the morning and had walked past her at the top of the stair without looking at her.
She wrote that he had walked to the dormitory, sat on his bed, and not spoken a word for three days. She wrote that on the morning of the fourth day, he had come to her at breakfast and said to her very quietly that he was sorry for whatever the sisters had thought he had done.
He said he understood now why he had been sent to the punishment room, and that he would not need to be sent again. Then he smiled at her. And she wrote that she had known at the moment he smiled that whatever had come out of the punishment room that morning was not entirely Timothy anymore.
That was the first sentence Aldus Ren read. He sat in the reading room of the Diocese of Erie archive for the rest of the afternoon and read every remaining page of the notebook. When he closed it at five in the afternoon, he did not go to dinner and he did not sleep that night.
By morning he had decided that he would spend the next portion of his professional life trying to understand what Sister Bernardine Vel had seen.
Timothy Oid Hesk was born in December 1914. His father was a coal miner in Schuylkill County, his mother a seamstress. Both died in the influenza pandemic of 1918 within four days of each other in the last two weeks of October.
Timothy was three years old. He was taken in briefly by an aunt in Pottsville, but the aunt was already caring for four children of her own and could not manage a fifth. In April 1918, Timothy was transferred to St. Ans in Kendale County, where he was placed in the youngest boys' dormitory and where he lived for the next ten years of his life.
He was, by every account Ren gathered from interviews in the 1960s, an ordinary boy. He was small for his age, quiet, and read well. He was liked by the sisters and tolerated by the older boys.
He had one particular friend, a boy his own age named Marvin Hos, with whom he spent most of his free time. He did not cause trouble. He had not been sent to the punishment room in the first five years he lived at St. Ans, which was, Sister Bernardine noted in her notebook, unusual.
Most children at the orphanage went to the punishment room at least once by the time they were nine. Some went five or six times. Timothy had not been. His record was, by the standards of the institution, unblemished.
The event that sent him to the punishment room on the night of October 11, 1923, was not in itself serious. He and Marvin had been caught in the kitchen after evening prayer, taking a piece of bread and a small pat of butter from the pantry.
This was theft, and the sisters treated it as theft. Both boys were disciplined. Marvin got three strokes of a switch on the palm of his hand and was sent to bed.
Timothy, who was the taller of the two and who was believed by Sister Vera Jump, the kitchen sister who caught them, to have been the ringleader, was sentenced to a night in the punishment room. He had not been to the punishment room before. He was frightened.
He asked Sister Bernardine, the sister on duty that night, whether he could sleep in the dormitory and go the following night instead. Sister Bernardine, who had a soft spot for Timothy and had never sent him to the punishment room herself, said no.
She said the rule of the house was that discipline followed the offense, that the offense had happened tonight, that Timothy would go tonight, and that in the morning he would come out and eat breakfast and the matter would be finished.
She walked him down to the upper cellar, then down the narrow wooden stair to the punishment room. She opened the oak door, led him inside, and showed him the iron cot. She told him he could lie on it, that he could sleep, that he would be all right, and that she would come for him in the morning.
She did not tell him anything about the iron door in the floor. There was, in October 1923, nothing to tell. The door was, as far as she knew, a piece of the floor.
She did note in her notebook entry two months later that Timothy had glanced at the iron door as he walked past it toward the cot, and had glanced at it slightly longer than she would have expected a nine-year-old to glance at a piece of floor, but that she had thought nothing of it at the time.
She wrote that she had noticed it only in retrospect, when she was trying to reconstruct every detail of that evening. She was not sure she had noticed it at all. She might have invented the glance in her memory later because the glance made the rest of the story easier to bear.
She left the punishment room, closed the oak door, drew the iron bolt from outside, climbed the narrow wooden stair, closed the trapdoor at the top, and left the upper cellar. She went upstairs to the sisters' quarters on the third floor and prepared for bed.
It was, she wrote, an entirely ordinary October evening. There was no wind, no storm. The moon was in its first quarter. The dormitory upstairs was quiet. The chapel bell had rung at nine, and the boys had all been in bed.
Timothy was in the punishment room. The rest of the children were asleep. Sister Bernardine went to bed at ten and slept without dream.
At some time in the night, however, she was awakened. She writes that she cannot say what time. She did not consult the small clock on her bedside table and in retrospect wishes she had.
What she can say is that she was awakened by the sound of a child crying. She recognized it as coming from the direction of the upper cellar. She assumed it was Timothy and was not alarmed. Children in the punishment room often cried in the night. This was one of its intended effects. She turned over in her bed and went back to sleep.
She writes four years later that she has spent every day since that night thinking about the sound she heard. She writes that Timothy was crying, but that Timothy's crying was not the only sound.
Underneath the crying, or perhaps woven into it, or perhaps arriving at the same interval but from a different direction, there was another sound. She writes that the second sound was rhythmic, a soft, deliberate, patient knocking.
She writes that at the time, in her bed on the third floor of St. Ans, she assumed the knocking was Timothy on the oak door of the punishment room asking to be let out. But in the four years since, she has become certain that the knocking was not on the oak door.
She writes that the knocking was on the iron door in the floor, and that it was not Timothy who was doing the knocking.
Sister Bernardine woke at five as she always did. She dressed, said her morning prayers, and went down to the kitchen to heat water for tea. Then at a quarter to six she went down to the upper cellar, opened the trapdoor, descended the narrow wooden stair, and drew back the iron bolt on the oak door of the punishment room.
