Scientics Finally Reveal How Savage Ferrickay Clan Was It’s Shocking

In the Missouri Ozarks of 1899, where the hollows fold so deep between the ridges that a man could walk into one in daylight and never be found again, a family named Farraay had lived apart from the county for 31 years. Abselum Farraay called it a covenant. He was a lay preacher with a Bible he had read to pieces. And when the last wagon road to his hollow washed out in 1868, he did not rebuild it. What grew in that place over the next four generations would take 120 years and a laboratory full of instruments to finally measure. It broke open on a January night when a trapper named Dell Kratic crawled into the town of Calder Springs, raving about a bell ringing in an empty church and a voice singing under the ground. How does a thing like that survive for 31 years within 11 miles of a courthouse? What was under the meeting house floor? And why do four official records give four different numbers for the dead? The answer will test what you believe about faith, isolation, and what neighbors are willing to not see. Comment below with your city and local time. We want to know where these documented accounts reach across the world. Subscribe and stand with us as we uncover the stories history tried to bury. In the spring of 2019, a small county museum in southern Missouri ran out of money and closed its doors. And the closing of it is the only reason any of this came to light. The Delaney Museum of Ozark History had occupied a converted feed store on the main street of Calder Springs since 1938. It held what small museums hold: quilts, a hand press, a case of arrowheads, the uniform of a local man who died at Belleau Wood, a stuffed bobcat that generations of school children had been photographed beside. When the last two staff members packed the collection for transfer, they worked their way down through the building until they reached the basement. And in the basement, stacked against the north wall under a tarp that had been there long enough to have fused to itself, they found 22 wooden crates that appeared in no inventory the museum had produced since 1951. The crates were nailed shut. Each one carried the same stenciled letters along the side.

Each one was heavier than a crate that size had any business being. Tacked to the lid of the first was a card handwritten in fountain pen dated the 4th of November 1912: Human remains Farrakay Hollow Calder County, 19 individuals received of the Calder County Historical Society, not for public display. The crates went to Dr. Ellen Bray, 51 years old, a forensic anthropologist at Blackwell State University, who had spent 23 years doing the unglamorous half of her profession: flood recovery, fire scenes, the identification of people who had been in the ground long enough that dental records were the only thing left to argue with. She accepted the collection as a teaching set, which is what old institutional remains usually become, and she began the way she began everything, by laying out clean paper on a steel table and counting. The count is the whole story. It is worth understanding how it is done. To establish how many people are present in a co-mingled assemblage, an anthropologist does not count bones because bones lie. She selects a single element that occurs once on each side of the body and is dense enough to survive burial, and then she counts that element and that element alone. Bray chose the left temporal bone, the thick wedge of skull that houses the inner ear. Nineteen individuals cannot produce more than 19 left temporal bones. That is not an estimate. That is arithmetic. Before the end of her first afternoon, she had 31 of them on the paper. She stopped, photographed the table, and went back to the crates, and it was then that she noticed the thing that would sit at the back of her mind for the next two years. The remains had not been packed by individual. Nobody in 1912 had tried to keep one person’s bones with that same person’s other bones the way a museum or a coroner or a family would. The crates had been packed by size, long bones together, skulls together. The small bones of hands and feet poured loose into the corners like gravel. Somebody had emptied a burial ground the way a man empties a cellar in a hurry and by weight.

