There is a name the Archdiocese of Baltimore will not put in writing. Not in the ledgers. Not in the ordination rolls. Not in the private correspondence that survived the fire of 1941.
When a researcher named Coris Beaver went looking for him in the spring of 2008, three separate parish secretaries told her the same sentence almost word for word. We have no record of a Father Ithamar. We have never had a father. Please do not call this office again.
But there was a Father Ithamar. Seventeen households in one folded valley of eastern Kentucky remember him, and the shape of the memory is the same in every one of those houses.
A man in a black cassock walking up a mountain road in the wrong season. A man who did not knock because he did not have to. A man who would sit at your kitchen table and ask, in a voice that did not rise, whether the child had been sleeping through the night or whether the child had been sleeping at all.
He served four counties along the Cumberland spur between the summer of 1936 and the winter of 1949. By his own count, recorded in a private journal recovered from a foot locker in a barn near Whitesburg, he performed 411 exorcisms in the full, long form of the Roman Ritual.
That version of the rite permits only with written authorization from the local bishop. Father Ithamar never once requested it and never once received it.
The church says he never existed. The families say he saved their children.
In his last entry before he vanished into the ridge above Kutchin Creek in December of 1949, he warned that whatever he had been fighting all those years was not defeated. It was only waiting. It was only learning his name so it could come back and use it against the next one.
This is the story of Father Ithamar Coin, the Appalachian exorcist the church erased from every book it wrote.
He was born in 1902 in a rowhouse on Fitzwater Street in South Philadelphia, the fourth of six children in an Irish Catholic family that had come over from Sligo in the 1880s. His father worked the coal barges on the Schuylkill. His mother took in laundry from the Italian families two blocks over.
The boy who would grow into the priest they later refused to name was, by every account of those who knew him then, a quiet child with an unusual habit. He would sit in the pew after Mass and watch the empty church, not the altar, not the Stations, the empty space between the pillars, at about the height of a man's head.
His mother asked him once, when he was seven, what he was looking for. The boy said, in a voice she remembered until the day she died, that he was not looking for anything. He was looking at what was already there.
He entered the seminary at St. Charles Borromeo in Overbrook in 1920 at eighteen, the youngest of his class. His academic record was ordinary. His pastoral evaluations were exceptional.
Two of his instructors, in letters that survived because they were kept privately rather than filed with the diocese, described him as having what one called a native fluency in Latin and what the other called, more carefully, a discomforting ease with the language of the ritual.
He was ordained on the 29th of June, 1927, at twenty-five years old, and assigned as a curate to a parish in Chester, Pennsylvania, where he served for eight years without incident, without complaint, and, according to the pastor who supervised him, without any of the qualities that would have marked him for advancement.
Then, in the winter of 1935, something changed.
The pastor of the Chester parish, Monsignor Fallon, wrote a letter to the Archbishop of Philadelphia in February of that year. The letter survived in the private archive of the Fallon family because the monsignor did not send it. He drafted it three times, sealed it, and left it in his desk. His nephew found it after his death in 1952.
In it, Fallon wrote that Father Coin had come to him in early January after Christmas and had asked to be reassigned, not to another parish, to a mission field. Fallon asked him where.
Coin said, and Fallon wrote the phrase down in quotation marks, so we know he was quoting: "I need to go where the church is not yet."
Fallon asked what he meant. Coin said: "There are places on this continent where the ground is older than the sacraments, and they are calling."
Fallon did not send the letter because he did not know how to explain to the archbishop what his curate had said. In the weeks after that conversation, Coin stopped speaking about the mountains and returned to his ordinary duties, and Fallon convinced himself he had misheard.
But the letter contains a postscript. In it, Fallon wrote three lines that no rational man should have written.
He wrote: "I asked him what he had been reading. He said only the ritual. He said he had been reading the ritual every night for six months. And he said the ritual had begun reading him back."
Fifteen months later, in April of 1936, Ithamar Coin bought a one-way train ticket from Philadelphia to Corbin, Kentucky, on his seminary account. He left no forwarding address.
He left the parish house in Chester in the middle of the night on a Tuesday. The only things he took with him were a leather bag, a black cassock, and the Roman Ritual bound in tooled calfskin that had been given to him at his ordination.
The archdiocese noted his absence three days later and marked him in the private disciplinary log as absent without leave. Six weeks after that, when he still had not returned, the log was amended. The word absent was crossed out and the word deceased was written in above it in a different hand.
He was not deceased. He was not in Philadelphia either. He was walking a mountain road in a place his diocese did not serve, wearing a cassock they had not authorized him to wear.
The four counties Coin would work for the next thirteen years were, in 1936, among the most isolated Catholic communities in the United States. Not because there were many Catholics there, but because there were almost none.
The nearest parish with a resident priest was in Corbin itself. Between Corbin and the West Virginia line, across four hundred square miles of ridge and hollow, there was no Church of Rome, no rectory, no confessional, and no man in a black cassock until there was.
He appeared first in the community of Cranks, Kentucky, in Harlan County, in the last week of April 1936. He walked down the main street with his leather bag and asked at the general store where he might find a place to sleep.
The storekeeper, a man named Matias Rooney, told the researcher Coris Beaver seventy years later, at the age of ninety-three, that he had known the moment the priest walked in that something was going to change in Cranks. He had not known whether the change would be for good or for ill.
Rooney offered the priest the loft above his store, and Coin stayed there for eleven nights. On the twelfth night he was called out to a farm on Straight Creek, six miles up the hollow, and he did not come back to sleep at Rooney's loft for two weeks.
When he did come back, Rooney said the priest was thinner and his eyes had a different color in them. He asked Rooney quietly whether there was a Latin dictionary anywhere in the town, because he had encountered a word he had never heard before and needed to know what it meant.
Rooney said there was no Latin dictionary in Cranks, Kentucky, in the spring of 1936. And if the priest had encountered a Latin word he did not know, he had encountered it in a place where no Latin word had any business being.
Coin nodded. He went upstairs to the loft. He did not come down for supper that night. In the morning, when Rooney climbed up to check on him, the priest was sitting on the edge of the cot with the Roman Ritual open on his knees, crossing out a line in the exorcism rite with a pencil and writing something else in the margin in a hand so small Rooney could not read it even when he leaned close.
That was the first month.
Over the next thirteen years, Ithamar Coin would work almost entirely on foot. He walked from hollow to hollow with his leather bag, his ritual, and a rosary his mother had given him at his ordination.
