In the autumn of 1887, a Pennsylvania Dutch surveyor named Obadiah Reinhardt was hired by a Camden railroad concern to survey a parcel of land deep in the New Jersey Pine Barrens. He was 66 years old, a careful and unsuperstitious man who had spent forty years measuring property lines. The settlement he was sent to, called Eberly’s Crossing, no longer appears on any map.
The settlement was home to three families, all of Pennsylvania Dutch descent, who had moved from the Lehigh Valley in the 1850s to work a bog iron operation that had since closed. Eight adults lived there in October of 1887. They were the Hummelsteins, the Schönfeldts, and the Pretz family. Reinhardt was put up in the cleaned-out smokehouse and began his work on the morning of October 4th.
The first three days were ordinary. He took his measurements and returned each evening to his cot. On the third evening, the head of the largest family, Lebrecht Hummelstein, came to sit with him. As he was leaving, Lebrecht stopped at the door and said in German, "Do not be in the trees after the bell."
Reinhardt asked what bell. There was no church in the settlement, no bell tower, and no bell of any kind that he had seen. Lebrecht only replied, "You will hear it," and walked out.
On the fourth day, in the late afternoon, Reinhardt heard it. He was bent over his transit when a single, low, brassy tone came across the trees. It sounded like a handbell, but deeper, and it was held for too long. He noted the time in his field book: 4:22 in the afternoon. He packed his instruments and walked back faster than usual.
That evening, Lebrecht came again. He told Reinhardt that the bell rang between 4:00 and 5:00 in the afternoon, though not every day. When it rang, a person had to be inside a house with a closed door before the sun went down. The door could not be opened, no matter what was heard, until the sun had been up for one full hour the next morning.
Reinhardt asked what happened if a person did not follow the rule. Lebrecht said his brother had stayed out one night in 1863. They found his clothes folded on the table in the meeting room the next morning. He never came back.
The work continued over the next several days. The bell did not ring again for a while, but small things began to happen. On the morning of the 7th, Reinhardt found his transit turned around, facing the trees instead of the house. On the morning of the 8th, the eight black chickens kept by Lebrecht’s wife, Wilhelmina, stood in a loose circle in the yard, all facing outward, away from the center. They did not move until Wilhelmina clapped her hands.
On the evening of the 9th, Reinhardt heard a soft, dragging sound against the outside wall of the smokehouse. In the morning, he found a long, faint scuff in the wood at about the height of his shoulder.
On the 10th of October, the bell rang again. Reinhardt was about a mile and a half from the settlement when the sound came at 3:58 in the afternoon. As he started back, the woods went silent. Every animal seemed to hold its breath. Then he heard a footstep behind him. A pause. Another footstep.
He did not turn around. He understood that turning around was what the woods wanted him to do. The steps matched his pace for nearly twenty minutes, never closer and never farther. They stopped only when he came out of the trees at the edge of the settlement.
That night, something came to the door of the smokehouse. A voice spoke in perfect English with no accent at all. It said, "Please open the door. I am cold." Reinhardt did not open it. The voice pleaded, then said his name, "Obadiah," the way his mother had said it. His mother had been dead for nineteen years.
In the morning, there were no footprints in the dew-soft ground. When he went to the main house, Wilhelmina asked him, "Who did it call?" He told her. She nodded and said, "Mine called my sister last winter. My sister has been dead since before we came here."
Reinhardt stayed nine more days. He later told his grandson that he stayed because the work was not finished, and because he wanted to know.
The voices came to his door nearly every night. On the 12th, a voice claimed to be a lost surveyor and used the names of two engineers Reinhardt had met in Camden. On the 15th, the voice did not speak at all. It only breathed, slowly, deeply, for most of the night. Each breath took nearly twelve seconds.
On the 18th, the voice was Wilhelmina’s. It cried that her husband had fallen in the creek and was hurt. Reinhardt almost opened the door. He had his hand on the bar, but he remembered the rule and took his hand away. In the morning, Wilhelmina was alive and well at her kitchen door.
On the 20th of October, Reinhardt’s last day of measurements, he found that one of his survey stakes had been moved six feet to the east. He looked through the trees toward the old bog iron forge, a quarter mile away. The door of the forge was open. He knew it had not been open when he first walked the parcel.
He walked toward the forge. Inside, in a column of pale October light falling through the collapsed roof, he saw a circle of small stones on the floor, each about the size of a fist. He counted eleven stones. He drew a diagram in his field book. Then he heard a single clear sound from somewhere inside the forge: a small bell, held for too long.
