1927 Appalachian Horror – The Real Story Behind Deliverance 

1927 Appalachian Horror – The Real Story Behind Deliverance

Some locations on this map still carry their older outlines beneath the newer ones. You drive along a paved stretch that gives way to gravel, then to dirt, then to something the county doesn’t bother naming at all. And right there, that’s where a certain kind of story takes root.

Tonight’s begins in one such place. But before we get to it, let me say one thing upfront, and I’ll only say it once. A note before we start. If the type of case I’m about to tell is the sort you’d want more of, not one, but 10, each told in full. In a voice meant for the dark, there’s a collection called What the Mountain Keeps.

10 files from 10 counties across five states spanning 1893 to 1955. Every one of them walked into ground that looked easy and everyone was closed by the law with the wrong word. 10 hours to sit within the dark start to finish. The link is in the description and pinned at the top of the comments. Now then, let me know where you’re listening from tonight.

Drop it in the comments before I go further. I want to know what part of the country is dark right now. as I tell you this because this is a mountain story and mountain stories carry better in the dark. If you’ve ever driven a road at night that felt like it wanted you to turn back, I’d like to hear about that, too.

Some of you know exactly what I mean. You’ve heard of Deliverance. The book came out in 1970, written by James Dicki. The film followed two years later. Four men in canoes, a river about to be damned, mountain country that meant them harm. Most people who talk about deliverance today are really talking about one scene.

They say the word banjo and think that’s the whole picture, but the picture is bigger than that. Dicki knew what he was drawing from. He’d spent time in that country. He’d listened, talked to men who’d gone up hollows they shouldn’t have. and what he wrote when he sat down was the softest version he could make of what he’d heard.

He made it something between men, something you could understand, something you could point to in a courtroom if you had to. The real cases weren’t that neat. They were older than mean. They didn’t want to be understood. And the one I’m going to tell you tonight, the one a Knoxville surveyor named Ashen Ketering brought back down out of a place called Bitter Creek Hollow in the fall of 1927.

That one, in my opinion, is worse than the legend. Ashen Ketering was 38 when the Koffield Timber Company hired him out of their Knoxville office and sent him east and north into Perry County, Kentucky, to walk the boundaries of a hardwood track they had recently, and let’s say generously acquired.

Ashen was a tall man, six, two or near enough. thin in the shoulders and heavier in the legs, the way surveyors get after 20 years of walking hillsides. His hair had gone gray early at the temples. His hands were long and careful with a collus on the right thumb from where the transit rested when he carried it across his shoulder. He didn’t drink.

He didn’t smoke either, which was uncommon in his trade. He had a habit of writing everything down twice. once in the field book and once again at night in a leather journal he kept in his coat pocket. That second book is a large part of why we know this story at all. Koffield timber destroyed the survey. The field book vanished with it, but the leather journal stayed with Ashen until he died in a boarding house in Chattanooga in 1961.

And it passed from the landlitty to the county, from the county to a historical archive, and from the archive eventually to to those of us who go looking for these kinds of things. The tract he was sent to walk lay above the north fork of Bitter Creek in a stretch of country that on the map looked like nothing.

Two ridges, one hollow between them, a creek running down the middle and forking near the top. There was a family living up in that fork known to be there. The company had bought the mineral and timber rights from a man in Frankfort who claimed to have inherited them from his grandfather.

The family in the hollow had never been consulted. That too was known. What Ashen’s employers wanted from him was a clean set of boundaries, a tree count, and a written statement that the tract could be worked without complication. They knew there was a family up there. They did not know and did not much care to know what that family was going to say about it. A word about the deed.

Since this is where all the trouble starts, and since these things are usually just a little bit crooked in a way people don’t don’t like to admit, the tract on Bitter Creek Hollow had come to Koffield Timber through a man in Frankfort by the name of Call Pepper Witro. Witro was, by all accounts, a lawyer of the second rank.

He’d inherited a filing cabinet from his father, and his father had inherited it from his own father. Inside that cabinet were papers going back into the early part of the last century that nobody had bothered to sort. Wetro, needing money in the spring of 1927, sorted them. What he came out holding was a piece of paper saying his greatgrandfather had in 1841 purchased 2,000 acres of ridge and hollow in Perry County from a man calling himself Efron Pridemore for the sum of $90 in silver.

The paper was signed. It was notorized more or less by a justice of the peace whose signature was still legible if you held the sheet to the light. It was, as legal papers went in Kentucky in the 1840s, no worse than most. Witro took it to Cofield Timber. Cfield Timber took it as good.

Koffield Timber paid Wro a sum of money. I will not repeat here for the rights to the timber standing on that land. And Koffield Timber, having done its part, wanted to know exactly how much timber was standing there. That was the piece that landed on Ashen’s desk. Nobody in the Knoxville office had thought to ask a very simple question, which was this.

