The Story of the Ferrickay Clan (1879, Ozarks) — The Savage Family The Whole Village Feared Exposed

In the winter of 1879, the people of a small Ozark Valley began locking their doors before the sun had finished going down. Not against the cold, not against the wolves that came down off the ridges when the snow got deep. They locked their doors against a family that lived in the high hollow above them. A family whose name the oldest people in that country still lower their voices to say, even now, more than a hundred years after the last of them was supposed to have died. The Ferrises. For three generations, they had lived up there, past the last honest fence, past the last road a Christian man would walk after dark, in a place the settlers below had learned to leave alone. Livestock went missing, then children, then grown men who took the high pass and were never heard from again. And when the men of the valley finally climbed that hollow with torches and long rifles, what they found waiting for them in those cabins was worse than anything the circuit preacher had ever warned them about from the pulpit. This is the story the county tried to bury, the story that burned with the courthouse records in a fire nobody wanted to explain, the story of the savage family that an entire village feared for a generation. And by the time we are finished, you are going to understand exactly why they were right to be afraid. Before we climb up that hollow together, I want you to do one small thing for me. Down in the comments, type the name of the oldest place you know, the town your people came from, the county where your grandparents were born, the hollow or the bend in the river that nobody talks about anymore. I read every single one of them, and the reason I am asking will make perfect sense to you by the time this story is over.

Now, let us begin where the fear itself began. To understand the Ferrises, you first have to understand the country they lived in because that country made them, and that country hid them. The Ozarks are old. These are not tall mountains in the way people picture mountains. They are worn down, folded, ancient hills cut through with hollows so deep and narrow that the sun only reaches the bottom of some of them for two or three hours a day. In those deep places, the air stays cool even in August. The fog sits in the low ground until nearly noon, and sound does strange things. A man screaming from the wrong hollow cannot be heard at all. The people who came into that country understood quickly that the land had rules of its own, and that some hollows were better left to whatever already lived in them. The valley in our story sat along a creek the settlers called Sallow Creek, named for the pale, sickly color the water took on where it ran over the white clay beds near the bottoms. It was good enough land for the people who settled it. There was bottom ground for corn, timber on the slopes, clear springs, and game in the woods. By the middle of the 1800s, there was a proper little settlement there. 40 or 50 families, a grist mill, a store that doubled as a post office, a one-room school, and a church house that served as the meeting hall whenever the valley needed to decide something together. These were hard, plain, God-fearing people. They had buried their own in that ground, fought off sickness and flood and the lean years, and they did not frighten easily. That is the thing you have to hold onto as this story goes on. Whatever the Farracays were, they were bad enough to put fear into people who did not scare.

Above the settlement, the land rose sharply into a tangle of ridges, and up in the worst of that country, in a long, crooked, north-facing hollow that never saw a full day of sun, was the place the settlers came to call Blackthorn Hollow. It got its name from the thickets of thorn that choked the lower end of it, a wall of twisted, spiked brush so dense that no cow could push through it, and no man wanted to. The old story in the valley was that the thorns had been planted, not grown, set there long before the settlers ever came, to keep something in, or to keep the world out. And past that wall of thorn, up where the hollow narrowed and turned and the trees leaned in overhead until it was near dark at midday. That is where the Farracays had their cabins. Nobody in the valley could tell you for certain when the Farracays had come or where from. That was the first strange thing about them and in some ways it was the thing that unsettled people the most. Every other family in that valley could tell you their whole line. Who came in what year from Tennessee or Kentucky or Carolina, who they married, who they buried. The valley kept that memory close and exact. But when it came to the Farracays, the memory simply stopped. The oldest people in the settlement, the ones who had been children when their own grandparents were old, all told the same thing. The Farracays had already been up in that hollow when the first settlers arrived. They were there before the church, before the mill, before the road. As far back as anyone could reckon, that hollow had belonged to them and they had belonged to it.

The man who was called the head of the family in the years just before our story was a figure named Absalom Farracay. Absalom was not a young man even then. The people who saw him, and few did, described him the same way every time. Tall past the point of being natural, long in the arm, gray as iron with pale, wet-looking eyes that did not seem to blink the way other people blinked. He wore skins and homespun so dark with grease and smoke that you could not tell where the clothes ended and the man began. And he had a way of standing at the tree line at the top of a field at dusk, not moving, just watching the valley below until somebody noticed him and then he was simply gone with nobody having seen him turn to go. Where the fear really started though was with the land itself. And with what the Farracays did to keep it theirs. When the settlement first grew large enough that new families needed ground, some of the younger men looked up toward Blackthorn Hollow and saw all that empty, unclaimed land going to waste, and they thought about clearing it. According to the story that was passed down, three men went up into that hollow one spring morning to look the ground over and to make a fair offer for a piece of it. Two of them came back. The one who did not come back was never found. Not that day, not that year, not ever. And the two who did come back would never say what they had seen up there. One of them left the valley within the month, took his family all the way to Texas, and told people only that some ground was not meant to be bought and that a wise man does not knock twice on a door that opens on its own.

