A chilling account preserved in a private North Carolina archive tells of two brothers who disappeared into the Blue Ridge Mountains in the autumn of 1873—and only one of them ever came back. The story is documented in a letter written in 1891 by Obadiah Tallameyer, a former Civil War sapper, who detailed the final weeks he spent with his younger brother Ferris, a trapper. According to the account, the pair had been hired by a timber speculator named Cresswell Hobart to survey a remote parcel of land near Asheville. Hobart offered the brothers an extra $10, a significant sum, to take the job after his own regular men refused, citing unsettling stories about the ridge.
Obadiah’s letter describes an increasingly eerie series of events after they reached the property. He wrote of a forest that was unnaturally silent, mules that stared fixedly into the dark for an hour, and a cabin that stood on supposedly unimproved land with no path leading to it. Inside, the cabin showed signs of having been lived in days before, though no one had walked there for years. The brothers found an old Bible open to a page that was not scripture, but a handwritten list of 41 names.
That night, Ferris climbed a ladder into the cabin’s loft. He came back down without speaking, and according to Obadiah, he was changed from that moment on. The observations that followed were detailed in the letter: blazes cut into trees appearing to shift overnight, a song Ferris hummed that Obadiah had never heard, and Ferris eventually reciting the names from the Bible in his sleep before saying his own name aloud. Obadiah reported that when he checked the Bible, the previously blank 42nd line now held Ferris’s name in fresh ink, with the faint beginning of a 43rd entry forming beneath it.
He took the book to a creek and threw it into the water, then forced his brother to flee the property with him. They walked for a full day, but the cabin appeared behind them again. In his letter, Obadiah wrote that he then told his brother to walk ahead to the cabin and ran in the opposite direction, since his own name had not yet been permanently written. According to the letter, Obadiah ran through the night until he reached a farmhouse.
He claimed he heard his brother’s voice calling him twice from the woods, the second time right at his shoulder, using a private childhood name, but he did not turn around. He believed doing so would have made him the next name on the page. Days later, Obadiah returned to the site with local men, but the cabin and clearing were gone. The only object they found was the Bible, lying in moss at the foot of a large pine.
He then brought the book to a minister in Spruce Hollow, who locked it in a church safe. The church burned in 1914, but the Bible reportedly survived undamaged and was moved to a private archive in Knoxville, Tennessee. The archive reports that the page now contains 87 names. The most recent was added in 1959.
Officials there say the names are added in a hand nobody recognizes, and they have asked that the latest name not be disclosed. Ferris Tallameyer is recorded nowhere in any birth, census, tax, or county registry. According to Obadiah’s account, when he tried to file a missing-person report in 1874, no record of his brother existed anywhere. The only trace of Ferris Tallameyer remained, in dark ink, on the page of the Bible.
Obadiah Tallameyer lived another 19 years in Asheville, working as a hardware store clerk, and never returned to the deep woods. His account survives in that single letter, along with the Bible, in the private archive.