In the autumn of 1881, a small farming community in west-central Pennsylvania disappeared overnight. The valley, known as Yarrow Pass, was home to 312 people. By the morning of October 29, every man, woman, and child was gone.
A circuit preacher named Algernon Whitlock arrived that morning to find the town completely empty. The meetinghouse door was unlocked, with hymn books open on the pews. The general store was unattended, with a ledger left mid-entry and two cups of cold coffee on the counter. The blacksmith’s forge was still warm, with a half-finished horseshoe on the anvil. Cooked food sat on tables. Beds were made. Laundry hung on lines. There was no sign of struggle, no blood, and no bodies in any of the houses.
The only living things were six dogs, who followed Whitlock at a distance, whining. They did not bark. The preacher later said he felt watched, though not by the dogs. He rode hard to the next valley and summoned the county sheriff, Octavius Meade
Sheriff Meade arrived with a party of men as the sun set. They searched every house, barn, cellar, and outhouse. They found cattle still in their pens and horses still in their stables. A pie sat cooling on a windowsill, untouched. There were no footprints leading out of the valley. The road was as it had been any other Saturday. There were no tracks because, as Meade later told the coroner, nothing that walked on the surface of the earth had carried them away
Late that evening, a deputy named Phineas Marbury found something. He had been searching the western edge of town, where an old stone well sat on the property of a man named Ulysses Cobbett. The well was 60 feet deep and about 4 feet across. It had been capped with a wooden lid, latched shut. When the deputy opened it and looked down, he did not say what he saw. He returned to the square holding his hat in his hands, the way a man holds a hat at a funeral
The coroner, Tobias Quennell, was lowered into the well at first light. He stayed at a depth of 40 feet for almost 10 minutes without speaking. When he came back up, his hands were shaking. He said only, “They are all in there, every one of them.”
The recovery took four days. Forty-three men were involved. Each body was brought up one at a time, wrapped in canvas, and laid out in the meetinghouse. Coroner Quennell cataloged each one, matching every name against the census taken that previous spring. The lists matched perfectly. There was no one missing
The geometry of the well presented an impossibility. A well 60 feet deep and 4 feet wide holds roughly 750 cubic feet of space. The volume of 312 adult bodies, even pressed together, would be closer to 1,200 cubic feet. The numbers do not work. And yet the bodies were all there, counted, named, and identified
There was no obvious cause of death on any of them. No wounds, no bruises, no marks of strangulation, no signs of poison. No water in the lungs, though the lower bodies had been submerged in about three feet of water at the bottom. They were simply dead
Coroner Quennell noted one consistent feature on his second pass through the bodies. He wrote in his formal report that the eyes of every single person in that well were open, and that they were all looking up
In a private letter to his brother, Quennell wrote that the bodies were arranged. They were not stacked or thrown or piled. They were placed with their heads turned in the same direction, facing east. None were tangled or overlapping. He wrote that it had the look of something done by hand, slow and patient, the way a clockmaker lines up small parts on a felt cloth. He never went back into the well after the recovery was done. He retired in 1884 and moved to a small house on the Schuylkill River, where he raised honeybees. His wife later wrote that he would not allow any deep container in the house, not a cistern, not a rain barrel, not even a flower vase taller than a hand’s breadth
One of the recovery men, a stone mason named Coleman Yetter, kept a private notebook. He wrote that the air at the bottom of the well was warm, the temperature of a kitchen with a stove burning in it. The walls were cold. The water was cold. The bodies were cold. But the air was warm. When he came back up to the surface, he could feel the warmth rising from the lip of the well like the warmth from an oven door. On the third night, he walked back to the well alone after dark. He wrote that he had the feeling that something at the bottom was holding very still. He finished the job he had been paid to do. He never went down another shaft for the rest of his life
The county did not want the story to leave the valley. The railroad was making decisions about where to extend its lines. Investors had plans for new mines two valleys over. Sheriff Meade and his superiors wrote up the incident as a wasting fever of unknown origin. The bodies were buried in a single mass grave just east of the meetinghouse. The well was filled in with stones and sealed at the top with mortar. A small fence was put around it. The road into Yarrow Pass was officially closed the following spring
The sheriff dealt with the 43 recovery men individually. He did not threaten them. He simply asked them not to speak about what they had seen. He told them there were things in the world that the world was not yet ready to have explained to it. Most of them agreed. The silence held for 22 years
In 1903, Sheriff Meade, then 69 years old and in his last year in office, allowed the original report to be made public. He told a young reporter from the Philadelphia Inquirer that he did not want the report to die with him. The story ran on page four of the Sunday edition on May 3, 1903, under the headline “A Mountain Mystery Now 22 Years Old.” It was reprinted in seven other papers across the eastern half of the country. There was no follow-up investigation. There was no government inquiry
By then, the forest had taken most of the valley back. The meetinghouse roof had collapsed. The general store had been pulled down for its boards. The bell from the meetinghouse had been moved to a different church in a different valley. The well itself was still there, sealed, fenced, on private land. The family that owns the land has, by all accounts, never opened it