After that, the boundary was understood. No line on any map, no fence, no marker. There did not need to be. Everyone in the valley knew exactly how far up the creek a person could safely go. And past that point, nobody went. The Farracays did not hold their hollow with a deed. They held it with fear, and the fear was enough because every so often the fear was fed. The uncounted children were the next thing, and this is where even the plain practical people of the valley began to feel that something was truly wrong. The Farracays came down to the store perhaps four or five times a year, always in ones and twos, never the whole family, and never the same faces twice in a row. They came to trade. They brought hides mostly and sometimes ginseng root. And now and again strange old coins worn so smooth you could barely make out the faces on them, coins that matched no money the storekeeper knew. They traded for salt, for powder and shot, for iron, for cloth, and for nothing else. They never bought food, not once. A family that size living up in that cold hollow, and they never once bought a sack of meal or a side of bacon. Whatever the Farracays ate up there, they got it for themselves. And there were a great many of them. That was plain from the number of different faces that came down over the years and from the sounds that carried down the hollow on still nights, sounds of many voices, though never words a valley person could understand.

No census taker ever managed to count them. No preacher ever baptized one. No Farracay child ever sat in the valley school or was born in front of the valley midwife or was buried in the valley ground. They were born up there in the dark uncounted and they died up there uncounted and the world below never saw them come or go. To the people of Sallow Creek that was the most frightening thing of all. A family that lived and multiplied and died completely outside of every record that made a person real. As if, as one old woman put it years later, they were not people the Lord was keeping track of at all. Before we move on to the first disappearances, stop for a second. What you just heard about how the Farracays came to hold that hollow is the part that changes everything. But it only makes sense when you see it written out next to the full account: the founding pact, the uncounted children. It is all in the document linked below. Take five seconds right now, grab it, and then come back because what comes next builds directly on it. The first losses were the kind of thing a valley could explain away, and for a long time it did. It began with animals. A milk cow that wandered off the low pasture and never came home. A dozen shoats gone from a pen in a single night with the rails still up and no gap in the fence, as if the hogs had simply been lifted out over the top by something with long arms and no fear of a squealing pig. A good hunting dog that ran a deer up toward the high ground one evening and did not come back, though for three nights afterward, the family that owned him swore they heard him howling from somewhere up near Blackthorn Hollow, farther off each night and then not at all.

These things happened to everyone in that hard country from time to time, and a sensible person did not go looking up the wrong hollow for a lost hog. So the valley told itself the ordinary stories: wolves, panthers, a thief passing through, and the valley went on. But the losses came in a rhythm, and after enough years, even the most sensible people began to feel the shape of it. The animals went missing most often in the lean times, in the late winter when the snow was deep and old, and the deer had yarded up somewhere out of reach, and everything with a belly was hungry. That was when the Farracays came down out of their hollow and took what they needed from the edges of the settlement, quietly at the margins, never enough at one time to force the valley into doing something about it. A hog here, a calf there, a dog that got too curious. The valley paid a tax to that hollow every hard winter, and most people never let themselves say so out loud, because to say it out loud was to admit that they knew, and to admit that they knew was to admit that they had decided to do nothing. The first person to go missing, as far as the stories agree, was not a person the valley truly counted, either, and that is part of why nothing was done. He was a peddler, a traveling tin man who came through that country maybe twice a year with a wagon full of pots and pins and cloth and patent remedies. A talker, a foreigner by the valley’s reckoning, with an accent nobody could place. He came through in the fall of a year the old people put at 1876 or 1877, and he made the mistake that outsiders made, the mistake the valley people knew better than to make: he asked about the high road. He wanted to know if the old trace that ran up past the thorn thickets was a shortcut over the ridge to the next settlement, because it would save him a full day’s travel, and a full day’s travel was money to a man like that.

