A fur trapper who vanished into the deep timber of Cheat Mountain, West Virginia, in the late 19th century was found decades later still wearing the coat he had on the day he disappeared, according to a story that has been passed down through Appalachian folklore. The winter of 1887 brought with it the story of Obadiah Kestrel, a 46-year-old trapper who had lived alone on Cheat Mountain for years. He was known to his neighbors as a practical, steady man. A man who had once walked four miles to a doctor with a hatchet wound in his thigh because sitting down, in his words, would have meant lying down, and lying down would have meant dying.
Kestrel kept three trap lines. One ran north along the ridge. Another went down the eastern slope. The third crossed the shoulder of the mountain into a stretch of black timber that local people had long avoided.
He had walked into that timber once when he was 28, following a wounded buck. He had come back early without a word and had not gone near the place for 18 years. In the book that was later found in his cabin, Kestrel wrote about that first walk. The blood trail he had been following simply gave out in the middle of the forest.
The buck seemed to have stopped bleeding mid-stride. He wrote one line about the experience: “I felt the woods take notice of me. ” He turned around and walked out, and did not return for nearly two decades. When fur prices went strange in the winter of 1887, a man in Elkins told Kestrel there was silver fox sign in the black timber.
So, against his own instinct, he packed his traps and set out on December 2nd. The snow was already two feet deep on the high ground. On his first day cutting a line of twelve trap sets, he noted two strange things. There were no animal tracks at all in the snow under the spruces.
No grouse, no hare, not even a single mouse trail. And in the afternoon he heard a sound he could not place, a low hum, like a man humming a hymn with his mouth closed, only deeper than any man could hum. It stopped when he turned to face it. He also noted a tree by the eighth set that had been marked.
The marks were too high for any bear to have made, about nine feet up the trunk, four long parallel scrapes deep enough to expose the pale wood. He wrote that a bear standing on its hind legs in that country does not reach above seven feet. On his second morning checking the line, the first three sets were empty. The fourth set had been sprung, triggered but closed on nothing.
Not a paw, not a tuft of fur, not a scuff in the snow. He wrote that the trap had been moved about four feet from where he had set it, in a straight line toward the creek, and that the snow between the two positions showed no track at all. That night he wrote that a bear would leave a track, would breathe loud enough to mist the cold air, would smell like a bear. There was no track.
There was no breath. There was no smell. Around three in the morning on the third night, he was woken by the same humming. This time it was at his cabin.
He sat up in bed and listened as something walked the perimeter of his house, humming under its breath, circling three times. Then the humming stopped at the door. He wrote that a voice, low and patient, spoke his name from the other side of the door. It was the way his mother had called him when he was still at home.
He wrote that the voice was kind. He used that word twice. When it spoke his name a third time, the voice was not at the door. It was at the window above his bed, inches from his ear.
He did not turn his head. He kept his eyes fixed on the ceiling beam above him and counted the knots in the wood until the voice and the humming eventually stopped. In the morning he walked the perimeter of the cabin looking for tracks. The snow was untouched.
There was no print at the door, no print at the windows, no scuff, no drag. He wrote that the snow looked as if no thing had ever stood there. He also wrote that on his third time walking the circle, he felt watched from the direction of the sky, a feeling that did not stop until he went back inside and bolted the door. He thought about leaving.
He wrote that he weighed the cost of a wasted trip against the cost of being run off by a voice in the night. He decided to stay. “A man who is run by a thing he did not see is not a man any longer. He’s a rabbit,” he wrote.
On the fourth day he went back to check the line and found his own footprints in the snow. Between the seventh and eighth sets, there was a third set of boot prints. They were his boots, same size, same wear pattern on the heel where he favored his right foot after an old leg injury. But this third set went off the line, twenty yards into the spruces to the south, ground he had not entered.
Then it simply ended. No turn back. No print continuing. Just an end, as if whatever had walked out there in his boots had been lifted off the ground.
He drew the prints in his book. Twelve steps off the line. The depth did not match. His own boot in two feet of snow with his weight made a print about four inches deep.
The third set was only two inches deep. He wrote that either whatever was wearing his boots was considerably lighter than him, then crossed the line out. That night he sat by the stove with his rifle across his knees. The last thing he wrote before the candle ran out was a question.
“How did it know my mother’s voice? ”
On the fifth day he did not go out. He wrote almost nothing. One entry reads: “Quiet.
Too quiet. ” He noted the absence of birds, of squirrels, of anything moving in the timber. Even the wind had stopped. He wrote, “I have not heard a wind in two days.
I have not heard a branch crack. I have not heard a single thing fall in the snow. ”
That night the humming came back. He woke to the sound of someone humming, slow and patient, sitting at the foot of his bed.
The fire was out and the cabin was black, but he could feel a weight on the bed, and the humming was coming from the weight. It was a hymn his mother used to hum, one he had not heard in forty years. A voice, very close, very kind, spoke to him. “Obadiah, why did you come into the timber?
We had a quiet thing here. ” It told him he could keep the line and keep the cabin, but he would not walk past the eighth set into the deep timber. If he did, it said, “We will take you home with us and we will keep you. ”
He nodded in the dark.
After the second nod, the weight lifted off the bed and the cabin door, which had been bolted, opened from the inside and then closed. The bolt slid back into place by itself. In the morning the cabin was empty. On the table where his book sat, there was a small piece of soft pine, whittled into the exact shape Kestrel had been whittling since he was a boy, the shape his mother had taught him.