He turned and walked away. He did not run. The woods went silent again, and this time the steps behind him were faster. They got closer. He heard a dry, slow clicking sound, like two pieces of wood tapped together. Just when he knew he could not bear it, the bell from the forge rang one more time, far behind him, and whatever was at his shoulder turned and went back.
When he reached the main house, Lebrecht asked him, "Which one were you at?" Reinhardt said the forge. Lebrecht closed his eyes and said, "You saw the circle."
That afternoon, in the kitchen, the families told him the story. In 1849, a foreman at the ironworks had done something terrible to one of the workers. The other workers took matters into their own hands one night. They put the foreman into the forge and built up the fire. What came out of the forge afterward was not the foreman. It was not a thing they had a name for.
It had stood in the doorway and spoken in their own voices, using their wives’ names. It walked into the trees. It did not go far. It took three of the workers in the first month before Maria Pretz’s father figured out the rules. He built the circle of eleven stones on the forge floor as a kind of seam to hold the thing inside for most of the day. A twelfth stone was kept out, held back at the house, so the families would know the count if any of the stones were moved.
The families had been keeping the lid on the thing for thirty-six years. Maria Pretz, who had been born at the settlement, had been taught the rules by her father. She married Reinhardt Pretz in 1874 and brought him there to keep the watch with her.
That evening, before sundown, Lebrecht and Reinhardt walked to the forge. Lebrecht walked around the building once, stopping at each corner to speak words in German that Reinhardt did not know. He checked the circle. All eleven stones were there. He barred the door from the outside, and they walked back to the settlement.
That night was the worst of all the nights. The voices came to the door of the smokehouse, but it was not just one voice. It was several. They spoke at once and took turns. They were the voices of Reinhardt’s mother, his father, a sister who had died of typhus in 1848, and a man he had worked with who had been gored by a bull in 1852.
They told him things only those people would have known. His mother said the name of the dog he had loved. His father told him the location of a buried box containing a letter Reinhardt had never sent. His sister sang a hymn they had sung together by the kitchen stove.
Around midnight, the voices began speaking to each other about him. They described what he was doing in real time. They could see him through the wood. He pressed his hands over his ears and recited the 23rd Psalm in Pennsylvania Dutch, over and over, until the dawn came.
He left Eberly’s Crossing the next morning, the 22nd of October. Lebrecht walked the first three miles with him. Before turning back, Lebrecht said, "Do not write of this to anyone. Do not put it in any book. The thing in the forge does not like to be spoken of. Speaking of it is a kind of opening."
Reinhardt kept the promise. He never wrote of it. He told the story once, on a porch in Lancaster County in the spring of 1912, to his grandson. He died in 1914 in his bed, a quiet and peaceful death.
The grandson went looking for Eberly’s Crossing in the autumn of 1928. At the post office in Chatsworth, the man told him the settlement had burned in the spring of 1901. The families had moved on in the late 1890s. He also said the grandson was the second person that year to ask about the place. A woman, older, who spoke German more than English, had come in the spring asking the same questions.
The grandson found the place. The houses were gone. The smokehouse was a black mark on the ground. The forge had been unbuilt by hand. The stones were stacked neatly in two long piles. The earth where the floor had been was bare. There was no circle of stones.
He stood on the spot where his grandfather had stood. He did not feel watched. He felt instead that he was standing in a place that had been emptied. About thirty feet from the corner of the foundation, he found a piece of dark gray stone, smooth on one side and rough on the other, about the size of a fist. He held it for a long time. Then he put it down exactly where he had picked it up and walked away without looking back.
As he was walking toward the road, the sun getting low, he heard it. A single low brassy tone, held too long, from somewhere behind him in the trees. He did not turn around. He kept walking. He reached his motor car just as the sun went down. He drove to Chatsworth and did not stop. He never went back to the Pine Barrens.
In the last year of his life, Obadiah Reinhardt told his grandson one final detail. On the morning he left Eberly’s Crossing, Lebrecht had given him a small thing wrapped in oilcloth. He was told not to open it for at least a year, and not to open it inside a house. He opened it nearly two years later, in the middle of a fallow pasture in full daylight. Inside was a small dried sprig of an herb he did not know, tied with a strip of white cloth.
He buried it that afternoon at the corner of the pasture under a flat stone. He told his grandson he did not know whether the herb had kept him safe or whether it was only a kindness from a man who knew nothing he gave could really help. But he was glad he had buried it carefully, just in case.