In the autumn of 1893, a farmer named Oren Threadgill sat down on a stump near the well on his property in the Missouri Ozarks and refused to leave it. He was 47 years old, a man who had spent his life leaning into a plow, with gray eyes and hands like split oak. He had a 40-acre farm on a slope above a hollow called Hollow Bend, where the maps went vague and the post road thinned into a wagon track.
The well was older than the cabin and older than the orchard. His grandfather, Othniel Threadgill, had dug it in the spring of 1841 with two hired men and a length of rope. They went deeper than anybody on that side of the county ever had. Neighbors said you could lower a candle on a string and the flame would burn down to a coal before it reached the water. Othniel had struck something hard at about 30 feet and kept going another 20 out of stubbornness.
That summer had been queer all season. Long dry stretches, then sudden hot rains that did not cool anything. The cicadas started early and would not quit. Oren's hired hand that year was a young man named Asa Crew, 23 years old, from Arkansas. He slept in the barn loft and took his supper in the kitchen with Oren and Oren's wife, Verla.
In the third week of August, Asa came into the kitchen with a bucket of water and set it down hard. He told Verla the well sounded different. He said the water sounded closer than it ought to be when he dropped the rope. And then he said he heard something else. He said he thought he heard breathing.
Verla Threadgill did not laugh at him. She had grown up in a household with little patience for foolishness, but she did not dismiss what she could not explain. She told Asa to go about his chores. When Oren came in around sundown, she told him what Asa had said. Oren ate his supper, then went out into the yard with a lantern and stood at the lip of the well for an hour.
When he came back in, his face was as gray as his hair. He said only one thing before going to bed. "We don't draw from that well again until I say so."
The next morning, Oren nailed oilcloth over the wooden lid of the well and wrapped fence wire around it three times. Then he sat down on a stump about 10 feet from the well with his shotgun across his knees. He sat there all day. He sat there all night. From that day until the day he disappeared, he was almost never more than 50 paces from the well.
A man's farm in the Ozarks in the 1890s was not a place where you could afford to sit on a stump. The corn needed bringing in. The hogs needed feeding. There was wood to cut for winter. But Oren Threadgill sat on his stump and watched the well. Asa did what work he could. He brought Oren his coffee in the morning and his supper in the evening.
The neighbors began to come around. The first was Hollis Pemberton, who farmed the next hollow over and had known Oren since they were boys. He came up the wagon track on a Tuesday morning in early September. He asked Oren what he was doing. Oren said he was watching the well. Hollis asked from what. Oren said, "From whatever comes up out of it."
That was all he would say. Hollis went home and told his wife. By Sunday at chapel, the whole county had heard that Oren Threadgill had stopped sleeping and would not leave his well.
In the second week of September, a circuit preacher named Cornelius Marbury rode out to the farm. Marbury was close to 70 years old and had known Oren's grandfather, Othniel. He rode around to the back of the cabin and sat on his mule, looking at Oren for a long while. Then he said, "Othniel never told you, did he? He never told you what he found down there."
Marbury got down and sat on a stump beside Oren. He told him that in the summer of 1860, Othniel had come to him at a camp meeting and told him a thing. Othniel said he had dug a well that took him down through three layers of rock and into something that was not rock. He said the men he hired heard a sound from the bottom of the hole before the water came up. The sound was like breathing. It stopped when the water came. Othniel thought maybe the water had come up to keep the sound down.
Othniel had sealed the well with a flat stone the size of a wagon wheel and laid a lid over it. He told nobody else as long as he lived. He told Marbury because he was old and because a man should not carry a thing like that into the ground alone.
Marbury told Oren he had prayed for that well every Sunday for 33 years. He figured if Othniel had sealed it, it would stay sealed. He said, "You will not open that well. You will not let anything else go down it. You will not let anything come up out of it. You keep that lid on. You keep that wire tight. And you do not look down into it no matter what you think you hear."
Marbury stayed for supper. When the meal was done, he blessed the house and the people in it. He blessed the cabin and the barn and the orchard and the springhouse. He did not bless the well. Verla noticed. She did not say anything.
Marbury rode away before full dark. He never came back. He died the following March of a chest cold. Whatever else he knew about Othniel Threadgill's well went with him.
The first hard frost came on the night of October 3rd. Oren was on his stump with a wool blanket around his shoulders and the shotgun across his knees. Verla had stopped trying to get him to come inside. She left a folded quilt on the back step every night. In the morning, the quilt would be down by the stump with him.
On the night of October 3rd, Asa Crew came down out of the barn loft around 2:00 in the morning, saddled his horse in the dark, and rode away. He left his last week's pay folded inside a tin cup on the kitchen windowsill with a note pinned to it. The note said, "Mrs. Threadgill, I am sorry. Last night I went out to use the privy, and I stood by the back fence, and I heard my brother's voice from down in your well. He has been dead since April. I cannot stay. I am sorry. Asa."