Timothy Oid Hesk was sitting on the iron cot. He was upright, feet flat on the floor, hands folded in his lap, looking at the small high window on the west wall. He did not turn his head when Sister Bernardine opened the door. He did not turn his head when she spoke to him.
She said his name. She said it again. She stepped into the room, walked to the cot, knelt in front of him, and put her hand on his knee. Timothy looked at her then.
Sister Bernardine writes that his eyes were the eyes of Timothy, but were also not the eyes of Timothy, and that she could not at the time explain this observation to herself, and cannot four years later explain it any better.
She writes only that she knew at that first moment that something had gone wrong in the punishment room that night, and that whatever had gone wrong was not going to be described in any language she knew.
She walked Timothy up out of the cellar and led him to the kitchen. She sat him at a small table and gave him a bowl of oatmeal and a cup of milk. He did not eat. He did not drink. He sat and looked at the bowl and did not move.
Sister Bernardine sat with him for half an hour, then brought him to the dormitory. Marvin Hos, his friend, came over and asked what had happened, and Timothy did not answer. Timothy went to his bed, lay down, and looked at the ceiling. He did not speak for three days.
On the morning of the fourth day, he came to Sister Bernardine in the kitchen while she was preparing breakfast. He stood beside her at the stove. He waited for her to notice him. She noticed him. She turned to him.
He looked up at her and said the sentences Ren 45 years later read as the first sentence of Sister Bernardine's notebook. He said that he was sorry for whatever the sisters had thought he had done. He said that he understood now why he had been sent to the punishment room. He said that he would not need to be sent again.
And then he smiled. And Sister Bernardine writes that the smile was too old for his face. She writes that the smile was the smile of a man of 60 who had made a bargain with his own life and was satisfied with the terms of the bargain.
She writes that a boy of nine cannot smile that way, and that she had never seen a boy of nine smile that way, and that she felt in the moment Timothy smiled at her that she was in the presence of something she should not be in the presence of.
But she did not in October 1923 know what to make of the smile. She thought perhaps that Timothy had been frightened badly in the night, had experienced a nightmare, had come out of the punishment room shaken, and that the smile was a strange product of a frightened child trying to communicate to an adult that he had learned his lesson and would not repeat the offense.
She wrote a short note in her spiritual journal, which was a separate document from the private notebook and which she kept as part of her ordinary devotional practice. The spiritual journal for October 15, 1923, reads that Timothy Hesk had spent a night in the punishment room and had come out changed in a way she would pray about, that she would keep an eye on him, and that she trusted the boy would recover his ordinary temperament with time.
Aldus Ren located this spiritual journal in the same folder as the private notebook. The spiritual journal is far less remarkable than the private notebook. It contains no reference to the iron door in the floor, no reference to knocking, and no reference to the sound she had heard in the night.
Ren believed that Sister Bernardine kept the private notebook precisely because she needed a place to record what she could not in good conscience or in good sense put into a devotional record that another sister might one day read.
Timothy did not recover his ordinary temperament. He did not over the following weeks become withdrawn or troubled. He became instead quietly cheerful. He did his chores. He did his lessons. He played with Marvin. He ate. He slept.
He did not appear on the surface to be a boy who had been frightened. He appeared on the surface to be a boy who had grown up overnight. The other sisters remarked on it.
Sister Octavia Pre, then day nurse and already elderly, told Sister Bernardine at the end of the second week that Timothy Hesk had, in her opinion, become a small adult in the span of one night, that she had cared for orphan children 37 years and had never seen this kind of change in a child, and that she did not know whether to be pleased or troubled.
Sister Bernardine wrote in the notebook that she had said to Sister Octavia that she was troubled. Sister Octavia had said in reply that she was troubled too, but that she did not know what to be troubled about, and that until they could name it, they should not name it.
Sister Bernardine wrote that she agreed with this at the time and that she has come to regret the agreement. She believes that if she had named what she was troubled about in October 1923, and if she had gone to Mother Vitilene Cork with what she suspected, and if the two of them had gone into the punishment room together and opened the iron door in the floor, six children would still be alive.
But she did not name it. Neither did Sister Octavia. And by the end of October, Timothy Oid Hesk was going about his life at St. Ans as a boy who had learned an early and unusual lesson about self-control and who was by all outward measures a model child.
The sisters praised him. Mother Cork mentioned him in a formal report to the diocese for the month of October as an example of the good work the sisters were doing with difficult cases.
And Timothy, meanwhile, had begun very quietly to pay attention to which other children in the orphanage were the sort who might in the near future be sent to the punishment room.
Ephraim Ola was eight in October 1923. He was small, freckled, quick-tempered, and had been at St. Ans two years, since the death of his father in a farm accident in Butler County and the placement of the boy by an overwhelmed and unrelated widow who had briefly taken him in.
Ephraim was, in the assessment of the sisters, a difficult child. He was prone to fighting. He had bitten another boy on the arm in the summer of 1923. He had thrown a stone at Sister Vera Jump in September and had missed her by a foot. He had already been to the punishment room twice that year.
On the evening of October 22, 1923, 11 days after Timothy had spent his own night in the punishment room, Ephraim got into a fight with an older boy in the washroom. Both were bloodied. Sister Bernardine broke it up.
The older boy was disciplined with three strokes on the palm of his hand. Ephraim, whose record was already unfavorable and who was, in the opinion of the sisters, showing a pattern of aggression that required a more serious response, was sentenced to a night in the punishment room.
Sister Bernardine walked him down. She noted later that Timothy had been in the corridor outside the upper cellar as she walked Ephraim past, and that Timothy had smiled at her, and that she had not at the time thought anything of the smile. She noted that this was because she had not yet learned to be afraid of the smile.
