In the spring of 1912, the United States Census Bureau employed a network of traveling enumerators whose job was simple in description and difficult in practice.
Go to every household in their assigned district, knock on every door, and write down what they found.
James Aldrich was 24 years old. He had taken the enumerator position in March of that year, two months after his father’s hardware business in Morgantown had closed and 3 months before he had expected to begin reading law at the state university.
The census work paid 30 cents per day plus expenses, which was not enough to make a man comfortable, but was enough to make a young man with no other immediate income feel useful.
He had been assigned to the eastern districts of Ran County, the remote ones, the ones that ran up into the mountains along creek beds and hollow roads that most of the county’s population never had occasion to travel.
He was methodical. His supervisors in Morgantown said this about him when they assigned his district, that he was methodical and careful and not given to leaving things incomplete.
He kept his enumeration forms in a leather satchel that he oiled once a week.
He recorded every household in the order he visited them with the date and time of his arrival noted in the margin of each form.
He carried two pencils sharpened to identical lengths and replaced them at precisely the same interval so that he always had a reliable writing instrument.
He had been working his district for 6 weeks when he came to the last page of his assignment list.
The last name on the list was written in the standard enumeration format. Aldrich Sisters, Crow Hollow Road, approximately 14 mi northeast of Spencer.
Household composition unknown. Previous enumeration attempts zero. Note appended in the margin by whoever had prepared the list.
Remote access, no road maintained past mile 9, recommend horseback. The note was dated 1910.
Whoever had prepared the 1910 list had not apparently followed their own recommendation. The Aldrich sisters, no relation to James, had not been enumerated in 1910.
Nor when James checked the records, going back through his supervisor’s files in 1900, the household at Crow Hollow had not been formally visited by any representative of any government office in at least 12 years.
This was not in 1912. Particularly unusual in the remote mountain districts of West Virginia.
Roads were bad, access was difficult, enumerators were not always diligent, and supervisors were not always demanding.
Households in the deep hollows sometimes went a decade or more without official contact of any kind.
And this was generally accepted as one of the practical realities of conducting census work in a state that was in many of its corners still functionally frontier.
James Aldrich noted the recommendation for horseback arranged with a livery in Spencer for the use of a mayor for three days and set out for Crow Hollow on the morning of May 14th, 1912.
He told his landlady and Spencer where he was going. He showed her the assignment sheet with Crow Hollow written on it and the estimated return date he had penciled in the margin.
May 16th, 2 days out, accounting for the difficult access and the need to complete the enumeration form thoroughly.
His landlady, a woman named mrs. Taggard, who had operated the Spencer boarding house for 22 years, and who knew the county the way people who stay in one place know it, by the texture of its gossip and the weight of its silences, looked at the assignment sheet and said nothing for a moment.
Then she said, “Who did you say lives up there?” He said, “The Aldrich sisters.”
The name on the form. She said, “How many of them?” He said, “Household composition unknown.
That’s what the form says.” That’s why I’m going. She looked at the sheet again.
Then she said, “And James Aldrich wrote this down later precisely because he remembered it exactly.
She said, “I’ve heard of that hollow. I’ve heard of those women. I don’t know anyone who’s been up there and come back to tell me about it firsthand.”
He asked her what she’d heard. She said, “Just that they’re hospitable, that they take in travelers, that people speak well of them, people who’ve been told about them secondhand by others who’ve heard the same.”
He asked her whether that was a concern. She was quiet for a moment. Then she said, “I suppose not.
I suppose hospitality is a virtue.” She gave him his key and wished him a good journey.
He left the next morning before she was downstairs. He was gone for 4 days instead of two.
When he came back, he came back on foot. The horse had not come back with him, and he came back without his satchel, without his enumeration forms, and without the second pencil.
He had the first pencil. He had in his coat pocket, three pages torn from a notebook that he had been carrying separately from his official forms.
A personal journal in which he occasionally made notes about the landscape and the people he met and the things he thought about on long rides through empty country.
Those three pages are the only direct account that exists of what James Aldridge found in Crow Hollow in May of 1912.
He gave them to his landlady the morning he returned. He did not explain why.
He put them in her hand and said, “If I don’t come back for these, give them to the county sheriff.”
She asked him where he was going. He said he wasn’t sure yet. He went upstairs, packed his bag in under 20 minutes, paid his remaining board in cash, and left Spencer on the afternoon train heading west.
He never returned to Rome County. The three pages sat in mrs. Tagert’s bureau drawer for 11 years until her death in 1923, at which point her daughter found them while clearing the room.
The daughter read them, did not know what to make of them, and brought them to the county sheriff’s office in Spencer, as her mother’s instructions had directed.
The sheriff at the time was a man named Harwick. He read the three pages.
He drove up the Crow Hollow Road as far as his automobile could manage, which was not far, and then walked the remaining distance.
What he found at the end of the road is the second part of this story.