He did not charge for his services. He did not accept money. He accepted meals and a place to sleep and occasionally a ride in a wagon or on the back of a mule when the distance was very great.
He served four counties: Harlan, Letcher, Perry, and Leslie. He traveled a circuit that took him roughly six weeks to complete. He completed that circuit again and again for thirteen years.
In every hollow he passed through, he asked the same first question of whoever met him at the door. Is anyone in this house not sleeping?
Not is anyone sick. Not is anyone dying. Is anyone in this house not sleeping?
Because that, in his private journal, was the sign he had learned to read.
The families he served, most of whom were not Catholic and had never seen a priest before, did not know what to make of the question the first time he asked it. But they learned.
After the first winter, when word had spread through four counties that a man in a black cassock was walking the ridges and asking a question that seemed to know something no stranger should know, they stopped being surprised. They started answering him. And what they told him sent him, in the thirteen years of his ministry, into 411 households.
The first case we can date with any certainty comes from that farm on Straight Creek, the one he was called out to in May of 1936, eleven days after he arrived in Cranks.
The family was named Seismore. The father was a man called Ansel Seismore, forty-two years old, who had been a machinist in the Harlan mines until he lost three fingers of his right hand in the winter of 1933 and had come home to the hollow to farm what little bottomland his family owned.
The mother was Cordelia Seismore, thirty-six, who had borne seven children and buried two. The child in question was the youngest daughter, Valerie, who was nine years old in the spring of 1936.
According to the deposition Cordelia gave to a Baptist preacher named Henderson in July of that year, the child had stopped sleeping in the last week of March. Not stopped sleeping well. Stopped sleeping.
Cordelia said she had sat up with the child every night for six weeks and watched her, and the child did not sleep. She did not doze. She did not close her eyes. She lay in the bed and stared at the ceiling and did not blink for hours at a time.
When Cordelia asked her at three in the morning in the second week of this what she was looking at, the child said, in a voice Cordelia did not recognize, that she was looking at the man in the ceiling.
Cordelia asked, "What man?" The child said, "The man who lives up there. He has been living up there since I was born, and he wants to come down now."
Cordelia went to the Baptist preacher first. The preacher prayed over the girl. The preacher fasted. The preacher brought two elders from the church and they laid hands on the child and prayed all night.
In the morning the child was still not sleeping and was now speaking in her ordinary voice in a language none of them had ever heard.
The preacher told Cordelia there was a Catholic priest in Cranks. He had heard about him three days before. He said, in his own deposition, that he did not know if a Catholic priest would help, but he knew that what was in that child was not going to be moved by a Baptist preacher, and he had reached the end of what he knew how to do.
A neighbor rode down to Cranks that afternoon. Coin came the next morning. He walked the six miles from the general store to the Seismore farm, arrived at midday, and asked Cordelia the question he asked everyone. Is anyone in this house not sleeping?
Cordelia said yes. Coin asked how long. Cordelia said six weeks. Coin asked if the person who was not sleeping had begun to speak in a way she did not recognize. Cordelia said yes.
Coin nodded. He asked to be taken to the child.
What happened in the Seismore farmhouse between midday on May 14, 1936, and dawn on May 16 is described in three separate accounts: Cordelia Seismore's deposition to Henderson the preacher; a letter Ansel Seismore wrote to his brother in Ohio, which the brother kept and which was donated to the University of Kentucky special collections in 1991; and Coin's own journal entry, written in a mixture of English and Latin, spanning eleven pages, some of them in a hand so unsteady the letters sloped down the page as if he were writing on a moving train.
All three accounts agree on the following. Coin asked the family to leave the house. Cordelia refused. She said she would not leave her daughter.
Coin said very quietly that if she stayed she would hear things she would carry for the rest of her life, and that the carrying of those things had broken stronger women than her. Cordelia said she was not stronger than any woman and she would carry what she had to carry.
Coin looked at her for what Ansel described as a long minute, and then he nodded, and he said she could stay, but she would sit in the corner of the room with her back to the bed, and she would not turn around no matter what she heard, and she would keep her hands over her ears from the moment he began until the moment he told her to stop. Cordelia agreed.
He began the rite at three in the afternoon on May 14. He finished at dawn on May 16. That is thirty-nine hours. He did not eat in that time. He did not drink after the first evening.
Ansel, who was permitted to stay in the kitchen and bring water when the priest asked for it, said the priest asked for water four times in the first six hours and did not ask again after that.
The girl Valerie was in the bed the entire time. She did not sleep. She did not eat. She spoke, according to Ansel, in three different voices, and none of them were hers. And one of them, he said, was a voice he recognized and would not say from where.
Cordelia, in the corner of the room with her back turned and her hands over her ears, heard what she heard. Her deposition to Henderson is one page long. It ends with the sentence: I heard my daughter's name spoken by something that was not my daughter. And I heard it spoken in the voice of my mother who has been dead nine years. And I understood then that the thing in my daughter had been in my mother also, and that it had never left our family, and I understood then why my two babies did not live.
Coin's journal entry for those thirty-nine hours is written mostly in Latin. But there is one passage in English near the end, and it reads as follows.
It knew my name before I spoke it. It knew the name of my mother. It knew the name of the seminary I attended. It knew the name of the parish in Chester and the name of Monsignor Fallon and the name of the girl I did not marry in 1923 because I chose the collar instead.
It knew all of this and it used all of it against me, and I understood in the fourteenth hour that this thing had been waiting for me specifically, that it had known I was coming, that it had in some way I do not want to write down been calling me here since I was a child watching the empty space between the pillars at old St. Mary's.
And I understood then that I was not going to leave these mountains until it or one like it took me. And I made my peace with that understanding at four in the morning on the 15th of May. And I finished the rite at dawn on the 16th, and the child slept.
The child slept for three days. When she woke, she had no memory of the six weeks she had not slept. She had no memory of the priest. She lived to be seventy-nine years old and raised four children of her own. She died in 1996 in a nursing home in Hazard.
When Coris Beaver tracked down her granddaughter in 2008 and asked whether Valerie had ever spoken of a priest coming to her family's farm when she was a child, the granddaughter said no. She had never mentioned a priest.
But she had every night of her life slept with the light on, and she had told the granddaughter once near the end that she was not afraid of the dark. She was afraid of the ceiling.
That was the first case.
Coin wrote in his journal that night, back at the loft above Rooney's store, that he had made a mistake. He had thought before Cranks that he was coming to the mountains to find the work. He understood now that the work had been waiting for him.
