In the fall of 1847, a wake was held for a woman in an isolated Appalachian hollow, and the event would forever mark everyone who attended. The settlement, which was not marked on any map, sat between Baron Ridge and a local peak known simply as “the Knob. ”
The deceased woman was Jessamine Saul, known to the scattered residents of the hollow as a healer. While she was respected for her knowledge of herbs and remedies, she was also feared.
Local lore spoke of strange occurrences surrounding her, including gardens where plants withered and died if she merely walked past them. The most enduring rumor was that she was a witch. When a young barber surgeon named Virgil found her dead in her cabin, he noted that her body was unnaturally still, but her mouth was curved into a faint, knowing smile. The small community, led by a man named Phineas, decided to hold a proper wake for her at the largest home in the hollow, despite their fear.
The atmosphere at the wake was tense. As the night wore on, the 12 attendees began to feel a profound, unnatural cold that did not come from the draft. One by one, people began to leave, driven out by an unexplainable dread. Then, something remarkable happened.
Llewellyn Meriwether, a man known for his extensive knowledge, stood and spoke. He revealed that “Jessamine Soul” was not her real name and that she had been in the mountains for a very long time, longer than the settlement itself. He spoke of agreements made long ago between the first people and “the old ones”—beings that exist in the spaces between things. He said Jessamine had been given a long life and that she had been watching them all night.
His words were interrupted when the corpse on the table sat up. Its mouth stretched into a smile that was wider than any human mouth should be able to stretch, and it spoke in a chorus of voices, all speaking the same words at once. The entity inside the body began to whisper secrets to individuals in the room, things no one else could have known. It moved among them, and people began to flee.
The event lasted until the early hours of the morning, and by the end, only a few of the original attendees remained. The entity finally closed its eyes and lay back down, as if the night’s events had been exhausting. After the wake, the body was buried on the ridge without ceremony or marker. Within a month, no one spoke her name.
Within a year, it was as if she had never existed. Phineas, one of the last to leave, was haunted by the event for the rest of his life. He felt as if he had aged ten years in a single night. The story ends with a chilling thought from the narrator: the hollow is still there, and the pattern of visits to a healer at dusk has continued through the generations.
The final message was a warning: be careful what you watch for, because sometimes it watches back.