In the spring of 1912, on the porch of his home in Lancaster County, a surveyor named Obadiah Rinehart told his grandson a story he had kept secret for a quarter of a century—an account he would only share once, and that his grandson did not write down until after the old man’s death. Born in Berks County, Pennsylvania, in 1821, Rinehart was a careful, methodical man who had spent 40 years measuring land with chains and a theodolite. He was known to be sober-minded and free of superstition, which was precisely why the railroad company hired him for a survey job deep in the New Jersey Pine Barrens in 1887. In late summer of that year, a Camden railroad concern contracted Rinehart to survey a 1,400-acre parcel near a remote settlement that no longer appears on any map: Eberly’s Crossing.
Three Pennsylvania Dutch families lived there—eight adults in total—descendants of workers from a bog iron operation that had closed decades earlier. Rinehart traveled by train on October 2 and was expected to complete the work in about 10 days. He did not return until October 23. When his grandson later asked why it took so long, Rinehart explained: “The work took 10 days.
The walking out took 13. ”
The settlement consisted of three houses, a shared barn, a smokehouse, and a small stone meeting room. The nearest town, Chatsworth, was a seven-mile walk along a sand path. The railroad had been paying the families a stipend for quietly caretaking the parcel.
Rinehart was given lodging in the smokehouse and began his survey on October 4. During the first three days, the work progressed normally. On the third evening, the head of the largest family, Lebrecht Hummelstein, warned him, in German: “Do not be in the trees after the bell. ” Rinehart asked what bell he meant, since there was no church or tower in the settlement.
Hummelstein only replied, “You will hear it. ”
On the fourth day, late in the afternoon, Rinehart heard a single, low, brassy tone coming from somewhere deep in the trees. He noted the time—4:22 p. m.
—and returned to the settlement quickly. That evening, Hummelstein came to see him and confirmed the warning. He told Rinehart that the bell rang between four and five in the afternoon, though not every day. When it rang, a person had to be inside a house with a closed door before sundown, and could not open the door until the sun had been up for a full hour the next morning.
When Rinehart asked what happened if those rules were broken, Hummelstein said his brother had stayed out one night in 1863; his clothes were later found folded on a table in the meeting room, and he was never seen again. Over the following days, Rinehart noted strange occurrences. On the morning of October 7, his transit instrument had been turned to face the trees. On the 8th, the family’s chickens stood in a loose circle, all facing outward, unmoving, until the woman of the house clapped her hands and broke the trance.
On the evening of the 9th, he heard a slow, dragging sound along the outside wall of the smokehouse and later found a faint scuff mark at shoulder height. On October 10, the bell rang again at 3:58 p. m. As Rinehart hurried back, the woods fell utterly silent.
Then he heard a single footstep behind him, followed by another, maintaining his pace for nearly twenty minutes. He understood that the woods wanted him to turn around, and he was equally certain he must not. He reached the settlement and barred the door of the smokehouse, his hands shaking so badly he could not light his lamp for ten minutes. That night, a voice came through his door, speaking perfect, unaccented English: “Please open the door.
I am cold. ” When he refused, the voice addressed him by name, using his mother’s exact pronunciation. His mother had been dead for 19 years. The voice waited for nearly an hour, then walked away.
In the morning, the soft dewy ground showed no footprints. The following morning, Wilhelmina Hummelstein asked, in Pennsylvania Dutch, “Who did it call? ” When Rinehart told her, she said calmly that the voice had called her sister’s name the previous winter, and that her sister had died before the family ever moved to the settlement. Instead of leaving, Rinehart stayed on to finish the job—admitting later that he “wanted to know.
” Over the next nine days, the bell rang three more times, and each night something came back to the door. On October 12, a voice claimed to be a fellow surveyor who was lost, using specific, convincing details, including the names of two Camden engineers Rinehart genuinely recognized. On the 15th, the voice did not speak at all; it only breathed slowly, each breath lasting unusually long, moving the canvas hung over the door’s gap. On the 18th, a voice that sounded like Wilhelmina begged for help, saying her husband had fallen in a creek—but she was unhurt in her own house the entire time.