She put Ephraim in the punishment room. She showed him the iron cot. She closed the oak door. She drew the iron bolt. She went upstairs. It was again an ordinary October evening. She slept without dream.
At 6:15 the following morning, she went down to the upper cellar, opened the trapdoor, descended the narrow wooden stair, and drew back the iron bolt on the oak door of the punishment room. She opened the door. The room was empty.
There was no one on the cot, no one at the window, no one behind the door. Sister Bernardine walked in. She looked under the cot. There was no space under the cot. The cot was iron, six inches off the floor, with no gap large enough for a rabbit.
She looked at the small high window. The window was closed. The window had never opened. The window was a fixed pane of glass in an iron frame, and the iron frame was set into the stone wall, and the window well outside was covered by a heavy iron grate that had not been disturbed.
She checked the grate later. It had not been disturbed for years. There was a pattern of leaves and small twigs in it that indicated it had not been lifted since the previous autumn.
Sister Bernardine went back into the room. She stood in the center of it. She looked at the iron door in the floor. She writes in the notebook entry describing this morning that she stood and looked at the iron door in the floor for what she thinks was three or four minutes.
She writes that she did not touch it. She writes that she did not in that moment believe that the door had been opened, or that Ephraim had gone through it, or that the door had anything at all to do with the disappearance of the boy.
She writes that she did not believe this because she could see plainly that the iron door was still flush with the flagstones, that the iron ring in its top was still folded flat, and that there was no scuff, no drag, no scratch, and no mark of any kind on the stone around the door to indicate that the door had been lifted.
She writes that she was confident, standing in the punishment room at 6:20 on the morning of October 23, that the iron door in the floor had not been opened. She was confident of this observation for six weeks. She was confident of it until the second disappearance, in June 1924.
She was confident of it, she writes in her notebook, right up until the moment she saw at the bottom edge of the iron ring, so small and so faint that it could only be seen when the morning light struck the floor at a particular angle, a single dark grain of what appeared to be coarse coal dust.
She saw it on the morning of the second disappearance in June. She looked then at the corresponding position on the ring after Ephraim's disappearance in October, in the memory of that morning.
She wrote that she could not now be certain in retrospect whether there had been a similar grain in October and she had missed it, or whether the grain in June was the first one and the ring had been clean in October.
She wrote that she could no longer trust her own memory of the October morning. She could only trust what she had seen: that the room was empty, that the iron bolt had been drawn from outside, that the window was intact and had not been used, and that a small boy of eight named Ephraim Ola had been in the room at eight the previous evening and was not in the room at 6:15 the following morning.
There was no ordinary explanation for this absence.
She went upstairs. She went to Mother Vitilene Cork. Mother Cork listened. Mother Cork went down to the cellar with her and looked at the empty room.
Mother Cork asked her the questions a superior would ask. Had the door been locked? It had been. Had the window been checked? It had. Was there any place a boy could have concealed himself? There was not.
Mother Cork asked whether the boy had been in the room when Sister Bernardine had locked it the previous night. Sister Bernardine said yes. She was certain she had walked the boy in, shown him the cot, seen him sit on it, closed the door, and drawn the bolt.
Mother Cork went upstairs. She sent for Constable Willard Crup, who arrived within an hour. He examined the room, the window, the door. He interviewed Sister Bernardine. He interviewed Sister Vera Jump. He interviewed the older boy who had been in the fight with Ephraim. He interviewed Marvin Hos.
He interviewed the boy Timothy. Timothy told the constable that he did not know Ephraim well. Timothy told the constable that Ephraim had seemed sad recently in the days before he was sent to the punishment room, and that he, Timothy, had heard Ephraim say more than once that he wished he could run away from St. Ans and find his father, whom he had not fully accepted as dead.
The constable wrote this down. It became the working theory of the disappearance. Ephraim had somehow gotten out of the punishment room, run away, and would surely be found on the road to Butler County. Ephraim was never found.
Marta Vay was seven in June 1924. She had been at St. Ans four years, since her mother died of tuberculosis in a mill town near Erie. She was quiet and timid, with pale hair and a stammer that had worsened at the orphanage.
She was not, by the sisters' assessment, a difficult child, but she was prone to nightmares and had, over the previous winter, developed a habit of sleepwalking. Twice the sisters had found her wandering the second-floor corridor in the small hours. Once she had gone as far as the kitchen.
On the night of June 8, 1924, she was found by Sister Bernardine at the top of the stair to the upper cellar, in her nightgown, with her hand on the door latch, apparently attempting to go down. Sister Bernardine took her back to bed.
She discussed it the next morning with Mother Cork, who instructed that the matter be watched more closely. And later that same morning, Timothy, then nine and a half and considered by the sisters one of the more responsible older children, came to Sister Bernardine and asked very politely whether he might speak with her.
Sister Bernardine writes that she took him into the small parlor by the chapel and closed the door. He sat across from her in a wooden chair, hands in his lap. He looked at her, she writes, with the eyes of a boy of nine and the composure of a man of 40.
He said to her that he had been thinking about Marta, and that he was worried about her, and that he believed she was going to hurt herself soon if she was not corrected. He said she had been sleepwalking more. He said she had told him the previous week that she wanted to leave the orphanage the way Ephraim had.
He said he thought if Marta were given a night in the punishment room to feel the seriousness of the situation, she might come out of it more careful with herself. He said this, Sister Bernardine writes, with a look of grave concern on his young face.