But first, what James Aldrich wrote on those three pages, riding down from Crow Hollow in the dark on a horse that would not stop moving, regardless of how hard he tried to slow it.
He wrote quickly and in places illegibly, the letters crowding each other the way letters do when the hand that makes them is not entirely steady.
But the account is clear enough. It has been read by enough subsequent eyes that the unclear portions have been interpreted with reasonable confidence.
And it begins, as accounts of terrible things often begin, not with the terrible thing itself, but with the ordinary, comfortable approach to it.
He wrote, “The hollow was beautiful.” He wrote this first before anything else, as though he needed to establish it.
Needed the record to show that beauty had been part of it, that the place had not announced itself as wrong.
The road climbed through old growth timber, he wrote, and the light came through it in columns.
The way light comes through cathedral windows, and the creek that ran beside the road was clear enough to see the stones at the bottom.
And when the hollow opened up ahead of him, he thought for a moment that it was one of the most peaceful places he had ever seen.
The house sat at the center of the hollow, backed against the ridge. It was larger than he had expected, two full stories well-maintained, with a kitchen garden that was already producing in the May warmth, and a flower border along the front porch that had been planted with deliberate care.
Smoke from the chimney. A lamp lit in the front window despite the afternoon light, he wrote.
Before I reached the gate, the door opened and one of them came out to meet me.
He wrote. She was smiling before she could possibly have seen my face. There were four of them.
James Aldrich had not known to expect four. The assignment form had said household composition unknown, and he had assumed without particular reason, something smaller.
Two perhaps three at most. Four women in a house at the end of a road that disappeared into mountain wilderness was not what the standard enumeration form prepared you for.
Their names, as he recorded them later from memory. His forms were gone by then.
Left behind in the house along with his satchel and everything in it were Marin, Dileia, Sura, and Joe.
He did not get surnames from them or ages or any of the other standard enumeration data.
He got names because they introduced themselves each in turn as they came out of the house to meet him in the yard.
Marin first, the one who had come to the gate. The one who had been smiling before she could see his face.
She was the eldest, he thought, though it was difficult to be certain. Tall, dark-haired with threads of gray, a face that was handsome rather than beautiful, strong featured, with a quality of attention in it that he noticed immediately and could not quite name.
She took his hand when he dismounted and held it a moment longer than a handshake requires and looked at him with a directness that was not unfriendly, but that made him feel without knowing why that she was taking inventory.
Dileia was shorter, rounder, with a warmth to her that was immediately and genuinely comfortable.
The kind of woman who makes you feel that her house is the right temperature.
And her food will be exactly what you wanted.” She laughed easily. She touched your arm when she spoke to you.”
She made James Aldrich think of his aunt in Clarksburg, who was the most hospitable person he had ever known, and he thought this later, and found it difficult to reconcile with everything else.
Sura was the quiet one. She stood slightly back from the others when they came into the yard and watched James with an expression he struggled to describe in his notebook.
Not unfriendly, he wrote, but assessing the way a person looks at something they are trying to decide about.
And Joe, the youngest, he was fairly sure, though again the ages were unclear. Joe was the one who took his horse.
She came around from the side of the house when he dismounted, appeared as if she had been waiting just out of sight, and held her hand out for the rains before he had said anything about the horse.
She was slight, quick moving, with dark eyes that met his briefly, and then went to the horse with the focused attention of someone for whom animals were the primary interest.
She led the horse away toward the barn without speaking. He watched her go and noticed that the horse went with her without resistance, which horses with new handlers do not always do.
He wrote, “I should have thought more about the horse. I should have thought about what it meant that she took it before I had decided to stay.
He had not decided to stay. He had planned to complete the enumeration, which should take no more than an hour, and ride back down the hollow road before dark.
He had three more households on his list in other parts of the district, and had intended to reach the nearest of them by the following morning.
He did not complete the enumeration. He stood in the yard for a moment after Joe led the horse away, looking at the house and at the three remaining sisters arranged in the natural unhurried way of people who are at home in a place and not performing being at home in it.
This was something he noted later that nothing about them had seemed performed. The hospitality had the quality of something that had been practiced for so long, it no longer required effort.
Marin’s attention to him was complete and genuine. Dileia’s warmth was immediate. Sura’s watchfulness was simply how she occupied space.
None of it had the quality of theater. He wrote, “I want to be honest about this because I think it matters.”
They were not frightening. They were not immediately strange. If I had left that afternoon and never gone back, I would have described them.
To anyone who asked, as four women living alone in a hollow, who were more gracious and more interesting than I had any reason to expect.
The yard itself was neat, well-maintained in the way of a property that has regular attention.
A stone path from the gate to the porch, a well with a good timber cover, split firewood stacked under a leanto at the side of the house, a quantity of it that suggested serious preparation for winter.
More than four women would need for ordinary domestic use, but not so much as to seem remarkable.
A vegetable cellar door set into the ground at an angle near the kitchen wall, the iron handle worn smooth with use.
He looked at the vegetable cellar door and thought nothing of it. Marin invited him inside for supper before he had opened his satchel.