The storekeeper told him plainly not to take it, telling him the high trace was grown over and washed out and led nowhere a man wanted to go. The peddler laughed and thanked him, bought a twist of tobacco, and drove his wagon north out of the settlement in the gold afternoon light. That was the last that anyone in Sallow Creek ever saw of him. His wagon was found. That was the thing that stuck with people—not the man, but the wagon. It was found near a week later off the high trace near the lower edge of Blackthorn Hollow, the mule still in the traces and near dead of thirst, standing patient and starving in a laurel thicket as though it had been left there and told to wait. The wagon was untouched. That was the part nobody could make sense of. All the peddler’s goods were still in it, the pots and the cloth and the little bottles of medicine, everything a poor country would have stripped in an hour if a thief had done this. Nobody robs a man and leaves the goods, unless it is someone who has no use for pots and cloth and money at all, someone who wanted only the man. They cut the mule loose, watered it, and brought the wagon down, and the men stood around it in the store lot without looking at each other, nobody saying the name out loud, though everyone was thinking it. A search was talked about, even half organized, but it was late in the year, the weather was turning, and the missing man was a foreigner with no people in the valley to weep for him or demand action. When the morning came for the search to set out, only four men showed up, one of whom was drunk. When they reached the mouth of Blackthorn Hollow and stood before that wall of thorn, looking up into the dark of it, all four found a reason to turn back.

They told themselves the man had surely just gone off, gotten himself lost, been killed by an animal, or drowned in a creek. They told themselves a great many things on the walk back down, and the valley let the tin peddler go the way it had let the hogs and the dogs and the calves go, locking that loss away with the others and trying not to count them all up together because the total, when you counted it, was starting to say something no one wanted to hear. There was another loss in those years that the valley did not like to speak of because it was not a stranger and not a wanderer who could be blamed for his own foolishness. It was a young man of the valley named Isham Renner, and what happened to him frightened people in a different way because Isham did nothing wrong at all. He was a steady, sensible young fellow of about nineteen, well-liked, courting a girl on the far side of the settlement. One evening in the fall, he set out to walk to her people’s place along the low creek road—the safe road, the road everyone used, well below the mouth of Blackthorn Hollow. He never arrived, was not found off the high trace, and was not found up in the thorn because he had never gone anywhere near the high ground. He had been taken off the low road, the safe road, within a mile of houses on a route that valley children walked alone in daylight. That was what put a new kind of cold into people. The boundary they had all agreed on in their hearts—the line past which the hollow was dangerous and below which the valley was safe—had just moved, and no one had been told, and no one knew anymore how far down it would come. His hat was found on the low road and nothing else, along with marks in the soft ground at the edge of the road that trackers looked at and then quietly smoothed over with their boots so the women would not see them. The marks came down out of the brush on the uphill side and went back up into the brush the same way, and between them, where the hat lay, the ground told a story of something that had come down to the very edge of the safe world, waited there in the brush beside the road walked by children, and reached out. After Isham Renner, the valley stopped believing there was any safe road at all.

They stopped letting even the grown ones walk alone after dark, and a young woman on the far side of the settlement waited all that night at her window for a young man who never came. She never married, lived to be very old, and never once in all her long life walked past that stretch of the low creek road without crossing to the far side of it and hurrying—an old woman almost running until the brush was well behind her. Now, here is where I have to tell you what the Farracays’ place was actually like, because a few people did see it in these years and lived to describe it, and their descriptions are the closest thing we have to a photograph of a world scrubbed off the maps on purpose. The compound sat at the very head of Blackthorn Hollow in the narrowest and darkest part, where two little spring branches came together and the ridges pinched in so close overhead that a man standing in the yard at noon in June still stood in shadow. There were several cabins, not one—low, long, windowless things built of unpeeled logs gone black with age and chinked with a gray mud that witnesses said did not smell like ordinary mud. The roofs were bark and sod, so from up on the ridge the cabins looked less like buildings and more like long, low mounds in the earth, half-buried, as if rising up out of the ground rather than sitting on top of it. Around the cabins, and this is the detail every account includes, there was a fence—not a rail fence, not a stone wall, but a fence made of bone and thorn woven together. Poles of thorn brush were lashed upright, and hung on them, tied to them, and worked into them were bones. Animal bones mostly: long white leg bones, curved rib bones, and round staring skulls of deer, hog, cow, and dog, hundreds of them bleached and clattering in the wind. That was what the valley people said, speaking in the flat, careful voice country people use when telling the truth about something they wish were a lie. And not all of the bones, said the few who got close enough to see and were honest enough to say so, were animal bones. Some were too long, too straight, and shaped in a way a person who has helped bury the dead knows without wanting to know.