Sister Bernardine writes that she thanked Timothy for his observations, said she would think about them, and watched him leave the parlor with the beginning of a feeling in her stomach that she did not at the time know how to name.
Mother Cork, however, was persuaded. Marta had been found at the cellar stair, and the stair was dangerous. A night in the punishment room might, as Timothy had suggested, impress upon the girl the seriousness of her wandering, and would keep her locked in a room from which she could not walk into the stair.
On the evening of June 10, 1924, Sister Vera Jump walked Marta down the wooden stair, showed her the iron cot, and closed the oak door. The next morning at six, Sister Vera drew the bolt, opened the door, and found the room empty.
Constable Crup came again. He examined the room again, asked the same questions, and recorded the same answers. He wrote at the end of the second investigation that Marta had been a sleepwalker, must have somehow got out of the room in the night, must have wandered off, and would likely be found. She was not.
On the morning of June 11, 1924, Sister Bernardine walked into the punishment room after Constable Crup had left. She knelt on the flagstones near the iron door. She looked at the ring.
At the bottom edge of the ring, where it lay folded flat against the iron, she saw a small dark grain that was not part of the iron and had not been on the ring the last time she had looked. She did not pick it up. She did not touch it. She looked at it a long time.
Then she stood up, went back to her room, and began the notebook entry that becomes in Ren's manuscript the moment Sister Bernardine Vel begins to understand what has been happening in her orphanage.
She wrote that Timothy had suggested Marta be sent to the punishment room. She wrote that Marta had been sent. She wrote that Marta had disappeared. And she wrote, as a matter of ordinary observation and not yet of accusation, that Timothy had known Ephraim was thinking of running away, and that Timothy had suggested Marta be corrected.
In both cases the child had been placed in the punishment room in the week before disappearance, and in both cases the placement had followed an intervention or comment from Timothy.
She wrote that this was most likely a coincidence. She wrote that she did not want to think what she was thinking. She wrote that she would watch, would say nothing yet, and would try to notice without seeming to notice what Timothy said and did over the next several months.
She wrote that she prayed there would be no third disappearance. And she prayed for Ephraim and for Marta, that they were somewhere warm, somewhere fed, somewhere alive. Then she closed the notebook and went down to help serve the evening meal.
And Timothy sat at the boys' table and ate his soup and read a book about horses a donor had given the orphanage the previous Christmas. He did not look up at Sister Bernardine, and she did not look at him, but she watched him. She did not stop watching him until the day she went down into the punishment room alone in December 1927.
Hollis Prime was ten in November 1924. He had a temper and had been to the punishment room three times already that year. On the afternoon of November 18, he pushed a younger boy down the wooden stair leading from the chapel to the ground floor. The younger boy suffered a bad bruise on his hip but was not seriously hurt.
Sister Bernardine, who saw it from the top of the stair, said nothing to Hollis, and instead went to Mother Cork with a formal complaint. Mother Cork ordered a night in the punishment room. Sister Bernardine walked Hollis down herself that evening.
As she walked him past the boys' dormitory, Timothy was sitting on his bed reading. Timothy looked up as they passed and nodded very slightly at Sister Bernardine, and she had to stop in the corridor for a full minute and steady herself against the wall before she could continue down with Hollis.
She writes that before the nod she had not been sure. After the nod, she was sure.
Hollis Prime was in the punishment room at nine in the evening on November 18, 1924. He was not in the punishment room at 6:15 the following morning. The room was empty. The bolt had been drawn from outside. The window was intact. At the bottom edge of the iron ring was a second dark grain, slightly larger than the first two. Sister Bernardine noted its size in her notebook.
Cornelia Wade was six in March 1925. She wet the bed. This was a common problem in the dormitory and not ordinarily an offense that led to the punishment room. But Cornelia wet the bed for 11 consecutive nights in early March, and Sister Netti Corv, the dormitory sister, was becoming exhausted by the laundry.
Timothy Oid Hesk, who was now ten years old, stopped Sister Bernardine in the corridor on the afternoon of March 12 and told her very quietly that he had heard Cornelia say the previous night that she wet the bed on purpose because she wanted the sisters to be angry with her.
He said that he believed the girl was manipulating the sisters. He said that a night in the punishment room might help her. He said this, Sister Bernardine writes, without looking away from her face. And she writes that his eyes at that moment were the eyes of an accountant who was toting a ledger.
Cornelia Wade went into the punishment room on the night of March 14, 1925. She was six years old. She was terrified. Sister Bernardine writes that she carried the girl down the stair because Cornelia was too frightened to walk.
She sat with her on the iron cot for a full hour, prayed with her, told her the sisters would come back in the morning, and told her she loved her. Cornelia stopped crying. Eventually, Sister Bernardine left the punishment room at ten. She drew the bolt.
At 6:15 the next morning, the room was empty.
By the spring of 1925, Sister Bernardine had four missing children, four locked and empty punishment rooms, four visits from Constable Crup, and four reports filed by Mother Cork to the Diocese of Erie in careful institutional language that did not mention the iron door in the floor and did not mention Timothy Oid Hesk.
The reports treated each disappearance as separate. The orphanage's formal position was that four children had run away over an 18-month period. This was not a comfortable position.
Mother Cork was aware in her letters to the bishop that four runaways in 18 months was an unusual figure and that the diocese was going to become concerned. She wrote to the bishop in April 1925 to request a meeting. The bishop's secretary wrote back to reschedule twice, and the meeting was never held.
Sister Bernardine did not write to the bishop. Sister Bernardine wrote in her private notebook. She wrote that she was afraid to bring what she knew to Mother Cork because she was not in the spring of 1925 entirely certain of what she knew.