She did it the way practiced hospitality is extended, not as a question, not as a pressure, but as a simple statement of fact.
Supper was nearly ready. He must be hungry after the long ride. There was more than enough.
She turned toward the house as she said it in the manner of someone who has already assumed the yes and is moving on to the next thing.
He followed her inside. He wrote, “The house was clean and warm and smelled of cooking that made my mouth water before I could see what it was.
There was a large table in the main room set for 5. I did not ask who the fifth place was for.
I understood or thought I understood that it was for me. He wrote, “The food was very good.”
He wrote, “I ate more than I intended to.” He wrote afterward. Marin said the road back down the hollow was not safe in the dark.
There was a section where the creek crossed the road twice in close succession, and the stones were slippery, and that I was welcomed to stay the night and leave in the morning.
She said this while clearing the table, her back partly to me, in the same tone she had used to invite me to supper, as if it were already decided, as if the only question was whether I understood it yet.
He had agreed to stay. He would spend 36 hours in the house at Crow Hollow before he ran.
The 36 hours were not, for most of their duration, frightening. This was the thing he came back to again and again in the three pages of his notebook.
The ordinariness of most of it. The way the house and the women and the rhythms of the place had worked on him like something designed to keep his attention occupied and his instincts quiet.
Marin talked with him about books. She had a substantial shelf of them in the parlor, mostly history and natural philosophy, some fiction well read.
She had opinions about what she had read that were sharp and original, and she asked him questions about his own reading that made him feel his answers were being genuinely weighed.
He had not expected this. He had not expected a great deal from a household of women at the end of a wilderness road in 1912, which he acknowledged in his notebook with a self-deprecation that suggested he understood the limitation even as he had held it.
What he did not write in his notebook, but what he described in the 1951 letter to his daughter was that Marin’s knowledge of the books on her shelf was not recent.
She spoke of some of the older volumes, histories from the 1860s and 1870s, natural philosophy texts that predated his birth, with the familiarity of someone who had lived with them for decades, who had read them not once but many times, returning to passages the way you return to conversations with people you find consistently interesting.
This had struck him at the time as unusual without his understanding why. In 1951, writing to his daughter, he understood why.
The books on the shelf were old. Older than the house appeared to be, though the house was old enough.
Some of them had dates stamped inside the covers that put them in the 1840s and 1850s.
If Marin had read them as a young woman, she would have been an old woman in 1912.
She was not an old woman in 1912. He had looked at this fact and looked away from it.
The way you look away from things that require too much adjustment to accommodate. Dileia cooked for him as though feeding him were a form of affection.
Breakfast was elaborate. Lunch was pressed on him despite his protests that he was full.
She watched him eat with the particular satisfaction of someone for whom the act of nourishing another person is its own reward.
Sura said little, but when she spoke, it was with a precision that made him listen more carefully than he usually listened to anyone.
She asked him once on the second morning how long the Census Bureau kept its records.
He said he wasn’t sure. Indefinitely, he assumed. She nodded slowly, as if this was information she was storing carefully.
Joe, he saw primarily at a distance. She spent most of her time in the barn or in the fields at the hollows edge.
And when she came inside, she was quiet and quick moving and ate rapidly and went back out.
She watched him sometimes from across the room with those dark eyes, and he had the feeling she was the most observant of the four, the one who was paying the most comprehensive attention.
But she directed none of that attention toward conversation. He wrote, “I began to feel by the second afternoon that I had been there longer than I thought.
I felt this without being able to account for it. The days in that hollow seemed to take a different quantity of time than ordinary days.
I slept more heavily than usual and woke less rested.” He wrote, “On the second afternoon, I walked the hollow.
I told Marin I wanted air after the morning inside, and she smiled and said the hollow was beautiful in May, which it was, and said to mind the creek at the north edge, where the bank was soft.
She said this with the specific knowledge of someone who has walked every foot of the terrain, the way you direct a guest around the hazard in your own yard, and I minded the creek and walked the hollow for perhaps an hour.
What I found in the hollow is not what I expected. The hollow was larger than it appeared from the house.
It opened to the north into a second smaller basin that was not visible from the yard or the road.
In this basin, there was a clearing roughly circular, perhaps 30 yards across. The clearing was bare earth.
No grass, no weeds, no undergrowth in a forest where undergrowth pressed in from every direction.
The bare earth had been maintained. It was the clearing of a place that is regularly used, regularly cleared.
There was no other structure, no tool left behind, no indication of what the clearing was for.
I walked back to the house and said nothing about it to any of the sisters.
He wrote, “On the second evening, I asked Marin about previous visitors. She had smiled at him when he asked this.
A full warm smile, the kind of smile that is confident rather than comfortable, that does not ask you to like it, but simply assumes that you do.”
She said, “Oh, we have had many visitors over the years, many travelers through the hollow.
We are always glad of company.” He asked. “Do they stay long?” She said. “As long as they need to,” he asked.