Verla folded the paper four times and put it in the pocket of her apron. She did not show it to Oren. She did not show it to anybody for years.
After Asa left, the weather turned. The leaves came down all at once in the second week of October. The ground hardened. The mornings smelled like iron. Oren moved his stump 3 feet closer to the well. He stopped shaving. Verla brought him a comb and a pair of scissors and asked if he would let her at least trim his beard. He let her. She sat on his stump beside him and trimmed his beard while he watched the well. She did not look at the well even once while she worked.
On the Friday of that week, a stranger came. He came up the wagon track in the late afternoon, alone, on foot. That was the first strange thing about him. People in those hollows did not walk to a place like the Threadgill farm. A man on foot in October in the Ozarks was a man who had walked from somewhere, and walking from somewhere meant he had a reason he did not want anybody asking about.
The stranger was tall and thin. He wore a dark suit that did not fit him well at the shoulders and carried a leather case in his left hand. His face was the color of paper that has been left in a drawer too long. He told Verla his name was Mr. Lavinius Caro and that he was with the United States Geological Survey. He said he was hoping to speak with the head of the household about the deep well on the property.
Verla told him he would need to speak with her husband. The stranger walked around the corner of the cabin. Verla never saw or heard of Mr. Lavinius Caro again after that afternoon. She wrote years later to the geological survey office in Washington, and the office wrote back to say that no Mr. Caro had ever been on their rolls and that they had not conducted any inventory of deep wells in southern Missouri in 1893 or any year before or since.
What happened between Caro and Oren around the back of the cabin, no human being other than the two of them saw. But Verla heard it. She heard Oren's voice, low and level. She heard the stranger's voice, smooth and professional. She heard Oren's voice again, higher and hard. She heard the stranger laugh. It was a short laugh. It was not friendly. Then she heard the metal click of the shotgun being pulled back to half cock. And then she heard Oren say, quite clearly, "You don't get to look down there, mister."
There was a long silence. Then footsteps coming back around the corner. The stranger picked up his hat from the porch rail, put it on, and walked back down the wagon track. He never came back.
That night, Verla carried Oren's supper out to the stump. She sat beside him. She asked him who the stranger was. Oren said he wasn't with no government. He said the man knew about the stone, the flat stone his grandpa laid in. He wanted Oren to let him take it up. He wanted to see what was under it.
Verla asked, "Oren, is there really something under it?"
Oren did not answer her for a long time. Then he said, "There is something that wants to be let out." And then he said, "And there is something else that has been keeping it down." He did not say which one he was guarding against.
The week after the stranger came, the animals began to change. The dog, a brindle hound named Murch, would not come into the backyard anymore. He stayed by the front porch and would come no further than the corner of the cabin. If Verla called him toward the well, he would lower himself onto his belly and crawl backwards. He would not bark. He would only watch.
The hogs began to crowd into the corner of their pen farthest from the well. The chickens stopped laying. A flock of crows that had wintered in the orchard for as long as Verla had been on that land moved off. They went south down the hollow and did not come back that fall.
On a still night, if you stood in the yard and listened carefully, you could sometimes hear the wire creak, the wire Oren had wrapped around the lid. It would creak very softly, like something on the other side of it was leaning out and then leaning back. Verla heard it twice. After the second time, she stopped going into the yard at night.
The first snow fell on the 11th of December. It came down all afternoon and into the night. Oren sat on his stump and let it pile. Verla brought him a cup of coffee at midnight. He took it. He said, "Verla. I want you to know I have been a good husband to you."
She said, "You still are, Oren."
He did not answer. She went inside. She sat up by the kitchen stove with a shawl around her shoulders and fell asleep in the chair. She woke up just before dawn. She knew at once that something was wrong. She woke up because the cabin was too quiet, not because she had heard a sound, but because she had stopped hearing one.
She got up, put on her coat and boots, and went out into the yard. The snow had stopped sometime in the night. The sky had cleared. The lantern was still burning on the rock by the well. The quilt was on the stump. Oren's boots were set neatly together side by side on the snow at the foot of the stump. His shotgun was leaning against the side of the well. He was nowhere.
There were no tracks leading away. There were no tracks leading anywhere. The lid of the well was off, not all the way off, just shifted about 3 inches to the side so a narrow black crescent showed at one edge. The snow around that crescent had melted in a ring about the size of a dinner plate.
Verla stood in the yard for what she said later felt like a very long time. Then she walked back to the cabin, put on her warmest coat, lit a second lantern, and walked the 3 miles into Hollow Bend. She went straight to the marshal's office and told the marshal, a man named Cleon Renshaw, that her husband had gone missing in the night and that he had better bring some men.