She wrote that she had a pattern and a suspicion and nothing else. She wrote that a suspicion against a ten-year-old boy without evidence in a Catholic institution in 1925 would not be taken seriously by any authority, would not be acted upon, and would most likely result in her own transfer to another convent and in the continuation of whatever was happening at St. Ans without her presence to observe it.
She wrote that she believed it was more useful to remain, to watch, to record, and to try to understand than to raise an accusation that would be dismissed. She wrote that she was not certain she had the theology for the accusation.
She wrote that the church had teachings about the nature of evil and about the operation of malign forces in the world, but that these teachings in her reading were about grown men and women who had turned themselves toward evil by their own free choice.
She wrote that she did not know what to do with a ten-year-old boy who had gone into a punishment room for the theft of a piece of bread and had come out different. She wrote that the theology did not fit the case and that she was going to have to think about it on her own.
She began in April 1925 a series of interviews with Timothy under the cover of ordinary spiritual direction. It was the practice of the sisters to meet privately with each older child once a month for a conversation about prayer life and behavior. Sister Bernardine took over Timothy's monthly meeting from Sister Netti Corv in April.
She wrote that she conducted it in the small parlor by the chapel, began by asking Timothy about his prayers, and then gently asked him about the night he had spent in the punishment room in October 1923.
Timothy answered. He was, Sister Bernardine writes, entirely willing to talk about that night. He did not seem uncomfortable or defensive. He described the evening as she had in her own notebook. He had gone in with her, sat on the cot, cried a while, and eventually fallen asleep.
He had dreamed, he said, of a very old thing. He said it as a boy might describe any dream. He said that in the dream the very old thing had come up through the floor of the punishment room, had sat with him a long time on the cot, and had talked with him.
Sister Bernardine asked what they had talked about. Timothy said the very old thing was hungry. She asked what it had been hungry for. Timothy considered this for what she wrote was a long time.
He said finally that it had been hungry for what was underneath. He said the phrase in a way Sister Bernardine writes she understood to be significant. She asked what was underneath.
Timothy said he was not sure, but that the very old thing had been given only a small amount of it over a long time, and had learned to want more, and that he, Timothy, was going to be the one to provide it, because the very old thing had said that he would, and that if he did, it would allow him to grow up, and that if he did not, it would take him instead.
Sister Bernardine writes that she asked Timothy whether he had understood at nine years old that this had been a dream. And Timothy had looked at her with the composure he had carried ever since October and had said no. He had known at nine years old that this had not been a dream.
He said that a dream ends when you wake up. He said that this had not ended.
Sister Bernardine writes that she was silent a long time after this. Timothy sat across from her, hands folded. She asked whether he had known Ephraim was going to disappear. Timothy said yes. She asked whether he had known Marta was going to disappear. Timothy said yes. She asked about Hollis and Cornelia. Timothy said yes to both.
She asked whether he was the one who had caused their disappearances. After a pause of what Sister Bernardine writes was perhaps 30 seconds, during which Timothy looked past her shoulder at the small window over the chapel door and did not blink, Timothy said he was not the one.
He said the very old thing was the one. He said he had only pointed, and the very old thing had followed his pointing. He said this was the arrangement, that the arrangement was not his to change, and that it was going to continue until the very old thing was full, or until he was grown, whichever came first.
He did not know how many children the very old thing would need before it was full. He said he hoped it would not be many more. He said that he was sorry, and he said it, Sister Bernardine writes, with what she believed was genuine sorrow. This was the observation that made her most afraid.
She ended the interview. She sent Timothy back to the dormitory. She sat in the parlor a long time. She wrote a long entry that evening, dating it April 27, 1925.
She wrote at the end that she had two competing obligations, one to the four missing children and their memory, and one to the other 23 children then at St. Ans, and that any action she took against Timothy would need to satisfy both, and that she did not yet see what such an action could be.
Jonas Bril was eight in September 1926. He had been at St. Ans a year. He was a curious, cheerful boy who liked to take things apart. He had disassembled a mantel clock in the sisters' parlor that summer and had not been able to put it back together. He had done it on his own initiative and had confessed immediately.
Sister Bernardine had not thought it worthy of the punishment room. Mother Cork agreed. But on September 12, 1926, Timothy stopped Mother Cork in the corridor outside the chapel and told her very respectfully that he had seen Jonas the previous evening opening the back of a wall clock in the schoolroom.
He said he worried Jonas would hurt himself with the mechanism or the glass, and that he thought Jonas needed a serious correction before he did serious damage. Mother Cork thanked Timothy for his concern.
Mother Cork went into the schoolroom that afternoon and did in fact find that the back of the wall clock had been recently removed and replaced. She spoke with Jonas, who admitted to it. On the evening of September 14, 1926, Jonas Bril was sent to the punishment room.
Sister Bernardine did not walk him down. Sister Netti Corv walked him down. Sister Bernardine writes that she had by then made a policy of avoiding whenever she could the act of walking a child down to the punishment room, and that when she could not avoid it, she prayed the entire way.
She was avoiding, she writes, the moment at which she would have to place a specific named child on the iron cot and close the oak door and draw the bolt. She writes that she was aware this was a form of moral cowardice. She writes that she prayed about it. She writes that she does not know what else she could have done in the spring of 1926 that she was not already trying to do.
On September 15, 1926, the punishment room was empty. Constable Crup came. Constable Crup wrote his fifth report in three years and closed the fifth investigation with the same conclusion. Runaway.