The families had simply learned the rules and kept them. On October 20, Rinehart returned to the eastern edge of the parcel to set his final stakes. He found one stake had been moved about six feet. Then he noticed that the door of the old bog iron forge, which the families had told him to avoid, was standing open.
Acting against his better judgment, he approached and looked inside. On the floor, in a shaft of pale light, he saw a carefully arranged circle of eleven stones, each about the size of a fist. He drew a diagram in his field book and counted the stones twice. As he turned to leave, he heard a small bell ring—held far too long—from somewhere inside the forge.
As he walked back, the woods went silent again, and the footsteps behind him came faster. He told his grandson that the thing came close enough that he heard a dry, clicking sound near his shoulder. He was about to turn around when the bell rang again from far behind him, and whatever was behind him turned back and left. Back at the main house, Lebrecht Hummelstein asked which building he had gone to.
When Rinehart said the forge, Hummelstein’s face changed. The men returned to the forge before sundown, and Hummelstein walked around the building, speaking words in German at the corners. He counted the stones and confirmed all eleven were still in place. “Then it has only been listening,” he said.
“It has not been loosed. ” He barred the door and led Rinehart back. That night was the worst. Multiple voices came to Rinehart’s door—his dead parents, a sister who had died of typhus in 1848, a colleague killed in an accident decades earlier.
They told him things only those people would know and spoke to one another about him in real time, describing his movements through the wall. Rinehart sat with his hands over his ears, reciting the 23rd Psalm in Pennsylvania Dutch dozens of times until dawn. In the morning, the families finally explained the settlement’s secret. Something had been buried at the forge that should not have been there—the result of an incident in 1849 that nobody would describe fully.
Maria Pretz, whose father lived through it, said a foreman had done something to a worker under his command. The other workers had taken matters into their own hands and put the foreman into the forge fire. But what came out of the forge afterward was not the foreman and had no name. It spoke to them in the voices of the men who had built the fire, then walked into the trees—but it remained near.
Eleven stones, arranged in a circle by Maria’s father, formed a kind of seam that held the thing inside the building for most of the day, releasing it only between four and five in the afternoon. A 12th stone was kept in the house so the count could be checked. The families had carried the keeping of the stone circle for 36 years, passing the rules down to new arrivals, including Maria’s husband Reinhardt when he came to marry her. Rinehart left Eberly’s Crossing on October 22.
Hummelstein walked three miles with him and gave him a warning: “Do not write of this. Speaking of it is a kind of opening. ” Rinehart promised to comply, and he did—until he told his grandson in 1912. He died at home in Lancaster County in 1914.
In 1928, the grandson traveled south to look for the settlement. A post office clerk in Chatsworth told him the place had burned in the spring of 1901 after the families had moved on years earlier. The clerk added that an older woman who spoke German more easily than English had come looking for the same place earlier that spring. The grandson found only the foundations of the houses and a black mark where the smokehouse had stood.
The forge was gone entirely—the stone walls had been pulled down by hand and stacked neatly. No trace of the circle of stones remained. Near the corner of the foundation, he found a gray stone, smooth on one side and rough on the other, about the size of a fist. He held it for a long time, then set it back down exactly where it was and walked away.
As he made his way back to his car in the long afternoon shadows, he heard a single low, brassy tone, held too long, coming from behind him in the trees. He did not turn around. He did not return to the Pine Barrens again. In his final year, Rinehart told his grandson one last detail: before he left the settlement, Hummelstein had handed him a small parcel wrapped in oilcloth, instructing him not to open it for at least a year, and then only alone, in the middle of an open field, in full daylight.
Rinehart waited two years. When he finally unwrapped it in a fallow pasture in the spring of 1889, he found a small dried sprig of an unfamiliar herb tied with a strip of white cloth—nothing else. He buried it that afternoon under a flat stone at the corner of the pasture. He told his grandson he never knew whether it had protected him or was simply a gesture of kindness from a man who knew nothing he gave could really help, but wanted to give something anyway.
He confessed he was glad he had buried it carefully, just in case.