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(1936_ Kentucky) Horrific Ritual_ Man Murders Entire Family in the Dark · The Mind of a Man

• 0:00
  Speaker 1: 1936, Kentucky. Man kills entire family because of creepy ritual.
• 0:07
  Speaker 1: On a stifling August night in Ashwick, Kentucky, 1936, a
• 0:11
  Speaker 1: scream tore through the stillness of the Appalachian Hills. The
• 0:15
  Speaker 1: scream came from the Lowell house, then fell silent. A neighbor, Mr. Jedediah,
• 0:20
  Speaker 1: sitting on his porch, heard it. He waited. but there
• 0:23
  Speaker 1: was only the sound of crickets and the thick fog
• 0:26
  Speaker 1: that blanketed the red dirt road. Driven by annoying unease,
• 0:31
  Speaker 1: he hurried to the sheriff's office. Sheriff Davies and his deputy,
• 0:35
  Speaker 1: a young man named Cole, were dispatched. Neither of them
• 0:38
  Speaker 1: suspected that night that they were about to walk into
• 0:41
  Speaker 1: a scene that would haunt this small town for decades,
• 0:44
  Speaker 1: a place where logic and sanity no longer applied. The
• 0:47
  Speaker 1: trail leading to the Lowell House looked ordinary. Towering pines
• 0:51
  Speaker 1: and the faint trickle of a dry creek. But that night,
• 0:54
  Speaker 1: the log cabin stood isolated, next to the massive shadow
• 0:58
  Speaker 1: of an abandoned blacksmith's forge. It wasn't its age or
• 1:02
  Speaker 1: its desolate appearance that sent a shiver down their spines.
• 1:06
  Speaker 1: It was the front door, ajar, letting the light from
• 1:09
  Speaker 1: an oil lamp inside flicker, wavering like a dying breath. Inside,
• 1:14
  Speaker 1: there were no signs of a break-in, no broken furniture,
• 1:17
  Speaker 1: no screams, just a suffocating stillness. The smell was the
• 1:21
  Speaker 1: first alarm, the smell of charcoal smoke, acrid, mixed with
• 1:25
  Speaker 1: the scent of rust and something else, cloying and sweet.
• 1:29
  Speaker 1: In the main room, the officers found a dark stain
• 1:32
  Speaker 1: soaked into the wooden floor. No footprints, just a long
• 1:35
  Speaker 1: drag mark, as if something heavy had been pulled. Hannah
• 1:39
  Speaker 1: Lowell was found slumped on the kitchen floor, a dagger
• 1:42
  Speaker 1: plunged deep into her chest. Her eyes were wide open, empty.
• 1:46
  Speaker 1: With no signs of a struggle, Daniel Lowell, 11 years old,
• 1:50
  Speaker 1: was found in his bedroom, curled up on the floor,
• 1:53
  Speaker 1: his neck brutally snapped, the boy's eyes were still open,
• 1:56
  Speaker 1: fixed on a dark corner of the room, as if
• 1:59
  Speaker 1: staring at an invisible horror. On the table, an unfinished dinner,
• 2:03
  Speaker 1: two plates, one untouched, a glass of spilled milk, but
• 2:06
  Speaker 1: no sign of the father. No sign of the youngest
• 2:09
  Speaker 1: child until they saw the cellar door. It had been
• 2:11
  Speaker 1: bolted from the inside. What Sheriff Davies and his deputy
• 2:15
  Speaker 1: saw behind that cellar door was never recorded in the
• 2:18
  Speaker 1: official report. But according to Cole, who left the police
• 2:21
  Speaker 1: force shortly after, Edward Lowell was found sitting on the
• 2:25
  Speaker 1: cold dirt floor, his hands and shirt soaked in his
• 2:28
  Speaker 1: wife's blood. Beside him was his seven-year-old daughter, Lily, unharmed,
• 2:33
  Speaker 1: clutching a rag doll and her sobs racking her body,
• 2:36
  Speaker 1: but making no sound. The man was smiling, not a
• 2:40
  Speaker 1: mad smile, but one of serenity, of completion. When Davies
• 2:44
  Speaker 1: asked what happened, Edward said only one thing. They weren't pure.
• 2:49
  Speaker 1: Only Lily was chosen. Then he held out his wrists
• 2:52
  Speaker 1: to be cuffed, as if he had been waiting for
• 2:54
  Speaker 1: this moment for a very long time. The little girl
• 2:57
  Speaker 1: couldn't stop shaking. Lily Lowell, seven years old, sat wrapped
• 3:01
  Speaker 1: in an old woolen blanket, her bare feet dangling over
• 3:04
  Speaker 1: the worn wooden floor of the sheriff's office. Every time
• 3:07
  Speaker 1: Cole offered her a glass of water or gently asked
• 3:10
  Speaker 1: a question, she turned away, her eyes vacant. She wouldn't speak,
• 3:15
  Speaker 1: wouldn't blink. She had blood on her nightgown, not her own,
• 3:19
  Speaker 1: and not a single drop on her hands. Back at
• 3:21
  Speaker 1: the house, the scene was being sealed off. The forensics
• 3:25
  Speaker 1: team from the next county began their grim work. The
• 3:28
  Speaker 1: bodies of Hannah and Daniel were carefully removed, but the
• 3:31
  Speaker 1: real puzzle, the one that haunted Davies, was the layout
• 3:35
  Speaker 1: of the cellar. No other weapon was found besides the dagger,
• 3:38
  Speaker 1: no signs of a struggle, just an old wooden chair
• 3:42
  Speaker 1: placed in the middle of the floor, and behind it,
• 3:44
  Speaker 1: carved deep into the damp stone wall, was a symbol,
• 3:48
  Speaker 1: three interlocking triangles like a perpetually trapped flame. Edward Lowell
• 3:53
  Speaker 1: had written something beneath it in his own blood. The
• 3:56
  Speaker 1: fire demands purity. The unclean must be extinguished. It was
• 4:00
  Speaker 1: signed with the family name, Lowell. Sheriff Davies had served
• 4:04
  Speaker 1: in Ashwick for over twenty years. He had handled poaching cases,
• 4:08
  Speaker 1: family feuds, and even children lost in the woods. But nothing,
• 4:12
  Speaker 1: nothing had prepared him for the blank, serene expression on
• 4:16
  Speaker 1: Edward's face. Why did you do it, Edward? he asked softly.
