<\/p>\n
The sheriff and state police were on the tracks, using old hand pump cars, within an hour.\u00a0 And, by late afternoon, they stopped beside the burnt timbers and pile of stones that had been old Blackhill Station.<\/p>\n
Shelby had told them about the wind and the scream and the noise in the tunnel, but the only information they took to heart was that the Witch was still up there.\u00a0 They approached cautiously, guns drawn, taking the overgrown path up through the line of Oaks.\u00a0 The dolls and the bottlecaps didn\u2019t faze them \u2013 these boys had seen crazy lawn art before.\u00a0 They moved towards the front door, lunging into defensive postures when their presence flushed out several animals.\u00a0 Squirrels, birds, a raccoon, and a fox all came skittering through the door shortly before the sheriff stepped foot on the first step up to the porch.\u00a0 Then the sheriff led his men up to the porch and they all stood, crowded around the wide open door, shocked at the charnel house horror within.<\/p>\n
The sheriff quickly pulled himself together and moved into the entrance hall, stepping gingerly around the bodies.\u00a0 He announced himself, regretting it as soon as the words left his lips.\u00a0 His deputies and the state troopers all glanced at him as if he were crazy, then they spread out, checked the house, and called out all clears.\u00a0 Upstairs, they found no sign of the Witch.<\/p>\n
Her dress \u2013 that blue and white gingham that Shelby described \u2013 was floating in a dark pool of water that had flooded the unfinished basement.\u00a0 It was filthy and looked old, a far cry from the pristine condition Shelby described.\u00a0 There was no sign of a body in the water, though.<\/p>\n
All in all, there were 47 separate human remains in the house.\u00a0 The most recent was a 14 year old boy with a crushed skull.\u00a0 Harrison Danvers of Bear Creek, who\u2019d gone missing with his older brother while hunting in the eastern edge of Romney Wood five weeks prior. The oldest, according to the coroner, had been on the stained floor of the house for nearly 50 years. An unidentified male in his 40\u2019s whose remains showed some sort of massive, crushing injury.<\/p>\n
As for the Witch, there was no sign. The stained dress in the basement, according to later forensics, belonged to one of the recent female victims and had been in the basement for some time. The house had not been lived in.\u00a0 There was no sign of the food or supplies that Shelby had been dropping off for all those years.\u00a0 Except, of course, for the bottle cap tree.<\/p>\n
The sheriff\u2019s deputies pried off the bottle caps, the forensics experts collected all the dolls, dogs and mounted officers explored the woods for more bodies, or for signs of habitation.\u00a0 Deputies enlisted volunteers and combed the meager ruins of Black Hill and the surrounding forest.<\/p>\n
Back at the labs, several remains were identified.\u00a0 Young and old, mixed gender, tourists and locals.\u00a0 In the end, 22 were identified in the first year.\u00a0 In the late 80\u2019s, thanks to an Unsolved Mysteries<\/em> episode, another four were ID\u2019d.\u00a0 DNA helped ID seven more in 2000.<\/p>\n The victims came from all walks of life.\u00a0 Those who, today, remain unidentified could have been anyone.<\/p>\n The killings didn\u2019t stop, though. From time to time, someone will go missing in Romney Wood.\u00a0 After the rail bridge washed out in 85, and with Old Holland bricked up, you don\u2019t see too many people crossing over.\u00a0 There\u2019s no good hunting, and those old towns like Black Hill are a dime a dozen throughout these hills.\u00a0 Relic hunters have better pickings. The locals will tell you that there\u2019s a reason Black Hill isn\u2019t on the map. A tourist driving along wouldn\u2019t see the old tracks or the tunnel even from their car if they were to look down at Blackhill Creek. Old Route 344 is pretty dead these days, anyway.\u00a0 The Interstate came in around 1984.\u00a0 A nice, straight path passing 40 miles north of Blackhill mountain, blasting through another mountain, simplifying the way to points west or east.<\/p>\n The locals know not to look too hard at the other side of Blackhill creek. Let the mountain live, let the forest keep its secrets.<\/p>\n Between 1985 and today, only five people have gone missing.\u00a0 Two were tourists, enthusiasts of America\u2019s old byways and highways, they said.\u00a0 They followed 344, turned off onto a layby, and bounced their way down to Blackhill Creek.\u00a0 Their car was found at the edge of the creek.\u00a0 No trace of the tourists were ever found.\u00a0 The sheriff, armed to the teeth, led a procession of deputies and hunters on ATV\u2019s across the creek and up to the Witch\u2019s house, but there was no sign of activity.<\/p>\n One recent case was a local boy.\u00a0 Another child lost while hunting. Though, these days, the more commonly accepted explanation is that a bear got him.