Adah Morrow was nine in July 1927. She was the last. She was a bright, talkative girl with dark braids and a slight limp from a childhood illness. She had been at St. Ans since she was five. She was a favorite of Sister Bernardine's and of Sister Octavia's.
She was, in the assessment of every sister at St. Ans, a wonderful child. She had never been to the punishment room. She had never done anything to warrant a visit.
On July 6, 1927, Timothy, now 12 and a half and grown taller and quieter and more composed, came to Mother Cork in her office and asked whether he might speak with her about something serious. Mother Cork received him. Timothy sat in the chair across from her desk.
He told her that he had over the previous three weeks seen Adah Morrow with a small paring knife from the kitchen, and that Adah had told him she was thinking of using it to cut her own hand in order to make the sisters feel sorry for her and pay more attention to her.
Timothy said he had tried to talk her out of it and had failed. He said he was afraid Adah was going to do serious injury to herself. He said a night in the punishment room to shock her out of the intent was the only way to prevent it.
He said this, Mother Cork later described to Sister Leonor Mast, with the demeanor of a person twice his age.
Mother Cork searched Adah Morrow that afternoon and did not find a paring knife. She asked Adah about it. Adah denied it flatly, was frightened, cried. Mother Cork asked Timothy about the discrepancy. Timothy said that Adah must have hidden the knife or thrown it out when she had suspected he might report her. Timothy said that Adah was a very clever girl and that this was why he was so worried about her.
Mother Cork, Sister Leonor later recalled, hesitated a full day. Then she decided that a night in the punishment room, given Timothy's testimony and the seriousness of the alleged intent, was warranted.
On the evening of July 8, 1927, Sister Vera Jump walked Adah Morrow down the wooden stair, showed her the iron cot, and closed the oak door. Adah was crying. Adah asked Sister Vera repeatedly why she was being sent to the punishment room. Sister Vera did not answer, because Sister Vera was not sure of the answer herself.
At 6:15 the following morning, the room was empty.
Sister Bernardine went down alone. She had over the previous week formed an idea about the iron door in the floor and had determined that if there was another disappearance, she would test it. She knelt on the flagstones. She looked at the iron ring.
At the bottom edge of the ring was a small pile of dark grit. She measured it with her thumb against the stone. It was larger than the previous grain, she wrote, the size of a small currant.
She lifted the ring. It came up easily, folded on a hinge, never welded shut. She pulled. The iron door rose on its own hinge along the far edge. She rested it back against the flagstones on the north side. She looked down.
There was a shaft. It descended straight down into darkness. She could smell the third cellar for the first time in her life.
She writes that the smell was not damp, not mold, not sewage, not earth. She writes that the smell was most closely that of a room used over a very long period for the storage of something living and never ventilated. She writes that the smell was not entirely bad. She writes that this observation frightened her more than any other she had made in four years.
She lowered the iron door. She let the ring fold flat. She stood up, walked out of the punishment room, drew the bolt from outside, and climbed the wooden stair.
She wrote in the notebook that evening that she now understood the arrangement. She wrote that the third cellar was the mouth, the punishment room was the throat, and Timothy was the tongue. The sound of a frightened child crying and asking for forgiveness and knocking on the iron door was the food.
She wrote that the very old thing below had learned through Timothy that it could be given more than the small ration it had received from the hospital in the previous century, that it had adjusted its expectations, and that the adjustment could not be unmade without closing the plug.
She did not know what closing the plug entailed, but she believed she was going to have to find out. She wrote that she had five months to prepare.
She was going to spend them studying the diagram she had made that morning of the shaft and the room below, which she had descended into alone before she had lowered the iron door and left. She wrote that she had spent nine minutes in the third cellar.
She had counted the marks on the walls from the shaft opening around and back to the shaft opening again, running her finger along the carved band as she counted. She had touched the depression in the floor and found it warm to the palm, warmer than the surrounding stone.
Warm in a way, she wrote, that was not the warmth of a heated thing, but the warmth of a thing that had a temperature of its own, and had been holding that temperature for a very long time.
She wrote that she had not been alone in the third cellar. Whatever else had been there had not touched her, had not spoken to her, and had not, so far as she could tell, moved. It had watched her, and it had let her leave, because it wanted her to come back.
Sister Bernardine spent the autumn of 1927 preparing. She writes that she spent long afternoons in the small library of the diocese in Erie on days when she could arrange to travel, consulting texts on the rite of exorcism and on the sealing of consecrated ground.
She writes that none of the texts described anything that resembled the third cellar under St. Ans, and that she came to believe what she was dealing with was older than the rite of exorcism and older than any theology available to her.
She writes that she did, however, find in an old Latin manual, whose author and date she recorded but which Ren was never able to identify, a passage describing the sealing of a threshold by the physical restoration of a stone that had once been placed over it and had been moved.
The passage did not describe an incantation or a prayer. It described only the restoration of the stone. It said the stone had to be placed back in the exact position it had held before, that the placement had to be made by a person who understood what was being sealed, and that the sealing carried a cost to the person making it.
The cost was not in every case death, but for a threshold that had been open a long time, the cost tended toward death. This had been known to the persons who had in past centuries undertaken such sealings, and they had nonetheless undertaken them.
Sister Bernardine writes that this passage was, in her judgment, the description of what was required. She read it three times and made her decision.
She continued her ordinary duties through the autumn. She said nothing to Mother Cork. She said nothing to Sister Leonor Mast, though she wrote that she was tempted several times, because Leonor was a younger sister of whom Sister Bernardine had grown fond and to whom she felt some obligation of instruction.