• 4:20
  Speaker 1: His voice tinged with the sadness of a man who
• 4:22
  Speaker 1: had known this family for a long time. Edward didn't hesitate.
• 4:26
  Speaker 1: They were tainted, he said. The fire was stirred by
• 4:29
  Speaker 1: impure thoughts. I tried to extinguish them. Only Lily was chosen.
• 4:34
  Speaker 1: Because she's your daughter? Edward slowly looked up, his eyes
• 4:38
  Speaker 1: dry and unreadable. Because she listened. That word stuck with Davies.
• 4:43
  Speaker 1: Listen to what? Back at the sheriff's office, Cole found
• 4:46
  Speaker 1: something unexpected. Dozens of small notebooks. tied together with twine
• 4:50
  Speaker 1: and hidden in a tin box under the Lowell's kitchen floor.
• 4:54
  Speaker 1: Each was marked with a year. Inside were Edward's fragmented notes. Prayers, Hannah,
• 4:59
  Speaker 1: the hearth, the whispers, Daniel's sleep, smoke, Lily's silence. Most
• 5:05
  Speaker 1: of the pages were smeared with ink, perhaps from the dampness,
• 5:08
  Speaker 1: but a few passages were still legible. A notebook from
• 5:11
  Speaker 1: 1935 began with shaky handwriting, then Edward's script. I hear
• 5:18
  Speaker 1: it again in the walls, in the burning wood. I
• 5:21
  Speaker 1: think it's using them to call me. I can't let
• 5:23
  Speaker 1: it have Lily. Davies assumed Edward had been driven mad
• 5:26
  Speaker 1: by poverty and isolation, but when Lily was later asked
• 5:29
  Speaker 1: about the voice, she only whispered that it was in
• 5:32
  Speaker 1: the chimney. And this is when the town of Ashwick, Kentucky,
• 5:36
  Speaker 1: began to change. Before the tragedy, no one paid much
• 5:39
  Speaker 1: mind to the Lowells. After the tragedy, no one dared
• 5:43
  Speaker 1: speak their name. Neighbors started locking their doors earlier. The
• 5:47
  Speaker 1: school took down the picture Daniel had drawn of the mountains.
• 5:50
  Speaker 1: The general store where Hannah used to buy flour quietly
• 5:53
  Speaker 1: removed her name from the credit ledger, as if the
• 5:55
  Speaker 1: family had never existed. But one thing remained, Lily Lowell, alive, silent,
• 6:02
  Speaker 1: and carrying a story no one wanted to hear. It
• 6:05
  Speaker 1: took nearly a year for Lily Lowell to truly speak
• 6:07
  Speaker 1: about what happened. In 1937, at the age of eight,
• 6:11
  Speaker 1: Lily lived with Mrs. Martha Reed, a distant relative. She
• 6:15
  Speaker 1: was described as an introverted, obedient, and strangely quiet child.
• 6:20
  Speaker 1: She didn't speak unless spoken to. She hardly made eye contact.
• 6:24
  Speaker 1: But one night, she used a piece of charcoal to
• 6:27
  Speaker 1: draw something on the wooden floor of her room. The
• 6:29
  Speaker 1: same symbol from the cellar. Three interlocking triangles, like a
• 6:34
  Speaker 1: trapped flame. When Martha asked what it was, Lily just said,
• 6:38
  Speaker 1: I saw it in the smoke. That's what my daddy
• 6:40
  Speaker 1: was listening to. That's when Mrs. Martha knew she had
• 6:44
  Speaker 1: to contact Eleanor Price. Eleanor Price was a social worker
• 6:47
  Speaker 1: specializing in neglected children in Lexington. She had worked with
• 6:52
  Speaker 1: children orphaned by illness, families broken by poverty, and children
• 6:56
  Speaker 1: who had survived family tragedies. But Lily, though only eight,
• 7:00
  Speaker 1: was unlike anyone she had ever met. She didn't cry.
• 7:04
  Speaker 1: She didn't get angry. She spoke slowly, mechanically, as if
• 7:08
  Speaker 1: everything was a sad fairy tale being retold. And the
• 7:12
  Speaker 1: first time she described what happened, she said it like this.
• 7:15
  Speaker 1: We weren't supposed to go into the cellar, but I
• 7:18
  Speaker 1: woke up when I heard Mom scream. So, I went
• 7:22
  Speaker 1: out to the living room, but the lamp was out
• 7:24
  Speaker 1: and the floor was sticky. Sticky? Eleanor asked gently. Lily nodded.
• 7:29
  Speaker 1: Like honey. She didn't correct the girl. She said her
• 7:32
  Speaker 1: father had been awake for many nights, that he had
• 7:34
  Speaker 1: stopped going into the woods to chop wood, that he
• 7:37
  Speaker 1: would just stare at the fireplace even when it wasn't lit.
• 7:40
  Speaker 1: He said there was something in the chimney, that Mom
• 7:43
  Speaker 1: had heard it, that her brother Daniel had been marked.
• 7:46
  Speaker 1: Lily told Eleanor that her father had stuffed rags into
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  Speaker 1: all the cracks in the windows and and sealed the
• 7:51
  Speaker 1: fireplace with a wooden plank. He said it used smoke
• 7:54
  Speaker 1: to move. Who did? Lily didn't look at her. She whispered,
• 7:58
  Speaker 1: the one with no face. Eleanor's colleagues in Lexington dismissed
• 8:02
  Speaker 1: this testimony. Trauma projection. A child's mind inventing monsters to
• 8:07
  Speaker 1: cope with real-life horror. But there were details Lily provided
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  Speaker 1: that had never been made public. The position of the bodies,
• 8:14
  Speaker 1: the color of Hannah's apron, the location of the axe
• 8:17
  Speaker 1: Edward usually used— which had never been found. She also
• 8:21
  Speaker 1: mentioned something else. Her mother had tried to take the
• 8:24
  Speaker 1: children away two nights before it happened, but Edward had
• 8:27
  Speaker 1: blocked the door and told them they were now sealed
• 8:29
  Speaker 1: by the smoke. Lily said she remembered her mother crying
• 8:32
  Speaker 1: by the well, talking to herself, but no one in
• 8:36
  Speaker 1: town had seen her leave the house for over a week.
