In the spring of 1902, a coal wagon driver named IAS Trout was hauling his empty cart down a switchback road above the Elk Fork Settlement in southern West Virginia when his mule stopped in the middle of the road and refused to move another step. Trout climbed down, cursing the animal, and that is when he saw the boy sitting on a flat stone at the edge of the treeine.
The child was maybe 7 years old. He was wearing a night shirt that had once been white and was now the color of river silt. His feet were bare. His hair had been shorn close to the scalp with what looked like a dull blade. And when Trout walked toward him, the boy did not run, did not cry, did not so much as flinch. He simply looked up at the coal driver and asked in a voice that Trout later described in a sworn statement as calm as a Sunday morning, whether the ones below had come up yet.
Trout carried the child to the nearest town, a place called Pickins, and delivered him to the county sheriff, a man named Absilon Witam. What the boy told Sheriff Witum over the next 4 days would be transcribed by hand into a leatherbound ledger filed in the Randolph County Records Office and then in the summer of 1958 would vanish from that same records office along with every other document from that particular year.
There is no photograph of the boy that survives. There is no birth record for any child in that county matching his description. There is no missing person’s report from any settlement within a 100 miles that fits him. He appears in the historical record for exactly 6 weeks in the spring of 1902 and then he too vanishes and the sheriff who took his statement is dead within a year and every deputy who spoke to the child is dead within three.
and the doctor who examined him is found in a creek bed in the fall of 1903 with his tongue removed and his boots placed neatly on the bank beside him. What the boy said about the ones below is the reason for all of it. Before we go any further into what that child said, do one thing for me.
Type the name of the state you are watching from into the comments right now. Just the state. I want to see how far this story has traveled and I want to know how close some of you are to the ridges where all of this happened. Type it now, then stay with me because the next part is where the sheriff starts writing things down that he wishes he had never heard.
Elias Trout was 41 years old in the spring of 1902. He had been driving coal wagons for the Canawa and Michigan Railway for 11 years and before that he had driven timber wagons for the Cheat River Lumber Company, and before that he had ridden with a survey party that mapped the ridges between the Elk and the Taiggart in the winter of 1889.
He was not a superstitious man. His deposition taken by a stenographer named Ida Mertton on the 4th of April describes him as a Methodist, a widowerower, and a man who had, in his own words, seen enough of the world to know what a lost child looks like. The boy on the flat stone did not look lost. That is the first thing Trout told the sheriff.
The boy looked, according to the deposition, as though he had been placed there. The road where Trout found him is still there. It runs above what used to be the Elk Fork Tipple, a coal loading platform that was abandoned in the 1930s and dismantled for scrap during the Second World War.
The switchback where the mule stopped is now grown over with laurel and roodendron. And the flat stone the boy was sitting on has, according to a survey conducted by the West Virginia Geological Survey in 1972, sunk approximately 14 in into the lom since the turn of the century, but it is still visible. Locals in Pickins will point it out to you if you ask, though most of them will not.
The stone has a name in the older families. They call it the sitting rock. And there are stories told quietly and only to blood kin about other children who were found there over the years. Always alone, always calm, always asking the same question. Trout did not know any of that. He was a man on a road with a stopped mule and a barefoot child in a night shirt, and he did what any decent man would have done.
He wrapped the boy in a horse blanket he kept behind the seat, lifted him into the wagon, and drove him the seven miles down to Pickins. The boy did not speak during the ride. Trout told the sheriff that he tried to ask the child his name, where his people were, whether he was hungry, and the boy simply looked at him with an expression Trout could not describe.
In the deposition, Trout searches for a word for almost a full minute, and the stenographer notes the pause in the margin. He finally settles on the word patient. The boy looked patient, Trout said like he was waiting for something to be over. They arrived in Pickkins just afternoon. The town was small, even by the standards of that time and place.
A general store, a blacksmith, a Methodist church with a graveyard behind it, a two- room schoolhouse, and the sheriff’s office, which was really just the front parlor of Sheriff Abselum Wickham’s house with a jail cell built into the back wall. Wickham was 53 years old and had been sheriff of Randolph County for 19 years. He had fought at Cedar Creek in 1864, taken a rifle ball through the meat of his left calf and walked with a cane for the rest of his life.
He was a serious man, well read for the region and known for keeping careful records. His log books from the 1890s still exist, held in a collection at Marshall University, and they are notable for the precision of his handwriting and the almost clinical detachment of his descriptions. When Trout carried the boy into the parlor, Witkum was writing a letter to his sister in Ohio.
He set down his pen, took one look at the child, and told Trout to fetch Dr. Ephereim Cade from the schoolhouse where Cade was giving a lecture on hygiene to the older students. Cade arrived within 20 minutes. He examined the boy in the sheriff’s parlor while Wickham watched. What Cade found was recorded in a separate document, a physician’s report, which was filed with the Randolph County Health Office and which, unlike the Sheriff’s Ledger, was preserved in a private collection until 1981 when it was donated to the Appalachian Studies
Archive at West Virginia University. That document, three pages, handwritten in Cad’s careful cursive, is the only surviving primary source that directly describes the physical condition of the boy. The child weighed 42 lb. His height was estimated at 3 ft 8 in. His teeth were sound.
His eyes were described as gray, though Cade noted in a marginal aside, that they seemed to change color in certain light, becoming almost colorless. His skin was unusually pale, and Cade wrote that it had a quality he had never observed in any child he had examined in 26 years of practice. He described it as feeling cool to the touch, even in the warm parlor, and as having a faint bluish tint at the temples and along the inside of the wrists.
The boy’s pulse was slow, 48 beats per minute, which Cade found alarming in a child. His breathing was likewise slow and shallow. And when Cade lifted the boy’s night shirt to examine his torso, he found in a neat vertical line running from the base of the sternum to just above the navl, seven small circular scars, each approximately the diameter of a pencil, each perfectly spaced from the next, and each, according to Cade, appearing to be years old.