In the end she told Sister Leonor only one thing. She told her three weeks before she went down into the cellar that the plug was the mouth, not the door, and that if anything happened to her, Leonor should not attempt to open it.
Sister Leonor said in her 1962 interview with Ren that she had not at the time understood what Sister Bernardine had meant. She had nodded. She had not asked. In the years since, she had understood, and had carried the understanding without ever telling anyone else in the order.
Sister Bernardine went down on the night of December 9, 1927. She waited until the other sisters had gone to bed. She dressed in her habit. She took a lantern, her private notebook, and a small brass cross her mother had given her at her final vows.
She descended to the upper cellar, and then the wooden stair to the punishment room. She drew the bolt from outside, closed the oak door, and drew the bolt again on the inside, because the bolt on the outside was not the important bolt tonight. She wanted, she writes, the room to be locked in a way that expressed a clear intention.
She lifted the iron ring. She raised the iron door in the floor. She descended the shaft on the small iron rung set into the wall, which she had seen on her previous descent and had, she writes, tested for rust and found sound.
She reached the third cellar. She stooped. She walked to the shallow depression at the center of the floor. She knelt beside it, and she does not know how long she was in the third cellar, because when she came out and looked at the small watch she had left on the cot, more than three hours had passed, and she does not remember the time passing.
What she remembers is that the very old thing spoke to her. She writes that it did not speak in a voice, did not use language, but made itself understood the way a very cold room communicates the cold to a body that has entered it.
She writes that the very old thing offered her an arrangement. She declined it. It offered a second, differently phrased. She declined that. The very old thing then became, in her word, quiet, and she understood the quiet to be a kind of waiting.
She writes that at some point during the three hours she had moved to the shallow depression in the floor, placed her small brass cross into the center of it, and spoken aloud the sentence from the Latin manual, which she translated into English for the notebook.
The sentence reads that this threshold is closed by the person now speaking, and that the closure is made in the name of the seven children whose names follow.
She wrote the seven names. She listed Timothy first. She listed Ephraim, Marta, Hollis, Cornelia, Jonas, and Adah. She writes that when she spoke Timothy's name aloud, the quiet in the third cellar became attentive. She was afraid. Then she continued anyway.
At the end of the sentence, the very old thing withdrew. The withdrawal was not a movement, but a change in the density of the room. She felt it. She stood up. She left the small brass cross in the depression. She climbed the shaft. She pulled the iron door closed above her head and let the ring fold flat.
And she writes that at that moment, at the exact moment the iron door closed and the ring lay flat against the iron of the door, she felt a fine dark grit fall against her face and into her mouth and into her lungs. She coughed a long time. When she stopped coughing, she went upstairs to bed and slept for 11 hours.
She woke on December 10. She began to cough that morning and coughed dark grit into her handkerchief through the day. The grit was fine, dark, and dry, and it accumulated in the handkerchief without staining it in the way soot or coal dust would have stained it.
She continued to write in the notebook. She wrote that she believed the plug had held. She wrote that she believed Timothy was released. She wrote that she believed the grit in her lungs was the cost that the Latin manual had described. She wrote that she was at peace with the cost.
She wrote her final entry on the evening of December 11. She wrote that she was tired, that she was going to sleep, and that if she did not wake, she wanted whoever read the notebook to know that the plug was in position, and that the sister should never, under any circumstance, open the iron door in the floor of the punishment room again.
She died in the early hours of December 12, 1927.
Dr. Ambrose Fothergill was called. He recorded the cause of death as pneumonia. He noted in his private log book, which Ren found in 1971, that Sister Bernardine Vel had coughed up in his examination of her body a fine dark grit that resembled coarse coal dust but was not coal dust, and that he had, upon completing his examination, washed his hands twice, gone home, and spoken to no one about the grit.
Timothy Oid Hesk was 13 when Sister Bernardine died. He was, per Sister Leonor Mast's later account, informed of her death by Mother Cork at breakfast on December 12, 1927. He nodded. He did not cry. He asked politely whether the sisters would be all right.
Sister Leonor recalled that Mother Cork had said yes, and that Timothy had returned to his oatmeal, eaten it slowly, and gone to his lessons at the ordinary time.
In the following weeks, the sisters observed a small change in Timothy. Sister Octavia Pre described it in her 1939 letter to her nephew in Scranton. She wrote that Timothy had in the days after Sister Bernardine died seemed for the first time in four years to be a boy of 13.
The composure he had carried had softened. He had become briefly more ordinary. She wrote that she had thought at the time he was mourning Sister Bernardine, and had been touched.
She wrote that in retrospect she believed he had been discovering that he was no longer required to be composed, and that the discovery had come as a relief. She wrote that she did not know how to reconcile these two observations and had stopped trying.
In March 1928, three months after Sister Bernardine's death, a family in Pittsburgh named Hesk applied to St. Ans for adoption. They had recently lost a son of their own to a farm accident and were seeking a boy of about 14.
Timothy Oid Hesk was, by coincidence of surname, brought to their attention by Mother Cork in her first letter of response, though the Pittsburgh Hesks were, per all subsequent investigation by both Ren and Fusk, not related to Timothy in any traceable way.
The family visited St. Ans twice. On the second visit they met with Timothy. They asked him whether he would like to come with them. Timothy said yes. The adoption was finalized on March 22, 1928. Timothy left St. Ans on the afternoon of March 23. He was 14 years old.
The Hesks lost contact with St. Ans within two years. Mother Cork wrote to them in spring 1930 to inquire about Timothy's progress and received no reply. She wrote again in summer and received no reply.