He wrote a single Latin phrase at the bottom of that entry, and it translates as follows: The vineyard tends the vine dresser.
He did not sleep that night. He did not sleep the next night either. On the third night, exhausted, he lay down on the cot in Rooney's loft, and he closed his eyes, and he heard very distinctly a voice in the room with him.
The voice was speaking Latin. It was speaking the responses of the rite of exorcism. It was speaking them in his own voice. And the voice was on the other side of the room.
He got up. He lit the lamp. There was no one there. He sat with the lamp burning until dawn.
In the morning he wrote in the journal that he understood something now that no one had told him at the seminary. He understood that the rite of exorcism was not a one-way conversation. He understood that when a priest performed the long form, he was not casting something out. He was inviting something to leave.
And the thing that left did not go far. It went into the room. It went into the walls. It went into the priest.
He wrote, and this is a direct translation, that every exorcism he performed would leave a residue. That the residue would accumulate. That there was a limit to how much residue a man could carry. And that when that limit was reached, the priest himself became the thing his replacement would be called upon to cast out.
He had performed one exorcism. He was already hearing his own voice speaking Latin from across the room. He calculated in the margin of the journal how many more he could perform before the residue reached the limit. The number he wrote down was 300.
He would perform 411.
The second case came seventeen days later, on the far side of Pine Mountain, in a settlement called Kingdom Come. The family was named Halcom.
The afflicted was not a child. It was the grandfather, a man of seventy-three named Elzie Halcom, who had, according to his daughter-in-law, walked out into the yard at three in the morning in the first week of May and stood there facing the ridge, speaking, not to anyone, to the ridge itself, in a language his family had never heard him speak.
Elzie Halcom had never left Letcher County in his life. He had, so far as anyone knew, spoken no language but English and the broken remnants of the German his own grandfather had brought from Pennsylvania in the 1830s.
But he was speaking at three in the morning to the ridge above the house in what Coin, when he arrived four days later, identified as ecclesiastical Latin of the fourteenth century.
Coin asked the daughter-in-law when it had started. She said the first week of May. Coin asked what the family had been doing in the last week of April.
The daughter-in-law said they had been clearing a field. She said Elzie had wanted to plant tobacco on a piece of ground the family had never planted before. It was a flat stretch on the second bench above the creek, and they had been meaning to clear it for years, and Elzie had finally decided that spring to do it.
He had gone up there alone with an axe. He had been up there three days. When he came down, he was quiet. Two nights later, he was in the yard speaking Latin to the ridge.
Coin asked to be taken to the field. The daughter-in-law walked him up the bench. She showed him the stumps where the trees had come out. She showed him the pile of stones Elzie had cleared.
And in the middle of the field, half buried, she showed him a flat slab of shale about the size of a dinner table, on which someone had carved, at some point in a past the family did not know, a symbol Coin had seen exactly once before, in a book in the seminary library that he had not been supposed to open, and that he had opened anyway on a rainy afternoon in his fourth year.
He did not tell the daughter-in-law what the symbol meant. He wrote in the journal that night that he did not know what it meant precisely, but he knew what family of symbols it belonged to. And he knew that no such symbol should exist on the second bench above Kingdom Creek in Letcher County, Kentucky.
And he knew that Elzie Halcom had disturbed something older than the Diocese of Louisville by clearing a field his family had left uncleared for six generations.
The exorcism of Elzie Halcom took nineteen hours. It was the shortest of the 411.
Coin wrote that the thing in Elzie had not been in him long and had not learned how to hide, and had gone out of him almost gratefully, as if it had also not wanted to be there.
The trouble was where it went. Coin wrote that he watched it leave, which he had not been able to do at the Seismores, and he watched it go back to the field. He watched it, in his words, return to its bed, and he understood then that the field itself was the problem, and that Elzie had merely been the first man foolish enough to disturb the sleeper by clearing the covering.
Coin walked up to the field the next morning. He blessed the ground. He recited the long form of the rite over the flat slab of shale.
He wrote in the journal that the rite had no effect on the slab, that the slab did not care about the rite, that whatever was under the slab or in the slab or of the slab was older than the language he was speaking and older than the church he was speaking for.
He wrote that he covered the slab with the stones Elzie had piled up, and he told the Halcom family, in the plainest English he could manage, that no one was ever to clear that field again, that it was to be allowed to go back to trees, that the trees were the covering, and that the covering had been left by people who knew what they were doing, and that Elzie had not known.
The Halcoms agreed. The field, according to a satellite image Beaver pulled in 2009, is still covered in trees. It is the only patch of second growth on that bench.
Elzie Halcom never spoke Latin again, and never spoke of the field. He died in his sleep at eighty-four.
That was the second case. It taught Coin something the first had only hinted at. It taught him that some of what he was fighting was not itself invasive. It was resident. It had been in the ground since before the first white man crossed the Cumberland Gap.
It was not evil exactly, in the sense the seminary had taught him. It was old. And old, he wrote in the journal, is a category the church has never known how to address, because the church itself is only two thousand years, and the ground of Kentucky is four hundred million.
He wrote, and this passage is quoted in the journal in a hand that is very steady, as if he had thought about the sentence a long time before writing it down, that he had come to the mountains believing he was bringing the light.
He understood now that he was not bringing anything. He was learning. And the thing he was learning was that his ritual, the long form of the Roman rite, was not a weapon. It was a language. And the ground of these hollows spoke that language too, and had been speaking it for longer than Rome had existed, and would still be speaking it when Rome was rubble.
He was thirty-four years old when he wrote this. He had been in the mountains eleven weeks.
By the end of 1936, he had performed eleven exorcisms. By the end of 1937, forty-three. By the end of 1938, ninety-two.
The circuit had settled into a pattern. He walked out of Cranks in the second week of April every year and returned in the third week of March the following year. He was gone eleven months and home three weeks.
In the three weeks he was in Cranks, he slept above Rooney's store. He ate one meal a day at the boarding house across the street. And he sat in the loft with his journal, and he wrote.
He wrote fast in those three weeks, catching up on everything he had not had time to write down while walking. Rooney, who could see the light burning in the loft window at all hours, told Beaver that the priest wrote as if he were being chased.
He was being chased.
He had understood this by the winter of 1937. He wrote in an entry dated December 18 of that year that he had begun to notice, in the fourth or fifth month of every year on the circuit, that something was walking behind him on the ridge trails.
Not a person. Not an animal. A pressure. A weight at his back that increased the longer he stayed in the mountains.