The boy could not have been more than seven. The scars, in Cad’s estimate, had been made when he was an infant. Before we move on to the next passage, stop for a second. What you just heard about the seven scars on that child’s torso is the part that changes everything. But it only makes sense when you see it written out next to Dr. Cade’s original physicians report, the scar spacing, the infant timeline.
It’s all in the document link below. Take 5 seconds right now, grab it, and then come back because what comes next builds directly on it. The link is in the description. QR code is on your screen. The boy did not speak for the first 11 hours he was in the sheriff’s parlor. Witcom offered him food, which he accepted without expression, eating slowly and methodically, a piece of cornbread and a small bowl of chicken broth that Witcom’s housekeeper, a woman named Cassie Peele, prepared and served on a tin plate. The boy ate every crumb.
He drank the broth in careful sips. When he had finished, he set the plate on the floor beside the chair and folded his hands in his lap. He did not ask for more. He did not thank anyone. He simply sat. Whitam in his ledger entry for that day wrote that he had never in his life encountered a child of any age who displayed such total absence of the ordinary signs of childhood.
There was no fidgeting. There was no curiosity about the objects in the room. There was no fear and no relief and no confusion. The boy watched the fire in the parlor great for a long time without blinking, and Wickham, who noted this in the ledger with the precision of a man who was making sure he would remember it, counted the intervals between the boy’s blinks.
He wrote that the child blinked on average once every 90 seconds. At approximately 9:00 that evening, after Dr. Cade had gone home and Cassie Peele had cleared the supper dishes and Witcom was sitting at his writing desk making notes. The boy spoke. He did not turn his head. He was still looking at the fire.
And he said in the same calm voice that Trout had described from the road that he needed to tell the sheriff something before the sheriff went to sleep, because if the sheriff went to sleep without hearing it, he might dream it, and if he dreamed it, they would know. Witcom picked up his pen. He wrote down in that moment the boy’s exact words and he continued writing for the next 3 hours.
What he transcribed during that first session filled 17 pages of the leatherbound ledger. The pages are gone now along with the ledger itself and every other document from that year that was stored in the Randolph County Records Office. But Wickham, in a letter to his sister in Ohio, dated the 18th of April, described the contents of that first conversation in enough detail to reconstruct its shape.
And that letter, unlike the ledger, was preserved by the sister’s descendants and eventually published in 1994 in a small regional history journal called the Alaganis Quarterly in an article by a folklorist named Marjgerie Salow. The boy told Witham that his name was or had been Thiel. He did not know a last name. He did not know his mother’s name or his father’s, or whether he had ever had either.
He knew only that he had lived for as long as he could remember in a place he called the lower rooms, and that the lower rooms were reached through a doorway in the side of a hill, and that the hill was not far from where trout had found him, though he could not say in which direction. He told Wickham that the lower rooms were lit by something that was not fire and not sunlight, and that the walls of the lower rooms were smooth and cold and not made of any stone he had ever seen on the surface.
He told Wickham that there were other children in the lower rooms, and that some of them were older than him, and some were younger, and that none of them, so far as he knew, had ever been outside. He told Wickham that the ones below, were not people. He was very specific about this. They walked on two legs.
They had faces that looked in most respects like the faces of people, but they were not people. And the children in the lower rooms all knew this, and none of them were ever confused about it. The ones below spoke a language that Thananiel could understand, but could not repeat because the sounds could not be made by a human throat.
They fed the children on a pace that was gray and had no taste. And they measured the children with instruments that clicked. And they took blood from the children at regular intervals, which was what the seven scars on Thananiel’s chest were from, though he did not know why the scars were in that particular line, and no other child he had known had scars in the same pattern.
He told Wickham that he had escaped or been released. He was not sure which, three nights before Trout found him. He had woken in the middle of what passed for night in the lower rooms, and the door to his sleeping chamber had been open, and there had been no keeper at the end of the corridor, and he had walked, following his hand along the wall, until he had come to a stair, and he had climbed the stair.
And at the top of the stair there had been a second door, and the second door had also been open. And beyond the second door there had been a room he did not recognize, and beyond that room there had been a passage, and beyond the passage there had been earth and roots, and eventually night sky. He had walked in the dark for what he thought was a long time.
He had slept for a while under a fallen tree. He had walked again, and then he had come to the road and the flat stone, and he had sat down on the stone because he was tired, and because he had a feeling, which he did not know how to explain, that if he sat on the stone, someone would come. Witcom, in his letter to his sister, wrote that at this point in the conversation, the boy stopped speaking and turned his head for the first time to look directly at the sheriff.
And Wickham wrote that the look on the child’s face was not the look of a child at all. It was the look, he said, of a very old man who has just remembered something terrible. And Thaniel said in that same calm voice, that the ones below would come looking for him. Not that night, probably not the next, but soon.
And when they came, they would not come alone. And whatever the sheriff did, he must not, under any circumstance, let them into the parlor. The next morning, Sheriff Wickham sent a rider to the county seat at Beverly with a telegram addressed to a man named Colonel Henderson Price, who was the president of the West Virginia State Historical Society and a personal correspondent of Whitams dating back to the 1880s. The telegram was brief.
It asked Price to come to Pickins at his earliest convenience and to bring with him any records he possessed concerning what Witcom, in the telegram, called the older diggings. That phrase, the older diggings, is not one that appears in any of Whitam’s surviving correspondents before that date, and its meaning has been the subject of some debate among the small circle of historians who have studied the Thananiel case.
Marjorie Salow in her 1994 article argues that Wickham was referring to a set of pre-industrial excavations in the region that predated the coal boom of the 1880s and which had never been satisfactorily explained by geological survey teams. Whether those excavations were the same as what the boy called the lower rooms is a question that Witcom himself, according to his sister’s letters, was actively trying to answer during the six weeks that followed.