• 8:39
  Speaker 1: The last thing Lily remembered was the sound from the fireplace.
• 8:42
  Speaker 1: It wasn't normal, she said. It didn't sound like burning wood.
• 8:46
  Speaker 1: It sounded like whisperings. Eleanor asked her what it said.
• 8:49
  Speaker 1: Lily didn't answer. She just got up, walked to the
• 8:52
  Speaker 1: sheriff's office window, and began to draw on the dusty
• 8:56
  Speaker 1: pane with her finger. She drew the symbol again. That's
• 8:59
  Speaker 1: the door, she said. It lets it in. And in
• 9:02
  Speaker 1: that moment, Eleanor stopped thinking. this was just a girl
• 9:06
  Speaker 1: with delusions, because she had seen that symbol before, not
• 9:09
  Speaker 1: in a book about cults, not in Lily's file, but
• 9:13
  Speaker 1: in another, unrelated case, one she hadn't thought about in years. Next,
• 9:18
  Speaker 1: we uncover what Eleanor remembered and how another case might
• 9:21
  Speaker 1: be connected. Eleanor Price was not a superstitious person. She
• 9:25
  Speaker 1: had graduated from the social work program at the University
• 9:28
  Speaker 1: of Kentucky, had worked in impoverished slums, and had studied
• 9:32
  Speaker 1: psychological trauma in abused children. Her job was to mend
• 9:36
  Speaker 1: broken souls, not to believe in curses. But when Lily
• 9:40
  Speaker 1: Lowell drew that symbol, something shifted. A cold clarity ran
• 9:44
  Speaker 1: down her spine. She had seen it before, exactly once,
• 9:48
  Speaker 1: and it had haunted her for the past five years.
• 9:51
  Speaker 1: In 1931, she was a trainee social worker at an
• 9:55
  Speaker 1: orphanage in the mountains of eastern Kentucky. It was not
• 9:58
  Speaker 1: a place people remembered fondly. The building had been converted
• 10:02
  Speaker 1: from an old factory, and most of the children there
• 10:05
  Speaker 1: carried irreparable scars. One of them was a boy named
• 10:08
  Speaker 1: Samuel Pike. Samuel had been sent to the orphanage at
• 10:11
  Speaker 1: the age of 12 after being accused of starting a
• 10:14
  Speaker 1: fire that burned down his family's farm, killing his parents
• 10:18
  Speaker 1: and two younger sisters. But what made his case stand
• 10:21
  Speaker 1: out wasn't just the crime. It was his behavior afterward.
• 10:25
  Speaker 1: He never showed remorse. He never screamed. He just muttered
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  Speaker 1: the same phrase over and over. The fire demands. Eleanor
• 10:33
  Speaker 1: had been assigned to observe Samuel. At first, it seemed
• 10:36
  Speaker 1: like a routine task. Then, one afternoon, she noticed something
• 10:40
  Speaker 1: on the dusty ground of the playground. A symbol drawn
• 10:43
  Speaker 1: with a stick, identical to the one Lily had drawn.
• 10:47
  Speaker 1: Eleanor had asked the orphanage director about it. He told
• 10:50
  Speaker 1: her it was nonsense, said that some traumatized children often
• 10:53
  Speaker 1: drew strange shapes. But a week later, Samuel was found
• 10:56
  Speaker 1: dead in his room. No suicide note, no signs of
• 11:00
  Speaker 1: a struggle. The boy had died of smoke inhalation in
• 11:02
  Speaker 1: a locked room with no signs of a fire. The
• 11:05
  Speaker 1: doctors attributed it to a sudden respiratory failure, but Eleanor
• 11:09
  Speaker 1: always wondered why his lungs were filled with soot if
• 11:12
  Speaker 1: nothing had burned. Now, five years later, Lily Lowell had
• 11:16
  Speaker 1: drawn the exact same symbol, and when asked where she
• 11:19
  Speaker 1: saw it, she didn't hesitate. Behind the fireplace, it was
• 11:23
  Speaker 1: already there. Lily had never known Samuel. She wasn't even
• 11:26
  Speaker 1: born when the boy died. But the connection, the deaths,
• 11:30
  Speaker 1: the fire, the whispers, all pointed to something older, something
• 11:34
  Speaker 1: no longer confined to psychological records or village gossip. Eleanor
• 11:38
  Speaker 1: retrieved her personal notes from that 1,931 case. She still
• 11:44
  Speaker 1: kept them in an old leather briefcase, page after page
• 11:47
  Speaker 1: of Samuel's fragmented statements. Most were incoherent, but one line
• 11:52
  Speaker 1: stood out, scribbled over and over. The door opens where
• 11:55
  Speaker 1: smoke gathers. It only needs one to listen. She circled
• 11:59
  Speaker 1: that phrase. What if Edward Lowell had become that listener?
• 12:02
  Speaker 1: What if this wasn't just madness? What if he hadn't
• 12:05
  Speaker 1: imagined something in the chimney, but had invited it in?
• 12:08
  Speaker 1: Eleanor sent a detailed report to the welfare office in Lexington,
• 12:12
  Speaker 1: linking the two cases. It was ignored in less than
• 12:15
  Speaker 1: a week. The response came back in bureaucratic terms. No
• 12:19
  Speaker 1: clear connection. Recommend focusing on the child's resettlement. But someone
• 12:23
  Speaker 1: must have read it because that same week, her boarding
• 12:26
  Speaker 1: house room was searched. Nothing was taken. except the file
• 12:29
  Speaker 1: on Samuel Pike's case. If Eleanor Price hadn't returned to
• 12:32
  Speaker 1: the abandoned Lowell family home, none of what followed would
• 12:36
  Speaker 1: have come to light. She wasn't authorized to do so.