<\/p>\n The two most recent missing persons knew this story. They were that particular sort of ghoul who turn past murder and mayhem into a holiday.\u00a0 We\u2019re all guilty of that.\u00a0 Touring graveyards and battlefields, snapping photos and touching bullet-riddled trees.<\/p>\n They arrived, stayed at the Black Hill B&B, then took off down 344 looking for the old government road.\u00a0 This was shortly after the DNA tests in 2000 that, briefly, brought the story back into the local news.<\/p>\n Most likely, they were more the victims of Blackhill Creek than anything supernatural.\u00a0 A storm hit the same afternoon they headed off, and their car was found washed into the bridgeworks of another rail trestle roughly 20 miles downstream.\u00a0 The fools must have tried to cross.<\/p>\n The bodies were never recovered, but it\u2019s all pretty wild out there.\u00a0 Get lost in Romney Wood and, unless you have a sense of the woods in you, you\u2019re doomed.\u00a0 Big city folk and their SUV\u2019s weren\u2019t made for Romney Wood.<\/p>\n There was another sighting of the Witch after 1976, though.\u00a0 For the sake of storytelling, we\u2019ll say it was legit, but you can\u2019t really trust the source.\u00a0 Mabel Elliot, the 27 year old daughter of Russell and Patricia Elliot, was always a little touched in the head.\u00a0 She\u2019d been in and out of institutions, whenever Russell and Patricia could afford to do so.\u00a0 More often than not, she was out and living with them in their double-wide.<\/p>\n Mabel rarely spoke, and the doctors said she was functioning on the level of a four year old child.\u00a0 The older Russ and Patty got, the more Mabel would sneak away and run wild.\u00a0 Usually into town, where the sheriff or a deputy would pick her up and ferry her back.\u00a0 But once she vanished for three weeks, and everyone figured she was another victim of Romney Wood.<\/p>\n Franklin Hart was the one who found her.\u00a0 Sunday morning, taking old Route 344 at dangerous speed, he nearly killed Mabel as she stumbled, naked, out of the woods beside Blackhill Creek.<\/p>\n Mabel had a sack with her, full of empty bottles of Coca Cola, and she was talking.\u00a0 Talking more than she had her whole life.\u00a0 Though talking is saying a bit much.\u00a0 She still couldn\u2019t communicate properly.\u00a0 She was just reciting the same thing over and over again.\u00a0 Seventy nine names.<\/p>\n Among the seventy nine were the names of the identified remains taken from the house in 76, and the names of the handful that had gone missing since, and she always ended with her own name.\u00a0 Then she\u2019d start over.\u00a0 And over. And over until her voice cracked, and the doctors had to sedate her.\u00a0 Whenever the sedatives wore off, she\u2019d start saying the names again.<\/p>\n As far as anyone knows, she\u2019s locked up in a state hospital still saying those names.\u00a0 Only once, a month after they found her, did she break the pattern.\u00a0 A fancy shrink from Harvard came down to interview her, and see if he could get more details.\u00a0 She broke off when the shrink mentioned the supposed identity of the Witch \u2013 Amanda Atherton \u2013 and she looked him dead in the eye and said, \u201cThese are the things she done.\u201d<\/p>\n Then she returned to the litany of names.<\/p>\n Poor Mabel.\u00a0 One good thing that came of that was that a few of the unidentified remains were matched up to the names she was rattling off.\u00a0 One was an earlier victim.\u00a0 Missing since 1934, the son of a coal baron from two counties over.<\/p>\n He was identified just last week, his remains finally returned to his family.<\/p>\n And that, I suppose, is why you all are here.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[67],"tags":[252,405],"class_list":["post-658","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-serials","tag-romney-wood","tag-serials"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/greatsociety.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/658","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/greatsociety.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/greatsociety.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/greatsociety.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/greatsociety.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=658"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/greatsociety.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/658\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1315,"href":"https:\/\/greatsociety.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/658\/revisions\/1315"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/greatsociety.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=658"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/greatsociety.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=658"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/greatsociety.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=658"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}