The Breakfast Club sat in rapt attention as Thelma Jackson told them about digging through records in libraries all over five states — Kentucky, West Virginia, Virginia, Tennessee and Ohio — looking for information about all things Nower County, and specifically about Gideon and the people who’d lived there.
“There’d never have been a town there if it hadn’t been for the coal company. Not a whole lot of people were itching to set up housekeeping in Fearsome Hollow.”
“Even before Gideon, there were superstitions?” Charlie asked.
“As far back as I could find records there were mentions of the ‘haints of Fearsome Hollow.’ I couldn’t trace where it all started, but more than just a couple of people claimed to have had encounters with them.”
“What kind of encounters?”
“Not sit-down-and-have-a-cup-of-tea encounters. They were always described as terrifying. The haints were in the mist, or maybe the haints were the mist — some people said that. And it wasn’t like you could build a house somewhere in the hollow and avoid the mist, since it moved around.”
Malachi exchanged a look with Charlie. “We had a front-row seat at the traveling-mist show,” he said. “We’ll tell you all about it—”
“And about the rest of what we’ve figured out—” Sam put in.
“But first, we want to hear what you came here to say,” Malachi said. “The people you talked to who reported haint sightings — what did they think they were?”
“Spirits of the dead. That’s what a haint is, a ghost. These were particularly nasty ghosts.”
“What’d they do?” Charlie asked.
“I only found a couple of incidents where anybody actually described what they saw. There were lots of references to hearing them, though, that they made a sound like crying children, like there was some kid hurt in the woods.”
“Which would lead people out to investigate, thinking there was a lost child,” Sam said and Thelma nodded.
“The descriptions I did find were remarkably similar, and they were from different parts of the hollow and separated by more than sixty years. The first one was a man named Jeb Pollock, who had built a little shack at the base of Hazard Bluff downstream from the waterfall. He was a trapper, took pelts down Troublesome Creek in the spring to the Rolling Fork, into the Licking River and the Ohio to Cincinnati.”
Thelma had brought along a fat manila envelope and she opened it then and dumped the contents on the breakroom table. She searched through the pile of papers until she found the one she wanted, then she read from it. “I heared a little ‘un, cryin’ and went to see to it.”
Thelma looked up. “What he found instead of a child was”— she looked down again at the paper — “a beastie twenty feet tall, teeth sharp as knives, eyes like the devil, come running at me out of the mist in the trees.”
“I’d heard the crying-little-kid part but not the knife-teeth part,” Sam said.
“The second description was from a circuit-riding preacher named Aloushous Hardy on his way from Frogtown to Killarney who camped for the night on Buzzard Knob. He said ‘The Devil his own self came to carry me away to hell. Its teeth were daggers and its eyes were full of lost souls.’”
“Correct me if you don’t agree” — Malachi looked from one to the other — “but it seems like a no-brainer to me that the haints have something to do with the Jabberwock. They’re both phenomena outside the range of … normal. Maybe the haints are the Jabberwock.”
“But if the haints have always been in Fearsome Hollow,” Sam said, “why’d they suddenly decide to get nasty and gobble up a town — and a hundred years later, the whole county?”
“I don’t know why anybody would ever have set foot in Fearsome Hollow in the first place,” Charlie said and actually shuddered. “The place is off the charts on the creepy scale and sounds like it always has been.”
“Well, you have to admit that with that waterfall it’s one of the most beautiful places in Nower County,” Thelma said. “The coal company wouldn’t have cared about how scenic the waterfall was, of course — they were just looking for a piece of flat land — but I’m sure that’s why the Quakers built a settlement there.”
Malachi sat up straighter in the chair and leaned toward her. He’d heard variations of the other stories she’d told — and stories about sightings of the haints that she hadn’t mentioned — but he did not know there’d ever been another town in Fearsome Hollow besides Gideon.
“There was a Quaker settlement?”
“Yes. It was called Carthage.”
“Carthage … as in the Carthage Oak.” Everyone knew the huge tree in the center of Gideon was called “the Carthage Oak,” but until now Malachi didn’t know where the name had come from. "Did the Quakers plant it?"