Price arrived in Pickkins on the 9th of April, 5 days after the boy’s discovery. He brought with him three trunks of documents, most of which were maps and survey records collected during his tenure at the historical society. He also brought a nephew, a young man named Silas Corwin, who was 22 years old, a graduate of the mining engineering program at Washington and Jefferson College, and who was, according to Price’s own letters, uniquely suited to assist in what Price called a delicate geological inquiry.
Corwin’s name will become important later. For now, it is enough to say that he arrived. He was introduced to the boy and he spent two days going through Price’s maps in the sheriff’s parlor while Wickcom sat with Thaniel and continued to write. The boy answered every question Wickham put to him and he answered them without hesitation, but he could not always answer them in the terms Wickham wanted.
When Wickham asked how many other children were in the lower rooms, Thaniel said there were as many as fingers on a certain number of hands, but he did not know how to count higher than 12, and he could not describe the number in any other way. When Wickham asked how long he had lived there, Thaniel said he had lived there for the time it takes a child to grow from being carried to being able to walk and then again for that same amount of time and then again and he thought maybe four times over, though he was not sure.
Witcom in the ledger estimated that this made the boy between 6 and 8 years old, which matched Dr. Cade’s physical assessment. When Witcom asked what the ones below wanted with the children, Thaniel said he did not know, but he had a guess. And his guess was that the ones below were waiting for the children to be ready.
He did not know ready for what. On the 11th of April, Witcom, accompanied by Dr. Cade and Silas Corwin, took the boy out into the country to see if he could identify the direction from which he had walked. They traveled in Cad’s covered buggy. Corwin brought a compass and a leatherbound notebook. The boy sat between Cade and Wickham in the back of the buggy and watched the ridges pass with an expression that Cade, in his own private journal, described as one of gradual recognition.
They drove for approximately 4 hours following the road that Trout had been on when he found the boy. When they reached the switchback with the flat stone, the boy asked to get out. Witcom helped him down. The boy walked to the flat stone, placed one hand on it, and stood very still for what Cade estimated was 3 or 4 minutes.
Then he pointed without turning his head up the wooded slope on the west side of the road, and he said that the door was on the other side of that ridge, past the second creek at the base of a leaning tree. Corwin, who had been marking their position on a survey map, looked up at the ridge and then down at the map.
He told Witcom, in a low voice that the ridge the boy was pointing at did not correspond to any surveyed feature in the county records. The map showed the ridge, but it did not show any creeks on the far side because the far side of that ridge had never, according to the historical society’s records, been walked by a survey team. It was, in the language of the survey maps of that period, a blank interval, meaning that it fell between two survey grids and had been skipped by the original surveyors, presumably because it was steep and inaccessible, and no
timber or coal interest had ever requested a mapping of it. It was, in short, a piece of the county that officially did not exist. Witcom decided on the spot that they would walk to the top of the ridge. Cade objected on the grounds that the boy was in no condition for such a climb. Wittram agreed to leave the boy at the buggy in Cad’s care and to take Corwin alone.
The two men set out at approximately 2 in the afternoon. They carried a pistol each, a hand lantern, a coil of rope, and Corwin’s notebook and compass. They returned to the buggy at approximately 6:00 in the evening. Corwin was pale and shaking. Wickcom was silent. Neither man would say what they had seen at the top of the ridge, and neither man would speak of it in Cad’s presence during the ride back to Pickins.
But Wickcom that night made an entry in his ledger that his sister quotes at length in a letter dated the 20th of April. The entry, according to the letter, described the top of the ridge as being unnaturally flat, as though a small clearing had been cut into it. And at the center of the clearing, half buried in leaves and moss, was a stone slab approximately 6 ft across and 8 ft long, and set into the stone slab was an iron ring the size of a dinner plate.
And beneath the iron ring, when Witcom and Corwin tried to shift the slab and could not, they had heard quite distinctly the sound of something moving on the other side. Wickcom did not go back to the ridge the next day. He wrote in the ledger, according to his sister’s summary, that he wanted to consult a man who lived in a hollow about 6 milesi east of Pickkins, an old man named Abselum Kettle, who was known throughout the county as someone who had lived in that country all his life and who knew things about it that were not written down
anywhere. Wittram had known Kettle since he had first taken office in 1883. He had over the years occasionally consulted the old man about matters that fell outside the ordinary run of sheriff’s business. A missing girl in 1891 found alive in a cave that no one but Kettle had known was there. A series of livestock killings in the winter of 1896, which Kettle had traced not to a bear, but to a man who had gone mad after his wife’s death and was living in the woods above his own farm.
a dispute over a boundary line in 1898, which Kettle had settled by producing from a locked chest, a handdrawn deed dated 1779, that no one else in the county had known existed. Witcom trusted him. He rode out to the hollow the morning of the 12th of April alone, and he took with him a single sheet of paper on which he had transcribed the boy’s description of the ones below.
Kettle was 81 years old that spring. He lived in a log cabin that his grandfather had built in the 1790s on a piece of land that had been in his family for four generations. He was a widowerower, childless, and he kept himself with a small kitchen garden and a rifle. He was known to be uncannily accurate with the rifle, and he was known to speak in the older families the way people had spoken before the Civil War, using words that had gone out of common use by the 1860s.
He was also known in certain circles to have been raised by his grandmother who had been raised by her grandmother and who had told her stories that her grandmother had told her going back by Kettle’s own reckoning to a woman who had come down into the valley in 1743 and who had according to family tradition been the first white settler to speak with the ones who were already there.
Witcom sat with kettle in the cabin for the better part of the day. There is no written record of what was said between them. Witcom did not enter the conversation in his ledger, and Kettle, who could read, but wrote only with great difficulty, did not keep a journal. But Wickham, in his letter to his sister, dated the 20th of April, mentions that Kettle had listened without interrupting to the entire description of the boy and the boy’s story, and had then, when Wickham finished, gotten up from his chair, walked to a low chest in the corner of
the cabin, unlocked the chest with a key he wore on a leather thong around his neck, and taken from the chest a bundle wrapped in oil cloth. He had brought the bundle back to the table and had unwrapped it in front of Witcom. And inside the bundle had been a single object, which Wickham described in the letter as being like nothing he had ever seen in his life.