January the 23rd, 1899 began as the worst blizzard the Ozark Plateau had seen in three decades. The temperature at Calder Springs stood at 6 degrees below zero by dark and kept falling. Snow drifted to the second rail of the fences along the Tolliver Road and stayed there for 11 days. Calder Springs at that time held 410 people: a red brick courthouse, a mercantile, a Methodist church, a livery, and a boarding house on the corner of Main and Water Street run by a widow named Ada Merrill. There was one physician in the entire county, Dr. Emmett Shaw, and he was 68 years old and had been talking about retiring for a decade. Dell Kratic was 61, a fur trapper, and he had worked that country for 26 years. He ran a line for mink and otter along the branches that feed the north fork of the Calder River. And in the third week of January, he was working the water above Bell Spring, which comes out of the base of a limestone bluff at the head of the country the county maps left blank. He came into Calder Springs on the evening of the 25th, two days into the storm, and he covered the last 40 yards of Main Street on his hands and knees. He had lost his rifle. He had lost his pack, his snowshoes, and one boot. Dr. Shaw’s notes, which survive, record frostbite to both feet, to the fingers of the right hand, and to the left ear, along with pneumonia already well established in both lungs. But it is the other observations in those notes that people remember. Kratic would not go near the stove. He asked twice for the lamp to be carried out of the room. And when Ada Merrill put her hand on his shoulder to settle him, he flinched from her the way a dog flinches from a raised hand. He lived 11 hours. For most of that time he talked, and because Dr. Shaw asked her to, Ada Merrill sat beside the bed with a ledger turned over to its blank side and wrote down what she could catch. That page is in the county collection today. Her handwriting is careful at the top and much less careful further down. He had been caught by the storm above the spring, she wrote, and had gone in under a rock ledge and built no fire because there was no dry wood to build one with. Somewhere in the second night he began to hear singing.

He took it first for wind moving through the bluff. Then he took it for a woman. Then he understood that it was several voices layered unhurried and that it was not coming from the ridge or the trees or from anywhere above him at all. It was coming out of the ground, out of the mouth of Bell Spring where the water leaves the rock. He followed the sound at first light because a man alone and freezing follows the only human thing in the world with him. Over the top of the bluff he found a hollow that no road entered. He counted a house of two stories, four smaller structures, a stock pen, and a meeting house with a plank steeple and a bell. There was light behind the windows of the house. There was no smoke above any chimney in that hollow, not one thread of it, in weather that had killed cattle standing in their own barns. The bell in the meeting house rang while he watched. It rang again perhaps a quarter of an hour later, and again after that, and no person went in, and no person came out, and no rope hung anywhere on the outside of the building. There was a girl at an upper window of the house. Kratic told Ada Merrill that she was watching him and that he raised his hand to her and that she did not move at all and that he could not afterward say how long the two of them stayed like that. Then he said the thing that made Dr. Shaw take the pen out of Ada Merrill’s hand and finish the page himself. Kratic said the singing under the ground had words in it. He had recognized them. It was a hymn he had learned as a boy in a church in Rolla, and he had sung it himself at his mother’s funeral in 1864, and he could hear it clearly, he said, coming up through 40 feet of limestone at the bottom of a hollow where no living person was supposed to be. He died on the morning of the 27th of January. In the pocket of his coat, folded down to the size of a playing card and worn soft as cloth, was a page torn from a Bible. It was from the 19th chapter of Genesis, and in the margin beside the text in pencil, somebody had written a single word: vanity. Nobody in Calder Springs knew what the word meant, and the record shows no evidence that anybody asked. The page went into an envelope, and the envelope went into the bottom drawer of the sheriff’s desk, and from there it went into the historical society’s holdings, where it lay unread for 120 years until a graduate student photographed it under raking light in 2019.

The sheriff of Calder County was Alton Cobb, 53 years old, 11 years in the office, and popular enough to be unopposed in two elections. On the 9th of February, once the drifts had settled, he rode out toward Farraay Hollow with two men from town. They went as far as the washed out ford below the mouth of the hollow. They did not cross it. Cobb’s daybook, a small leather volume now held in the county collection, gives the entire matter four sentences: Went up Farerra. Nothing to see. Old man was out of his head with the cold. No further action. And this is the part the county would spend the next century keeping out of its own record. Everyone in Calder Springs knew the Farraays existed. The mercantile ledger shows purchases against the name as late as 1884, and after that nothing. Three families had quit grazing stock on the North Ridge and would give no reason for it beyond the state of the fencing. The school register for the township, kept without a gap from 1871, never carried a single Farraay child in 31 years. When a traveling minister asked after the family in 1896, the storekeeper is recorded as having said only that they kept to themselves and then having changed the subject to the weather. A family of that size does not vanish from a county’s paperwork by accident. It vanishes because a hundred people decide separately and quietly and over many years that the hollow is not theirs to look into. The letter that finally moved the case did not come from the sheriff or the physician or any of the men who had ridden to the ford. It came from Ada Merrill, 49 years old, who had sat up with a dying man for 11 hours and could not put down what he said because she had caught one more fragment. And unlike the singing and the bell and the girl in the window, this one had a name attached to it. Kratic had told her he saw a mail sack nailed flat over a gap in the boards of the meeting house wall. Leather, he said, with the government stamp still on it. In September of 1897, a contract mail carrier named Wilbur Pace, 24 years old, had left Calder Springs for Toliver store with a light bag and never arrived. Neither Pace nor his horse nor the bag was ever recovered. The county had written it off as a drowning at the crossing. The post office department had not written it off at all because a lost mail carrier is not a county matter and never has been. On the 4th of February 1899, Ada Merrill wrote three pages to the office of the United States Marshal at Springfield. The letter survives. She apologizes twice in it for taking up their time. She heard nothing for three weeks. Then on the 28th of February, a deputy was assigned, and a man who had spent four years of the war learning to read ground for a living began the ride east.