He wrote that he could feel it most clearly at dusk, when he was between hollows and the light was going and there were no houses within a mile. He would stop on the trail and turn around and there would be nothing there, and he would walk on, and after a hundred steps he would feel it again, closer.
He learned over the years that the pressure receded when he entered a house. It receded fully when he began the rite. It was absent entirely during the hours of the exorcism itself.
And it returned always in the hour after he finished, as he was walking away from the house, heavier every time.
He began in 1938 to time his exorcisms so that he finished them in the mornings rather than the evenings, because the pressure was easier to bear in daylight, when he could see the trail behind him and reassure himself that whatever was there was not visible to the eye.
It was not visible to the eye. It was visible sometimes in other ways.
In February of 1939, he was walking from a settlement called Line Fork to a settlement called Big Cowan Creek, a distance of about fourteen miles, in weather that had been threatening snow all morning.
He was crossing a saddle on the ridge above the head of Millstone Creek when the snow started, and it started heavy, and within twenty minutes he could not see more than ten feet in front of him.
He wrote in the journal that he had walked in worse. He was not concerned about the snow. He was concerned about the pressure, which had grown so heavy in the last hour that his shoulders were aching under it, as if he were carrying a coat lined with lead.
He stopped on the saddle. He turned around. He could see nothing but snow.
And he saw in the snow a shape. Not clearly. Not enough to describe. But the snow ten feet behind him was not falling straight. It was parting, as if something the size of a man was standing in the trail between him and Line Fork, and the snow were falling around it, and the shape of what was there was visible only in the negative space of what the snow was not.
He wrote that he did not run. He wrote that he understood in that moment that whatever was there had been walking behind him for two years, and that it had not touched him yet, and that if it had wanted to touch him, it would have done so already.
He wrote that he turned back around and continued on toward Big Cowan Creek, and he did not look behind him again for the next four miles.
When he arrived at the Cowan farm and asked the mother of the household whether anyone in her house was not sleeping, and she said yes, her father-in-law, he understood that the pressure had come with him to the door and had stopped at the door and would wait for him to finish the rite before it began walking behind him again.
He performed the exorcism on the father-in-law over the course of twenty-two hours. He walked back to Cranks a week later. The pressure walked behind him the entire way.
By 1940, his journal entries had begun to change. The Latin passages, which had been extensive in the first two years, thinned. He wrote more in English. He wrote more about what he was seeing. And he wrote for the first time about what he was hearing when he was alone.
He heard most nights his own voice speaking Latin in the room with him. It was speaking always the responses of the rite.
He heard it in the loft at Rooney's store. He heard it in the barns and spare rooms and back parlors of the families he stayed with on the circuit. He heard it in his sleep, when he slept at all, which by 1940 was rare.
He heard it once, and this entry is dated April 9, 1940, coming from the mouth of a small child sitting on a porch as he walked past. The child was three years old and could not have been speaking Latin. And yet the child was, in Coin's own voice, speaking the response, "Libera nos, Domine." And the child looked at him as he passed and did not stop speaking.
He wrote that night, in an entry that runs eight pages, that he understood now the true nature of the residue. It was not a passive contamination. It was seeking. It was, in his word, looking for its next host.
And the residue in him, the accumulation of ninety-two exorcisms as of that date, had begun to leak out of him into the people around him.
He wrote that the child on the porch had not been possessed. The child had been overheard. The residue in him had spoken through the child's mouth as it walked past, and the child had merely been the nearest available conduit.
He began that spring to avoid children. He crossed to the other side of the road when he saw them. He asked, when he arrived at a house for a case, that the children of the household be sent to a neighbor's house for the duration of the rite.
Most families complied. A few did not. And Coin wrote afterward that in every case where a child was present in the house during the rite, the child began within a week to display symptoms of a milder version of what he had come to treat.
He would return to those houses on his next circuit and perform a shorter rite on the child, and the child would recover, and he would walk on carrying, he understood, a little more of whatever had been in the child added to what was already in him.
The math of this, he wrote in July of 1940, was against him. Every exorcism added residue. Every failed containment added more residue. The residue was not passive. It was hunting. And the container it was hunting for, more and more, was him.
He did not stop.
He wrote in the same July entry that stopping would mean going home to Philadelphia, and going home to Philadelphia would mean walking into a diocesan office and explaining what he had been doing for the last four years.
And he understood that no one in that office would believe him. And he understood that even if they believed him, they would silence him. And he understood that the four counties of eastern Kentucky he had come to serve would then have no priest, and the 411 households he had not yet visited would go unvisited, and the residue in him would still be in him, and he would carry it into the diocese, and it would become their problem, and they were not equipped for it.
He wrote that his choices, as he saw them in July of 1940, were to stay and keep working and carry the residue until it broke him, or to leave and carry the residue somewhere it would break others who did not know what it was.
He chose to stay. He wrote at the bottom of that entry a single sentence, and it is one of the few sentences in the entire journal underlined in his own hand.
He wrote: "I am the wall between the mountains and the world beyond them. And if the wall falls, the world beyond does not know what is coming."
He was thirty-eight years old. He had nine years left.
The war came to the mountains the way it came to everywhere else in America. The sons of the hollows went to Fort Knox and to Campbell and to a hundred other places their fathers had never heard of. Some of them came back and some of them did not. And the ones who came back were not always the men who had left.
Coin noted in an entry from August of 1942 that he had begun to receive a new category of case. He called it in the journal the returning cases. Men who had gone to the war and come home and who were now, in the plainest terms he could find, no longer sleeping.
The first of these came from a hollow near Blackey in Letcher County in July of 1942. The man was named Ephraim Cornett, twenty-three years old, who had been at Pearl Harbor on the 7th of December, 1941.
He had survived. He had been discharged medically in April of 1942 and had come home to his mother's house on Rockhouse Creek, and from the first night of his return had refused to sleep in the house. He slept in the barn. He slept in the smokehouse. He slept, when the weather permitted, in the woods above the house.
His mother told Coin, when he arrived on the 3rd of July, that her son would come to the house for meals and would eat and would speak to her and would then leave the house and walk up the ridge, and she did not know where he went. She knew only that he would not come back through the door of the house after dark.
Coin asked the mother if her son had spoken of the war. She said no. She asked her son. Her son said only that Hawaii had been very hot.
Coin asked the mother if her son had spoken of anything unusual since his return. She thought about this for a long time.
She said her son had asked her the first week he was home whether the house had always faced east. She said the house had faced east since her husband's grandfather built it in 1879. Her son had nodded and had not asked again.