It was a piece of metal, roughly the shape and size of a man’s palm, dark gray in color, and cool to the touch, even after being handled. On one side, it was smooth. On the other side, it was inscribed with a pattern of small marks that Wickcom, who had spent a good deal of time in his youth studying botanical illustrations, said resembled nothing so much as the veins of a leaf, though arranged in a geometry that was not organic.
He wrote to his sister that when he touched the smooth side of the metal, he felt a faint vibration, so slight that he was not sure at first he had felt it at all, but persistent enough that when he set the metal down and picked it up again, the vibration was still there. Kettle told him that the object had been in the Kettle family for 159 years.
It had been given to Kettle’s four times great-g grandandmother by one of the ones who were already there in the year the family first came into the valley as a token of what Kettle called the arrangement. Wickham asked what the arrangement was. Kettle told him the arrangement, as Kettle described it, had been made between the first settlers who came into the valley and the beings who lived in the older diggings.
And it had been very simple. The settlers would not go into the older diggings. They would not attempt to open the sealed slabs. They would not, above all, disturb the sleeping. In return, the beings in the older diggings would not come up to the surface, and they would not take children from the settlements, and they would leave the valley to be worked and farmed and lived in by the human families who had come there.
The arrangement had been honored by both sides for nearly 140 years. Kettle said that his grandmother, who had died in 1841, had told him that the arrangement was still in force, and that as long as no settler was foolish enough to break it, it would remain in force. Kettle, who had lived his whole life in that country, had never heard of a child being taken, he had never heard of a slab being opened.
He had, until the day Wickham described the boy to him, believed that the arrangement was intact. But the boy, Kettle said, was proof that something had changed, and whatever had changed, it had not been changed by the ones below. Kettle was certain of that. The ones below did not break their own agreements. If a child had been taken and raised in the lower rooms, and then released.
It was because someone on the surface had broken the arrangement first, and the ones below had responded by beginning to break it in return. Kettle told Witham that if he wanted to know what had been broken and by whom, he needed to look not at the ridge above the flat stone, but at the men in the county who had been digging where they should not have been digging.
He named three of them. Witcom wrote the names down, and then Kettle put the piece of metal back in the oil cloth, put the oil cloth back in the chest, locked the chest, and told Witcom that he would not see him again in this life. Kettle died 6 days later in his sleep, apparently of natural causes. He was found by a neighbor who had come to bring him a jar of preserves.
The cabin was undisturbed. The rifle was still on its pegs above the mantle. The chest in the corner was still locked, and the key was still on the leather thong around Kettle’s neck. But when the neighbor, following the instructions of the county coroner, opened the chest to inventory, the contents for probate, the chest was empty.
The oil cloth was gone, the piece of metal was gone, and there was no sign of forced entry into the cabin, no sign of a struggle, and no explanation for how any object could have been removed from a locked chest whose only key had been around a dead man’s neck. Wickham, who had ridden out to the cabin as soon as word reached him of Kettle’s death, examined the empty chest himself, and according to his sister, said nothing for a long time.
He then walked outside, stood in the yard for approximately 10 minutes, looking at the ridge line to the west, and rode back to Pickins. He did not enter Kettle’s death in his ledger. He did not mention the missing object in any surviving correspondence except the one letter to his sister. But from that day forward, according to Cassie Peele, who was interviewed in 1931 by a WPA folklore collector named Ruth Anna Fetman as part of a project on West Virginia oral traditions, Witcom slept with a lantern burning in the parlor and kept his revolver on the
bedside table with the hammer cocked. The three names Kettle had given him were entered in the ledger, and Witcom over the following two weeks quietly investigated all three men. The first was a coal operator named Franklin Buland who had opened a small mine on a lease about 4 mi north of Pickkins in the autumn of 1901.
The second was a farmer named Elma Reynolds who had, according to local gossip, been digging for years in a hollow on his property in search of a Confederate gold cache that supposedly had been hidden there in 1863. The third was a man named Doctor Prosper Aling Clauss who was not a physician but a self-styled naturalist and antiquarian originally from Boston who had settled in the county in 1897 and who was known to have paid local men to help him excavate certain hillside features that he believed were the burial mounds of an
ancient race that had preceded the private Cherokee. Wickcom interviewed all three. His notes on the interviews, according to the sister’s letters, were extensive and troubling. Borland, the coal operator, admitted that his mine had struck what he called a strange void at approximately the 200 ft mark. His crew had broken through a wall of unusually hard rock into a hollow space that was, in Buland’s words, larger than a church, and smoother than any natural cave he had ever seen.
Buland had ordered the crew to seal the opening with masonry and to reroute the tunnel around the void. He had done this, he told Wickham, because two of his men who had gone into the void had come out changed. One had died within a week of what the doctor called brain fever. The other had gone home to his family in Kentucky and had, according to a letter Borland had received the previous month, hanged himself in his own barn.
Buland was not a superstitious man, but he had sealed the void, and he intended for it to remain sealed, and he would show Wickham the map of where the void was, but he would not, under any consideration, take him there. Reynolds, the farmer, had been digging in a hollow at the back of his property for 11 years. He had found no gold.
He had, however, found in the winter of 1901 a passage. He described it to Wickham as a set of stone steps leading down into the earth at a steep angle, cut with obvious skill, and lined with walls of dress stone that did not match any of the local geology. Ronalds had descended the steps to a depth he estimated at 40 ft.
At the bottom of the steps he had found a door made of what looked like iron, but was not rusted, and set into the door had been a lock of a design he had never seen. He had not opened the door. He had climbed back up, filled in the hole, and had never dug there again. But he had that winter sold his farm and made preparations to move his family to Ohio.
