In the autumn of 1871, county officials who visited the Hollings family property in a remote hollow of what was then eastern West Virginia found a household in a disturbing state of collapse. According to a privately kept account written by county recorder Whittaker Sledge, three men who arrived in late October found the family recovering from what they described as a two-week illness, but the behavior of one of the visitors, Deputy Sheriff Mosby Pell, changed everything. The Hollings family, led by 46-year-old Talmadge Hollings, had lived on the land for generations. The household included his wife, Calpurnia, his brother Ainslie, and his elderly father, Cordell.
The troubles, according to a household ledger kept by Talmadge and later copied by a historian, began with the family dog in the second week of October. Talmadge wrote that the dog, a hound named Hester, was found in the yard one morning sitting upright and staring at the eastern tree line. She was warm and breathing but unresponsive, and did not react to her name or to being touched. When a neighbor examined her, he told Talmadge it was as if the dog had seen something she could not unsee and her mind had stepped out for a while.
The dog later wandered off into the woods, walking in a straight line toward the ridge that ran behind the Hollings property. A few days later, the family patriarch, 73-year-old Cordell Hollings, was found standing barefoot in the yard, staring at the same tree line. He did not respond when spoken to. When he finally came back to himself, he would not explain what had happened.
The next morning, according to Calpurnia, he said clearly that they were still up there, but would not say who he meant. By mid-October, Ainslie Hollings, who lived in a nearby cabin, had stopped coming to the main house. Calpurnia found him sitting at his kitchen table staring at a blank wall, unable to respond. When moved to the main house, he let himself be carried but did not speak or stand.
Within days, Cordell began repeating the same phrase, the fence is broken, dozens of times a day. Ainslie would not get out of bed. Talmadge, who began standing at a window for hours without knowing how much time had passed, later wrote that he had not felt afraid and could not explain why. Calpurnia was the only member of the household who did not seem affected.
Calpurnia later wrote to her sister that she had made a deliberate decision: she would not look toward the high pasture or the eastern ridge. She covered the eastern windows with coats and told the men it was to keep out the cold. She later wrote that whatever was up there seemed hungry for being seen and that she would not feed it. She also described a night when she heard slow footsteps crossing the porch, which she did not answer, and a smell she compared to something buried in cold earth and dug up again.
Sledge, the county recorder, wrote in his personal account that when the three officials arrived on October 29, Calpurnia seemed thin and tired but was the only person in the household he would have called awake. The men had come partly to check on the family after no word from them in over a week. Talmadge, who was recovering, said everyone had been ill and that they had kept the windows covered against the wind. While Sledge spoke with Talmadge, Deputy Sheriff Pell went upstairs and pulled down a coat that covered a small window on the eastern side of the house.
According to Sledge’s reconstruction of Pell’s partial account, Pell looked out at the high pasture and at the ridge beyond it. He later described seeing something that he never clearly identified. He told his wife it was a person but not a person standing in the upper field. He told the doctor it was the height of a man but was not a man.
Whatever Pell saw, he stood looking at it for roughly a quarter of an hour. When he came downstairs, Sledge wrote that he descended like a man who had been called, and that his face had gone the color of paper left out in the sun. Pell sat down on a bench, placed his hands on his knees, and did not respond to anyone. The doctor examined Pell and quietly told Sledge that they needed to take the man home.
Calpurnia, standing in the kitchen doorway, told Sledge that Pell had pulled the coat down and that she had told nobody to do so. When Sledge asked what was on the other side of the window, she warned him not to go up and look. Sledge wrote that he believed her, and that he put the coat back over the window without looking out it. Pell was taken home and did not speak for two days.
He slept, woke, and asked his wife what day it was, saying he had a long dream he could not remember. His wife said in later years that he was never quite the same. He would not go upstairs after dark and would not look out windows at night. He once asked her whether she ever felt that someone was watching the house from the field behind it.
Sledge filed an official report saying only that the Hollings family had been ill and recovering and that no further county action was required. A separate page in the county records concerning unusual incidents on outlying properties was later cut out of the book with a knife. The identity of whoever removed it was never established. Years before his death, Sledge donated money to the local library with a note requesting that the library not collect volumes on summoning, scrying, or the practice of looking deliberately at things which are deliberately hiding.
The librarian honored the request, and to this day the library carries no books on those subjects. The Hollings family left the property in the spring of 1872, less than six months after the events. They sold the land and moved to Ohio, and none of them spoke publicly about what had happened. Talmadge died in 1896, his wife in 1920, and Ainslie much earlier, in 1878.
In 1913, a man named Pendrake Wafford bought the abandoned property. On the inside of the parlor door, he found three lines scratched into the wood in what he described as a woman’s handwriting. They read: Do not look east after dark. Do not answer a knock you did not hear.
If you see it, it has already seen you. Keep moving. Wafford stayed at the house for 14 years and said nothing ever happened. He made only one rule for himself: he did not look at the eastern slope from any window after the sun went down.
He said he did not believe in what was written on the door, but that following the rules cost him nothing. When the house was abandoned again and fell into ruin, the door and the original ledger were both lost in a fire in 1926. What survives is a sketch of the door made by the historian who copied the ledger. On the final page of that ledger, in a different hand, a woman had written a warning to whoever might find it, urging them not to go up to the ridge and not to turn their head toward anything sensed in the corner of the eye.
In 1968, a hiker walking what he believed to be an old logging trail came across the foundation stones of the ruined Hollings house. He stayed only briefly, saying the place had a feel to it, and later told a historical society that as he left he felt a strong urge not to look back at the eastern slope. He said he walked without looking, and that one hour later his hands were shaking for reasons he could not explain.
He never returned.