But she said, and this is what she said last, her son had begun in the last month to speak to the ridge at night. Not loud. Not so anyone in the house could hear the words. But she had walked out one night at two in the morning to use the outhouse, and she had heard her son on the ridge above the house, speaking in a low, steady voice, in a language she did not know, and she had thought in that moment that the language sounded a great deal like the language a Catholic priest had once used when he came through Blackey when she was a girl and had blessed the house for her mother.
Coin wrote that night in his journal that he understood what had come home from Pearl Harbor with Ephraim Cornett, and it was not something Pearl Harbor had made. It was something Pearl Harbor had merely stirred.
He wrote that he did not know what the ground of the Pacific Islands was, or what had been asleep in it, or what six thousand men dying in a single morning had disturbed. But he wrote that whatever it was had followed a boy home to Kentucky, and had settled gratefully in a hollow that already had a bad piece of ground under it, and had begun the work of introducing itself to the ridge above the Cornett house, and the ridge above the Cornett house had, over the course of six weeks, been receiving it.
Coin performed the rite on Ephraim Cornett in the smokehouse, at the boy's request, because Ephraim would not enter his mother's house after dark. It took twenty-six hours.
Coin wrote that the thing that had come from Pearl Harbor was not the thing that spoke to the ridge. The thing that spoke to the ridge was already there and had been there since long before, and Ephraim's condition had merely been the introduction of an unfamiliar guest to a very old host. The two had, in the six weeks between the son's return and the priest's arrival, gotten along.
He wrote that the rite got the visitor out. It did nothing at all about the host. He wrote that he blessed the ridge as best he could, and that he understood, as he had understood at Kingdom Come six years before, that the ridge did not care about the blessing.
He wrote that he told Ephraim Cornett's mother before he left that the boy would sleep in the house again, but that she should not let anyone in the family go up onto that ridge alone. She asked how long. He said, "For the rest of your life." She asked what would happen if someone did. He wrote that he did not answer.
Ephraim Cornett lived until 1971. He slept in the house. He never went up on the ridge alone. He married a woman from Whitesburg and they had four children. None of the children went up on the ridge alone. None of the grandchildren went up on the ridge alone.
And in 1991, when the granddaughter of Ephraim's youngest daughter, a college student home from the University of Kentucky, walked up the ridge alone for the first time in the family in forty-nine years, she did not come back.
She was found three days later, four miles up the ridge, sitting on a log. She was alive. She would not speak. She has, according to Coris Beaver's notes from 2010, not spoken a full sentence since. She is still alive. She lives in a group home in Hazard. She is looked after by her cousins, who take turns.
Coin received nineteen more of the returning cases between 1942 and 1945. The men had been at Guadalcanal and at Anzio and in North Africa and at Iwo Jima.
Coin wrote that in every case the pattern was the same. Something had come home with them from a place where a large number of men had died at once. The something was in each case slightly different, and in every case the something was in a hurry to introduce itself to whatever was already asleep in the Kentucky ground, and the Kentucky ground was in every case willing to receive the introduction.
He wrote in the summer of 1944 that he was beginning to understand something about the war that no one else seemed to be tracking. He wrote that when men die in large numbers in a small piece of ground in a short amount of time, something is released.
That something has no name in any language, he knew, but it travels. It attaches to the survivors. It comes home with them, and it looks everywhere it goes for other pieces of ground that are already waking up.
He wrote that he did not know how many pieces of ground in America were waking up. He wrote that he knew of at least thirty-seven from the accounts of the returning men and the hollows they came home to.
He wrote in the same entry that he was one priest, and that he could not walk fast enough, and that the war would produce more returning cases than he could reach in the years he had left. He wrote that he did not know what to do about this. He wrote that he prayed for guidance and received none.
And he wrote at the very end of that entry, in a hand that had begun to slope down the page, in the way it always sloped when he had been up too long, a single line in Latin. The line translates as follows: The vineyard is larger than the vine dresser understood.
By the end of 1945, he had performed 231 exorcisms. His body was failing him in ways he documented meticulously.
He had lost twenty-seven pounds since arriving in Cranks. His hair, which had been dark brown, was fully gray. He had developed a tremor in his right hand that was present at all times, except when he was performing the rite, and disappeared entirely for the hours he was speaking Latin, and returned the moment he closed the ritual.
He had lost three teeth. He had a cough that never fully cleared.
And he had, since the winter of 1943, been unable to look at himself in a mirror. Not because he did not want to. Because he had tried, in a boarding house in Hazard in December of 1943, and had seen in the glass a face that was his own face, but not entirely, and there was someone else looking out from behind his eyes.
He had known in that moment that the residue had a face now, and that the face was learning to be his.
He wrote that night in Hazard that he understood he was going to have to find a way to stop before the face inside became the only face. He wrote that he did not know what stopping would look like.
He wrote that he would not go home to Philadelphia, because he would take the face with him, and the face would then be Philadelphia's problem, and Philadelphia had done nothing to deserve it.
He wrote that he would have to find in these mountains a piece of ground that was ready to receive what he had become. And he would have to give himself to it, and he would have to do it in a way that ensured the residue went into the ground and stayed in the ground and did not walk out of the ground into whoever came next.
He was, in December of 1943, forty-one years old. He had six years left. He spent them looking for the piece of ground.
The search for the piece of ground began in the spring of 1946. He wrote that he was looking for a specific set of qualities.
The ground had to be remote enough that no one would find it accidentally. It had to be old enough that whatever was in it would recognize what he brought. It had to be, in his phrase, willing.
He wrote that this last quality was the hardest to describe. Most of the pieces of ground he had encountered in the mountains were not willing. They were resident. They had been asleep for so long that they did not want to be woken, even by someone offering to lie down inside them.
He needed to find a piece of ground that had, for whatever reason, been left uncovered. A piece of ground that was, in his word, hungry.
He walked more than usual that year. He extended the circuit. He went into hollows he had not visited before, and he walked ridges he had not walked, and he sat on outcrops, and he listened.
He had, by 1946, developed a sensitivity to what he was listening for that he could not have described to anyone at the seminary in Philadelphia. He wrote that a piece of hungry ground had a quality of stillness. Not the stillness of nothing being there. The stillness of something being there that was very careful not to move.
He wrote that he had walked past hungry ground twice on his early circuits and had not known what he was walking past. He knew now.