• 12:39
  Speaker 1: In fact, Sheriff Davies had asked her not to go back,
• 12:43
  Speaker 1: especially not alone. The house had been sealed, slated to
• 12:46
  Speaker 1: be left to collapse on its own. But something about
• 12:49
  Speaker 1: Lily's drawing, that symbol... wouldn't let her go. She needed
• 12:53
  Speaker 1: to see for herself. It was dusk when she arrived.
• 12:56
  Speaker 1: The log cabin stood like a gaunt skeleton, next to
• 12:59
  Speaker 1: the black shadow of the forge, silent under the blood-red sunset.
• 13:03
  Speaker 1: The fire of tragedy had not taken everything, but what
• 13:07
  Speaker 1: remained was worse. The smell of old charcoal smoke, the
• 13:10
  Speaker 1: scent of mildew, and inside, the lingering smell of dried blood,
• 13:15
  Speaker 1: and something sweeter, human. Eleanor entered through the back door.
• 13:19
  Speaker 1: The kitchen was dark, but the hallway was still intact.
• 13:22
  Speaker 1: She walked past the traces of a life that had
• 13:24
  Speaker 1: been extinguished and into the living room, where Lily claimed
• 13:27
  Speaker 1: to have seen the symbol. The fireplace was cold, its
• 13:31
  Speaker 1: mouth soot black, but behind the rusted iron fire screen,
• 13:35
  Speaker 1: something was wrong. Eleanor pulled the screen aside and pulled
• 13:38
  Speaker 1: out a loose brick. It wasn't part of the original
• 13:41
  Speaker 1: structure of the fireplace. She pried it out. Beneath it
• 13:45
  Speaker 1: was a narrow, dark hollow, deep inside the wall. The
• 13:48
  Speaker 1: smell that hit her nose wasn't the smell of ash.
• 13:51
  Speaker 1: It was something ancient, dry, metallic, like iron ore and
• 13:55
  Speaker 1: burned bone. Using a flashlight, she looked inside, on the
• 13:59
  Speaker 1: bricks lining the inside of the chimney. Every few inches
• 14:03
  Speaker 1: was the same carved symbol, dozens of them, identical. Eleanor
• 14:07
  Speaker 1: couldn't explain it, but in that moment, she felt it.
• 14:11
  Speaker 1: The air around her grew denser, Her chest tightened. Somewhere
• 14:15
  Speaker 1: deep in the chimney, she heard it. A low rumbling.
• 14:19
  Speaker 1: A repetitive melody. Just like Samuel Pike. Just like Lily.
• 14:23
  Speaker 1: She backed away and hurriedly put the brick back in place.
• 14:27
  Speaker 1: Back at the sheriff's office, still trembling, she began to
• 14:30
  Speaker 1: research the historical records of Ashwick and the symbols associated
• 14:35
  Speaker 1: with that shape. She filtered out the common ghost stories,
• 14:38
  Speaker 1: instead focusing on local history, land records, settlers' notes... and
• 14:43
  Speaker 1: county archives from the 19th century. Then she found it.
• 14:47
  Speaker 1: In 1894, near the Lowell property, a small settlement of
• 14:51
  Speaker 1: miners had been abandoned after a mysterious fire. No bodies
• 14:55
  Speaker 1: were found, but several old mine shafts were discovered beneath
• 14:58
  Speaker 1: the ruins, much deeper than what was recorded on the maps.
• 15:02
  Speaker 1: This settlement had been shunned since 1888 due to pagan
• 15:06
  Speaker 1: rituals involving fire and earth. Among the remaining artifacts found,
• 15:10
  Speaker 1: there was a notebook, all describing the songs of the earth,
• 15:13
  Speaker 1: repetitive melodies. On the last page of the notebook, a
• 15:17
  Speaker 1: symbol was drawn with charcoal, identical. Eleanor Price stared at
• 15:22
  Speaker 1: the record, her heart pounding. This wasn't madness. This was
• 15:25
  Speaker 1: an inheritance. Whatever had controlled Edward Lowell had also controlled
• 15:29
  Speaker 1: others before him, and now it was talking to his daughter. Next,
• 15:33
  Speaker 1: we return to Lily and find out what she saw
• 15:36
  Speaker 1: on the night her father changed. Lily hadn't spoken in days.
• 15:40
  Speaker 1: Not since she drew on the floor. Not since she
• 15:43
  Speaker 1: recounted seeing her father break her brother's neck while humming
• 15:46
  Speaker 1: a tune no one recognized. But she wasn't mute. Not exactly.
• 15:50
  Speaker 1: She still whispered. Just not to people. Eleanor returned to Mrs.
• 15:54
  Speaker 1: Martha's house to visit her the morning after discovering the
• 15:57
  Speaker 1: secret wall cavity. She noticed something new. A stone fireplace
• 16:01
  Speaker 1: in the corner of the living room. The kind of
• 16:04
  Speaker 1: old fireplace that hadn't been used in years. Lily was
• 16:07
  Speaker 1: sitting beside it, her knees drawn up. her lips barely moving.
• 16:11
  Speaker 1: She stepped closer. Lily, what are you saying? The girl
• 16:14
  Speaker 1: didn't flinch, didn't blink, just kept whispering softly directly into
• 16:19
  Speaker 1: the cold mouth of the fireplace. A repetitive melody, like
• 16:22
  Speaker 1: a chant. The same melody. She leaned in closer. That's
• 16:26
  Speaker 1: when the girl stopped and finally looked at her and said,
• 16:29
  Speaker 1: He's still singing. But not from here. From below. Below where, Lily?
• 16:34
  Speaker 1: Lily didn't answer. She slowly squeezed her small fingers into
• 16:37
  Speaker 1: the crack between the cracked bricks of the fireplace and
• 16:41
  Speaker 1: pointed into the darkness within. There, just for a moment,
• 16:44
  Speaker 1: she heard it. A scratching sound. Then another. Then something
• 16:48
  Speaker 1: that sounded like a muffled rumbling. From beneath the house.