“Where do they go when they leave?” And Marin looked at him for a moment with that smile still on her face and said, “Where does anyone go?”
He wrote, “I did not sleep well that second night. He woke on the third morning before light.
He was not sure what woke him. Not a sound exactly, or not a sound he could identify.
Something had changed in the quality of the house’s silence. He lay in the bed in the upstairs room they had given him and listened and could not identify what was different.
And after several minutes, he got up and dressed without lighting the lamp and went to the window.
The hollow was dark. The ridge above blocked the sky on three sides, and the stars were visible only in the strip of open air directly above the creek.
The house below him was dark. No lamp in any window. The barn was dark, he wrote.
I stood at the window for some time and then I saw Sura. She was crossing the yard from the house toward the barn.
She was carrying something. He could not see what only that both her hands were occupied with it.
And she was moving quickly and without a lamp, which meant she knew the yard well enough in darkness to move through it at that pace without light.
She went into the barn. The barn door closed behind her. He stood at the window for another 10 minutes.
Sura did not come out, he wrote. I made a decision then. I want to be clear about the decision because I have thought about it many times since.
I decided to go into the barn. He went downstairs carefully, avoiding the step he had learned creaked.
The front door was not locked. He crossed the yard in the gray pre-dawn light, moving slowly, and reached the barn door and put his hand on it.
He wrote, “I want to say here that I almost didn’t open it. I want to say that because it is true and because I think it matters that there was a moment where I knew with the kind of knowledge that lives in the body rather than the mind that what was on the other side of that door was something I would not be able to set aside afterward.
I knew this. I opened the door anyway. I don’t know what that says about me.
He wrote, “What I found in the barn, I will describe plainly and without embellishment because I have no interest in making it worse than it was, and it was bad enough.”
He wrote, “There were structures at the back of the barn, built against the back wall, constructed from good timber, clearly not original to the barn.
Stalls, or the shape of stalls, but modified. The modifications involved locks, good locks, solid iron, the kind you would use on a cellar door or a strong box.
He wrote, “The barn was larger inside than outside. I understood this when I was inside it in a way I had not understood from the yard.
The back wall was further from the front wall than the exterior dimensions suggested. This was not immediately apparent in the dark.
I had no lamp, only the gray pre-dawned light through the door. But as my eyes adjusted, I began to count the distance and to understand that the discrepancy was not small.
Several feet, perhaps five or six feet of interior space that did not correspond to any exterior wall.
He wrote, “There was a door in the back wall, not a barn door, a fitted panel flush with a timber with a small iron ring rather than a handle.
I didn’t open it. I had seen enough by then. I want to be honest.
I had seen enough and I was not brave enough to open that door. And I have never decided whether this was cowardice or sense,” he wrote.
The stalls were not empty. Here, his handwriting became harder to read. The letters were formed correctly, but pressed harder into the paper, and in one place the pencil had torn slightly through the page.
He wrote, “I will not write what I saw in the stalls in any further detail than this, that there were people there, or what had been people in conditions that indicated the barn had been in use for this purpose for a long time, that the people, I am using the word loosely.
I am using it because I do not know a better word for what I saw, had not been brought there recently.
That Sura was standing at the far end of the barn with something in her hands and she had not yet heard me come in.
He wrote, “I left the barn. I went back across the yard. I did not run yet.
I walked. I went inside and I went to my room and I took my notebook and my pencil from the coat pocket where I had put them the night before.
And then I went back downstairs and out the front door and I walked to the gate and then I ran.
He wrote, “I did not take my satchel. I did not take my forms. I did not take the second pencil.
I ran and I kept running until I reached the place where I had tied my horse.
I had moved it from the barn to a tree near the gate the evening before, without explaining why to any of the sisters.
And this is why I had a horse to run on. He wrote, “The horse needed no encouragement.”
He wrote, “When I had ridden perhaps a mile down the hollow road, I stopped and looked back.
The house was not visible from that distance. The hollow had closed around it. The light was coming up now, gray and cold, and the timber on either side of the road was very still.
I waited for perhaps 2 minutes watching the road behind me. Nothing came down the road.
I rode on. He did not stop until he reached Spencer. He did not tell anyone in Spencer what he had seen in the barn at Crow Hollow.
He told no one. He gave his three notebook pages to mrs. Tagert with instructions about the sheriff, and he left on the afternoon train, and he never came back.
He was 24 years old in May of 1912. He was 24 years old and he had seen something in a barn at the end of a mountain road that he spent the rest of his life not talking about.
And the three notebook pages he left with his landlady are the only record he left of what it was.
What he did not write down because he ran before he had time to count carefully was the number Sheriff Harwick 11 years later would count.
He would wish afterward that he had not. But before Harwick, before the 1923 discovery, there is a question that the three notebook pages raise but do not answer, and that no subsequent investigation was ever fully able to address.
The question is, how long had the hollow been in use? The household at Crow Hollow had not been enumerated in 1900 or in 1910.