He found the first candidate in the summer of 1946, on a ridge above Kutchin Creek in Leslie County. It was a bald, a patch of open ground about two acres in size, on the top of a ridge, where no trees grew, and where the grass grew shorter than it should have, and where the wind moved through in a way that did not match the wind on the ridges to either side.
He sat on the bald for six hours. He wrote afterward that the bald had noticed him. He wrote that it had noticed him without any sign he could describe. He had simply become aware, in the third hour of sitting, that he was being considered.
He wrote that the consideration was not hostile. It was not welcoming. It was, in his word, appraising. As if the bald were trying to determine whether he would be sufficient.
He wrote that he did not know how to tell whether the bald had decided he would be sufficient. He wrote that he stood up and thanked it out loud in Latin and walked back down the ridge.
And he wrote that when he was about a mile down the trail, he stopped and turned around, and he realized for the first time in ten years that the pressure that had been walking behind him for the entire decade was gone. It was not there. He had left it, he wrote, on the bald.
He walked the rest of the way to Cranks without it. He wrote that the journey home was the lightest walking he had done since 1936.
He wrote that he understood, when he arrived at Rooney's loft, that he had found the ground. He wrote that the ground had accepted the introduction. He wrote that the pressure had gone home ahead of him and was waiting for him now on the bald, and would wait as long as it took for him to finish his work and come to it.
He calculated that night in the margin of the journal that he could perform another 150 exorcisms before he had to go to the bald. He wrote at the bottom of that calculation a single note. It read: "This is more than I had hoped for. It is fewer than the mountains need. I will do what I can."
He did more than that. Between the summer of 1946 and the winter of 1949, he performed 180 exorcisms. He worked in those three years at a pace that his own journal describes as unsustainable, and that was self-evidently sustained.
He walked into households where the situation had gone on for months because no one had known to send for him. He walked into households where children had not slept for so long that the mothers had begun to sleep instead in the day, on their feet, standing up at stoves.
He walked into households where the returning cases had gotten out of the returning man and had gone into the wife or into the older brother or into the dog.
He wrote in an entry from October of 1947 that he had performed the rite on a dog in a barn near Colgood, and that the rite had worked, and that the dog had lived another two years, and that the family who owned the dog had not been Catholic and had not known what the rite was, and had thanked him and offered him supper, and he had accepted the supper, and he had not told them, and had never told them, what had been in their dog.
He was, by 1947, unrecognizable to his own family. His mother in South Philadelphia had written him letters through the Corbin post office since 1936. He had responded to none of them.
She died in the spring of 1947 at seventy-nine years old, and the notice of her death was forwarded to Cranks, and Rooney took it up to the loft himself, and Coin read it, and he did not speak for two days.
On the third day, he came down and asked Rooney, without preamble, whether Rooney thought a man could love a place more than he loved his own mother. Rooney said he had never thought about it that way.
Coin said he had been thinking about it since the notice arrived, and he had concluded that a man could, and that this was neither a virtue nor a sin. It was, he said, a fact of the mountains. The mountains took what they took.
He went back up to the loft. He did not travel to Philadelphia for the funeral. He wrote in the journal that night that he had not been at his mother's deathbed, and that this was a debt he would carry with him to the bald, and that the bald would understand what the debt was and would not judge him for it.
He walked out of Cranks the next morning for the spring circuit. He was gone eleven months.
He wrote very little that year. The entries for 1947 and 1948 fill only about a third as many pages as the earlier years.
He wrote in a note at the top of the 1948 section that he had begun to conserve his writing because he no longer had the strength to write and to work, and the work came first, and the writing could be caught up in the last winter he had.
He knew by then that the last winter was coming. He had begun to see, in the margins of his own vision, movement that was not there. He had begun to hear, when he was performing the rite, a second voice speaking underneath his own, and the second voice was in English, not Latin, and it was giving him instructions.
He wrote that he did not follow the instructions. He wrote that he was not sure how much longer he would be able to not follow them.
In September of 1948, he came down out of the hollows early. He had been due in Cranks the third week of March, but he arrived in the second week of December, sixteen weeks after he had been expected.
Rooney said he came down the mountain in a snowstorm, alone, with the leather bag and the ritual and nothing else. He had lost the rosary his mother had given him at his ordination. He would not say where.
Rooney asked if he was well. Coin said he was very tired. He asked if he could sleep in the loft. Rooney said, "Of course."
Coin went up the stairs, and Rooney, watching him climb, said later that he had not seen a man look that way since a mine cave-in near Lynch in 1922, when three men were pulled out alive after six days, and one of them, the one who had been at the back, had come out looking the way Coin looked coming up those stairs.
Coin slept for three days. On the fourth day, he came down and ate a bowl of soup at the boarding house. On the fifth day, he wrote the last long entry of the journal. It runs fourteen pages.
It is the entry in which he explains for the first time what he intended to do at the bald and why, and what he had learned about the ground of Kutchin Creek that had made him choose it. And it is the entry at the very end where he tells the reader, whoever the reader turned out to be, what to do if what he was about to attempt did not work.
He wrote that the bald above Kutchin Creek was one of a small number of places in the southern Appalachians where the ground had been left deliberately uncovered by people who knew what they were doing, and who had understood that a piece of hungry ground, tended properly, was more useful than a piece of covered ground.
He wrote that he did not know who those people had been. He wrote that they had not been the Cherokee and had not been the Shawnee and had not been white settlers. They had been earlier than any of those, and they had known the ground of the mountains in a way that the church, for all its rites and rituals, did not know.
He wrote that they had, at the balds they left uncovered, buried certain things. He wrote that he did not know what those things were precisely, but he knew that the balds were not empty. They were, in his phrase, occupied.
And the occupation was, in his understanding, ancient and stable and mostly benevolent, in the sense that the balds did not seek out victims. They accepted only what was brought to them.
He wrote that his plan, such as it was, was to walk up onto the bald in the last days of December 1949 and to perform the long form of the rite on himself.
He wrote that he did not know if this was possible. The rite had not been designed for a priest to perform on his own body. But he had, over the years, made certain modifications to the Latin, and he had inserted certain phrases he had not learned at the seminary, and he had crossed out certain lines the seminary had considered essential.
He wrote that he had been, without meaning to at first and then very much on purpose, developing a variant of the rite that could be spoken by a priest into himself, and that could, if the ground was willing, remove the residue accumulated over 411 exorcisms and transfer it into the ground, where it would settle among whatever was already there and would be, in the phrase he used, absorbed.
He wrote that he did not know if he would survive the transfer. He wrote that he doubted it.