There were paths worn into that hollow, and the paths were wrong. A man who has spent his life in the woods knows the shape of trails made by people and trails made by animals, but the few valley men who ever got close enough to see the Farracay paths said these were neither. They were worn too deep and too smooth, packed hard as a road by the passing of many feet over a very long time, but they were too narrow for a grown man to walk upright. They ran low under the brush, ducking beneath branches, forcing a person to stoop and wind along the ground like the runs made by deer and hogs. Except no deer or hog had made them. They were the paths of things that went as easily on all fours as on two legs, having traveled that way for so many years that the very earth of the hollow had been shaped to their movement. And the smell of the place—every account mentions it: a thick, close, rendered smell of old smoke and old grease, and something underneath that the valley people would only call, when pressed, the smell of a slaughter yard in high summer, refusing to say any more than that. The Farracays did not welcome visitors, and there was almost never a reason for a valley person to be up there. But a few came over the years, and their reasons tell you something. A boy of the valley, twelve or thirteen years old, chasing a runaway heifer, followed her tracks farther up the creek than he meant to go. He came around a bend in the thorn and found himself looking straight into that yard, close enough to see smoke coming from the eaves of the low cabins, close enough to see figures moving in the dooryard. He said there were children up there—the part that broke him a little in the telling years later as an old man. There were Farracay children in that yard playing the way children play, running, squatting, and turning over rocks, but there was something wrong in how they moved: low to the ground, quick, on all fours as much as upright. They stopped all at once, all together, and turned to look down the creek at him, every one of them at the exact same instant, though he had made no sound. A woman came to a cabin door and looked at him too, not calling out, not raising an alarm, not chasing him. She only looked, smiled, and lifted one hand—not to wave him away, but to beckon him in, inviting him up into that dooryard as friendly as you please. And the boy ran.

He ran until he was sick, and he never in his life went up that creek again. To his dying day, the thing he could not forget was not the bones on the fence or the low black cabins, but that smile, that beckoning hand, and the fact that the invitation had been warm. The valley church would not have them; that has to be understood, because it was not for lack of trying, at least at first. The failure of it told the valley something it did not want to learn. In the early years, when the settlement was young and its faith was strong, a circuit preacher took it as his particular burden to bring the gospel to the strange family in the high hollow. A young man then, full of fire, he did not believe in leaving any soul to the dark. He went up that creek alone with his Bible under his arm, against the advice of every soul in the valley, to preach to the Farracays and call them down to be baptized in the pale water of Sallow Creek. He was gone the better part of a day. When he came back down at dusk, the valley people who saw him said he was not the same man who had gone up. He was gray in the face, refused to say what he had seen or what had been said to him, never went up that hollow again, and more than that, never preached with the same fire again. Within two years, he left the circuit and the country altogether. The only thing he ever said about it, whispered late at night to another preacher, was that there was a church up in that hollow already, that the Farracays had their own faith, their own worship, and their own book older than his, and that some things are worshipped in this world that a man is better off never learning the names of.

There is one more thing about the Farracays that has to be told before we go on, because it turns this from a story about a bad family into a story about something much older and harder to look at directly: the coins. I mentioned them before, the strange old coins the clan brought down to trade, worn so smooth you could barely make out the faces on them. The storekeeper at Sallow Creek was not an ignorant man; he handled money from all over, coins of a dozen states and a handful of countries passing through the hands of travelers, peddlers, and settlers, and he knew what money looked like. The coins the Farracays brought down did not look like any of it. They were heavy and old, and the metal was wrong—a pale gold that was too soft and too heavy to be the gold he knew. The faces stamped on them, worn as they were, were not the faces of any president, king, or country he had ever seen. When turned right to the light, they showed a face that was not quite a man’s face, wearing something on its head that was not quite a crown, alongside letters around the edge in an alphabet belonging to no book in the valley. He took them anyway because gold is gold and weight is weight, but he kept them separate in a little box by themselves and did not like to touch them. After a while, he stopped taking them at all and told the Farracays he had no use for them. They never seemed surprised, as though they had expected the world to forget the money they came from. Where does a family living in a sunless Ozark hollow get old heavy gold coins stamped with a face that is not a man’s and letters from no living alphabet? The valley never knew, and neither do I, but the coins fit with the other things, all pointing the same direction: back and back and back, older than the county, older than the church, older than the first settlers’ wagon.