Now hold the number 19 in mind, because it is about to become the most important number in this case. It took Dr. Bray and two graduate assistants six weeks to work through all 22 crates. They separated, sided, and cataloged every recoverable element. And at the end of it, they laid the left temporal bones out in rows on brown paper and photographed them in daylight. There were 63. Sixty-three human beings had come out of Farraay Hollow and gone into those crates from a card that promised 19. And when Bray built the age profile from dental development and from the fusion of the growth plates, the shape of the assemblage came up out of the table at her, and it was not the shape of a family. Forty-four of the 63 had not lived to the age of 12. Nine of them had never drawn breath outside their mothers at all. The card on that first lid had been written in a steady, unhurried, educated hand. It was not a guess, and it was not a clerical slip, and Bray was certain of that within a day of finding it, because a man who writes not for public display is a man who knows exactly what he is looking at. Nineteen was the right number. It was simply the right number for something else entirely. And it would be another two years and one more excavation before anybody understood what.

The man the Springfield office sent was Deputy United States Marshal Silas Ward, 44 years old, 11 years with the service, and before that a cavalry scout with the Missouri State Militia from 1862 to the end of the war. He had spent those four years doing the one job that suited him, writing ahead of a column into country nobody had mapped, reading the ground, and coming back alive with an accurate account of it. Missouri in those years was not a battlefield in the way Virginia was a battlefield. It was a place where neighbors killed one another over things they had been saving up since before the war started, and where a man learned that the most dangerous ground is not the ground with soldiers on it. It is the ground where everybody has already agreed on a story and will not be moved off it. Ward was tall, narrow through the shoulders, and by nature slow to speak. His personnel file describes him as thorough. His service record shows a citation for conduct at Westport and a note that he had twice refused promotion to a desk. His wife Cora had died of typhoid in 1891 and he had not remarried. He wrote long reports in a small level hand. And he wrote them the same way whether the case ended in an arrest or ended in nothing. He arrived at Calder Springs on the 11th of March 1899, and he did not go to the courthouse. He went first to the boarding house on the corner of Main and Water, and he sat with Ada Merrill for the better part of a day, and he took her through the 11 hours she had spent beside Dell Kratic’s bed three times over from three different directions, the way you take a scout’s report apart to find out which parts of it he actually saw. He wrote down her answers. Then he read her own letter back to her aloud and asked her to stop him anywhere he had it wrong. She stopped him once. She had written that Kratic said the mail sack was nailed over a hole in the meeting house wall. What Kratic had actually said, she told him, was that it was nailed over a window. Ward wrote that down, too, and it mattered later more than either of them could have known. Then he went out into the county, and the county closed like a hand. He spent nine days on it. He talked to the storekeeper, the liveryman, the blacksmith, four farmers along the Tolliver Road, the Methodist minister, the schoolmaster, and both men who had ridden to the ford with Sheriff Cobb in February. His notes on those interviews run to 22 pages, and they are in their way more unsettling than anything that came later because almost nobody lied to him. Lying leaves marks. A man who lies to a federal officer gets his story too straight, or he volunteers a detail nobody asked for, and Ward had been reading that particular ground since he was 21. What he met instead was a kind of practiced narrowness. Men answered exactly what was asked and stopped. Yes, there is a family up Farraay. No, I could not tell you how many of them. No, I have not been up there. My father did not go up there either. The blacksmith asked when he had last shot a horse for anyone of that name, thought about it, and said 1881, asked whether he had wondered about it since.