In the autumn, she wrote to a parish in Pittsburgh asking whether the Hesks were still in residence. The parish priest replied that the Hesks had moved from their address on Federal Street the previous winter, that he did not know where they had gone, and that Timothy had been enrolled briefly in the parish school and withdrawn without notice.
Ralph Fusk located in 2010 a single verified record of Timothy Oid Hesk after 1928. It is a registration card at a boarding house in Cleveland, Ohio, dated May 1931. The card gives the age as 17 and the name as Timothy Hesk, with no middle name. It records that the resident stayed six weeks, paid his rent in cash, and left without a forwarding address.
There is no further record. Fusk could find no marriage license, no draft registration, no employment record, no death certificate, no census entry. If Timothy Oid Hesk moved through the 20th century under his own name, he left none of the ordinary traces. If he changed his name, he did so completely and without any surviving link to the boy who left St. Ans in 1928.
He would be, if he is still living, 111 years old.
St. Ans continued as an orphanage for 20 more years. There were no further disappearances.
Sister Leonor Mast, in her interview with Ren, said that in the years after Sister Bernardine's death she had gone down into the punishment room on 11 separate occasions to satisfy herself, that the iron door in the floor remained flush, and that the ring remained folded flat.
She said that on every occasion the door and the ring were as they had been. She had never lifted the ring. Sister Bernardine had told her not to, and she had honored the instruction and had never regretted honoring it.
St. Ans closed in 1948 when the state opened a new facility in Erie and the children were transferred. The building was sold to a private owner in 1952 and used as a feed and grain warehouse until a fire of undetermined cause burned the upper floors in 1971.
The stone lower structure survived. The foundation and cellars remain beneath rubble on private forestry land. Kendale County was dissolved in 1954. Its records were absorbed by two surrounding counties in wooden crates whose cataloging continues to be, in the words of retired records clerk Loretta Thorp, interviewed by Fusk in 2012, a slow and unfinished project.
Ren spent 17 years on the material. He interviewed Sister Leonor Mast at length in 1962. He located the Fothergill log book in 1971. He tracked down Sister Octavia Pre's nephew and obtained the 1939 letter. In 1973 he visited the diocesan archive in Erie 11 times and read Sister Bernardine's notebook cover to cover at least 20 times.
Each reading, he wrote, revealed a small observation he had not previously noticed. His manuscript, 114 pages, was finished in 1985 and was never published.
He wrote in his introduction that he had not sought publication because he was not in the end prepared to invite readers to a body of material for which he had no framework of explanation. A story such as Sister Bernardine's, presented without a framework, risks becoming entertainment, and Sister Bernardine and the six children who had vanished into the third cellar under St. Ans had not, in his view, deserved to become entertainment.
Ren donated the manuscript, along with the interview transcripts and collected letters, to the special collections of the small Catholic college where he had taught for the last 20 years of his career. He requested it be cataloged as personal research papers and that access be granted on request to serious researchers only. The college honored the request.
In 2008, 17 years after Ren's death, Ralph Fusk, an independent researcher in Erie, requested access. Fusk had been working on the history of Catholic institutional care in Western Pennsylvania and had come across a reference to Ren's manuscript in a footnote to a graduate thesis. He read the manuscript over four days in the college reading room.
Fusk continued the work. He interviewed elderly former staff who had known St. Ans in its last years. He found Loretta Thorp. He visited the site in the spring of 2009. He walked the foundation and identified the stone footings of the punishment room. He did not attempt the cellar entrance.
He wrote in a letter to a colleague that he had stood on the rubble covering what had once been the wooden stair, that he had thought about lifting a stone, and that he had not. He wrote that his reasoning was practical. If the plug had held for 100 years, he was not the person qualified to test it. Sister Bernardine had earned the closure with her life, and he did not intend to unearn it with his curiosity.
The plug, as of Fusk's visit, had held for 82 years. It has now held for 98.
The upper floors are gone. The cellars remain sealed under rubble and the weight of a collapsed floor on private forestry land in what used to be Kendale County and is now quietly part of two other counties, unmarked on any map, unlisted on any register, unknown to anyone who has not read Sister Bernardine's notebook or Ren's manuscript or Fusk's research files.
Whether the plug still holds is not verifiable. The last person to check was Sister Leonor Mast, who died in 1991 at the age of 92, and her last recorded visit to the punishment room was in 1947, three months before St. Ans closed.
Whether Timothy Oid Hesk is still alive somewhere at 111 is not answerable. Whether the six children he pointed to are still in some sense on the other side of the plug is not answerable either.
Sister Bernardine's notebook does not describe what she believed happened to the children on the other side. It describes only that she named them in her sealing sentence and believed the naming had counted for something.
Ralph Fusk, when interviewed by a local newspaper in 2018 about his ongoing research and asked whether he intended to open the cellar, said that he did not, never would, and that anyone who read Sister Bernardine's notebook would understand why.
He added that if the plug ever were opened, by a curious owner of the forestry land, by an unlucky hiker who lifted the wrong stone, or by a well-meaning historian who did not know what they were about to disturb, he would want that person to have read, before they made the attempt, at least the final page of Sister Bernardine's notebook.
In his transcription, it reads that the plug is not the door, but the mouth, and that the very old thing on the other side has been fed the equivalent of an apology and a small brass cross and the last two days of a woman's breath.
And that this ration will suffice for a very long time, but a very long time is not forever. And whoever comes next should know before they do anything what they are agreeing to feed.