By noon there were nine men at the farm. They had ropes and lanterns and a long pole with an iron hook lashed to the end. They examined the lid. They examined the boots. They examined the snow. There were no tracks anywhere in the yard except the ones Verla had made that morning.
Cleon Renshaw said, "We are going to have to look down there."
They moved the lid the rest of the way off. They lowered a lantern on a rope. The lantern went down a long way. Cleon Renshaw said later that he watched that lantern go down for what seemed like a quarter of an hour. The rope was the longest rope they had, 120 feet of good hemp. The lantern got to the end of it and he still could not see the water. They tied a second rope to the first and lowered another 40 feet. The lantern reached the water.
Cleon Renshaw said the water was very still. He said it was the stillest water he had ever looked at and that there was no reflection of the lantern in it, no flame on the surface, just black all the way to the edges. They had a man named Junius Vale pick up a rock the size of a fist and drop it down the well. They heard it hit the water. They all heard that.
And then they heard something else. This is the part of the story that the men of Hollow Bend would not talk about for the rest of their lives, except very late and only to each other and only sometimes after a hard drink. What they heard after the stone hit the water was a sound that came up out of the well.
One of them said it was a sound like a long, slow breath. Another said it was a sound like rope being drawn across rope. Another said it was a sound like a man trying to speak with his mouth full of water. Another said it was a sound like nothing he had ever heard before or wanted to hear again. They all agreed on one thing. The sound was not Oren's, but it was not nothing's either. It was somebody's.
Cleon Renshaw ordered the rope hauled up. He ordered the lantern put out. He ordered the lid put back on and the wire wrapped around it again. By sundown, the well had been sealed. The lumber men built up a flat round cap of stone over the wooden lid, a foot thick, fitted with river rocks set into mortar so close they were almost touching. They stamped the marshal's badge into the wet mortar in three places like a kind of seal. They set a prayer over it that the doctor had written out in pencil on the back of a feed bill.
When they were done, the well looked like a low round grave at the back of the cabin.
Cleon Renshaw went to Verla in the kitchen. He said, "Mrs. Threadgill, we did not find him."
She said, "I know you didn't."
He asked if she was going to stay out there. She said, "This is my home, Marshal."
Verla Threadgill stayed on that farm for another 41 years. She lived to be 88. She kept hogs and chickens and a small kitchen garden and sold preserves at the church on the first Sunday of every month. She would not allow a guest to walk around the back of the cabin under any circumstance. She would meet you at the front porch. She would feed you on the front porch. She would send you home from the front porch.
She remarried in 1909 to a quiet widower named Edris Halverson. He moved into the cabin. He learned without ever being told not to go around back. He lived with her for 22 years until he died of pneumonia in the spring of 1931. After he died, she stayed on alone.
She was sometimes seen in those last years in the very early morning sitting on a stump at the back of the cabin, just sitting. Sometimes a neighbor passing on the wagon track would catch a glimpse of her through the bare winter branches. They would say later that she seemed to be talking, not loudly, not even moving her mouth much. Just sitting on the stump in her shawl with her head bent a little toward the round stone cap, talking the way an old woman talks to a husband who has been gone a long time.
Verla Threadgill died in the autumn of 1934. She was found in her bed by her sister's grandson, who had been bringing her groceries from town once a week. She had a folded paper in her hand. It was the note Asa Crew had left her 41 years before. She had been holding it when she fell asleep for the last time.
The farm went to a cousin in St. Louis who had never been to the Ozarks in his life. He sold it sight unseen to a timber company in 1936. The timber company cut over the ridge for a few years and then went broke during the war. The cabin fell in. The orchard went wild. The fence rotted away.
The well is still there. The mortar cap is still on it. You can find it if you know where to look, in a stand of second growth oak about a quarter mile up an old wagon track off the county road. The stones in the cap are still snug. The mortar is cracked in a few places, but it has held. The marshal's three stamped seals are mostly worn away, but you can still see one of them faintly on the south side.
People who hunt in those woods know the spot. They walk past it. They just don't look down. Some of them say they hear something in the spring when the ground is wet and the wood is full of running water. A long slow breath. A turning sound like rope being drawn across rope.
Some of them say they have heard a voice from inside, very faint. The kind of voice you can never quite make out the words of. Some of them say it sounds almost like a man trying to talk to somebody on the other side of a closed door. Almost like he is asking somebody to come out and not getting an answer. Almost like he is asking somebody to go back in and not getting an answer to that, either.
And the breath that follows is harder to place. It is not his, but it is not nothing's either. It is somebody's, and whoever it belongs to, it is still down there.