He said that a man has enough to wonder about with his own business. The schoolmaster, a young man named Otis Pruitt, who had come from Rolla two years before, was the only person in Calder Springs who gave Ward a straight and useful answer, and he gave it because he had not been there long enough to learn better. He told Ward that in his first autumn, he had proposed at a township meeting that somebody ought to find out whether there were children up that hollow who ought to be in a schoolroom. Nobody had argued with him. That was the thing he wanted the marshal to understand. Nobody said the family was dangerous or that the road was bad or that it was none of the township’s affair. The room had simply gone quiet, and after a moment a man near the stove had asked about the price of seed corn, and the meeting had gone on, and in two years not one person had mentioned it to him again. Ward wrote a single line under that interview: They are not hiding it from a stranger. They have hidden it from themselves. The minister was the last man he spoke to, and the minister gave him the only piece of hard history he got in Calder Springs. Abselum Farraay had once come down off that mountain to preach. Through the 1860s and into the early 70s, he had been a familiar figure at Brush Arbor meetings across three townships, a lay preacher of the sort the Ozarks produced in quantity with no seminary behind him, and a Bible he had memorized in pieces. People remembered him as a good speaker, serious, plain, hard on himself. He had a wife named Esther and a growing string of children and he farmed a hollow his own father had claimed in 1851. Then sometime in the early 70s he had stopped coming down. The minister had been a boy then and could not date it closer than that. What he remembered was his own father saying that Farraay had got something into him and that it was better to leave a man alone once that had happened. The last time anyone from the church had gone up to Farraay Hollow was so far as he knew 1882 when two deacons rode up to ask after the family and came back the same day. Ward asked what the two deacons had reported. Both men were long dead, the minister said, and neither of them had ever spoken about it to him, and he had never heard a soul in the county repeat a single word either one of them said.

On the morning of the 21st of March, 1899, Silas Ward rode up into Farraay Hollow alone. He did that on purpose. He had asked Sheriff Cobb for a man, and Cobb had offered him three, and Ward turned all three down, and noted in his report exactly why. He did not intend to arrive at that place with an escort of men who had spent their whole lives learning not to look at it. The old wagon road ended a mile and a half below the mouth of the hollow, where the ford had washed out in ’68 and been left to the weather. Past that point there was a stock trail and past the stock trail there was nothing but the creek bed and the way the ground told a man to walk. Ward led his horse the last mile. He was three-quarters of an hour covering it. The country closed over him as he went. Limestone bluffs on both sides leaning inward. The ridges coming together at the head of the hollow like a pair of cupped hands. Cedar and black oak so thick along the north face that the light under them stayed the color of dusk at 11 in the morning. Sound behaved oddly. He wrote that he heard the creek from places where he could not see it and did not hear it from places where he was walking beside it, and he put that down to the rock. He was right about the rock. He had no idea yet how right. It is worth saying plainly what this country is. The Ozark plateau is karst. It is limestone and dolomite laid down under an ancient sea and then dissolved for millions of years by rainwater working down through every crack in it. What that leaves behind is a landscape that is hollow underneath: sinkholes, losing streams that run into the ground and come out three miles away, and caves. Missouri has more than 7,000 recorded caves. And in 1899, it had recorded almost none of them because recording a cave requires that somebody go into it and come back out with a description. A man could disappear into these mountains and never be found. In this particular country, he could disappear into them straight down.