If a man named Ephron Pridemore had sold 2,000 acres of Kentucky Ridge in 1841, and if the Pridemore family, whose name was still on maps in that hollow, had never once in 80 6 years contested the sale, then who exactly had been living up in that hollow all those years? And what did they think they were doing there? That was Ashen’s job to find out.

He didn’t yet know it was his job. He thought his job was to walk boundaries and count trees. Ashen took the train from Knoxville to Hazard on the 3rd of October, 1927. From Hazard, he took a wagon east with a mail carrier as far as a place called Sims Store, which was a store and also a post office and also the last building on that road that had glass in the windows. from Sim store.

He was on foot. He’d been told to ask for a man named Almanrretic, who lived in a cabin about 2 mi up the creek and who would guide him the rest of the way for a fee. Ashen found him easily enough. Alman Kratic was 62 that autumn, though he looked older, the way mountain men do when their teeth start going.

He was short, not quite 56, with a barrel chest, small careful hands, and a mustache that was more yellow than white from smoke. Alman Kratic had been born, he said, when Ashen asked, in a cabin about a mile up Sims Creek in 1865 in the last spring of the war. His father had come home from Virginia in the summer of that year without a right foot and had lived another eight years on a wooden peg carved by a neighbor.

His mother had lived long enough to bury three husbands and a good number of hopes. Alman himself had been married once to a woman named Perseus, who had died of a fever in 1902, and he had not remarried. He lived alone in a cabin with a good stove, a rocking chair on the porch, and a hound dog named Peele, who was by then the fourth Peele to hold the job.

Almanic knew every road cut and deer path in the western half of Perry County. He had guided surveyors Coleman and twice an old professor from Lexington who’d wanted to look at rocks. He had guided once a preacher who wanted to bring the good news up a hollow. And Alman had brought that preacher back down two days later with a look on his face and a Bible he no longer trusted.

Ashen would learn all of this in the days that followed. On the first morning, sitting on Almond’s porch, Ashen only knew that the old man had a shotgun that was not oiled for show and a way of listening to a question. that made you want to answer it truthfully. When Ashen said the words Bitter Creek and Pridemore in the same sentence, Alman stopped rolling his tobacco and looked at him for what Ashen later wrote was a long, unfriendly 10 seconds.

Then Alman said, “Well, I’ll take you as far as the millhe, and after that you’re on your own, and there ain’t enough money in Frankfurt to change that.” Ashen asked why. Alman said because past the millhe is pridemore country and they keep to themselves and God don’t come up that far.

Ashen being from Knoxville being 38 being a college trained surveyor wrote that sentence down in his journal and put a small question mark next to it. He would not in the days that followed be smiling at that question mark anymore. Have you ever had someone tell you a thing about a place and part of you laughs it off while the other part, the older part, the part you don’t like to listen to, files it away and keeps it warm for later.

That’s the part of Ashen that wrote that sentence down. That’s the part I want you thinking about. They set out the next morning at first light. Alman kratic in front, a canvas pack on his back and a shotgun over his shoulder that he did not explain and did not apologize for. A shen behind him, transit case in one hand, chain in the other.

His coat buttoned high because the air in that hollow was already colder than it had any business being in early October. Bitter Creek runs north to south for about six miles from its source, and the last two of those miles are the fork. Ashun carried in addition to his transit and chain, a small canvas pack containing two sandwiches, a tin cup, a notebook, three sharpened pencils, a folding knife, and the leather journal.

He also carried a German compass in his breast pocket close to the heart because that was where he’d learned in the war to keep things he could not afford to lose. He was not a nervous man. He was not a superstitious man. He had walked ridges in West Virginia at night in the rain alone and had come down whistling.

He noted as he set out that morning behind Almanrretic that his mouth was dry in a way that had nothing to do with thirst. He wrote that down later. He was a man who wrote things down. It was in the fork that Ashen was meant to work. Alman walked him up the west side of the creek, staying off the trail and going through the trees instead, which struck Ashen as strange, but which he did not question.

The old man moved like someone who did not want to be seen. They walked in silence for the last half hour. Alman was not a man for talk in the woods and a shin who was now noticing the way sound behaved in that particular hollow did not want to break it. There was a moment about halfway up when Ashen became aware that he could not hear his own footsteps on the leaves.

He could feel his boots come down. He could see the small displacements of the moss, but there was no sound at all beneath his own weight. He looked ahead at Alman. Alman’s boots were making sound. A small, clean crunch on the leaves. Ashens were making none. He did not point this out. He walked more carefully after that, and by the time they reached the ridge above the creek, his own boots were quiet again, or the world had grown loud again, and he could not have said which it was. By late morning, they had come

to a piece of open ground where the creek widened and split. On the far side of the water, half sunk into the earth, was a millstone. Beside it, hanging from what remained of a wooden frame, was a wheel. Ashen would write about that wheel more than once in the pages that followed. He would write that it was old.