• 16:51
  Speaker 1: Eleanor didn't sleep that night. She searched for every land
• 16:55
  Speaker 1: record she could find about the area around the Lowell house.
• 16:58
  Speaker 1: What she found startled her. This land originally belonged to
• 17:01
  Speaker 1: a mining company established in 1880. Beneath the ground was
• 17:05
  Speaker 1: a network of old tunnels and mine shafts, including unused
• 17:09
  Speaker 1: ventilation shafts, collapsed passages, and areas marked as unstable that
• 17:13
  Speaker 1: had been sealed for nearly 50 years, and buried in
• 17:16
  Speaker 1: one of the old geological maps, barely visible, was something else.
• 17:21
  Speaker 1: A circular chamber beneath the forge area marked only with
• 17:24
  Speaker 1: the words fire pit sealed 1894 she laid the map
• 17:30
  Speaker 1: down and looked at it in disbelief and no one
• 17:33
  Speaker 1: had ever mentioned this in the town stories no one
• 17:36
  Speaker 1: in ashwick talked about it yet it had been there
• 17:39
  Speaker 1: all along she returned to mrs martha's house the next
• 17:42
  Speaker 1: morning to check the fireplace again this time the wooden
• 17:45
  Speaker 1: plank sealing the fireplace mouth had been pried off Lily
• 17:49
  Speaker 1: was nowhere to be found. She raised the alarm. Sheriff
• 17:52
  Speaker 1: Davies and Cole searched the entire house, the garden, and
• 17:55
  Speaker 1: the dry creek. Nothing until Davies found the cellar door
• 17:59
  Speaker 1: of the Lowell house ajar. They followed the familiar path,
• 18:02
  Speaker 1: down the rotten wooden stairs lit only by a flashlight.
• 18:06
  Speaker 1: On the far wall was an iron door, recently opened.
• 18:09
  Speaker 1: Below it were stone steps leading into darkness. Lily was
• 18:12
  Speaker 1: sitting on the bottom step, calm, silent, and barefoot. When
• 18:17
  Speaker 1: they approached... She looked up and said something that stopped
• 18:19
  Speaker 1: everyone cold. He stopped singing when I got close because
• 18:22
  Speaker 1: he smelled mom. Lily didn't resist when they carried her
• 18:26
  Speaker 1: up the stairs, but she didn't say anything either. She
• 18:28
  Speaker 1: just kept glancing behind her, toward the iron door at
• 18:32
  Speaker 1: the end of the tunnel, toward the darkness. They took
• 18:35
  Speaker 1: her back to Mrs. Martha's house and a doctor gave
• 18:38
  Speaker 1: her a sedative, but Eleanor stayed behind. She needed to
• 18:41
  Speaker 1: know what was down there. She returned to the tunnel.
• 18:44
  Speaker 1: armed only with a flashlight and an iron bar. The
• 18:47
  Speaker 1: air was colder, dry, smelling of coal and something else
• 18:50
  Speaker 1: she couldn't identify, like burnt metal. The tunnel ended in
• 18:54
  Speaker 1: a circular room. The walls were stone. The floor was
• 18:57
  Speaker 1: packed earth, but in the center, an old fire pit
• 19:00
  Speaker 1: had been cleared of ash. It looked recent. There were
• 19:03
  Speaker 1: new scratch marks, and inside the pit was a circle
• 19:06
  Speaker 1: of bricks leading straight down. This was it, the fire pit,
• 19:10
  Speaker 1: and someone had been in it. She aimed her flashlight down.
• 19:14
  Speaker 1: The pit was about fifteen feet deep. At the bottom,
• 19:17
  Speaker 1: there was no water, only a thick layer of black ash.
• 19:20
  Speaker 1: Dozens of metal fragments, old forging tools, animal bones, and
• 19:25
  Speaker 1: symbols carved into the walls, visible even through the grime.
• 19:29
  Speaker 1: But it wasn't just objects. There was something else in
• 19:32
  Speaker 1: the ash, something bigger. She squinted. It was a human figure,
• 19:37
  Speaker 1: sitting cross-legged, back straight, pale. She stumbled back, It was
• 19:41
  Speaker 1: the body of Edward Lowell or something that looked like him,
• 19:44
  Speaker 1: but it wasn't burned. His skin was pale, but taut
• 19:48
  Speaker 1: and smooth, with no burns. no tears, eyes closed, as
• 19:52
  Speaker 1: if meditating, a peaceful expression, except the corner of his
• 19:56
  Speaker 1: mouth was slightly turned up in a smile, as if
• 19:58
  Speaker 1: he had just heard something satisfying. Eleanor ran out of
• 20:01
  Speaker 1: the tunnel and reported everything. The police were called. The
• 20:05
  Speaker 1: recovery took hours, and when the body was pulled up,
• 20:09
  Speaker 1: Something else became clear. There were no wounds on his body,
• 20:12
  Speaker 1: no blood, no signs of violence. The man was completely intact.
• 20:16
  Speaker 1: So whose body had they found in the kitchen that night,
• 20:19
  Speaker 1: and who had they buried? Lily was awake again that evening,
• 20:23
  Speaker 1: silently drawing in her notebook. Eleanor sat beside her. The
• 20:27
  Speaker 1: girl pushed the notebook toward her, a drawing of the pit.
• 20:30
  Speaker 1: And beside it, not just her father's body, but a
• 20:33
  Speaker 1: second man, not a drawing of a dead man. A
• 20:36
  Speaker 1: man standing in the pit, observing. Smiling, Eleanor asked, Who
• 20:41
  Speaker 1: is that, Lily? The girl looked down and whispered, He
• 20:45
  Speaker 1: was always down there. Daddy just helped him out for
• 20:48
  Speaker 1: a while. She stared at the picture again. The second
• 20:51
  Speaker 1: man's face was not entirely human, long and narrow, with
• 20:55
  Speaker 1: no eyes, and where the mouth should have been, it
• 20:58
  Speaker 1: was just a shadow. Next, we returned to the house
• 21:01
  Speaker 1: where it all began, but nothing is where it should be.
