The ledger was discovered in 1961, hidden behind a wall panel in a house in Lockstep Crossing, Northwest Arkansas, during a rewiring project. The document, written by a country doctor named Goff Tatum, detailed an account he had kept for 48 years, and he had died just four months after writing its final pages. Tatum, a widower and the only physician for 30 miles, recorded the strange events of the autumn of 1877. On November 4th of that year, identical twin brothers Weston and Talmage Pickrol, both 31, left their cabin in Witten Hollow to check their trapline.
They told a neighbor, Renfro Cab, they expected to be gone three or four days. They never returned on schedule. The brothers’ dog, Bucket, came back alone a week later, hiding under the cabin porch and refusing to leave. A search party of nine men, including Tatum and an old hunter named Hardacre, spent three days scouring the ridges.
They found no tracks, no sprung traps, no campfire ash, and no signs of a struggle. It appeared as though the men had vanished, and their trapline had simply ceased to exist. On the night of November 19th, the brothers walked back into their cabin yard. Renfro Cab, who had been staying there to care for the horse, was inside.
He noted that the men’s coats and boots were immaculately clean, which struck him as odd, as one brother never cleaned his rifle. The brothers moved with perfect synchronicity, sitting, eating, and speaking in unison, which unnerved Cab deeply. He rode four miles in the dark without his coat to fetch the doctor. When Tatum examined the brothers the next morning, he found their pulse rates were identical, not just similar but beating as one.
Over the following weeks, their behavior remained unnervingly synchronized. They claimed not to remember what had happened in the woods, and they had forgotten the name of their dog. Preacher Cobb noted that the brothers, who used to sing the doxology in perfect harmony, had stopped attending church entirely. Tatum later discovered that the date the brothers disappeared, November 4th, was the anniversary of their mother’s burial.
He had written her death certificate years prior. When he visited her grave, he found the earth at the foot of the stone had been disturbed and carefully smoothed back over, as if someone had been digging. Wiki: “The Hollow Files”
In the second week of December, Hardacre came to the doctor and told him a story about a buck he had shot, only to find that the creature hanging in his smokehouse was not the animal he had killed. He told the doctor that the same thing had happened with the Pickrol brothers: “Same hide, same antlers, but it wasn’t him.
Something else had got in. ”
Tatum searched the ridge on his own and found a hollow within the hollow, a small rock bowl with the ground swept perfectly flat. Impressed into the dirt were two seated impressions, facing each other, as if the men had sat cross-legged for a very long time. He found no evidence of a campfire or food.
On the night of December 17th, Tatum accepted a dinner invitation at the cabin. The brothers set the table with their mother’s best china. During the meal, he noticed they never leaned toward the lamp for light. They insisted he stay the night.
He slept on a pallet by the stove, aware that the brothers were in the loft above. Tatum wrote that at around midnight, he heard one long, slow intake of breath from above, and then nothing for an hour. At two in the morning, he opened his eyes to find the brothers standing beside his pallet in their nightshirts. For an hour, they stood facing him, not moving, not blinking, and according to his account, not breathing.
The temperature in the room dropped so low that the doctor could see his own breath in the moonlight. At three o’clock, they climbed back to the loft in silence. During that hour, Tatum glanced at them just once. He saw that the man in Weston’s nightshirt was looking at him with the eyes of Talmage, and the man wearing Talmage’s nightshirt had the look of Weston.
He committed this observation to memory but did not write it in his ledger for many years. In April 1878, one brother, Weston, walked out of the cabin at dawn with his rifle and never returned. No search was made this time. Talmage remained, living on as a solitary trapper.
He slowly regained normalcy, returning to church, singing the doxology, and paying his bills. In 1880, he dug an empty grave beside his father’s and placed a marker for his brother, setting the death year as 1877. Talmage died in October 1922 at the age of 76, with the doctor, then 96, at his side. On his deathbed, he asked the doctor if he remembered that night.
When the doctor said he did, Talmage replied, “I remember it, too,” and died. The doctor wrote the death certificate, but he never fully believed in the natural causes it cited. The doctor’s account concludes with his own death in 1926, at age 99. The ledger remained hidden for 35 years until its discovery.
The narrator of the account traveled to the site three times and confirmed the cabin foundation, the twin graves, and the mother’s headstone were still there. They noted that someone had recently placed fresh flowers on Talmage’s grave. The central mystery of what truly came back from the woods that November was never resolved, leaving the doctor’s private account as the only record of the disappearance.