And he was, at the time of Witcom’s interview, waiting only for the sale to be finalized before leaving the county for good. Orinccllo, the naturalist from Boston, was the most troubling of the three. He was, in Wickham’s estimation, a man who had spent too many years alone with his own theories, and who had come gradually to believe things about the region that no rational person could accept.
Orinclaus had over the course of 5 years excavated a series of sites in the hills around Pickins, and he had from those excavations recovered a collection of objects that he kept in a locked cabinet in his study. He showed the collection to Wickham with obvious pride. It included fragments of dressed stonebearing insized markings, a small metal object that Witcom recognized with a jolt he was careful not to show as being very similar to the one Kettle had produced from his chest and in a glass jar filled with alcohol, an object that
Alenclaus identified as a fossilized hand. It was not fossilized. It was preserved and it had, Wickham noted in the ledger, seven fingers. Wickham asked Ochinclaus where the hand had come from. Orincclos told him it had been recovered from a sealed chamber at a site he had been excavating for the previous 11 months, a site he called, in his own notebooks, the lower entrance.
He offered to show Wickham the site. Wickham declined. He returned to Pickins that evening and, according to his sister’s letter, sat for a long time in the parlor with the boy and did not speak. The boy, Thaniel, watched him with the same patient expression he had worn since his arrival, and after a while, without being asked, said quietly that the man from Boston had already been marked, and that it would not be long now, and that Wickham should not go to the man’s house again under any condition. To understand what Wickcom
was beginning to grasp, we have to consider a larger set of questions that have haunted the study of Appalachian history since the first surveyors entered these mountains in the 1700s. The ridges of central and southern west Virginia along with the connecting ranges in eastern Kentucky, western Virginia, and southwestern Pennsylvania contain a density of unexplained man-made features that no serious geologist or archaeologist working in the region has ever been able to satisfactorily account for.
There are stone walls in places where no known indigenous people ever built stone walls. There are cut stone chambers, some of them 30 ft on a side, buried in hillsides that were considered virgin wilderness when the first Europeans arrived. There are shafts perfectly vertical lined with masonry in locations where no colonial or industrial mining ever took place.
There are in more than a hundred documented sites across the region, features that have been variously attributed to lost tribes, to pre-Colombian Norse expeditions, to a wandering group of Welsh explorers led by a semi-leendary prince named Maddok, and in more recent years to a civilization that some researchers believe occupied the entire continent long before the arrival of any of the peoples we know from the historical record.
That civilization has been called by many names. In the mainstream, its existence is denied outright and the features attributed to it are reattributed one by one to natural processes or to indigenous groups whose actual construction traditions do not match the features in question. But among a certain kind of researcher and among the older families of the region who have always known what they know without needing outside confirmation, the civilization has a name.
It is called most commonly the Tartarian civilization or simply Tartaria. And the theory in its broadest outlines holds that Tartaria was a globe spanning technological civilization that reached its peak sometime in the millennium before the year 1600. that its remains are visible everywhere in the world if one knows how to look and that it was ended deliberately or accidentally by a catastrophic event or a series of events that left the survivors scattered, its cities buried and its history systematically erased from the official
record. The specific mechanism of erasia varies from theorist to theorist, but the pattern of what was erased and what was left behind is remarkably consistent. In Appalachia specifically, the Tartarian theory holds that the region was at the time of the fall an inhabited and heavily developed territory and that its underground infrastructure sealed by whatever catastrophe ended the civilization on the surface has survived in a state of preservation that would astonish any conventional archaeologist for somewhere
between four and six centuries. The catastrophe itself, in the version of the theory most commonly told in the older Appalachian families, involved a great mud flood, a rising of subterranean water and sediment that swept across the surface of the continent and buried the lower stories of every existing structure to a depth of 8 to 12 ft.
Which is why so many of the region’s older buildings have windows at ground level that appear to have been originally designed as secondstory windows. and why so much of what looks like natural hillside contour in the mountains follows lines that are on closer inspection too regular to be natural. What was buried in that flood, according to the theory, was not empty.
And the beings who lived in it or who were sealed into it as it happened did not necessarily die. This is the framework within which the story of the boy Thananiel makes a certain terrible sense. If the lower rooms, he described were the surviving lower levels of a Tartarian settlement, and if the ones below were not, as Kettle had told Witham, ordinary human beings, but something else that had inhabited those structures before or during the catastrophe, then the arrangement that Kettle’s family had maintained for
nearly a century and a half was not a superstitious pact with imagined spirits. It was a very real diplomatic understanding negotiated by the first white settlers in the valley with the surviving inhabitants of a buried civilization and honored on both sides until the arrival of coal mining and industrial excavation in the late 19th century began to breach the seals that had held the arrangement in place.
Borland’s mine had broken through into a void. Runns had dug down to an iron door. Orinloths had in the pursuit of what? and Thananiel, the boy with the seven scars, was the response. Witcom did not have the word Tartaria. That framework would not be developed in its modern form until decades later, but by the middle of April, he had enough pieces to understand the shape of what he was dealing with.
He had a boy who had lived underground with beings who were not human in structures that were not built by any people known to the historical record. He had an old man, now dead, whose family had preserved for six generations a piece of metal that vibrated in the hand, and that had, upon its keeper’s death, vanished from a locked chest.
He had three separate accounts from three unrelated men of intrusions into subterranean spaces whose construction did not match anything the county’s mining engineers had ever seen. and he had the direct testimony of the boy himself, delivered in the same calm voice night after night in the parlor, that the ones below were now aware of what had been done, and that they were preparing a response, and that the response would not be limited to Oouching Clauss and Ronalds and Burland.
It would extend, according to Thiel, to everyone who had heard the story, including the sheriff, including Dr. decade, including Silus Corwin, the young mining engineer who had climbed the ridge with Wickham and who had heard the movement beneath the stone slab. All of them had been marked, Thananiel said, from the moment they had been told.