He would write that it was black with time. He would write that the flume that had once fed it was gone entirely. No wood, no channel, nothing. And yet, as he stood there with his transit case in one hand and the chain in the other, the wheel was turning slowly, about one full rotation every 20 seconds. There was no water in it.

There was no wind on it. There was nothing pushing it that he could see or hear. Alman Kratic did not look at the wheel. He looked at Ashen and said, “This is as far as I go.” Ashen asked if he was afraid of the wheel. Almond said, “No, I ain’t afraid of the wheel. I’m afraid of what keeps it turning.

” And that is the last thing Almanic said to Ashen Ketering that day. He turned around and went back the way he’d come and he did not once look over his shoulder. Ashen watched him go until he could no longer see the top of his head above the ferns. Then Ashen Ketaring took a long, careful breath and crossed the creek. Before I take you across with him, I want to check in.

This is the part of the story where things start to slip. And I want you here for it. If you’re still with me, tell me down in the comments. Was there ever a place you went as a young person that felt wrong to you? And you couldn’t say why. Not haunted like the movies, just wrong off, not for you. Comment about it. I read those. I keep a folder of them.

Some nights I go back and read them all again and I don’t know exactly why. Now across the creek. The first thing Ashen noticed after he crossed was that the compass in his coat pocket. a good German instrument he’d carried for 11 years, was no longer pointing north. It was pointing at the ridge above him.

He held it flat in his palm and walked in a slow circle, and the needle turned with him, always pointing at the ridge. He was near enough to a large seam of coal or a large body of iron that a compass might do strange things. This is what he told himself. It is what any trained man would tell himself. He wrote it down as a probable explanation.

Closed the compass and put it back in his pocket. He did not take it out again for the rest of that day. He would later write that after he crossed. Sound changed. That is the exact word he used in his journal. Changed. The creek behind him was still running, and he could hear it, but it sounded farther off than it should have, as if he were listening to it through a wall.

The wind in the leaves overhead was there, but it did not match what the leaves were doing. He tried to walk in a straight line up the west bank of the fork and found that he was drifting to the right, always to the right. No matter how carefully he set his feet, he had walked ridges his entire adult life. He knew what it meant when your feet drifted.

Usually, it meant you were tired. He was not tired. It took him nearly 2 hours to walk what should have been 40 minutes. Somewhere in the middle of the second hour, he began to smell wood smoke. He came up onto the Pridemore cabin at about 3:00 in the afternoon by his watch, though the light overhead did not agree. It was one of those small mountain days that had already started dimming.

The sun caught behind the ridge. The shadows leaning long across the yard. The cabin was not what he’d been expecting. Most cabins in that country face south or face the creek or face the trail. This one faced neither. The front door of the Pridemore cabin was set into the uphill side.

The porch, such as it was, looked up at the ridge. The back of the cabin, blind and windowless, was what greeted a visitor coming from the creek. You had to walk all the way around to knock. Ashen walked all the way around. He knocked. The door was open before his hand came down for the second knock. The man who stood in the doorway was thin, not skinny, thin.

His skin was pulled close over the bones of his face, and his shoulders were narrow, and his hands were folded quietly in front of him. He wore a shirt that had once been white and was now the color of buttermilk. His trousers were held up by a single brace. His feet were bare, though the porch under them was cold enough to sting.

He was Ashen guessed somewhere between 40 and 60. It was difficult to say which. He looked at Ashen with what Ashen later called a patient kind of attention. The way a man looks at a letter he has already read and said, “Ketering, come inside. You must be tired.” Ashen had not told anyone in that hollow his name. He had not spoken to a soul except Almanic since Sim store.

Alman had turned back before they crossed the creek, and here was a man in a doorway on the backside of a cabin that faced the wrong way, saying his name as if he had been expecting him all morning. Ashen in his journal would write only that he felt the small hairs stand up on the back of his neck and that his good sense, the same good sense that had gotten him up 10,000 hillsides in his life, told him plainly to walk back down to the creek.

He did not walk back down to the creek. He went inside. The man’s name was Amasip Pridemore. He said it once at the door and did not say it again. Inside the cabin, the light was low and orange, and it took Ashen a long moment to sort out what he was looking at. A single room, or so it seemed at first, with a stone fireplace on the wall to the left, a long plank table down the middle, and at the far end, a heavy wooden door that stood a little open onto darkness.

Two other people were in the room. A woman was seated at the table, hands folded, eyes down. She was older than Amasa, or she looked older, though again the light made it hard to be certain. Her hair was silver, white, and pulled straight back, and her dress was gray, and she did not lift her eyes when Ashen came in.

Behind her, in the corner near the fireplace, a younger man stood without moving. He might have been 40. He might have been 40. He had Amas’s thinness and a quiet way of holding himself and his eyes did not blink for long stretches. Amasa said, “My sister Verley, my nephew Riddick. They do not speak much to strangers. You will forgive them.