There is a detail in the public record that suggests the people of Yarrow Pass were not surprised. A surveyor named Wendell Garrick stayed in the valley for nine days in late September of 1881, mapping property lines. He kept a journal. On September 27, he noted strange business at the Cobbett well. The hired man reported that the bucket came up empty three times before it filled, and that he could hear no splash when he let it down. Cobbett told him the water level in that well moves on its own
Garrick wrote that he had been having the same dream for three nights. In the dream, he was standing in the meetinghouse in the middle of the day, but there was no light coming through the windows. The whole town was there with him. They were all looking at the same thing, but he could not turn his head to see what it was. He could only look at the faces of the others, and they were all looking up
On October 2, he wrote that there was a sound in the valley at night. It came from somewhere west of the Cobbett property, up toward the high pasture. He described it as the sound of a great many people speaking very quietly at a great distance, all at the same time. The words were not clear. There was a rhythm to it. It rose and fell. It paused. It began again. He asked Cobbett about it casually. Cobbett looked at him for a long while. Then he said the valley had its own habits, and that a man who slept in it for a season learned to keep his window shut after dark
Garrick left at first light the next morning. He never returned to the valley. He continued to work as a surveyor in Eastern Pennsylvania, but refused after 1881 any contract that would have taken him into the western part of the state. He married in 1885 and had a long, happy life. His wife’s diary records that for the 44 years of their marriage, he insisted that the window in their bedroom be shut every single night, regardless of the season. On the night of his death in 1929, the last thing he said to her was that he could hear them coming. He did not say who
In the autumn of 1907, a hunter named Asher Mountjoy was crossing the upper pasture near the old well. He heard a sound like a great many people speaking very quietly at a great distance, all at the same time. He could not make out the words, but there was a rhythm to it. It rose and fell. It paused. It began again. He became absolutely certain of two things. The sound was coming from inside the well. And whatever was speaking down there knew his name. He left the county that night and did not return. His descendants still live in Pennsylvania. The family has passed down a single rule for four generations: no Mountjoy is to set foot in Hephzibah County at any time for any reason
A family in the next valley over, the Sturbridges, had a farm set against the western ridge that separated their valley from Yarrow Pass. Their farm journal contains an entry dated October 28, 1881, the night it happened. It reads, in part:“About sundown, there was a sound from over the ridge that I cannot account for. The dogs would not come out of the barn. It was not a sound like any animal I have ever heard. It was not wind. It was not water. It was, if I must say, like the singing of a great crowd of people very far away. Only the words were not words, and the singing was not singing, and the sound rose and fell in the way a tide does three times before it stopped.”
The next entry in the journal is dated October 31. It reads in full:“The people of Yarrow Pass are all dead. Whitlock came down at first light yesterday, and the sheriff has gone up.”
The Sturbridge family has passed down a rule for four generations: close the kitchen window before sunset on the 28th of October every year. The current owner, a retired county librarian named Pernilla Sturbridge Haywood, still does it. She does not know exactly why. Her grandmother had told her when she was a young woman that it was for the singing. She said no more than that
About 10 years ago, she forgot. There had been a death in the family that week, and she had not been thinking about the date. She was doing the dishes after supper with the window open. She remembered standing at the sink and feeling all the small hairs at the back of her neck rise at once. She did not hear anything. She felt that she had almost heard something, that a sound had begun somewhere on the other side of the ridge and had not been able to come the rest of the way because she had not opened the door for it. She closed the window so fast she cracked one of the small panes. She has never forgotten the date again
She asked that the rule be told out loud, so it would not be forgotten when she was gone. If you live in central Pennsylvania in the ridge country west of Hephzibah, in any of the small farmhouses on the slopes that look toward the empty valley of Yarrow Pass, close your kitchen window before sunset on the 28th of October every year without fail. She said it could not hurt. She said it might help. She said she did not know
The land where Yarrow Pass once stood is now part of a state game commission tract. There is a small dirt road that leads in from the county route. If you follow it for about a mile and a half, you can find the foundation stones of a few buildings half buried in moss. There is the outline of what was once the meetinghouse. There is the stone hearth of what was once the Renfrew forge. There is a low wrought iron fence. Inside the fence is a circular stone mound about 4 feet across, sealed at the top with old gray mortar. There is no marker. There is no plaque
There is a clause in the original land transfer from the county to the state in 1915 that requires the mound to remain undisturbed in perpetuity. The reason given is fragmentary. As near as anyone has been able to read it, the clause states that the mound is to remain closed because the land’s previous owners had reason to believe that something below the surface in that location should not be allowed easy passage upward
The moss on the stones of the mound is thicker on the east side. That is the side, if you are standing on the mound and looking down, where the bodies were facing