• 21:04
  Speaker 1: The investigation team expected decay, ash, bloodstains, something to make
• 21:09
  Speaker 1: sense of the carnage, but when they re-entered the Lowell
• 21:11
  Speaker 1: house to begin a full sweep, they found almost nothing.
• 21:15
  Speaker 1: The living room, where Daniel's body was found, had been cleaned.
• 21:19
  Speaker 1: No bloodstains on the floor, no drag marks, no signs
• 21:23
  Speaker 1: of a struggle, just an old wooden chair placed too
• 21:25
  Speaker 1: perfectly in the middle of the room, facing the cold fireplace.
• 21:29
  Speaker 1: Even stranger, the wooden walls, not just clean, but scrubbed,
• 21:34
  Speaker 1: so much so that the old varnish had been worn
• 21:36
  Speaker 1: away to reveal the raw wood in some places. An
• 21:39
  Speaker 1: investigator pressed his finger against a faint smear next to
• 21:42
  Speaker 1: the fireplace and noticed something. The dark layer on the
• 21:46
  Speaker 1: wall wasn't a stain. It was a thick layer of
• 21:48
  Speaker 1: pine resin used historically to mask odors and bloodstains. Who
• 21:53
  Speaker 1: had cleaned this place? Hannah before she died? Or had
• 21:56
  Speaker 1: Edward been preparing in the shed next to the house?
• 21:59
  Speaker 1: They found a set of forging tools, old but polished,
• 22:03
  Speaker 1: and arranged in a neat row on a canvas cloth.
• 22:06
  Speaker 1: An iron clamp still had a long strand of hair
• 22:09
  Speaker 1: stuck in its hinge. It didn't match anyone in the family.
• 22:12
  Speaker 1: The investigations took weeks, but when the results came back,
• 22:16
  Speaker 1: they shocked everyone. The strand of hair belonged to a
• 22:19
  Speaker 1: young woman who had gone missing five years earlier, a
• 22:22
  Speaker 1: girl who had disappeared from a farm in the next valley.
• 22:25
  Speaker 1: No one had ever connected her case to the Lowells
• 22:28
  Speaker 1: until now. The town had long whispered that Edward Lowell,
• 22:32
  Speaker 1: like his father and grandfather, was a quiet man who
• 22:35
  Speaker 1: knew a lot about the old remedies and customs of
• 22:37
  Speaker 1: the mountains. Now it seemed he hadn't forgotten a thing.
• 22:40
  Speaker 1: The cellar was worse. Beneath the flagstones of the floor,
• 22:44
  Speaker 1: hidden in a wall cavity, they found wooden boxes sealed
• 22:47
  Speaker 1: with beeswax. Each box was filled with charcoal. Inside, personal items...
• 22:53
  Speaker 1: Small things preserved too well for how long they must
• 22:56
  Speaker 1: have been there. A baby tooth. A fingernail. A ribbon.
• 22:59
  Speaker 1: In one box. A doll's glass eye. Still intact. Lying
• 23:04
  Speaker 1: amidst the black charcoal like a pearl in the darkness. Marked. Dated.
• 23:09
  Speaker 1: No names. Just numbers. Back at Mrs. Martha's house, Lily
• 23:13
  Speaker 1: was drawing again. Eleanor asked her gently, Do you know
• 23:16
  Speaker 1: who those things belong to? Lily nodded. They were the
• 23:20
  Speaker 1: Lost Ones. The lost ones. Daddy said they weren't pure.
• 23:23
  Speaker 1: The fire said so. Daddy was keeping the pure ones.
• 23:27
  Speaker 1: What do you mean, keeping them? Lily looked up, her
• 23:30
  Speaker 1: voice flat. Daddy said they would be needed when the
• 23:32
  Speaker 1: forge wakes up again. Eleanor froze. Wakes up. Lily pointed
• 23:37
  Speaker 1: to the floor. The walls sometimes go to sleep, but
• 23:40
  Speaker 1: they'll open again soon. That night, one of the investigators,
• 23:44
  Speaker 1: a man named Peters, locked himself in his office. He
• 23:47
  Speaker 1: was found hours later huddled under his desk. muttering a
• 23:50
  Speaker 1: single sentence after having carved it into his desktop with
• 23:54
  Speaker 1: his pocket-knife. He's not gone. He just got in. Sheriff
• 23:57
  Speaker 1: Davies had lived his whole life in these mountains, but
• 24:01
  Speaker 1: nothing unsettled him like the smell under the Lowell house.
• 24:05
  Speaker 1: It wasn't the smell of decay. It was older, drier
• 24:08
  Speaker 1: than damp, a smell he couldn't identify, like wet coal
• 24:12
  Speaker 1: and molten iron, metallic and acrid. He followed it into
• 24:15
  Speaker 1: the cellar, past the empty shelves, past the loose flagstone
• 24:18
  Speaker 1: where the boxes had been hidden. Then he saw it,
• 24:21
  Speaker 1: an iron-trapped door set beneath a wooden plank, almost too perfect,
• 24:26
  Speaker 1: almost staged. He hesitated. Behind him, Cole and the others
• 24:30
  Speaker 1: began to mutter. Do you all smell that? Christ, it's
• 24:34
  Speaker 1: even in my hair. When they pried open the trapdoor,
• 24:37
  Speaker 1: it revealed a set of jagged stone steps. Thick, black
• 24:41
  Speaker 1: roots had pushed through the earthen walls, coiling like veins.
• 24:45
  Speaker 1: The air grew colder, drier. They descended in silence, each
• 24:49
  Speaker 1: footstep echoing with a sharp, dry crunch on the stone.
• 24:53
  Speaker 1: Below them, a single corridor carved into the Kentucky clay.
• 24:57
  Speaker 1: No electricity, no ventilation, just earthen walls, hand-dug, reinforced with
• 25:03
  Speaker 1: wooden beams and carvings. Along the walls, dozens, perhaps hundreds
• 25:08
  Speaker 1: of names were carved with a sharp object, perhaps flint
• 25:11
  Speaker 1: or old bones. Some were years, some had initials, a
• 25:15
  Speaker 1: few were just whispers, but one message repeated every few feet,
• 25:20
  Speaker 1: always the same six words. He feeds the fire. The
• 25:23
  Speaker 1: fire feeds him. The end of the tunnel opened into
• 25:26
  Speaker 1: a circular room. And there, half buried in the dirt floor,
• 25:30
  Speaker 1: was a large stone forge. Black. Basalt. Too smooth. Too perfect.