” Ashen said something polite. He does not record what. He set his transit case down beside the door. Amasa gestured him toward a chair at the near end of the table. And as Shen sat from the chair, he could see without turning his head that the walls of the cabin were bare of most of the things you would expect a mountain cabin to hold.

There were no tools, no tobacco pipes, no hats on pegs, no calendar, no almanac. There was a single framed photograph on the wall over the fireplace. It was small and the light was poor, but a Shen whose eyes were still good, could make it out. It was a portrait. A man in a stiff dark coat standing very straight, one hand on the back of a chair, the lettering along the bottom of the frame said in a careful script, Pridemore, 1812.

He looked at that photograph for what he later thought was too long. The problem, Ashan wrote later, was that photography. as we understand it was not really practiced in this country until the 1840s. Dagario types came in around 1839. What he was looking at, if the date on the frame was correct, was a photograph that had been taken more than a quarter century before photographs of that kind existed.

He told himself the date must be wrong. He told himself it was a later portrait, mislabeled. He told himself many sensible things. But the man in the photograph, in the small careful features of the face, looked very much like Amasa Pridemore, not like a greatgrandfather, like the same man.

Have you ever had that moment in a house that wasn’t yours? when you noticed a small detail that wasn’t quite right and you told yourself it was nothing and then in the same breath you started counting the other small details that’s where Ashen was sitting at the table in that cabin listening to Amassa Pridemore explain in a soft voice that his people had been in this hollow since before there was a Perry County and that they were not much for company but that a surveyor would be welcome as long as he understood the rules of the house.

Ashan being polite and being deep in country he did not know said he understood and asked what the rules were. Amasa smiled a very small smile. Ashen wrote, “Do not open the door at the back of the room after dark.” Amasa said, “Do not go up past the second ridge after the light goes. Do not answer if you hear your name called out in a voice you know.

That is the important one. If you hear your name and it sounds like someone you love, do not answer. We call that a courtesy in this house. Do you understand? Ashen said he understood. His hand in his coat pocket was closed hard around the compass. It felt warm through the case, which it should not have felt.

Verly Pridemore at the far end of the table lifted her head then and looked at him for the first time. Her eyes were very light, not blue, not gray, just light, as if they had once been colored, and something had been washed out of them. And she said in a voice as soft as her brothers, “We are glad you came, Mr. Ketaring.

We have been expecting a Ketaring for some time.” Ashen did not know what to say to that. There was, so far as he knew, no reason for a Pridemore of Bitter Creek Hollow to be expecting a Ketaring of Knoxville. His people had come to Tennessee from Pennsylvania. They had no ties to Kentucky. He had never in his life met a person named Pridemore.

And yet Verie was looking at him with the sort of gentle recognition that a great gives a nephew she has not seen since he was small. Amasa did not seem to hear his sister. He was talking again easy as the fire about the tract. He said the company in Knoxville had made an error. He said the deed the man in Frankfurt claimed was not a deed.

he said and here he became careful with his words that the timber on this land was not for the cutting. Ashen doing his job explained that he was there only to walk the boundaries and count the trees. He was not there to cut anything. What the company chose to do afterward was up to the company. Amasa nodded slowly as if this was a satisfactory answer.

And then he said, “We will show you the boundaries in the morning. Tonight you will eat with us and you will sleep on the porch bed and you will not open the back door.” That was Ashen Kettering’s first evening in the Pridemore cabin. He ate a stew that he did not recognize the meat of and which he wrote later had a very particular sweetness to it.

He would think about that sweetness later more than he wanted to. It was not the sweetness of onions or of carrot, though both were in the bowl. It was, he wrote, like the sweetness of something that had been slow, cooked for a very long time in a covered pot until the marrow had gone soft and the fibers had come apart, and the flavor had turned inward on itself.

He thought at first it might be venison. He thought later it might be pork. He thought later still that he did not want to know what it was. And he did not ask, and Amasa did not offer. And Verley did not lift her eyes from the fire. And Riddick in the corner did not eat at all. That was a small thing he noticed and set aside. Riddick did not eat.

He drank spring water from a clay cup. He answered Amas’s careful, quiet questions about the road up from Sims, about the news out of Knoxville, about the wheat harvest, which he did not follow closely, and Amasa listened to it all with that same patient attention. Very did not speak again. Riddick, the nephew, did not speak at all, but Ashen caught him once late in the meal, watching him from the corner, and the expression on Riddick’s face was not curious and was not hostile and was not blank. It was, Ashen later wrote,

hungry. He did not know how else to write it. There is a page in the journal dated that first night where Ashen tries to draw the layout of the cabin. He is a surveyor. Drawing plans is a thing his hand can do without much thought. But the drawing on that page will not close. The rectangle of the main room will not meet itself at the corner.