No government representative had visited it in at least 12 years and probably longer because the note on the 1910 assignment list had been written by someone who seemed aware that access was difficult.
An awareness of that kind suggests a previous failed attempt rather than a first consideration.
12 years is the minimum. The structures in the barn that James Aldrich described, built from good timber, clearly not original solid iron locks, had not been assembled in a season.
They had been assembled over time with materials that had to be sourced somewhere and transported up a road that disappeared after 9 miles.
The kitchen garden had been planted with deliberate care over multiple seasons. The flower border along the front porch.
He had noted it specifically because it had contributed to his first impression of the place as peaceful was not the work of one year’s planting.
The four sisters, Marin, Dileia, Sura, Joe had lived in Crow Hollow for a long time, longer than 12 years, possibly much longer.
And the road to the hollow in those years had not been entirely without travelers.
People had passed through. Travelers had been directed there by word, by reputation, by the same mechanism that had operated in Cutter’s Gap and Red Bone Hollow, the stranger at the crossroads.
The recommendation passed along a mountain road. The Aldrich sisters were known in the way that such establishments become known, not officially, not broadly, but in the particular underground current of information that flows between travelers on difficult roads.
Good food, warm fire, hospitable women, a place to stop. James Aldrich, the census worker, no relation, had been told about the sisters before he left Spencer.
He mentioned this in his notebook pages, but barely, as an aside. Someone in the livery stable, when he mentioned where he was going, had said that the women up in Crow Hollow kept a good house.
He had not thought much of it at the time. He thought about it later.
He thought about it for the rest of his life. He would write in 1951, nearly 40 years after his visit, in a letter to his daughter that he apparently wrote and then did not send and that was found among his papers after his death in 1959.
In that letter, which is the only other account he ever gave of what he saw in Crow Hollow, he said that what haunted him most was not what he had seen in the barn.
What haunted him most was what he had eaten at supper. He wrote in that letter, “I ate very well, three meals over two days.”
I said so in my notebook. I wrote that the food was very good. I wrote it casually as a detail because at the time it was only a detail.
It became something else later. It has been something else ever since. He wrote, “I do not know what I ate in that house.
I knew what I was told it was. I did not ask further questions because there was no reason at that point to ask further questions.
There is never a reason to ask further questions until there is.” He wrote, “I have not eaten certain things since May of 1912.
My wife has never asked me why. I am grateful to her for this.” He signed the letter.
He did not send it. He folded it and put it among his papers and died in 1959.
And his daughter found it and in 1963 she donated it along with the rest of his papers to the West Virginia State Archives where it remains.
The letter is cataloged as personal correspondence, miscellaneous, undated, and unscent. It is available to researchers upon request.
Very few researchers have requested it. Franklin Harwick became sheriff of Ran County in 1919.
He was 42 years old. A methodical man, a former school teacher who had gone into law work after the war.
Not the Great War. He had been too old for that. But the smaller private war of a county that had in his years of teaching its children accumulated grievances and secrets that a classroom could not contain.
He was the sheriff who received mrs. Tagert’s drawer of pages in the autumn of 1923.
Handed over by her daughter with the explanation that her mother had kept them 11 years on the instructions of a young census worker who had never come back for them.
He read them in his office on a Thursday afternoon. He read them twice. He sat for a while afterward with the pages on his desk and the window showing him the ordinary street life of Spencer going past outside.
Then he drove up the Crow Hollow Road on Friday morning. His car made it to mile 9 as the 1910 note had predicted.
From there he walked. The road above mile 9 was overgrown, not impassible, but visibly unused for an extended period.
Grass growing in the wheel ruts, saplings beginning to reclaim the edges. He walked for what he estimated was an hour and a half before the hollow opened, and he saw the house.
It was empty, not abandoned, not in the way of a place that has been left suddenly and chaotically.
The house was empty in the way of a place that has been left deliberately and completely.
The furniture was still there. The kitchen still had its equipment, the iron stove, the pots, the crockery on the shelves, the table set for four in the manner of a household that expected to return and then did not.
The bookshelf in the parlor still held its volumes well read with margins occasionally annotated.
In a handwriting that Harwick examined, but could not match to any known person. The flower border along the front porch was overgrown.
He could see the remains of the deliberate planting underneath the weeds, the structure of it, the care of it.
But several years of neglect had obscured most of what had once been decorative about it.
He walked through the house room by room. He found nothing that told him where the sisters had gone or when.
He found nothing that told him their full names or their ages or where they had come from before Crow Hollow.
He found in a drawer in the upstairs bedroom that had been used as a study or workroom a collection of small objects that he laid out on the desk and examined.
He counted them. He counted them twice to be certain. There were 87 distinct items, small things, the kind of things a person carries on a journey.
The contents of pockets and satchels and coat linings. A watch, several coin purses, a pocketk knife with a brass handle, a tobacco tin empty, a railroad ticket punched for a journey that had originated in a town in Ohio, a woman’s brooch, a man’s collar button, a child’s wooden top, a child’s wooden top.