• 25:35
  Speaker 1: But it rumbled. Not metaphorically, but audibly. Deputy Cole reached out.
• 25:41
  Speaker 1: Just a finger touched the stone surface. Then pulled back instantly.
• 25:45
  Speaker 1: It wasn't cold or hot. It was alive. Sir. One
• 25:49
  Speaker 1: of the volunteers called to Davies. They had found something
• 25:52
  Speaker 1: behind the forge, another wooden box. Inside, a lock of hair,
• 25:57
  Speaker 1: a baby tooth, and a piece of tanned leather folded
• 26:00
  Speaker 1: so many times that it nearly crumbled when opened. On it,
• 26:04
  Speaker 1: a symbol was carved with charcoal, three interlocking triangles. Except
• 26:09
  Speaker 1: the central triangle wasn't a triangle. It was a mouth, teeth,
• 26:12
  Speaker 1: and all. Meanwhile, at Mrs. Martha's house, Lily had gone silent.
• 26:17
  Speaker 1: Stopped drawing, stopped talking. Eleanor noticed something in the girl's posture.
• 26:22
  Speaker 1: She had begun to imitate someone or something. She sat
• 26:25
  Speaker 1: with her back straight, her eyes forward. She refused to
• 26:29
  Speaker 1: look at the fireplace or the dark corners of the room.
• 26:32
  Speaker 1: When asked why, she only whispered, he sees through the ash.
• 26:37
  Speaker 1: Daddy said the forge has an eye. That's how it
• 26:39
  Speaker 1: finds who's next. Back in the tunnel, one of the
• 26:42
  Speaker 1: young volunteers stood too close to the forge. He stepped
• 26:45
  Speaker 1: forward just once and collapsed. Heart attack. Seizure. No one
• 26:50
  Speaker 1: could tell. But his lips were moving. And when they
• 26:53
  Speaker 1: listened closely, he was muttering a string of nonsensical words.
• 26:57
  Speaker 1: Sounding like an ancient language, the town of Ashwick had
• 27:00
  Speaker 1: long forgotten its origins. Most believed it was founded in
• 27:04
  Speaker 1: the late 1800s by miners and churchgoers seeking a new life.
• 27:08
  Speaker 1: But Sheriff Davies now knew better. The forge was not
• 27:11
  Speaker 1: just an old relic or a child's ghost story. It
• 27:14
  Speaker 1: was part of something older and darker. When the Blackstone
• 27:17
  Speaker 1: Forge was discovered beneath the Lowell House, Davies ordered the
• 27:21
  Speaker 1: county archives opened, files that hadn't been touched in decades,
• 27:25
  Speaker 1: locked drawers with crumbling ledgers, newspaper clippings printed in faded
• 27:29
  Speaker 1: ink on brittle paper, and beneath it all, a church
• 27:32
  Speaker 1: register from 1871. The first few pages were standard entries
• 27:38
  Speaker 1: for births, deaths, and weddings, but then something strange. Occasionally
• 27:43
  Speaker 1: the word baptism was crossed out, replaced with the word offering.
• 27:47
  Speaker 1: There were names beside it, children aged seven to twelve,
• 27:51
  Speaker 1: all marked with the same phrase, given to the fire,
• 27:55
  Speaker 1: witnessed by four. The ink was smeared, some pages were torn,
• 27:59
  Speaker 1: but the name of the officiant remained clear. Blacksmith Amos Lowell,
• 28:03
  Speaker 1: Edward Lowell's great-grandfather, the Lowell family had been part of
• 28:07
  Speaker 1: the town's lifeblood from the beginning. but no one ever
• 28:10
  Speaker 1: talked about them. They owned land, provided tools for the
• 28:13
  Speaker 1: whole town, even helped build the school, always quietly, always
• 28:18
  Speaker 1: just enough to earn respect. But this wasn't faith, this
• 28:21
  Speaker 1: was ritual, and it went far beyond the Lowells. In
• 28:24
  Speaker 1: a dusty old tin box, Davies found a daguerreotype photo
• 28:28
  Speaker 1: dated 1875. A group of four men standing outside the forge,
• 28:35
  Speaker 1: all dressed in dark clothing, No smiles. Every child standing
• 28:39
  Speaker 1: next to them had a blank expression. At the front,
• 28:42
  Speaker 1: Amos Lowell, one hand on a book, the other resting
• 28:45
  Speaker 1: on what looked like a stone anvil. The same forge
• 28:48
  Speaker 1: now beneath the Lowell house, the same black surface, the
• 28:52
  Speaker 1: same impossible texture. It hadn't been moved. The forge had
• 28:56
  Speaker 1: been built around it. Back at Mrs. Martha's house, Lily
• 28:59
  Speaker 1: began to speak again, but her drawings had changed. No
• 29:03
  Speaker 1: more simple triangles. Now she drew flames, dozens of them,
• 29:07
  Speaker 1: inside the fireplace, beneath the floorboards, in the earth under
• 29:10
  Speaker 1: the oak trees. He doesn't sleep, Lily whispered to Eleanor.
• 29:14
  Speaker 1: He just waits until the forge gets hungry again. Eleanor
• 29:18
  Speaker 1: asked who he was. Lily answered with a name no
• 29:20
  Speaker 1: one had taught her. Amos. That night, Eleanor reviewed old
• 29:24
  Speaker 1: county records related to the town. There had been others.