Ward came out into the open at the head of the hollow a little before noon, and what he saw matched the dying words of Dell Kratic closely enough that he stopped and stood still for some time before going any further: a two-story house of squared logs, dogtrot in the middle, with a stone chimney at each gable; four outbuildings; a stock pen with 11 goats in it and no cattle; a garden plot of perhaps an acre still under winter stubble worked in raised beds the way a garden is worked by people who intend to eat everything it makes. Twenty yards up the slope from the house, a meeting house of unpainted plank with a squat steeple and a bell hung in it. And behind the meeting house on the shoulder of the hill where the ground was thin over the rock, a burial ground. Ward counted the stones from where he stood and wrote the number in his notebook before he did anything else: 31. Not one of them was cut. They were creek slabs set on end, some of them scratched with a nail, most of them not marked at all. Thirty-one graves for a family that had never appeared on a school register in a hollow 11 miles from a courthouse. The other thing he wrote down in that first minute was the chimneys. It was the 21st of March, and there was still ice in the shaded seams of the bluff. Both chimneys were cold. There was no wood pile anywhere he could see, no axe, no chopping block, and no stack of split lengths under any eave. And this was a place where nobody had bought a stick of anything in town since 1884. They were living in that hollow through Ozark winters. They were cooking and they were heating and they were doing it somewhere he could not see.

The first discovery came within 20 minutes. He walked down to the house and called out from the yard and waited, and nobody came, though he was certain within moments that he was being watched from inside. He called again, identified himself and his office, and waited a second time. It was while he was standing there, turned three-quarters away from the house, that he noticed the path—not the path from the house to the meeting house, which was beaten bare, but another one. It ran from the rear of the house, past the goat pen, up the slope, past the edge of the burial ground, and in among the cedars at the base of the north bluff, and it was worn deeper and smoother than any other track in that hollow. It was, he wrote, the most used path on the property, and it did not go to a barn or a springhouse or a privy or a field. He was 40 yards up it at the point where it turned in under the cedars when a man’s voice behind him told him to stand where he was. Abselum Farraay was 68 years old that spring. Ward described him in detail, as he described everyone, and the description is the reason we know anything about the man’s physical presence at all, since no photograph of him has ever been found: tall, better than 6 feet, and gone thin in the way old men go thin who have never once eaten more than they needed; white hair to the collar; a full beard, also white, kept trimmed; clean shirt; no coat in 40-degree weather. He carried a shotgun broken open over his forearm, which is how a man carries a gun when he wants you to see that he has one, and also see that he is not pointing it. He was, Ward wrote, entirely calm, and he spoke like a man who had spent his life being listened to. He said that the hollow was private ground patented to his father in 1851 and that he would be glad to see the marshal’s authority for walking on it. Ward showed him his commission and stated his business, which was the disappearance of a contract mail carrier named Wilbur Pace in September of 1897.

He did not mention Dell Kratic. He did not mention singing or a bell or a girl at a window. He said afterward that he wanted to see what the old man would offer up on his own. What Abselum Farraay offered up was courtesy. He said he was sorry to hear about the young man. He said no rider had ever come up that hollow in his lifetime, and no rider had reason to, since the hollow was on no route, and the road had been out since ’68. He invited the marshal to look wherever he cared to look, and then he stood aside from the path. Ward, who had spent four years learning what an invitation costs a man, wrote three words in his notebook that night: Too fast. Rehearsed. He looked. He walked the outbuildings with the old man beside him: a corn crib with very little corn in it; a smokehouse with two hams in it and hooks for 30; a shed of tools, all of them old, all of them sharp, all of them mended over and over with wire and with rawhide, because nothing had been bought new in that hollow in 15 years. And people began to come out of the house. He counted 12 and he wrote each one down: three men between roughly 20 and 40; four women, one elderly; five children. He noted that not one of the 12 spoke to him, that not one of them came within 20 feet, and that all 12 of them, from the oldest to the smallest, arranged themselves without being told into a loose half circle behind Abselum Farraay, facing the marshal the way a congregation faces a pulpit. He noted something else in language he chose with obvious care, and it is the first appearance in this case of a physical fact that would take 120 years to properly explain: Several members of the family, he wrote, showed marked resemblance beyond what is usual, and several showed physical afflictions of a kind he had seen before only in the same household. One of the young men held his head at a fixed angle and did not turn it. One of the children had a cleft in the lip and palate that had never been closed. Two of the women had the same pronounced malformation of the hands. Ward, who was not a doctor and knew it, wrote only that these people appeared to be very closely related to one another and left the sentence there. The last thing he saw before he left that hollow was in the meeting house, and Abselum Farraay did not want him in the meeting house. The old man’s objection was mild, and it was theological:

