A traveling photographer left his profession changed after being hired in the autumn of 1897 to photograph the surviving members of an isolated family in a West Virginia hollow, and he never looked into a mirror again for the remaining 39 years of his life. Casemir Ostrov, 36 years old and working with the newer glass plate photography, arrived in Sable Notch on the second Tuesday of October to fulfill a commission from an 84-year-old widow named Otili Faren. She had written to him requesting a set of family portraits, paying half in advance, and asking him to leave any mirror of his own outside her house. At the house, Ostrov found a home where every mirror was covered with cloth.
The old woman told him plainly that mirrors were never made to show reflections but to watch people, and what they see in a person is their own business. He was shown to his room, where a white cloth covered the small glass above the washstand, with instructions never to lift it. Over the following nights, he listened as the widow entered the parlor and spoke to the tall, covered mirror that hung there. He later heard a faint tapping sound from behind the cloth in his own room.
Ostrov learned the house contained a separate building full of roughly 40 covered mirrors of various sizes. The widow explained that a mirror holds what it has seen rather than merely reflecting it, and that a mirror used by one family for generations becomes something that knows them and should never be broken. On the Saturday, Ostrov photographed all 12 surviving family members together in the parlor, with the covered mirror kept out of frame. When he developed the plates, he found a woman’s face on the wall behind the sitters.
The widow identified the faint image as her husband’s mother, who had died in 1862. She asked if he would take another set. He agreed. When he developed the second set of plates, a man’s face appeared above the mantel, one with a scar on the cheek and gray at the temples.
It was his own face. The widow told him the mirror had learned him over the six nights he had spent there, and that once it knows a face, it keeps knowing it. Ostrov broke the plates and buried the shards under the springhouse. He accepted his payment and left, never returning to Sable Notch.
For the rest of his life, he never photographed another person, switching entirely to landscape work. He avoided all mirrors, shaving by touch, and asked that any glass in the rooms he rented be removed or covered. He carried with him a studio portrait of a woman he did not know, keeping it as the last face he was certain had never been seen by the mirror in the Fen house. He wrote to a nephew that he had not looked at his own face since age 36 and that he felt like a stranger to himself, but preferred that to letting the mirror see him twice.
In his final year, he commissioned a pencil drawing of himself from a fellow boarder who had been a portrait artist. He sent it to Loman Farren, the great-nephew who had inherited the Fen property, asking that it be placed inside the little house behind the old family place so the mirror would have a face of him to look at. The family carried out the request, and Ostrov died six weeks later in 1936. The tall walnut-framed mirror from the Fen house survived.
After Loman Farren died in 1944, it was sent to a distant cousin, then passed through an estate sale into private hands. Its current location is unknown. According to historians and local records, Ostrov was a working professional with more than 15 years of experience. He came out of that household permanently changed.
The family on record maintained the same belief for at least five generations.