He wrote that he had made his peace with not surviving it years before, in the first week at the Seismores, and that the 411 exorcisms since had been in every sense borrowed time, and he was grateful for the borrowing, and he understood that the debt on the borrowed time was now due, and that the bald was where he was to repay it.
He wrote that if he did survive the transfer, he would come back down to Cranks, and he would leave the journal with Rooney, and he would walk to Corbin, and he would take the first train east, and he would present himself for the first time in fourteen years to the archdiocese in Philadelphia, and he would tell them what he had done and what he had learned, and he would accept whatever discipline they chose to impose.
He wrote that he did not expect to reach this point. He wrote that if the reader of the journal was the Philadelphia Archdiocese, then he had not survived the bald, and the reader should know that he was sorry for what he had put them through by leaving in 1936 without notice, and that he had considered for many years whether he had done the right thing, and had concluded that he had, and that he would do it again.
And he wrote at the very end of that entry, in a hand that was surprisingly steady for a man who had been up three nights writing what he called the contingency, that if he did not survive, and if the transfer was successful, the bald above Kutchin Creek would from that point forward be, in his phrase, full.
He wrote that a full bald was not the same as an occupied bald. A full bald was closed. It could not receive more. It could only hold what it held.
And what it held, he wrote, would be him, and the residue of 411 exorcisms, and whatever had come home to Kentucky from Pearl Harbor and Anzio and Iwo Jima and had settled here in the years he had been working.
He wrote that this was a great deal to leave in one piece of ground, and that the ground would carry it for as long as it could carry it. But he wrote that ground, even hungry ground, had a capacity, and a bald that had been left uncovered for many centuries and had received at the end the accumulated residue of a wartime would eventually reach that capacity.
He wrote that he did not know when the capacity would be reached. He wrote that he estimated it in centuries, not decades.
But he wrote that the reader should understand that what he was doing at the bald was a stopgap, and that at some point in the future another priest, or someone else, would have to come to Kutchin Creek and find another piece of ground and repeat the transfer and take the burden into himself and go up on another bald.
He wrote that he did not know who this person would be. He wrote that he hoped they would be prepared better than he had been prepared.
He wrote that he hoped the church, by then, would have learned, and would send them properly authorized, and would put their name in the ordination rolls, and would not, when they disappeared, mark them absent and then six weeks later deceased.
He wrote that he did not think this would happen. He wrote that the church had not learned in his lifetime and would not learn in the lifetime of his successor.
He wrote that his successor would be, as he had been, someone who had read the ritual until the ritual began reading them back, and who had understood on their own that there was work in the empty places of the country that no one else was doing, and had gone to do it without permission.
He wrote that this was, in his understanding, the way it had always been and would always be, and that the church would go on writing its books with certain names left out, and the mountains would go on receiving certain visitors whose names never appeared, and the world beyond the mountains would go on not knowing what was being carried on its behalf.
He closed the entry with a Latin phrase he did not translate. Rooney, who read the journal after Coin left it with him, took the phrase to a Catholic priest in Middlesborough in 1953 and asked for a translation.
The priest read it and would not translate it. He said only that the phrase was not from any part of the Roman Ritual he knew, and that the phrase was, he thought, a private prayer, and that private prayers should be left private.
Rooney put the journal back in the foot locker in his barn. It stayed there for fifty-three years.
Coin left Cranks on the morning of the 29th of December, 1949. It was snowing lightly. Rooney walked him to the edge of town.
Coin carried the leather bag and the ritual and nothing else. He wore the black cassock and a wool coat over it. He wore boots that Rooney had resoled for him three years before.
He had left the journal on the desk in the loft above Rooney's store, weighted down with a stone from the bald that he had brought back on his last visit and set aside for this purpose. He had left a note under the stone that said, "For the finder." He had not addressed it to anyone in particular.
At the edge of town, Rooney asked him where he was going. Coin said, "Up Kutchin Creek." Rooney asked if he wanted company. Coin said no.
Rooney asked when he would be back. Coin said if I am back it will be within the week. If I am not back by the 5th of January I will not be coming back.
Rooney said he would watch the road. Coin said he did not have to. Coin said if I do not come back, do not send anyone to look for me. Do not tell the family in Philadelphia. Do not tell the archdiocese. Do not tell the state police. Put the journal somewhere safe and forget you have it. And when someone finds it who is looking for it, let them find it and give it to them, and do not ask them what they intend to do with it.
Rooney said he would do as the priest asked. Coin shook Rooney's hand. He walked up the road toward Kutchin Creek. Rooney watched him until he was around the first bend, and then Rooney went back to his store.
He did not see Ithamar Coin again.
He watched the road, in spite of what Coin had told him, for eight days. On the 5th of January, 1950, when Coin had not returned, Rooney took the journal off the desk in the loft and wrapped it in oilcloth and put it at the bottom of the foot locker in his barn, and covered it with three woolen blankets and a bag of horseshoe nails, and closed the foot locker, and did not open it again.
He died in 1978 at the age of ninety-three. The foot locker went to his son. His son did not open it. His son died in 1994.
The foot locker went to a grandson, who moved the barn to a lot outside of Whitesburg in 2003 and did not at that time look inside the foot locker either.
In the spring of 2008, the grandson's daughter, home from college for the summer, opened the foot locker looking for old clothes for a costume party. She found the oilcloth bundle at the bottom. She unwrapped it. She took the journal to her father.
Her father took it to a local historian in Hazard. The historian took it to Coris Beaver, who was at the time the only researcher in eastern Kentucky who had made a project of tracing the histories of unnamed clergy in the mountain counties.
Beaver read the journal in a single sitting in a coffee shop in Hazard in June of 2008. She wrote afterward that she had not slept that night, and that she had gone the next morning to the archdiocese in Louisville and had asked for records of a Father Ithamar Coin, and had been told, for the first time of what would become many times, that no such priest had ever existed.
She spent the next six years trying to prove otherwise.
She found the letter Monsignor Fallon had drafted and not sent. She found the deposition Cordelia Seismore had given to Henderson the Baptist preacher. She found Ansel Seismore's letter to his brother in Ohio.
She found seven of the eleven letters Coin's mother had written him at the Corbin post office. She found the train ticket receipt in the closed seminary account, dated April 5, 1936.
She found, at the general store site in Cranks, which had by then been demolished and replaced with a parking lot for a Dollar General, an elderly woman across the street who remembered the priest in the loft, and who confirmed at ninety-three years old everything Rooney had said to Beaver in the last interview before he died.
