In the spring of 1910, a 78-year-old man named Obadiah Crenshaw gave a testimony that he had refused to share for more than three decades, describing something he witnessed in 1878 in a small Amish settlement on the western edge of Lancaster County, Pennsylvania. His account was written down by a young Mennonite minister on twelve pages of lined paper and eventually deposited in a regional historical society, where a researcher later obtained access to it. The settlement was called Yarrow Hollow, a community of 31 Old Order Amish families who lived quietly, farming corn, wheat, and tobacco. The official post office there closed in 1904, and the last barn collapsed in 1922.
Today, only a stone foundation and a half-buried well remain on the land. Obadiah, a deacon in the community, was called upon when something seemed wrong. In the second week of September 1878, a young farmer named Zerubbabel Hostetler reported hearing voices coming from an unusually tall cornfield bordering his property. The language was unfamiliar to him, and he kept it to himself for several days before his wife heard the same sounds through the floorboards of their home, an experience that prompted him to report it to Bishop Yost Beiler.
The bishop sent for Obadiah. When Obadiah walked the field, he found nothing unusual in the corn itself, but he discovered a trail of footprints deep inside the rows. The prints were longer than a man’s foot and had eight toes, four on each side, pressed deep into the soil. They appeared to have been made within the hour.
He ordered the young couple to leave their home for three days and did not explain why. Obadiah stayed on the porch that night. Around 11:30 p. m.
, he heard what he later described as whispering coming from the field, the sound of many voices speaking together. Then he saw a figure at the edge of the corn, taller than the stalks, which he estimated were over nine feet high. The figure stood still, appeared to have a head but no face, and did not approach. After a few minutes, it was simply no longer there.
The footprints were gone by morning. The next day, Bishop Beiler revealed a private book kept by the community since 1742. The leather-bound record, written in three different inks, documented strange events in the western field going back more than 130 years. The first entry, from 1744, described a man named Hans Stoltzfus who walked into the corn at sunset and disappeared, leaving only his shoes placed neatly at the center of the field.
Another entry from 1771 described a young woman found unconscious after crossing the field’s corner; she never spoke again for the remaining 41 years of her life. Other entries detailed a farmer who vanished in plain view of his wife, and a traveling preacher who was found alive but unable to remember his own name. The entries followed a regular rhythm, occurring roughly every 12 to 15 years. The most recent entry was from 1863, which meant something was expected in the field soon.
That, the bishop said, was why he had sent for Obadiah. On the night of September 15, 1878, Obadiah entered the field alone, carrying his Bible, an unlit lantern, and a length of red yarn tied around his left wrist. The bishop instructed him to walk exactly 200 steps into the field and then wait. At step 143, Obadiah reported feeling the air thicken.
At step 172, the whispering began all around him. He described it as many voices repeating a name, though not his own. At the 200th step, he found a small opening in the corn with a three-foot-tall stone at its center, covered in markings that resembled no alphabet he recognized. The bishop had instructed him to place his Bible face down on the stone.
When he did, the whispering stopped instantly. He turned and began walking back, sliding his feet as instructed. He walked for what seemed much longer than 200 steps. He heard something walking parallel to him, several rows over, matching his pace exactly.
He did not turn to look. When he finally stumbled out onto the lane, the two men waiting there had to cut the yarn from his wrist with a pocketknife, because his hands were shaking too badly. The yarn, which had been red, had turned a brittle ivory white, as if all the dye had been drained from it. Bishop Beiler examined the yarn and placed it in an iron tin inside the trunk with the old book.
He told Obadiah that the field would be quiet now, but that the quiet was not the same as the end. Someone else, he said, would have to walk the rows again in another 12 to 15 years. After the incident, Obadiah’s hair, previously streaked with gray, turned entirely white. His left hand, which had worn the yarn, grew permanently cold to the touch.
He did not speak of what happened for 32 years. According to the historical record, the field remained quiet. Zerubbabel and his wife returned to their farm in spring 1879 and lived there for another 26 years without incident. The rhythm of the book, however, continued.
New deacons walked the field in 1893 and again in 1907, each following the same procedure. In 1920, with most families gone, the bishop at the time ordered the field left unplanted, hoping the rhythm could be broken. The whispering reportedly returned louder than ever, coming not only from the field but from the road and the abandoned houses. The bishop wrote a final entry recording his belief that this had been a mistake, that the field needed the corn to contain whatever was in it.
The last six families left that autumn and never returned. At the end of his written testimony, Obadiah added a note he had never told anyone. He wrote that on his walk back through the field, the tall thing pacing him three rows over had spoken once. It had called his name in the voice of his grandfather, who had been dead for 19 years.
He nearly turned his head, he wrote, but did not. He carried that voice with him for the rest of his life, and he wrote that in his old age, he sometimes wondered whether he had completely left the field that night, or whether some part of him was still walking back. The land where Yarrow Hollow once stood is now privately owned, and no crops are grown there. Aerial photographs taken in 2014 reportedly show an irregular patch of roughly eight acres where the grass grows in a different shade than the surrounding pasture.
The property owner, when contacted, declined to discuss the area, saying only that he does not allow anyone to walk that section after sunset. He did not explain why.