Harwick sat with this for a while. Then he went to the barn. He had been preparing himself for the barn since he read the notebook pages the day before.
He had tried to prepare himself adequately, which he would note in his own report was not something he had managed to do.
The stalls at the back of the barn were there, as Aldrich had described them.
The timber was good. The locks were solid iron. The locks were open. Had been open from the look of them for some years.
The stalls were empty in the sense that nothing living remained in them. They were not empty in the other sense.
Harwick spent 3 hours in the barn before he came out. He was thorough as Aldrich had been, more thorough than Aldrich, who had fled, and more thorough than was entirely good for him.
He documented what he found in handwriting that became progressively more controlled as the three hours went on.
As though he was applying increasing deliberate effort to keeping his hand steady on the page.
His report filed with the county court the following week was sealed on the day of its filing by order of the circuit court judge, a man named Aldis Carr, who had been on the bench for 19 years and who read Harwick’s report and then sat in his chambers for some time before signing the sealing order.
The report remained sealed for 31 years when it was partially declassified in 1954 as part of a broader review of sealed county court records from the first half of the century.
The portions that were released contained the following information. Harwick had documented evidence of long-term use of the barn for purposes that his report described as inconsistent with agricultural function and consistent with the systematic detention and processing of human beings.
He had documented a number of individual sets of personal effects. The 87 items from the drawer, plus additional items found in the barn itself that he assessed as representing a minimum of 43 individuals.
43. He had documented the structures in the barn, the modified stalls, the iron locks, additional equipment built into the back wall, whose function he described in technical language that the declassified version rendered in careful euphemism.
He had documented the condition of the barn floor and the back wall and the space behind the back wall.
There was a space behind the back wall, narrow, stonelined, accessed through a fitted panel, and these conditions were described in language that the declassified report did not render in any kind of euphemism.
Because there was no language that would have served, he had attempted to establish a timeline for when the barn had last been actively used.
Based on the condition of the structures and the organic material present, he estimated that the barn had been in use until approximately 5 to 7 years before his visit, which would place the last use somewhere between 1916 and 1918.
And based on the condition of the oldest materials and the structural age of the barn modifications, he estimated that the barn had been in use in some form for at least 20 to 25 years before that.
20 to 25 years of use before 1916, which means the barn had been operational since somewhere between 1891 and 1896.
The census worker Aldrich had visited in 1912. The household had not been enumerated in 1900.
The 1910 form had noted the access difficulty without indicating a successful visit. The sisters had been in Crow Hollow since at least the early 1890s, possibly since the late 1880s.
The mountain road had been delivering travelers to their door for 20 years or more before James Aldrich rode up it on a May morning in 1912 and ate supper and slept poorly and went to look in the barn before dawn 43 minimum 20 or more years.
Harwick noted at the end of the documented portion of his report one additional observation.
He wrote, “The household appears to have been vacated in an organized manner consistent with planned departure rather than emergency flight.
The furniture is intact. The kitchen is fully equipped. The books are on the shelf.
The table is set for four. The only things absent from the house in any systematic sense are personal items that would be carried by people, leaving a place with the intention of not returning.
Clothing, personal documents, anything that identified the occupants as specific individuals. He wrote, “This suggests that the household was abandoned at a time and in a manner of the occupants choosing, not in response to Aldrich’s 1912 visit, since the evidence of use in the barn extends to approximately 1916 to 1918 after that visit.
Something else caused the departure. Something that occurred between 1916 and 1923 that I have not been able to identify.
He wrote, “I do not know where the Aldrich sisters went. I do not know how many of them there were.”
The name the Aldrich sisters appears to have been used loosely referring to the women of the household and the number four given by the census worker may not be accurate for all periods of the household’s existence.
I do not know their real names. I do not know where they came from before Crow Hollow.
He wrote, “I know what they did for 20 or more years in a hollow at the end of a road in Ran County, West Virginia.
I know it in more detail than I would prefer. I do not know anything else about them.”
He signed the report. He filed it. He went home and told his wife he was not hungry for supper.
He was sheriff of Ran County for another 14 years. He did not reopen the Crow Hollow case.
He did not speak publicly about what he had found. When he retired in 1937, he gave a brief statement to the Spencer newspaper in which he said that the job had been harder than he had expected in some respects and easier in others, and that he was glad to be done with it.
The reporter asked him whether there was any case from his tenure that had stayed with him.
He said several and did not elaborate in the decades that followed Harwick’s 1923 visit.
The house at Crow Hollow slowly ceased to be a house. It did not burn.
It was not demolished. It was not formally condemned or officially removed. It simply went the way structures go when no one attends to them.
The roof giving way first, then the upper floor, then the front wall, then the rest, gradually over years, the mountains patient reassertion of what had been mountain before anyone built anything in the hollow.
