A box of letters sealed for decades in Asheville, North Carolina, contained testimony that officials in three counties reportedly agreed to suppress in the 1890s. The records pointed to a man named Hollis Grimshaw, who built a cabin on Blackthorn Ridge in the late 1880s and was never seen again after authorities searched it. The information was pieced together from 17 pages of testimony given by Deputy Sheriff Caleb Thornwood, dated March 1894. The pages were stored in a wooden crate left by a circuit judge who died with instructions that it remain unopened for 50 years.
His great-granddaughter opened it early and shared its contents. Grimshaw came down from Kentucky in 1886 and purchased 40 acres on the south face of Blackthorn Ridge. He paid in silver coin, more than the land was worth. The seller, a 62-year-old widow named Mahala Caldwell, later recalled an unsettling encounter when a coin rolled to the floor and Grimshaw appeared closer to her than he had been moments before.
He smiled and told her he meant her no harm. She said the word “mean” troubled her, because it sounded like harm was something he would have to choose to do. He built the cabin alone, refusing help from neighbors. He ran a trap line and sold furs at a trading post in the nearby town, where the proprietor noted he always bought far more salt than one man needed.
When asked what he was curing with it, Grimshaw reportedly said, “Things that don’t want to stay put. ”
In the fall of 1889, a traveling preacher passing the cabin noticed an absence of birdsong for roughly half an hour, then described the sound returning after he was well past the property. In the summer of 1890, Jeremiah Creed, the 22-year-old son of a nearby farmer, vanished while hunting. His rifle was found propped neatly against a tree, and his canteen hung from a branch seven feet off the ground with its strap deliberately looped.
He was never found. Disappearances in the area increased in 1891. A man checking on his family’s hogs did not return. A peddler was found with his horse and cart intact, his tack stacked neatly on the driver’s seat, but he was gone.
Another young man was found dead about three miles from the cabin. The deputy who discovered him recommended the family be told he was killed by a bear, and wrote privately that no bear had done that. The coroner said of what had been done, “Whoever did this was not in a hurry. ”
A midwife named Prudence Whitmore kept a private ledger of disappearances, cross-referenced with trading post records.
She found that four trips Grimshaw made down the ridge corresponded with four people going missing within two weeks of each trip. On those same four trips, he wore a black coat no one had sold him. She noted that every person who disappeared around those times was gone, except for one, whose body was later found. Deputy Thornwood admitted he was afraid to act earlier.
He testified that his horse stopped dead, shook, and foamed at the mouth when he rode near the cabin once, and refused to go forward. He said, “I took my horse’s advice. ”
In March 1894, a judge issued a warrant to search the property. A party of six men, including Thornwood, the coroner, the farmer Mordecai Creed, and the trading post owner, went up the ridge.
The cabin was empty. A pot of coffee was still warm on the stove and a plate of food sat on the table, but there was no trail leaving the property and no sign of the occupant. In a cellar beneath the cabin floor, they found evidence connected to at least 11 missing people. Personal effects were later identified by families.
There was also a shelf with glass jars filled with salt, each containing a small object such as a lock of hair, a button, a tooth, or a folded paper with a name written on it. Deputy Thornwood counted 23 jars and described them as “trophies, packed in salt, like preserves laid up for a long winter. ”
Grimshaw was never found. Deputy Thornwood wrote that he believed Grimshaw had known the party was coming and had left deliberately, leaving the coffee warm so they would find it.
He closed his testimony with a line: “I do not think he is dead. I think he went further up. ”
The cabin was boarded up and left standing. Those involved said burning it might be a kind of cleansing, but one note suggested “some evils feed on fire.
” Reports state the ground around the cabin stayed bare in a perfectly circular ring where nothing grew. The judge who issued the warrant kept a small iron box. On his deathbed in 1942, he asked his daughter to bury it unopened. She opened it instead.
Inside was a sheet of paper listing five names of people who went missing between 1915 and 1938, all within 100 miles of Blackthorn Ridge. At the bottom, in unsteady handwriting, were the words, “He is still walking. ”
That same year, according to the family story, a tall, lean man with dark hair and leather gloves came to the judge’s door in September and said an old neighbor had stopped by to pay his respects. By the time the judge was fetched, the man was gone.
The judge bolted the doors and sat up all night with a revolver on the table. The survivors, according to the records, lived out their lives scanning the room’s corners and checking their doors. Prudence Whitmore’s final words reportedly were, “I’m making sure he doesn’t come any closer.
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The document trail ends there.