He has drawn and redrawn the far wall three times, and the far wall is longer in each drawing than the near wall by about 8 ft. Though nothing in his eye at the time told him this was so. At the bottom of that page, he has written in a hand that is trying not to be shaky. Cannot get the walls to agree. Something about the room is longer inside than out.

Do not look at this in the morning. He looked at it in the morning. He tried to redraw it and could not. He put the journal in his coat and did not open it again until he was down at Almanratic’s cabin 2 days later. And by then when he looked at the drawing, he found that the walls closed neatly.

It was, he wrote beside it, a normal cabin now on paper. As I sit here reading you this account, if you’re enjoying the way this is unfolding, this story is being narrated by the fear behind you. If you’re new here, hit that subscribe button so you don’t miss the next one. We’ve got more of these coming, and I don’t want you to lose the thread.

And if you happen to be hearing this on another channel that isn’t mine, know that it was taken without permission. Send it my way. I’ll deal with it. Now, the porch bed was not on the porch. That was one of the strange things. Amasa led him. after supper through a small side door and into a narrow room that had a bed and a window and nothing else.

The bed was made up neatly with quilts that smelled of cedar. The window looked out or should have looked out onto the yard. When Ashen went to the window and pulled aside the curtain, he was looking at a wall of packed earth. The room was set into the hillside. There was no window. There was only a curtain hung over a rectangle of earth as if the room had been dug rather than built. He turned around.

Amasa was still standing in the doorway. Amasa said, “Sleep well, Mr. Ketering. Do not answer if you hear your name.” Ashen said he would not. Amasa closed the door. Ashen did not sleep. He sat on the edge of the bed for a long time in the dark listening. The cabin was quiet in a way that mountain cabins are almost never quiet.

No wood settling, no creek at a distance, no wind, only the small sound of his own breath and occasionally a soft dry sound from somewhere overhead that he could not identify. It was, he wrote, like the sound of a hand moving across a wall in another room. Once and only once he heard from somewhere out beyond the wall of earth behind the curtain a slow scraping sound as if someone were dragging a shovel through soil.

It went on for perhaps 3 minutes. Then it stopped. He did not sleep that night. In the morning there was no evidence of digging in the yard. Ashen looked. He walked the perimeter of the cabin twice before breakfast. in the soft blue light of the hour before sunrise. And the yard was smooth, and the leaves were undisturbed. And the ground behind the cabin, where the room he had slept in should have opened onto the hillside, was flat and grassy, covered in old moss that had not been walked on in a long time. He wrote later that he was not

sure at that moment whether he was more frightened by the possibility that someone had been digging outside his window all night or by the possibility that no one had. Morning came to the porch bed slowly. There was no rooster in that hollow. There was no bird song. The light in the room shifted from black to a kind of soft gray.

And there was no way to say what time it was without looking at his watch. And his watch when he pulled it from the vest pocket where he had left it had stopped at 417. He wounded it caught. He wrote in his journal, “Watch stopped at 417. Wounded running again.” And he did not know at the time that this small detail would matter, but it would. He surveyed for two days.

Amasa Pridemore walked him along the boundaries and Ashen ran his chain and set his transit and made his notes. The tract was smaller than the deed described, but not by much. The timber was good, mostly oak and chestnut with some hickory in the coves and some old white pine near the top of the second ridge.

It was from a company standpoint a valuable stand. Ashen could see already in his head what the report was going to say. He could also see in his head what Amasa Predomore was going to do. If the company came up with saws, he could not have told you why he was so certain. He just was. On the afternoon of the second day, they came to the top of the second ridge and Amasa stopped.

He said, “This is the northern boundary. From here the land is not ours. Ashen checking his notes said politely that the deed extended a further quarter mile north. Amasa did not answer. He looked past Ashen up the ridge at a stand of tall pines that leaned all in the same direction. Though there was no wind that afternoon and had not been any wind that Ashen had felt for two days.

Amasa said, “We do not go up there. If you go up there, do not come back after dark. Ashen being a professional went up there. He carried the transit and the chain alone. Amasa waited at the boundary. Ashen walked into the pine stand, and the first thing he noticed was that the ground under his feet was soft in an unnatural way, as if the earth had been turned recently, though the moss on top of it was old.

The second thing he noticed was that there were no birds, not just quiet, absent. In two days in this hollow, he had not seen a single bird. He realized, and only now was he thinking of it. The third thing he noticed was the smell. Not a bad smell, not death, something older. Something like a seller that has been closed for a very long time and that has stored the same thing over and over for generations.

He worked as fast as he could. He set his transit at the far corner. He shot his angles. He wrote his numbers down. He did not look up the ridge behind him, though he wanted to because the feeling that there was something behind him. Watching him work was at that point so strong that it was almost a pressure against his shoulder blades.

When he had his last angle recorded, he packed up and left. He did not run but he did not linger. He came out of the pine stand and Amasa was still standing where he had left him. Amasa did not ask what he had seen. Amasa said only we will go back now. It will be dark before we reach the cabin. Ashan said he thought they had time. Amasa said, “No, we do not have time.