On the 16th of April, Dr. Prosper Alencclos was found dead in his study in the small house he had built on the outskirts of Pickkins, he had been dead for approximately 18 hours when his housekeeper, arriving to prepare his breakfast, discovered him sitting upright in the leather chair behind his writing desk, his eyes were open, his hands were folded in his lap.
There was no sign of struggle, no sign of intruder, no sign of poison in the coffee cup that stood half empty on the desk beside him. The coroner, who was Dr. Cade, ruled the death as cardiac failure, though he noted in the private journal that he kept alongside his official reports that Ochingloss had been 49 years old and in apparent good health when Witcom had interviewed him 3 days earlier.
Cade also noted that the locked cabinet in which Alinclauss had kept his collection of artifacts was standing open when the housekeeper arrived and that the cabinet was empty and that the key to the cabinet was still on the ring at Oinccllo’s belt and that there was no indication that the lock had been forced. The following night, Silus Corwin, the young mining engineer, boarded an eastbound train at the Beverly depot with the stated intention of returning to his mother’s home in Pittsburgh. He never arrived.
The train reached Pittsburgh on the morning of the 18th of April. Corwin’s trunk was on it. His compass and his leatherbound notebook were in the trunk. His seat, according to the porter, who was interviewed by the county sheriff in Randolph County 2 weeks later, had been occupied when the train left Beverly, unoccupied when the train stopped at Grafton, and had not been observed to be occupied by Corwin at any point between those two stations.
There were no witnesses to his departure from the train. There was no sign that he had jumped, been thrown, or otherwise left the car. He was, in the phrase used by the Pittsburgh Detective Agency his family hired to investigate his disappearance, simply not on the train when it arrived. His body was never recovered.
His notebook, which contained his sketches of the ridge above the flat stone, along with his notes on the stone slab and the iron ring, remained in the trunk, and was, according to his mother’s later correspondence, eventually deposited with the family papers at the Historical Society of Western Pennsylvania, where it can, in theory, still be consulted, though a researcher who requested it in 1979 was informed that the notebook had been lost in the archives sometime in the previous two decades. and could not be located.
Witkim, upon learning of Ochinclaus’s death and Corwin’s disappearance, took two immediate actions. First, he wrote out in longhand a full account of everything the boy had told him, everything Kettle had told him, everything he had seen at the top of the ridge, and everything that had happened since.
This document ran, according to his sister’s letter of the 28th of April, to 62 pages. He sealed it in an oil skin packet and gave it to Cassie Peele with instructions that she was to hide it in a specific location he had chosen in the wall of the smokehouse and that she was in the event of his own death to remove it from the smokehouse and send it by trusted courier to his sister in Ohio.
Second, he wrote a shorter document, only three pages, which was addressed to the governor of West Virginia and which he sent by registered mail through the post office at Beverly on the morning of the 19th of April. That document has never been recovered from any archive. The postal receipt survives. The document does not. On the 22nd of April, the boy Thiel stopped speaking. He did not become ill.
He did not appear distressed. He simply on the morning of that day refused to answer any question Wickham put to him and he continued in that refusal for the next four days. He ate his meals. He sat in the parlor. He watched the fire, but he did not speak and he did not, according to Cassie Peele, appear to be listening when spoken to.
On the morning of the 26th of April, Wickham entered the parlor to find the boy standing by the front window looking out at the road. Witcom asked him what he was watching for. The boy did not turn from the window. He said in the same calm voice he had used from the beginning that they were coming today. He said Witkim should send Cassie away and lock the doors and load the shotgun and wait.
Witcom, according to Peele’s WPA interview, did exactly what the boy told him to do. He sent Peele out of the house with a madeup errand that took her all the way to Beverly. He locked the doors. He loaded the shotgun that stood in the umbrella stand by the front hall and he sat down in the parlor across from the boy and he waited.
What happened in the parlor between approximately 11:00 in the morning and approximately 4:00 in the afternoon of the 26th of April 1902 has never been established with any certainty. Witkum did not enter it in the ledger. The ledger at that point had only 3 days of entries left in it before the entries stopped altogether.
He did not describe it in any letter to his sister that was preserved. Cassie Peele, when she returned to the house that evening, found the front door unlocked, the shotgun standing in its usual place in the umbrella stand, unfired, the boy Thiel sitting in his usual chair by the fire, and Sheriff Witcom sitting at his writing desk, apparently absorbed in his correspondence, and appearing to her no different than he had appeared that morning.
But over the following weeks, according to Peele’s later testimony, Wickham began to change. He grew thinner. His hair, which had been iron gray, began to whiten rapidly, and by the end of May, it was the color of milk. He slept less and less. He wrote long letters at night that he burned in the parlor great before morning, and he refused, categorically, and without explanation, to allow anyone in the household to speak the boy’s name aloud.
On the 15th of May 1902, the boy Thaniel disappeared from the sheriff’s parlor. He had gone to bed the night before in the small room off the kitchen that Wickham had set aside for him in the presence of Cassie Peele, who had tucked him in and left a candle burning on the dresser.
When Peele entered the room the next morning to wake him, the bed was made. The candle had burned out normally. The child’s borrowed clothing was folded on the chair, and the child himself was not there. The window was closed and latched from the inside. The door to the kitchen was closed. There was no sign of any intruder. Peele called for Wickham, who came from the parlor, examined the room in silence, and then walked outside and stood in the yard for a long time.
When he came back in, according to Peele, he told her in a voice, she said she would remember to her dying day that the boy had not been taken. The boy had been called home. Witcom continued as sheriff for another 11 months. He performed his duties. He answered his correspondence. He appeared, to those who did not know him well, to be simply an aging man in visibly declining health.
And no one in the county except Cassie Peele and Dr. Cade connected his decline to the events of April and May. He died in his sleep on the 22nd of April, 1903, one year, almost to the day after the boy Thaniel had first spoken to him about the ones below. His sister traveled from Ohio for the funeral.