By the 1940s, visitors to the site, and there were visitors, occasional ones, people who had heard the story from someone who had heard it from someone, found only the foundation stones and the outline of the garden and the remains of the fence that had once bordered the road.
The barn lasted longer. Stone and iron last longer than timber. The modified stalls remained structurally intact into the 1950s.
Someone, it is not recorded, who removed the iron lock sometime before 1960. Whether this was an act of removal for practical reasons or an act of removal for other reasons is not known.
By the time a historian named Patricia Voss, no relation to the medical examiner Samuel Voss, visited the site in 1971 as part of her research into unsolved disappearances in Appalachian, West Virginia.
The barn was largely collapsed. She photographed what remained. Her photographs show stone walls and fallen timber and the particular silence of a place that has been a long time absorbing something it would prefer not to have absorbed.
She also found the clearing in the smaller basin to the north of the main hollow.
She found the circular clearing that James Aldrich had described in the 1951 letter to his daughter.
The bare earth, the absence of undergrowth, the maintained quality of a place that is regularly used.
In 1971, the clearing was still bare. 60 years after Aldridge had walked through it, 53 years after the sisters had left the hollow by Harwick’s estimate, the clearing was still bare.
Grass had not reclaimed it. Weeds had not encroached. The surrounding forest pressed to its edge on every side and stopped.
Voss photographed it and noted its dimensions and took a soil sample that she later sent to a colleague at the university geology department.
The colleague’s report, which Voss preserved in her research files, stated that the soil in the clearing contained an unusual concentration of organic compounds consistent with long-term decomposition of biological material.
The colleague asked in a note attached to the report what exactly she was researching.
She did not reply. She noted in her research journal that the clearing in the May afternoon light of 1971 had the quality of a room.
The trees around it were close enough to create something like walls. The sky was open above it, a circle of blue through the canopy, the way a chimney is open above a hearth.
She stood in it for a while and then left it and did not go back.
She noted in her research journal that the clearing felt deliberate. Not in the way that cleared land feels deliberate.
Not the deliberateness of agriculture or habitation. The deliberateness of a space that has been maintained for a specific purpose carefully and over a long time by people who knew exactly what the purpose was.
She noted in her research journal that the hollow itself felt different from the surrounding terrain.
She noted this without claiming any supernatural interpretation of it. She was a rigorous academic and she was careful about the language she used.
But she wrote, “There is a quality to the air in that hollow that I cannot account for by reference to geography or meteorology.
It is a heaviness. It is the kind of heaviness you associate with buildings rather than with open land.
The heaviness of enclosed spaces, of rooms that have held too many things for too long.
The hollow is not an enclosed space, but it feels like one. She also noted something else, something she had noticed on her walk up the hollow road from where she had left her car.
She had passed on the road. A man coming down. He was middle-aged or older.
She estimated 60, though the mountain sun ages faces quickly. He was carrying nothing. He was wearing clothes that were adequate for the terrain, but not specifically outdoor gear.
The clothes of someone who had not planned to be on a mountain road that day.
He nodded to her as they passed. She nodded back. She wrote, “I thought nothing of it at the time.
People walk mountain roads. It is not unusual.” She wrote, “It was only later after I had spent several hours at the site and was walking back down the road myself that I thought about him again.
Specifically, I thought about the fact that when I had arrived at the hollow, I had seen no sign of another recent visitor.
No car parked on the road below. No tracks in the path that were clearly newer than mine.
No food wrappers, no equipment, nothing that would indicate that the man I had passed was coming from the hollow rather than from some other point on the road.
She wrote, “The road ends at the hollow. There is nowhere else to come from.”
She wrote. I told myself he had parked further down, further than I had parked and walked up.
This is possible. This is the reasonable explanation, and I have no reason to reject it, she wrote.
But I keep thinking about the way he looked at me as we passed. Not with curiosity.
You would expect curiosity meeting someone on a remote mountain road. With something else, something I would describe, if I were being less careful than I prefer to be, as recognition.
She did not publish this observation in her academic work. It appears only in her research journal, which was donated to the West Virginia State Archives after her death in 2003.
The question of the Aldrich sisters, who they were, where they had come from, where they went, was never answered.
Their names were not Aldrich. This much was established by subsequent research. The name appears to have been adopted from the road or the hollow or some prior association with the property.
And the women who lived in the house at Crow Hollow had no demonstrable connection to any Aldrich family in Ran County or any adjacent county.
Their actual names, if they had consistent names, are unknown. Their origins are unknown. Their ages in any period of their residence in the hollow are unknown.
Their number which James Aldrich reported as four and which may have been four in 1912 but which may have been different in earlier or later periods is unknown.
What is known is the 43 the minimum count. 43 individuals whose belongings were found in a drawer in a barn, in a hollow at the end of a mountain road.
43 sets of small objects that were the last evidence anyone found of 43 people who had gone up the crow hollow road and not come back down.
Among the 43, Harwick had been able to trace some portion, 12 by his count, to specific missing person’s reports in the surrounding counties.