” And he was right. They walked back down the ridge as the light was leaving, and by the time they reached the fork of the creek, the sky was the color of old iron, and Ashen’s watch, which he had not looked at all afternoon, said it was 10 minutes past 6, though by his own eyes the day should have been at least an hour longer.

He wrote later that he was almost certain as they walked that he heard footsteps in the pines behind them. Not close, not fast, just present. A single set of footsteps keeping pace, matching their speed exactly. When Ashen slowed, the footsteps slowed. When he stopped, the footsteps stopped. When he began again, they began again.

Amasa did not look back. Amasa did not comment. Amasa walked with the same quiet, even stride he had used all day and that night. Back inside the cabin, sitting at the plank table with Verly at the far end and Riddic in the corner and the fire low, Ashen asked Amasa a question he had been holding all day. He asked, “Mr. Pridemore, why have you been expecting a ketering?” Amasa looked up from his cup.

And for the first time in two days, his patient careful expression showed something like surprise. He said, “We have not been expecting a ketering, sir.” Ashen said, “Your sister said on the day I arrived that you had been expecting a ketering.” Amasa looked at his sister. Verie was staring into the fire.

Amasa said slowly, “My sister sometimes says things that are not for the day. Do not mind her. Ashen was not going to be turned that easily. He said, “Has my name come up in this house before? Amasa was quiet for a long time.” Then he said, “There was a ketering once who went up past the pines a long time ago. He did not come back down.

We thought perhaps when we heard of you that it might be him, but you are not him, so it is nothing.” Ashen did not know what to do with that. His grandfather had lived and died in Pennsylvania and his greatgrandfather in Delaware. So far as he knew, none of his people had ever set foot in Perry County, Kentucky.

He wrote in his journal that night, and this is a direct quote from that book. They think I am a returning man. I am not a returning man, but they think I am. And that is not a thing I can argue them out of. He also wrote at the very bottom of the page in a slightly shakier hand. The wheel is still turning. I can hear it.

There is no water in it. It has been turning without water for 2 days. It does not stop at night. That night he did not sleep either. He lay in the porch bed in the room with the earth window and he listened and around what he later guessed was 2:00 in the morning he heard very clearly from just outside the curtain someone say his name Ashen the voice it was he wrote his mother’s voice his mother had been dead for 11 years’s words came back to him do not answer if you hear your name called out in a voice you know Ashen did not answer. He held

very still, so still that his back began to ache with it, and his hands went numb, where he had them pressed against the quilt. After perhaps a minute, the voice came again. Ashen, please. And this time it was closer, as if someone had put their face right up against the earth of the wall behind the curtain and were speaking through it.

He did not answer. He closed his eyes. He counted his own breathing. He waited. Between the second and the third call, and this is a thing he does not put in the journal until months later, in a smaller hand, on a page inserted between two other pages, he heard another voice. It was not a voice he loved.

It was a voice he only half remembered. It was a voice he had heard once in a hospital tent in France in 1918, belonging to a young private from Ohio, who had died with his head in Ashen’s lap, and had in his last minute asked to tell his mother, that it had not hurt. Ashan had told the mother later by letter exactly what the boy asked him to tell her.

He had not thought about that boy in a long time. He had certainly not spoken his name aloud in this cabin. And yet between the second and third calls of his own name on the other side of the earth wall, that boy’s voice said evenly and clearly, “Tell her again. Tell her it did not hurt. Please.” Ashen did not answer. He did not move.

He wrote later on that inserted page that this was the hardest thing he had ever done in his life. Harder than the war. Harder than anything he had done since. Because the voice on the other side of the wall was a boy who had died with his head in Ashen’s lap. And Ashen had loved him in the way you sometimes love a person for one hour on the worst day of both your lives.

And the boy was asking him for a small thing and Ashen from the porch bed in the Pridemore cabin in Bitter Creek Hollow would not give it to him. The voice came a third time, softer, farther off, disappointed, and then it was gone. There was no more digging that night. In the morning, he told Amasa what had happened.

Amasa nodded once, the way a man nods when the weather turns exactly as he predicted. Amasa said, “You did the right thing. You will leave today. I will take you as far as the wheel. After the wheel, you will find your way. Do not come back up this hollow, Mr. Ketering. And write in your report, if you can, that the timber here is not sound, that there is rot in the heart of it, that the tract is not worth the trouble.

If you can write that, I will consider your debt to us paid. Ashen said he would write it. He meant it. They walked down together, and Ashen noted as they went that his compass, which he had not consulted in two days, now pointed south as it should, as if whatever had been pulling it toward the ridge, no longer cared to. At the mill wheel, Amasa Pridemore stopped. He held out his hand.

