q1903

In the Appalachian Mountains of West Virginia, a village called Hollow Creek once held a secret that science would spend decades trying to explain. It was a place accessible only by a single unpaved road winding through dense forest and rocky terrain. In 1976, fewer than 200 people called it home. Most families had lived … Read more

In March 1866, two sixteen-year-old sisters vanished from a remote Appalachian homestead where Virginia meets Kentucky. Rebecca and Rachel Whitlock were identical twins with pale gray eyes and chestnut hair, the only children of Samuel Whitlock, a stern forty-three-year-old widower. Their mother, Martha, had died giving birth to them in the winter of 1850. The … Read more

In the autumn of 1890, a coal surveyor working a new excavation site on the western slope of the Blue Ridge Mountains lowered his lantern into what he took to be an empty shaft. Something in the darkness lowered a lantern back. The light was strange. It was faint, tending toward green, and it did … Read more

In the autumn of 1890, a coal surveyor working a new dig on the western slope of the Blue Ridge Mountains lowered his lantern into what he took to be an empty shaft. Something in the darkness lowered a lantern back. The light was strange. It was faint, tending toward green, and it did not … Read more

In the winter of 1884, a county surveyor named Ambrose Thackeray came down out of the Smoky Mountains carrying a piece of oiled cloth on the shoulder of his coat and a sealed envelope full of papers that he never allowed anyone to read. He kept that envelope with him until the day he died, … Read more

Deep in the southern Appalachian range, there is a place where the creek water runs the color of rust and the trees grow at angles that do not seem logical from a distance. The ridgeline curves inward like the spine of a creature curling around itself to protect something. The locals have a name for … Read more