A peddler from Parkerburg who had last been seen in Spencer in 1897 asking directions to a farm in the Eastern Hollows, a timber contractor from Charleston who had been reported missing in 1903 whose wife had been told he must have run off with debts.
A school teacher on her way to a new position in a mountain community in 1908 whose trunk had arrived at its destination, but whose person had not and who had been assumed eventually to have changed her mind and gone home.
A traveling minister in 1911, whose congregation in three counties had waited for him to complete his circuit and eventually absorbed his absence into the general sadness of lives interrupted.
12 names attached to 12 items in the drawer. 31 items with no name attached.
31 people who had left no trace, no report, no wife or creditor or congregation to notice they were gone.
Harwick noted this in his report with a precision that was itself a form of anguish.
He wrote, “The 31 unidentified sets of effects represent individuals for whom no missing person’s report was ever filed.
This may indicate that these individuals had no family or community connection that would prompt such a report.
It may indicate that reports were filed in jurisdictions I have not contacted. Or it may indicate that in some cases the person’s absence was known but attributed to a cause other than disappearance.
That someone somewhere believed the person had simply moved on and found this believable enough to accept.
He wrote, “The reliability of the missing person system depends on someone noticing that a person is gone.
For 31 of the 43 minimum, no one noticed or no one said so. What is known is the 20 or more years of use, the 1890s to the mid1 1910s, more than two decades.
What is known is the mechanism, the recommendation, the stranger, the word passed along a road.
The sisters were hospitable. The sisters kept a good table. The sisters welcomed travelers. This information moved through the informal networks of mountain road travel.
Carried by word of mouth through communities that did not examine too carefully the source of the recommendation or the person who made it.
What is not known and this is the question that Patricia Voss carried with her from the hollow in 1971 and that the researchers who have come after her have carried in turn is where the sisters went when they left.
They left between 1916 and 1918. They left in an organized manner, taking their personal documents and their identifying objects, but leaving their furniture and their kitchen and their books on the shelf.
They left the table set for four. They went somewhere. The mountain road from Crow Hollow descends to the main road below, and from there a person can go in any direction.
And in 1916 or 1917 or 1918 in a country distracted by war and movement and the large-scale disruption of ordinary life, people going in any direction were not necessarily noticed or recorded.
The sisters were not noticed. They are not recorded. There is no death record for any woman named Marin, Dileia, Sura, or Joe Aldrich in West Virginia or any state immediately adjacent for any year from 1912 onward.
There is no marriage record, no census entry, no legal document of any kind that connects those four names to any person who can be identified in any subsequent public record.
They arrived somewhere as they had arrived in Crow Hollow. They set up a house as they had in Crow Hollow.
They planted a garden. Perhaps they kept a warm fire and a full table perhaps.
They smiled at visitors before the visitors had come close enough to see their faces.
Perhaps. And somewhere on some road there was a man or a woman who mentioned them to a traveler casually, helpfully in the manner of one person passing useful information to another, and the traveler noted it down and continued on toward the place where the road ended and the women were waiting.
James Aldrich lived until 1959. He became a lawyer as he had intended and practiced in Ohio for 30 years and raised a family and by most accounts had an ordinary and reasonably contented life.
His daughter, in a brief memoir she wrote after his death for a family collection, described him as a gentle man who did not speak often of his past, and who was, in her memory, the only person she had ever known who never ate venison.
She had asked him about this once as a child. He had said only that he had gone off it.
He did not say when or why. He did not say that he had eaten well in a hollow in West Virginia in May of 1912 in a house where the table was set for five before he arrived.
He did not say that the food had been very good. He did not say that for the rest of his life, every time he sat down to a meal that he had not prepared himself, there was a moment, brief, irrational, immediately suppressed, when he thought about what he had eaten in that house, and what had been in the barn and what Marin had said when he asked where the visitors went when they left.
Where does anyone go? He did not say any of this. He folded the letter.
He had written to his daughter in 1951 and put it in his papers and let it wait.
Crow Hollow is still there. The road still ends where it has always ended. The hollow is full of trees now, second growth and older, and the creek still runs clear over the stones.
And in spring, the light still comes through the timber in the way that James Aldrich noted in his notebook.
In columns like cathedral light. Beautiful in a way that does not announce what the beauty is covering.
There is nothing left of the house. Nothing left of the barn. The stone walls are buried under decades of fallen leaves and new growth.
And the iron of the locks has rusted into the soil, and the hollow has taken back everything that was built in it with the thoroughess of a place that has decided to forget.
The table is not set anymore, but somewhere in some other hollow on some other road at the end of some other track that disappears into mountain timber.
There may be a house with a warm fire in the window and a smell of good cooking coming from the kitchen and a woman who comes out to the gate before you have reached it, smiling, already certain you will stay.
And somewhere on the road below, a stranger you have never met mentions the place as he passes.
He mentions the food, the warmth, the hospitality of the women there. He mentions it casually as if he knows the place well, as if he has sent people there