Ashen shook it. The hand was cold and very clean. Not the hand of a man who had walked ridges for two days. Not the hand of a man who chopped wood or drew water or did any of the things a mountain man does. It was the hand of a man who did not at bottom need to do any of those things anymore. Ashen did not think that thought clearly at the time, but he wrote it down that night at Sim store in the light of a kerosene lamp.

And reading it now in his journal, you can see where the ink pressed heavier on the paper. Amasa said, “Go well, Mr. Ketaring. Do not come back. If ever a man named Ketaring does come back to this hollow, we would like it to be the one we are waiting for, and it will not be you.” Ashen said he understood. He crossed the creek. He walked down the west side alone.

The wheel turned behind him. He did not look back until he was around the first bend. And by then, of course, the wheel was out of sight, and he could tell himself it had stopped. He got to Alman Kratic’s cabin near dark. Alman was waiting on the porch, sitting in a rocker with a shotgun across his knees.

And when Ashen came into the yard, Alman looked him up and down once, twice, and said only, “Well, well, so you’re the one that comes back. Come inside. I’ve got soup.” That night, Almanrretic told Ashenket three things. First, that in 1894, a survey party of four men had gone up Bitter Creek Hollow on behalf of a coal company out of Louisville, and only one had come back.

That man had been unable to say what had happened. He had signed a paper saying the tract was worthless and had left Kentucky and never returned. second that in 1911, a state forester by the name of Rston had gone up to catalog the timber on that same track. Rston had come back down after 3 days, thin and quiet, and had asked for a bed at Alman’s own cabin.

He had died in that bed on the second night, of no cause the county doctor could name, though the doctor had noted in his report that the man’s hair had gone completely white in the space of those three days. And third, that Alman’s own father, when Alman was a young man, had told him that the Pridemore had been in that hollow for as long as anyone knew, and that there had never been a wedding in the Pridemore family, and there had never been a birth in the Pridemore family, and there had never been a death in the Pridemore family either.

So far as any preacher in Perry County could remember, that family was not, Alman’s father had said, quite in the ordinary way of families. They were more like something that lived in the shape of a family because that shape was useful to them. Ashen wrote all of this down. He wrote it carefully.

He did not at that hour feel like a man laughing at any question marks. a breath here before what comes next. If this is the kind of case you’d want to sit within the dark, not just hear it once, but keep it. There’s a collection I put together with the people at forbidden unresolved stories. What the mountain keeps. 10 complete cases, 8 hours, 62 years of records nobody wanted to finish.

Each one placed dated and signed off with a tidy word that never once fit what happened. The link is in the description below and at the top of the comments. Let’s go back to it. Ashen went back to Knoxville. He wrote his report the way Amassa Pridemore had asked him to write it. He said the timber was rotten, that the boundaries were unclear, and that the tract could not be worked without significant loss to the company.

He recommended abandonment. His employer, a Mr. Halverson, was not pleased. Mr. Halverson pointed out that Ashen’s own field book, which he had turned in along with the report, listed thousands of sound trees. Ashun said the field book was in error. Ashun said he had recounted at the ridge and found extensive rot.

Mister Halverson looked at him a long time and then said Ketering are you all right? As Shanun said he was not sleeping well. He asked to be reassigned to another survey. Mr. Halverson granted the request. He also quietly sent another man up Bitter Creek in the spring of 1928. That man was named Fielder. Fielder was younger than Ashen and less careful and more ambitious.

Fielder did not come back at all. His pack was found beside Bitter Creek, just below the fork, undisturbed. His transit was found on a rock, still leveled, still set for a shot he had never made. His shotgun was found in the crook of a chestnut tree about a/4 mile above the mill wheel with three shells missing.

Fielder himself was never found. The Fielder matter was briefly a small story in a small newspaper in Hazard. A missing surveyor was a missing surveyor and it was assumed at first that he had slipped off a bank or been bitten by a snake or found a still and been shown the door in the mountain manor. The sheriff’s men went up as far as the fork of Bitter Creek.

They found the pack, the transit, and the shotgun in the crook of the chestnut. They did not go past the mill wheel. The under sheriff, a man named Lester Yarborough, who would later be shot to death in a domestic matter in 1934, wrote in his report that the tract was not safely enterable and that in his estimation, the surveyor had been taken by a beer.

There were no bears in that part of Perry County in that year. Yarbor knew there were no bears. He wrote bear anyway. That is one of the reasons the report reads the way it reads. The company sent one further man in the summer of 1928. A foreman named Roy Halbrook with three hired hands and a mule. Halbrook made it to the millhe, looked at it, looked at the water that was not there, and turned his party around.

He wrote in his report that the tract was cursed. The company owner in Knoxville read that report, put it in a drawer, and let the matter drop. The tract was never worked. The deed sat in a filing cabinet in a Frankfurt office until the 1950s when the building was pulled down and the papers were pulped.