She retrieved from Cassie Peele the oil skin packet from the smokehouse wall. She took the packet back to Ohio with her, and she deposited it, according to her own later correspondence, in a safe deposit box at a bank in the town of Marietta, where it was to remain until such time as she or her heirs determined it was safe to bring the contents to light.
The sister died in 1929. her heirs, two nieces, and a nephew, opened the safe deposit box in 1930, and inventoried its contents. The oil skin packet was there. It was, according to their inventory, sealed with wax, and marked in Whitcom’s handwriting with the words to be opened only in extremity. None of the three heirs felt that any extremity had yet occurred.
The packet was returned to the box. The box was retained. In 1947, the last of the three heirs, the nephew, died. His widow, following the instructions in his will, transferred the contents of the safe deposit box, including the oil skin packet, to the Ohio Historical Society, where they were entered into the collection as the Wickcom papers, and assigned a catalog number.
The catalog record for that number exists. The physical materials do not. When a researcher named Delphine Watts requested the Witcom papers from the Ohio Historical Society in the summer of 1963, she was informed that the papers had been transferred in 1959 to a private collection whose owner had requested anonymity and that the historical society was no longer able to make them available to researchers.
The private collector has never been identified. The papers have never resurfaced. Dr. Ephraim Cade, the physician who had examined the boy on the day of his arrival and who had ridden out to the ridge in the buggy, was found dead in a creek bed about 3 mi north of Pickins on the 11th of October, 1903. His tongue had been removed.
His boots had been placed neatly on the bank of the creek beside his body. There were no other marks on him. The county coroner, who had by that point been appointed to replace Cade himself, ruled the death a homicide by person or persons unknown and closed the case within 6 months for lack of evidence.
Cad’s private journal, in which he had recorded his observations of the boy and his notes on the trip to the ridge, was not found among his effects. His widow, who had inherited the entire practice, sold the house and moved to Maryland within the year. Silus Corwin’s uncle, Colonel Henderson Price, the president of the State Historical Society, resigned his position in the summer of 1903, citing failing health.
He returned to his home in Charleston, where he lived quietly for another 16 months. In February of 1905, he was found in his study dead of what the coroner called a self-inflicted gunshot wound to the temple. Though the pistol, which was found on the floor beside his chair, had not been discharged, and there was no residue on either of his hands, and there was no wound anywhere on his body that could have been produced by the pistol found beside him.
The coroner nevertheless recorded the death as suicide, and the case was closed without further investigation. Cassie Peele, the housekeeper, outlived all of them. She continued to live in Pickkins, working for the family that eventually bought Whitam’s house until her retirement in 1924. She lived alone in a small cottage until her death in 1936 at the age of 82.
She gave the WPA interview to Ruth Ana Fetman 5 years before her death. And it is that interview along with the letters from Wickham’s sister and the surviving fragments of Dr. Cad’s official medical report that constitutes the bulk of what we now know about the case. Fetman’s original interview notes were held at the Library of Congress until 1968, at which point they were along with a substantial portion of the WPA West Virginia oral history collection, transferred to an off-site storage facility whose contents were destroyed in a fire in 1973. A
transcribed summary of the Peele interview prepared by Fetman in 1932 survives in the papers of a fellow WPA collector and is the source for most of what has been quoted from that interview in subsequent scholarship. The case of the boy at Pickins is not when viewed in the wider context of Appalachian folklore and historical anomaly unique.
It is in fact one of at least 14 documented cases from the region between 1860 and 1940 in which a young child was found alone in wilderness circumstances in apparently good physical condition but showing signs of prolonged confinement and in which the child described before subsequently disappearing or dying or being adopted into a family that then moved away and severed all contact with the community an underground place inhabited by beings that were not human.
Marjorie Salow cataloged six of these cases in her article. A follow-up study by an independent researcher named Hston Reev in 2007 expanded that catalog to 14. And Reev argued in a monograph privately published and later pulled from circulation at the author’s request in 2009 that the true number across the region was probably closer to 40.
The pattern in these cases is remarkably consistent. The child is always young, typically between 5 and 9 years of age. The child is always calm upon discovery and displays none of the behavioral signs one would expect from a child who had been genuinely lost or abandoned. The child bears in nearly every case some form of physical marking that suggests medical or scientific intervention.
The scars on Thananiel are one variant. In an 1874 case from Eastern Kentucky, the child had a small circular impression in the skin behind the right ear from which a fine thread of some unknown material could be extracted. In an 1891 case from Pocahontas County, Virginia, the child had a series of small tattoos on the soles of both feet arranged in patterns that no local artist could identify.
In a 1912 case from County, Tennessee, the child was found to have upon full medical examination a small metallic object embedded in the tissue at the base of the neck, which the local physician attempted to remove and which then, according to his written report, moved of its own accord to a position deeper in the neck tissue where it could not be reached without endangering the child’s life.
The stories the children tell when they are willing to speak are also remarkably consistent. There is always an underground place. There are always other children. There are always beings that walk on two legs and have faces like human faces but are not human. There is often a language the child can understand but cannot repeat. There is frequently a mention of feeding on a paste or grl that has no taste.
There is almost universally some reference to being measured or tested or examined at regular intervals. And there is in every case where the child speaks for more than a day or two some form of warning about what will happen if the story is repeated or investigated. The warning is not always heeded.
When it is not heeded, the pattern of what follows is also consistent. The adults who investigate the story die, disappear, or go mad in numbers and in sequences that no honest coincidence can account for. Reeves monograph identifies what he called the corridor, a geographical band running roughly from the northern edge of the Cumberland Gap up through the mountains of eastern Kentucky, southern West Virginia, and southwestern Virginia, and continuing north into the ridges of central Pennsylvania.
