The account comes from a family story, passed down from a surveyor named Obadiah Reinhardt. Born in Berks County, Pennsylvania, in 1821, Reinhardt was a practical man who spent his life measuring property lines. He was not given to superstition. That is why what he reported from the New Jersey Pine Barrens in the autumn of 1887 carried such weight.
In the late summer of that year, a railroad concern out of Camden hired Reinhardt to survey a parcel of land deep inside the Barrens. The area was near a small settlement called Eberly’s Crossing, a place that no longer appears on any map. Three Pennsylvania Dutch families lived there, descendants of settlers who had moved from the Lehigh Valley in the 1850s to work a bog iron operation that had since closed.
Reinhardt arrived at the settlement on October 3, 1887. The community consisted of three houses, a shared barn, a smokehouse, and a small stone meeting room. The head of the largest family was a man named Lebrecht Hummelstein, who lived with his wife, Wilhelmina. The other families were the Schönfeldts and the Pretz family. In total, there were eight adults living at Eberly’s Crossing that October.
Reinhardt was given lodging in the cleaned-out smokehouse. He began his survey work the next morning, measuring his way through the pitch pine and cedar swamp. The men of the settlement helped where they could, but he noticed they did not like to venture more than a mile from the houses. He initially thought it was simply the caution of people living in a hard country.
On the third evening, Lebrecht Hummelstein came to sit with him. As he was leaving, he stopped at the door and offered a warning in German. He told Reinhardt not to be in the trees after the bell. When Reinhardt asked what bell he meant, Lebrecht only replied, “You will hear it.”
On the fourth day, in the late afternoon, Reinhardt heard the sound. He was working about two miles north of the settlement 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 to the settlement before sundown.
That evening, Lebrecht came to him again. He explained the rule that governed their lives. The bell rang between 4:00 and 5:00 in the afternoon, though not every day. When it rang, everyone had to be inside a house with a closed door before the sun went down. The door could not be opened for any reason until the sun had been up for a full hour the next morning. Lebrecht’s brother had stayed out one night in 1863. They found his clothes folded on the table in the meeting room. He never came back.
Reinhardt continued his work over the following days, but he was careful. He kept his pocket watch in his hand all afternoon and turned for home early. Small things began to unsettle him. On the morning of the seventh, he found his transit instrument turned around, facing the trees instead of the house. On the eighth, Wilhelmina’s chickens stood in a silent circle, all facing outward, until she clapped her hands to break the spell.
On the tenth of October, the bell rang again. Reinhardt was about a mile and a half from the settlement. As he started back, he noticed the woods had gone completely silent. In that silence, he heard a footstep behind him. Then another. He did not turn around. He understood that turning around was what the woods wanted him to do. He walked for nearly twenty minutes with the steps matching his pace, until he reached the edge of the settlement and the sound stopped.
That night, something came to the door of the smokehouse. A voice spoke in perfect English, asking to be let in. It said it was cold. It said it had come a long way. Then it spoke his name, “Obadiah,” in the exact way his mother had said it. His mother had been dead for nineteen years. Reinhardt did not open the door. The voice waited for nearly an hour before walking away. In the morning, there were no footprints in the dew-soft ground.
Reinhardt stayed for nine more days. He heard the bell three more times. Each night, something came to his door. On the twelfth, a voice claimed to be a lost surveyor and used the names of engineers Reinhardt had actually met. On the fifteenth, there was no voice at all. Only a slow, deep breathing that moved the canvas at the bottom of his door. Each breath lasted nearly twelve seconds.
On the eighteenth, 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 before he remembered the rule. In the morning, Wilhelmina was alive and well. She had not left the main house all night.
On the twentieth of October, his last day of measurements, Reinhardt 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. It had not been open before. He walked toward it.
Inside the dim forge, in a column of pale light falling through the collapsed roof, he saw a circle of small stones on the floor. Each stone was about the size of a fist. He counted eleven. He drew a diagram in his field book. As he stepped back, he heard a single clear sound from somewhere inside the building. A small bell, held for too long. He turned and walked away.
On the walk back, the woods went silent again. 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 believed he could not bear it, the bell from the forge rang again, far behind him. Whatever was at his shoulder turned and went back.
Back at the main house, Lebrecht’s face went pale when he learned where Reinhardt had been. He asked if Reinhardt had touched anything. He had not. Lebrecht said, “Then perhaps it is only angry. Perhaps it is not loose.”
That afternoon, Reinhardt learned the full story. The families had been keeping watch for thirty-six years. In 1849, there had been an incident at the ironworks. A foreman brought in by the company had done something to a worker. The other workers had taken matters into their own hands. They had put the foreman into the forge and built up the fire. What came out of the forge afterward was not the foreman. It stood in the doorway and spoke in their voices. It walked into the trees, but it did not go far.
Maria Pretz, who had been born at the settlement, explained the rest. Her father had been a young man in 1849. He had figured out the rules and built the circle of eleven stones on the forge floor. The stones held the thing inside the building for most of the day, letting it out only between four and five in the afternoon. The families kept a twelfth stone at the house, so they could always count and know if any had been moved.
That evening, Lebrecht and Reinhardt walked back to the forge. Lebrecht did not enter. He walked around the building, speaking words at each corner that Reinhardt did not recognize. He counted the stones. All eleven were there. He closed the door and barred it from the outside.
That night was the worst. The voices came to the smokehouse door. They were the voices of Reinhardt’s mother, his father, a sister who had died of typhus, a colleague gored by a bull. They spoke to him. They told him things only those people would have known. Around midnight, they began describing his actions in real time. “His right hand is on his knee.” “Now he has moved his right hand to his beard.” “Now he is afraid.”
Reinhardt sat on the cot with his hands over his ears, reciting the 23rd Psalm in Pennsylvania Dutch. He said it perhaps forty times before dawn. The voices did not stop until just before sunrise. When he opened the door after the full hour, the yard was empty. There were no marks.
He left Eberly’s Crossing the next morning, October 22, 1887. Lebrecht walked the first three miles with him. Before turning back, he made Reinhardt promise never to write of the thing in the forge or speak of it. Speaking of it, he said, was a kind of opening. Reinhardt kept that promise for the rest of his life. He told the story once, on a porch in Lancaster County in the spring of 1912, to a family member. He died peacefully in 1914.
After his death, his field books were found. The book from October 1887 contained the diagram of the circle of eleven stones. Next to it, in his small, even hand, he had written a date and one word in German: “listening.”
In 1928, a relative of Reinhardt went looking for Eberly’s Crossing. The man at the post office in Chatsworth said the settlement had burned in the spring of 1901. The families had moved on in the late 1890s. He also said another person had asked about the place that year. An older woman who spoke more German than English. She had walked off in the same direction.
The relative found the site. The house foundations were still there. The smokehouse was a black mark on the ground. The forge was gone. Its stone walls had been pulled down by hands, not fire. The stones were stacked neatly in two long piles. The earth where the floor had been was bare. There was no circle of stones. There was nothing.
He stood on the spot where his grandfather had stood at the threshold. He did not feel watched. He felt, instead, that he was standing in a place that had been emptied. He found a single dark gray stone in the grass, about the size of a fist, smooth on one side and rough on the other. He held it for a long time. Then he put it down exactly where he had picked it up and walked away.
As he was walking back toward the road, with 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 and drove until he reached Chatsworth. He never went back to the Pine Barrens.
Before he died, Reinhardt told one final detail. When Lebrecht had walked those first three miles with him, he 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. When Reinhardt finally opened it in the spring of 1889, in the middle of a fallow pasture, he found 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 never knew 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.