She found no record of him in any church document anywhere. Not in Philadelphia, not in Louisville, not in Baltimore, not in Rome, which she wrote to and which did not respond.
She wrote her account of the story in 2012 and offered it to three university presses, and each of them declined, and she published it herself in an edition of two hundred copies, and she sold them at heritage fairs in Harlan and Whitesburg and Hazard.
When she died of a stroke in 2015 at the age of sixty-eight, the remaining copies of the book went into her attic, and the journal itself, per her will, went to the special collections at Berea College, where it sits today, in a temperature-controlled room, cataloged under an accession number that does not include Coin's name, because the cataloger in 2016 could not verify that Coin had ever existed.
The bald above Kutchin Creek is still there. It has not grown over. The grass on it is still shorter than it should be. The wind still moves through it in a way that does not match the ridges to either side.
Local hunters do not cross it. There is a widely understood rule in Leslie County that a deer wounded on that ridge is a lost deer, and one does not follow it onto the bald. The rule is not written down anywhere. It is understood.
In 2011, a graduate student from the University of Tennessee attempted to conduct a soil survey on the bald as part of a study on high-elevation bald ecosystems in the southern Appalachians. She spent one afternoon on the ground.
She wrote in her field notes that she felt throughout the afternoon as if she were being watched. She wrote that at no point could she identify the source of the feeling. She wrote that she did not return to complete the survey, and that the paper was ultimately not published.
Her field notes were donated to the Berea College special collections in 2017 and are shelved, by coincidence or otherwise, in the same box as Coin's journal.
There has been no other priest. No one has come to Kutchin Creek in the seventy-six years since Coin walked up that road with a leather bag.
The families of the four counties who remember him have kept their remembering to themselves, mostly. A few of them have talked to Beaver. One or two of them have talked to researchers who have come after her. Most of them will not speak of him at all.
And when they will, they will only say that a priest came through when they were children, and their grandparents told them not to speak of him after they died, and they have honored that instruction, and they do not intend to break it now.
There are, however, children in those hollows who are not sleeping. Not many, but some.
A woman in a hollow above Blackey told Beaver in 2013 that her granddaughter, seven years old, had begun in the spring of that year to lie awake at night and watch the ceiling, and that when she asked her granddaughter what she was watching, the granddaughter said she was watching the man in the ceiling.
The woman said she had heard the same words from her own aunt when she was a girl in the 1940s, before the priest came to their hollow the second time. The woman said her aunt had recovered. The woman said she did not know who to call now.
Beaver, in her notes, wrote that she did not know either. She wrote that she had thought for a time about calling the diocese in Louisville. She had, in the end, not called. She wrote that she did not think the call would do any good, and that it might, in ways she could not articulate, do harm.
The journal ends on its very last page with a single sentence written in Coin's hand, in English. It is undated.
Beaver believes, from the character of the ink and the position of the writing on the page, that it was written after the long final entry, possibly on the morning he left Cranks for the last time. The sentence reads as follows: If you are reading this and you have understood any of it and you are not one of ours, close the book and put it back where you found it, and do not come to the mountains looking for me.
The mountains have not been looked into.
The journal has mostly been forgotten. And the bald above Kutchin Creek, on winter mornings, when the snow lies on the ridges around it and does not lie on the bald itself, is visible from certain angles for many miles as a bare patch on the top of a ridge where nothing grows and where the wind does not move the way the wind moves anywhere else, and where a man in a black cassock walked up in the last week of 1949 and did not walk back down.
If you have ever traveled through eastern Kentucky and passed through Harlan or Letcher or Perry or Leslie County, and you have felt, for reasons you could not name, a pressure at your back on a particular ridge, or a silence in a particular hollow that felt not empty but occupied, then you have brushed the edge of what Father Coin spent thirteen years walking through.
You have brushed the edge of what he carried to the bald. You have brushed the edge of what the bald is now holding, and will hold until the day it can hold no more.
That day is coming. Coin wrote that it would come in centuries. He wrote that in 1949. Seventy-six years have passed.
There are, by the accounting of a researcher who died alone in a Hazard hospital room in 2015, and whose two hundred copies of a self-published book sit still, most of them in a plastic tub in an attic in Whitesburg, a number of children in the hollows who are not sleeping, and no one to send for.
There is a bald above Kutchin Creek that has not been walked on in seventy-six years. And there is a name the church will not write down.
The name is Ithamar Coin. He was ordained in June of 1927. He was, by everyone who knew him in the mountains, a good priest. He performed 411 exorcisms. He was thirty-three years old when he arrived in Kentucky and forty-seven when he left.
And he carried out of the mountains and into the ground more than any man should have been asked to carry. And he did it because no one else would, and because the ritual, one night in Chester, Pennsylvania, had begun reading him back.
The journal at Berea is not permitted to circulate. It sits in a locked case in a temperature-controlled room and may be viewed by appointment only. In the years since it was accessioned, it has been viewed by three people.
One was Beaver herself. One was a graduate student from Chapel Hill who spent an afternoon with it and left without taking any notes.
And one, in the summer of 2017, was a man who came without an appointment, in a black coat, and asked to see the Coin accession, and was told he would need to fill out a form and return the following week.
He signed the form. He left the space for name blank. Under the space for institutional affiliation, he wrote a single word in Latin that the librarian photocopied and sent to a colleague at Catholic University.
The colleague wrote back that the word was not a modern one. It belonged to a family of ecclesiastical terms that had fallen out of use by the fifteenth century, and it was, in her best guess, a title, a rank, something like custodian, but older. She did not know what it referred to.
She asked whether the man had come back. The librarian said he had not. He had not come back at all.
The form he filled out sits still in the file for the Coin accession, along with a photocopy of the Latin word. And behind it, at the very back of the file, is a single sheet of paper that Beaver added the year before she died.
On it, she wrote in her own hand that if any researcher ever came looking for the Coin materials and asked her successors what she had believed to be true about him, they should be told that she had believed him. That she had read the journal and believed every word of it.
That she had walked in the summer of 2011 up the trail toward Kutchin Creek alone, and had stopped a quarter mile below the bald, and had not gone farther.
She had felt, at the quarter-mile mark, a pressure at her back that she could not explain, and had understood in that moment that she was not welcome to come farther, and that the pressure was not hostile, but was, in her word, patient. It was waiting for her to decide.
And she had decided, standing there on the trail, that she would not press her welcome. She turned around. She walked back down. She drove home. She never returned.