Remember what the oldest people always said: the Farracays were already up in that hollow when the settlers came, there before the road. Consider the thorns on the lower hollow—the wall of blackthorn planted on purpose long before any settler arrived, set there to keep something in or the world out. Consider the low black cabins looking less like buildings and more like mounds rising out of the earth, half-buried as if the ground had grown up around them over a very long time, or built by people who did not think of a house as a thing sitting on top of the land, but as a thing going down into it. None of that belonged to the world the settlers knew. All of it belonged to some older world the settlers had blunderingly entered without ever understanding it was already occupied. That is the thought the people of Sallow Creek circled around all their lives and never quite let themselves think all the way through: that the map they trusted, showing empty unclaimed wilderness waiting to be settled, named, and counted, was a lie. That the land had been settled long before by someone or something whose roads, works, and worship had fallen into ruin, swallowed by timber and forgotten so completely that new people walked right over the top and called it wilderness. And not everyone from that older world had died when it fell; some had gone up into the deepest, darkest, most sunless hollows past the last good ground, behind walls of planted thorn, simply outlasting the ending of their own world, living on in gaps and shadows, keeping their old faith, their old book, and their old heavy gold, uncounted and unmapped, while a whole new world was drawn up over them as though they had never been.

The Farracays were not savages who had fallen out of the settled world. They were the last of something that had been there before the settled world was ever dreamed of, still there, waiting, hungry, while new people built a valley right underneath them without ever asking who had been there first. For a while after the peddler, things went quiet, and the valley let itself believe the quiet meant something had ended. It had not ended; it had only grown patient. The next loss came in the spring of 1878, and this time it was neither a stranger nor an animal, but a child of the valley named Delia Coin, nine years old. The Coins lived on the upper end of the settlement, closer to the high ground than most, on a hardscrabble place where bottom land gave out and slopes came down steep. They were poor with many children, and Delia was one of the middle ones—a quiet, dark-eyed girl known chiefly for not being afraid of the woods. She would go up into timber alone to gather greens, kindling, and little woodland strawberries ripening in old burns. Her mother would scold her for going too far, and she would go too far anyway, loving the deep quiet of the trees in a way the valley found charming right up until the day it did not. On an evening in late April, Delia Coin went up the slope behind the home place with a split oak basket to gather greens, and she did not come home. They searched for her the way they had not searched for the peddler. She was theirs—a child of the valley, a daughter, a member of the church, a name in the book. When a child like that goes missing, every able body turns out, and searching does not stop when weather turns or searchers grow tired or afraid.

For three days the men of Sallow Creek combed those slopes, calling her name until their voices gave out. On the second day, high up near the top of the ridge separating the Coin place from Blackthorn Hollow, they found her basket. The little split oak basket sat neat and upright in the middle of a game trail, the greens she had gathered still inside, wilted now but undisturbed. Set down. Not dropped, not scattered, not fought over. Set down the way you set a thing down when a friendly hand offers to carry it for you, and you take that hand and go along. The game trail led toward the hollow. Every man there knew it, and this time, because it was Delia Coin and not a foreign tin peddler, the men followed it. They went down into the head of Blackthorn Hollow, a dozen armed men in the full light of day, farther than any had ever gone, right up within sight of that bone fence and those low black cabins. They stood at the edge of the Farracay yard and demanded the girl back. Delia’s own father was among them, a big, slow gentleman made terrible by grief, standing at that fence of bones to call out his daughter’s name into the silence of the dooryard over and over. Nothing answered him. No door opened, no voice called back. The cabins sat black, low, and quiet with a little smoke rising from the eaves, and the wind moved the bones on the fence so they knocked together with a sound like slow applause.

Not one living Farracay showed themselves the whole time the valley men stood there, as if the entire clan had melted back into the dark of the cabins and the earth, waiting patiently for the noise to stop and the intruders to go, the way you wait out a storm. They did not go in. You have to understand what that yard felt like to understand why a dozen armed and grieving men did not simply storm those cabins and tear them apart to find that little girl. Every one of them in later years tried to explain it and none could, not really. It was the feeling, they said, of standing at the mouth of a den—the feeling that the quiet was not empty but full, that they were being watched from every dark doorway and every wall by more eyes than they could fight, and that the moment the first man set his boots inside that fence, the waiting would be over and the thing living in that hollow would stop being patient. Delia’s father would have gone in; he tried to, and three men held him back by the arms, pulling him away down the creek while he screamed his daughter’s name because they knew, the way an animal knows, that to go into those cabins was to not come out, and that they would only be feeding the hollow two coins instead of one. They came back down at dark without the girl, and Delia Coin was never seen again by any living soul in the valley of Sallow Creek. That was the loss that changed everything, because that was the loss the valley could not outlive.