“Oh, I doubt it. There's a bur oak at Airdrie Stud Farm in Woodford County that's smaller – less than hundred feet tall -- and arborists think it's almost five hundred years old. But there were mature fruit trees in the woods around Gideon that maybe the Quakers did plant. I don’t know much about Carthage. I’ll tell you what I do know, but first let’s talk about Gideon.”
Then Thelma described the coal camp built by Monroe Addington Coal, the company called simply MAC, which operated dozens of mines all over the coal fields.
“Gideon was like every other coal camp. The company slapped together some pathetic shacks and brought in miners from other coal fields in eastern Kentucky, Pennsylvania and West Virginia. And immigrants, too. The coal companies always tried to mix it up — some locals, some Irish, some Italian, some from Eastern Europe. Different languages and cultures made it less likely they would bond to their neighbors and present a united front against the companies.
“The Gideon miners who worked in the MAC #7 mine were the usual hodgepodge — West Virginians, mostly, from the Flat Top, Pocahontas, Kanawha and Greenbriar coal fields, with a handful of Irish from County Tipperary who’d dug anthracite in the Ballingarry Coal Mines. Conditions there were horrific — high up in the Slievardagh hills, the melting snow regularly flooded the mines and drowned all the miners inside. So they packed up their families, left everything they knew behind, crossed an ocean — only to land in mines here just as bad as what they left behind.”
“Even little kids worked in the mines, didn’t they?” Sam asked.
“Oh my, yes. Children as young as six or seven worked alongside their parents. The smaller the better because they could get into cracks and crevices grownups couldn’t, particularly mining low coal.”
Malachi thought of his brief stint working in a mine, which wasn’t the Hollywood version of a hole dug deep into the ground. The coal seam in eastern Kentucky wasn’t in the ground beneath your feet — it was under the mountain you were standing next to. Coal mine shafts were dug straight into the base of the mountains, but since the seam was only fifty-two inches thick, the mine shafts were dug only fifty-two inches tall. At over six feet tall, Malachi had worked on his hands and knees. There weren’t a whole lot of miners who could work standing up in a shaft where the roof was less than five feet off the floor. But children …
“There was no such thing as safety regulations, working conditions were … constant roof-falls, dangerous equipment, poison gas, explosions, breathing thick coal dust twelve hours a day. But miners were expendable, disposable, just throwaway people.”
“Is that why nobody seemed to care when they all vanished?” Charlie asked.
“The person I talked to about that part said that when the miners didn’t show up to board the wagons that transported them to the mine that day, the foreman did go looking for them.”
“I’d think so. That’s a good-sized hunk of missing employees — they’d have shut down a whole shift,” Malachi said.
“That’s what I’ve always wondered about,” Sam said. “Why didn’t their disappearance raise a hue and cry? Not because anybody really gave a rip whether they lived or died but because they were indebted to the company store and you’d think the coal company would’ve wanted to settle up.”
“What I pieced together from a couple of different sources is just an ‘educated’ guess. I believe the foreman was playing CYA and put out the story that the miners had packed up and left in the middle of the night, ran off on their debts and their jobs.”
“But—” Sam began but Thelma held up her hand.
“I know, that story would never have held up for long. Where could they go? They had no money at all, no currency. How would they survive? All I can figure is that the Bent Stick disaster took everybody’s eye off the ball.”
“Bent Stick,” Charlie said. “I didn’t realize … the dates … yeah.”
“When Bent Stick blew — all those miners, a hundred-fifty killed, more than two dozen of them children. The big city newspapers on the East Coast were all over it. Unions began to rear their ugly heads. Miners started demanding regulations and inspectors. MAC’s response was just to cut bait. They shut down all their mines in this part of the state and that threw so many miners out of work nobody was of a mind to go track down a lone coal camp who’d apparently left voluntarily.”
“You mentioned someone you talked to about what happened after the miners vanished — who was that?” Malachi asked.
Thelma dropped the words like stones into a still pool. “The Witch of Gideon.”