Ashen Ketering did not survey again after 1931. He took a position as a clerk with the Tennessee Valley Authority. indoors at a desk with no fieldwork at all. He never married. He kept his journal. He read a great deal and he wrote long letters to a cousin in Ohio that were sometimes about the news and sometimes about his health and sometimes later about the fact that he thought he had begun to hear his name called at night in his boarding house room in Chattanooga in a voice that was very old and very patient and not quite his mother’s

anymore. He wrote about it in his letters to the cousin in Ohio. He wrote about it in the journal. He wrote that he had begun sleeping with the light on and that this was foolish and that he did not care. He wrote that he had begun setting a chair against his door. Not because he thought a chair could stop what he was afraid of, but because it made a sound if it moved, and the sound would wake him, and he wanted very badly to be awake if the door opened.

He wrote that he had not answered his name in 12 years, and then in 15 years, and then in 20. He wrote that this was in his opinion the hardest kind of loyalty a man could learn not to those you loved but to the ones you had lost because to answer would be to give them or the thing wearing them a doorway.

He did not answer it. He wrote he would not answer it. In 1970 when he was 81, a copy of James Dickiy’s deliverance was left on the front porch of the boarding house by someone the land lady never identified. Ashen read it in three evenings. He is reported to have finished it, closed it, and said to the land lady that Mr.

Dicki had been kind to those men. He said it in a voice. The landl archavist that made her not want to ask any follow-up questions. Ashen Ketering died in his sleep on a Tuesday in November of 1971. He was found sitting up in bed, the covers pulled to his chest, both hands folded in his lap. The landl said he looked when she found him as though he had been listening to something at the moment his heart stopped.

His journal was on the bedside table. It was closed. It was She noticed still warm. That is one of the things she told the archavist that the journal was still warm when she picked it up. Bitter Creek Hollow is still there. If you look at a modern satellite map of Perry County, Kentucky, you can find in the upper reaches of a small creek that runs into the north fork of the Kentucky River, a piece of ground that is not owned by anyone the register can name.

There is no road to it. There are no clearings visible. There are no cabins, no smoke, no signs of human use. There is on the sloping ground at the fork. What might, if you look closely, be a dark round shape near the water, half swallowed by ferns. It might be a stone. It might be something else. There have been in the last 30 years three separate parties of hikers who have reported in trail journals and on internet forums that they went up into a hollow in that part of the county and [snorts] came back down with the strong

sense that they had been followed and with a strong reluctance to talk about what had followed them. One of them wrote in a single sentence at the end of a very long trip report and I am going to read it to you exactly as she wrote it. The wheel was turning and there was no water. Her account ends there or more precisely her account has no further entries on that site after that date.

Her name I have chosen not to say aloud in this recording because she is still living and because a woman is entitled to be believed without also being contacted and because I do not myself want to add her name to whatever list may already exist. If she wants to speak, she knows where I am.

If she does not, that is her right and I will not push. But I want you to hold that sentence in your mind. The wheel was turning and there was no water. 1927 2017 90 years and a wheel that has so far as any living person knows no reason to turn at all. That is all she said. I have looked. I have found nothing after that sentence. Her account ends there.

Have you ever driven past a place at night and felt something in it turned to watch you go by and known in your bones that if you had stopped you would not have driven on again? That is what I think about when I think about Ashen Ketering. That is what I think about when I think about James Dicki sitting down at his typewriter in the late 1960s working over and over to make a story that a book club could stand to read.

There is a letter dated November of 1969 from Ashen Ketering to his cousin in Ohio. In it, Ashen mentions that a young reporter has recently written to him from a magazine in Georgia asking about a survey he had conducted in Perry County in the fall of 1927. Ashan writes that he does not know how the reporter came by his name.

He writes that he answered the reporter’s letter politely and told him nothing. He writes at the bottom of the page in the small careful hand he used when he wanted his cousin to notice something that he suspects the reporter may be doing a favor for a novelist. He does not say which novelist. He does not have to.

Dicki knew he had heard the older stories. He softened them. He gave the horror a face and a name and a river you could get down to the end of in the real backwoods. The horror does not have a face you can name. It has a wheel that turns without water. It has a cabin that faces the wrong direction. It has a family that has not in the memory of any preacher been born or married or buried.

It has a voice in the dark that knows your name and you do not answer. If you know a story like this, if in your own family or your own county, there is a piece of ground people have always left alone, a hollow, a bend in a river, a stretch of woods, and you know the story of why. I want to hear it. Comment below. Tell me the state, and tell me the year.

Sometimes those comments turn into the next one of these. And if this is the kind of case you want more of, if you want the full 10 cases, the whole eight hours, the whole 60, two years of it, the collection is called What the Mountain Keeps. It is linked in the description. It is pinned at the top of the comments. It is meant to be listened to in the dark, one file at a time over autumn.

That is what I would do with it. I made it for that. Stay with me for the next one. It’s already coming together.