It was the Lord’s house, he said, and the marshal had no warrant that reached inside the Lord’s house. Ward went in anyway, and the old man came in behind him, and nobody else in that family crossed the threshold at all. It was a plain room: 12 benches; a pulpit built out of a single slab of walnut, which was the only fine piece of work anywhere in the hollow; a window on the east wall; and a second window on the north wall, and the north window was covered over on the inside by a flat panel of leather nailed up at its four corners. The leather was a mail sack. Ward could still read the government stamp on it. He was standing under the steeple when the bell rang. It rang once directly over his head, loud in that small room, and it was not the wind, because there was no wind that day, and he had already checked the rope, and the rope was the reason he had come to a stop in the first place. The bell rope did not hang down into the room the way a bell rope hangs in every church in America. It came down the inside of the steeple box, turned at a peg near the ceiling, ran down the wall behind the pulpit, and went into a hole bored through the floorboards at the base of the wall, and it kept going. Ward wrote that he watched it move. It came up perhaps six inches out of that hole, hung a moment, and slid back down, and the bell over his head answered it a second time. Something under the floor of that building had pulled it. Ward did not tear up the floor of that meeting house. He has been criticized for it gently by every writer who has come to this case since, and every one of them has been wrong. He was one man 11 miles from a courthouse, standing in a building he had already been told he had no warrant to enter, with 12 people outside the door and an old man behind him holding a shotgun. Whatever was beneath those boards had been beneath them for years. It would keep for 11 days. What he did instead was right.

That night at Ada Merrill’s boarding house, he filled 14 pages, and on the last of them he set down the six things he intended to establish before he came back. And the fourth of them is the reason this case exists at all: Establish the history of the family. When did they close the hollow and what closed it? Because a man does not wake one morning and decide to bury 31 people behind his own church. Something happens first. And in the Farraay case, we can date what happened to a single week in the autumn of 1868 because Abselum Farraay wrote it down himself in the front of a ledger he kept for 35 years. The ledger came out of that hollow in April of 1899 and it sits today in the Calder County Historical Collection cataloged as item 11 of the Farraay materials. It is a merchant’s account book quarter bound in calf, ruled in columns for pounds and pence by a maker in St. Louis who plainly expected it to be used for hardware. It has 240 pages, and Abselum Farraay used 211 of them. On the inside board in the largest hand in the whole book, he wrote the title he gave it: The Book of Increase. Abselum Farraay was born in 1831 in Rhea County, Tennessee, and came into the Missouri Ozarks at 20 with his father in the last big wave of Scots-Irish families who came west looking for hill country that reminded them of the hill country they had left. His father patented the hollow in 1851, cleared four acres of it, and died in 1859. Abselum married Esther Coyle of Toliver Township in 1854 when she was 19 and he was 23. For 14 years, by every measure the county has, they were unremarkable.

They appear in the census of 1860 and the census of 1870. They bought goods at the mercantile. Abselum preached at Brush Arbor meetings and the minister’s father thought well of him. Esther Farraay is recorded twice in the Methodist church minutes, both times for the same thing, which was organizing food for a family down on the Toliver Road whose barn had burned. They had eight children in those 14 years and buried three of them, which in the Ozarks in that period was not a tragedy so much as a statistic. The first 51 pages of the Book of Increase are farm accounting: bushels, kids dropped, salt bought, hides sold, a mule traded, rain noted. The hand is patient and the spelling is the spelling of a self-taught man who read one book very thoroughly and few others. On page 52, the accounting stops in the middle of a column. Esther died on the 19th of October 1868 of a hemorrhage following childbirth. She was 33 years old. The infant, a girl, lived nine days. Dr. Shaw’s predecessor did not attend because the road was out and nobody went for him and because in that country in that year a woman bleeding after a birth had perhaps two hours, and Farraay Hollow was three hours from town on a good day. Abselum Farraay wrote four lines about it, and then he wrote nothing at all for seven months. When the Book of Increase begins again in May of 1869, it is a different book written by a different man. The columns are gone. The farm accounting never returns, not once in 160 remaining pages. What fills them instead is scripture.