This one had not been made by him, and the wood was still wet, as if it had been finished in the dark while he slept. He put it in his pocket. His handwriting in the book for the sixth day is described as sloping unevenly down the page. He wrote that there was no man alive who knew that shape but him, that his mother was 31 years dead, and that he was being read.
For nine days he followed the terms. He checked the first seven sets, did not look at the eighth, and pulled three pelts. The humming did not come back. He started to sleep again.
He wrote, “A man can live with a thing at his door if the thing keeps its word. I have lived with worse. ” On the ninth day he wrote only one line. “I think it is testing me.
”
On the tenth day he found a man sitting on the chopping block outside his cabin. The man was wearing a coat that belonged to a trapper named Cassius Whirl, who had gone into the timber twenty years before and never come out. The face was Cassius Whirl’s face, as he had been at 28 years old, not a day older. The thing wearing the coat smiled and spoke in Cassius’s voice, inviting Kestrel to sit with him.
When Kestrel asked what it was, it told him that Cassius was not dead. “Cassius is at home. Cassius is with us. We have kept him a long time.
He has the others. ”
Then, Kestrel wrote, the thing opened its mouth and from inside came the voices of other men. He heard at least four, and one of them was the voice of his uncle Eustace, who had walked off into the woods in 1861 and never come home. He heard his uncle say, “Bo, Bo, come on home.
Your mother is waiting on you. ” Behind that was a woman’s voice calling him by a pet name no living person knew. At that moment, Kestrel wrote, he understood that the contract had never been a contract. It had been a leash.
The thing had been keeping him close, waiting until it was hungry enough to come sit on the chopping block in another man’s coat and call him home. He raised his rifle and fired one shot into the wood of his own cabin door. Then he ran, not for the trail down the mountain, but for the line, straight into the deep timber, into the country he had been forbidden from entering. He wrote later that he only knew the place he was forbidden from was the only place where the thing was not.
The deep timber was not quiet. He could hear birds, the rustle of a hare under the spruces, water moving under ice. He realized the thing had emptied the country around its lair, clearing the ground around itself the way a man clears the ground around his cabin. The deep timber was its edge, and the thing could not cross its own edge.
He sat in the deep timber for two days without a fire. On the second night the humming came from the direction of the cabin, the sound of something sweeping the country and calling his name. It called him in his mother’s voice, his uncle’s, and in the voice of a woman he had loved when he was 22. It called other names too, old names, names belonging to men who had walked into those woods and never walked out.
He did not answer, no matter how kind the voice was. On the third morning he walked out of the deep timber through ground he did not know. In time he came to a creek, which became a river, and the river took him to a logging road, and the road to a logging camp. The men there did not know him.
He told the foreman, an old man named Persimmon Brace, that he had been trapping the deep timber. The foreman took him aside. “Nobody traps the deep timber. You know that,” he said.
Brace told Kestrel that his own grandfather had worked the country in 1849 and had told his family never to set a line east of the ridge. “He told us the country there was somebody else’s country,” said Brace. Kestrel showed him the piece of soft pine. Brace looked at it and handed it back.
“You should keep it,” he said. “It will remember you longer than you remember it. ”
Kestrel never went back for his furs or his book. The book was found two years later by a hunter named Lucius Marrowbone, who found the abandoned cabin while tracking an elk.
He walked in, took the book, and left the mountain quickly. According to the account, he described three pelts hanging in the loft, a cold stove, a neatly made bed, and on the wall above the bed a row of twelve small whittled pieces of soft pine, all in the same shape, all wet. The whittlings were left where they were. The book was given to a county clerk in Pocahontas, who read it and put it in a drawer.
He told no one about it for 30 years, until he was dying, and then he told his son. Kestrel lived another 21 years. He moved to Marietta, Ohio, and took up cabinet work. He never married and never went back to the mountains.
He kept the piece of soft pine in his pocket and showed it once to a man at a tavern who asked what it was. “A reminder,” he said. When the man asked a reminder of what, Kestrel said, “That a thing in the woods knew my mother’s voice. ” He would not speak of it again.
His sister Hester came to visit him twice. The second time, in 1905, she said her brother had changed. He no longer slept in a bed. He slept in a chair by the window with a rifle across his knees.
He would not open a window, summer or winter, and would not eat anything that had not been cooked on his own stove. He kept a roll of whittled pieces on the mantel and counted them every night. One night while she was visiting, she passed the mantel and noticed there was one more piece than there had been the night before. She said nothing.
In the morning she heard him stand at the mantel and say, very quietly, “You found me. It took 21 years, but you found me. ” She wrote that she knew there was no place in that house that did not feel watched. Kestrel died in the spring of 1908.
The doctor said he died of a weak heart. His sister said he died of something else. She said that in his last week he had stopped sleeping entirely and told her he could hear humming again, just at the edge of the wind, just at the edge of the house. She asked where it was coming from.
He said, “It found me. It took 21 years, but it found me. I should have known it would. There is no place far enough.
”
She said that on the night he died, she heard someone humming a hymn from his room, slow and patient and kind. When she went in, the window was open, and there was snow on the sill, though it was April. Her brother was dead in the bed. On the table beside him was a piece of soft pine, freshly whittled, still wet, in the shape his mother had taught him.
She counted the pieces on the mantel before the undertaker came. There had been 12 the night before. There were now 13. She put them in a sack and threw them into the river that ran through Marietta, one at a time, and watched them float away on the dark water.
She wrote that she did not believe they sank.