Within this corridor, according to Reeves mapping, virtually every documented case of the phenomenon has occurred. The corridor corresponds imperfectly but suggestively to the geological formations of the central Appalachian coal basin, and it corresponds, more suggestively still, to the belt of unexplained pre-industrial stone construction that runs along the same ridges.
The corridor also corresponds, according to Reev, to a pattern of unusually high rates of certain kindly of unexplained disappearance, unusually high rates of certain kinds of local folklore about beings that live underground, and unusually low rates of certain kinds of official documentation of historical events between the 1850s and the 1920s, as though someone or something had been quietly ensuring that the written record of the region was less complete than it might have been.
The Tartarian framework applied to Reeves corridor suggests a specific interpretation. If the underground structures beneath the central Appalachian region are the remains of a Tartarian settlement, and if the surviving inhabitants of that settlement have persisted in some form for the six or so centuries since the surface catastrophe, then the corridor is not a random pattern of anomaly.
It is the map of a continuing occupation. And the children who have been taken and returned according to this reading are not victims in the conventional sense. They are messengers or samples or in some readings the products of a program whose purpose is only partially understood. The seven scars on Thananiel’s chest in this interpretation are not the marks of casual medical curiosity.
They are the marks of a specific procedure performed on infants at intervals over their first year of life whose purpose is to prepare the child for something that comes later. What comes later is, of course, the question the boy Thananiel could not answer or would not. He had told Witim only that the ones below were waiting for the children to be ready.
He had not been able to say what they would be ready for. But there are hints scattered throughout the 14 documented cases that suggest the answer. The most complete of these hints comes from a case in 1923 in which a girl of about 11 years was found near the town of Norton, Virginia, and was taken in by the family of the local Baptist minister.
The girl told the minister over a period of some months before her own disappearance from the family’s home in the spring of 1924 that the ones below were building something. She did not know what. She knew only that they had been building it for a very long time, and that when it was finished, the children would be needed to operate it.
She did not know how or for what purpose. She knew only that the children who had been marked had been marked precisely so that they could do this work, and that the work could not be done by anyone who had not been prepared for it from infancy. There is one final piece of the story of the boy at Pickins that deserves to be told and it is a piece that surfaced only in the last 20 years in a way that no one who studied the case in the 20th century could have predicted.
In 2006, a woman named Lorena Vestal, who was then in her mid 80s and living in a nursing home in Elkins, West Virginia, gave a recorded interview to a graduate student named Aaron Dole, who was researching regional folklore for a master’s thesis at Marshall University. Vestal had been born in Pickkins in 1920, the granddaughter of a woman who had known Cassie Peele personally and who had, according to Vestal, inherited a small collection of Peele’s private papers upon her death in 1936.
Among those papers had been a single sheet folded twice that Peele had, according to family tradition, removed from the sheriff’s parlor on the morning after the boy Thaniel disappeared. It was a sheet that had, according to Peele, been left on the writing desk where Wickham had done his work, and it had been in the boy’s handwriting, though how the boy had learned to write, since no one in the household had taught him, and he had never been observed to hold a pen, was a question Peele had never been able to answer. The sheet
which Vestal produced during the interview and which was subsequently photographed and cataloged by Dul contained a single sentence written in a hand that was neat, even and childish only in the sense that the letters were formed slowly and with deliberate care. The sentence read as follows. Tell them we do not want the surface.
We want the middle. And when we have the middle, everything above and below will be one. and there will be no more arrangement because there will be no more two sides. Vestal, when asked what she believed the sentence meant, said that her grandmother had refused to speculate, and that her grandmother had told her only that Peele had wept when she found the sheet, and had folded it and put it in her apron pocket, and had never spoken of it to anyone in the household during the 11 months that remained of Wickham’s life. Vestal died in 2009.
Duel’s thesis was completed and filed at Marshall University in 2008. The photograph of the sheet along with the recorded interview is on file at the university’s special collections library and can be requested by any researcher who wishes to see it. The sheet itself, the physical original, was in Vestal’s possession at the time of the interview.
When her estate was inventoried after her death, the sheet was not among her effects. Her family assumed at the time that it had been misfiled or misplaced. It has never been recovered. There is no marker at the flat stone on the switchback above Elk Fork. There is no plaque in Pickkins noting that Sheriff Whitcom once lived in the house that is now, according to the county records, a private residence owned by a family that has held the deed since 1961.
The stone slab at the top of the ridge, if you can find it under the leaves and moss, is still there. And the iron ring is still set into the stone, and no one in the 124 years since Wittam and Corwin tried and failed to lift it has been able to move it either. The county maps still show a blank interval on the far side of the ridge.
The far side of the ridge has still, so far as any surveyor has publicly reported, never been walked. The older families in the county still call the stone by its old name. And the children who grow up there are still told quietly and only when it becomes necessary that they should not sit on the sitting rock, not for any length of time, not for any reason, and above all not alone.
What the boy Thaniel wrote on the sheet of paper that Cassie Peele took from the writing desk was not, whatever it meant, a threat that any of the men who read it in their own time knew how to answer. And it is not clear that any of us in our own time know how to answer it either. The arrangement that Kettle described has been broken in ways that we can measure and in ways that we probably cannot.
What comes of that breaking is a question that the boy Thananiel could not or would not put into words the sheriff could understand. But the sheet is gone and Wickham is gone. And the 14 documented cases are only the ones we know about. And the ridges are still there. And the corridor runs in Reeves mapping from the Cumberland Gap all the way to the north.
And someone is still sitting occasionally on the flat stone waiting. Next week I want to tell you about a family in the Ozarks who in the summer of 1879 kept something in the attic of their farmhouse that the local circuit preacher was invited to visit exactly once and never spoke of afterward. and that the county sheriff four years later walked in on with consequences that would echo through that entire mountain community for the next 50 years.
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Disclaimer: This story is fictional and created for entertainment purposes only. Any names, characters, places, or events are fictitious or used fictitiously. No real person or organization is intended to be portrayed.