• 29:28
  Speaker 1: Children who saw strange things. who heard voices from the ground,
• 29:32
  Speaker 1: children who disappeared after playing near the old forge. But
• 29:36
  Speaker 1: one report chilled her. A boy in 1912 had spoken
• 29:38
  Speaker 1: a nearly identical phrase. He seized through the ash, and
• 29:43
  Speaker 1: he too had drawn the same symbol, a triangle with
• 29:46
  Speaker 1: a mouth full of teeth, just like Lily. Davies sat
• 29:49
  Speaker 1: alone in his office that night, looking at the old
• 29:51
  Speaker 1: daguerreotype photo again. He noticed something he hadn't before. In
• 29:55
  Speaker 1: the far corner, the shadow of a fourth man, unnamed,
• 29:59
  Speaker 1: Not facing the camera, but where his feet stood, the
• 30:02
  Speaker 1: ground looked scorched. The discovery came not from an investigator,
• 30:06
  Speaker 1: but from the forge itself. One of the townspeople, a
• 30:09
  Speaker 1: young man named Finn, had returned alone to the Lowell
• 30:12
  Speaker 1: property just after dawn. He had heard that people were
• 30:16
  Speaker 1: finding antiques there. Inside the crumbling stone walls of the forge,
• 30:20
  Speaker 1: Finn noticed something strange, a foundation stone that felt wrong.
• 30:24
  Speaker 1: not loose, but hollow. He pried it open and found
• 30:28
  Speaker 1: an iron box wrapped in a thick, rotting piece of leather. Inside,
• 30:32
  Speaker 1: a notebook, bound not in leather, but in what looked
• 30:36
  Speaker 1: eerily like tanned human skin. The pages were discolored, cracked
• 30:40
  Speaker 1: at the corners, and the handwriting was meticulous, steady, clinical.
• 30:45
  Speaker 1: He turned to the first page, there, written in neat script.
• 30:48
  Speaker 1: If this book is opened, the hunger has returned. It
• 30:52
  Speaker 1: feeds through blood, but it seized through the firekeeper. Finn
• 30:55
  Speaker 1: didn't understand, but something told him this was no ordinary notebook.
• 31:00
  Speaker 1: He brought it to Sheriff Davies, who immediately took it
• 31:03
  Speaker 1: to Eleanor. Together, they carefully opened it, one page at
• 31:07
  Speaker 1: a time. It was written by Amos Lowell, and it
• 31:10
  Speaker 1: chronicled over four decades of offerings. The language was coded,
• 31:15
  Speaker 1: not overt, but ritualistic. He spoke of the forge beneath
• 31:18
  Speaker 1: the foundation stone, the voice in the chimney, and the
• 31:21
  Speaker 1: importance of purity and silence. The notebook described rituals held
• 31:26
  Speaker 1: every twelve years, always involving four members. The others were unnamed,
• 31:31
  Speaker 1: only listed as brothers A through C, but the fourth,
• 31:34
  Speaker 1: always called the Firekeeper, Eleanor began to piece it together.
• 31:38
  Speaker 1: The Firekeeper wasn't an adult. It was a child. Always
• 31:42
  Speaker 1: a child. One who saw. One who remembered. One who survived.
• 31:46
  Speaker 1: And for each round of offerings, one child was spared.
• 31:50
  Speaker 1: not out of mercy, but to be a witness, a vessel.
• 31:54
  Speaker 1: Lily was not the first. She was the latest. Amos
• 31:57
  Speaker 1: had designed a ritual to continue even after his death,
• 32:00
  Speaker 1: something that could be passed down through bloodlines, through silence,
• 32:04
  Speaker 1: through trauma, and worst of all, the ritual required the
• 32:07
  Speaker 1: firekeeper to stay at the forge, to keep the fire
• 32:10
  Speaker 1: from erupting. Eleanor looked again at Lily's latest drawing. This
• 32:14
  Speaker 1: one was different. It was a map, not of the house,
• 32:17
  Speaker 1: but beneath it. Tunnels, Secret rooms, auxiliary forges, and at
• 32:22
  Speaker 1: the center, a black shape circled in red. Beside it,
• 32:26
  Speaker 1: the words, It's not sleeping. She asked Lily who told
• 32:29
  Speaker 1: her about the map. The girl didn't speak. She just
• 32:32
  Speaker 1: looked toward the fireplace and smiled. Next. We will discover
• 32:35
  Speaker 1: what lies beneath the foundation and why the Lowells were
• 32:38
  Speaker 1: never allowed to move away. The stone foundation of the
• 32:42
  Speaker 1: Lowell Forge had always made strange noises, even when it
• 32:45
  Speaker 1: was no longer in operation. The locals used to blame
• 32:48
  Speaker 1: it on the unstable ground of the Kentucky Mountains, but
• 32:51
  Speaker 1: after the notebook was discovered, attention turned downward. Lily's map
• 32:55
  Speaker 1: showed something that no drawing had ever recorded, a trapdoor
• 32:59
  Speaker 1: under the foundation of the main forge. Sheriff Davies and Eleanor...
• 33:03
  Speaker 1: along with two volunteers, returned to the forge. The forge
• 33:07
  Speaker 1: had long been cold, but the stone in the centre
• 33:10
  Speaker 1: was unmistakable. Unlike the other stones, this one had cracks
• 33:14
  Speaker 1: filled with a shiny black metal. When pried open, it
• 33:18
  Speaker 1: released a smell like damp coal and stale air. They
• 33:21
  Speaker 1: descended with gloves, flashlights, and a rope. The space below
• 33:25
  Speaker 1: was dry, silent, untouched by time, but about ten feet in,
• 33:30
  Speaker 1: the passage gave way to something deeper and a hollow pit, man-made.
• 33:34
  Speaker 1: There were markings on the walls, symbols carved into the
• 33:38
  Speaker 1: stone similar to those in Lily's drawings, and at the centre,
• 33:41
  Speaker 1: laid in a circle of black ash and rust, were
• 33:44
  Speaker 1: three skeletons. They were not recent. Davies guessed they had
• 33:47
  Speaker 1: been placed there at least fifty, sixty years ago, much
• 33:51
  Speaker 1: earlier than the recent tragedy, and they had all been
• 33:53
  Speaker 1: positioned in the same way. Arms crossed, skulls smashed, jaws
• 33:58
  Speaker 1: wired shut with metal wire. Near them, scraps of old canvas,
• 34:02
  Speaker 1: Remnants of work coats had been preserved in the still
• 34:05
  Speaker 1: dry earth. Beside them, a broken forge hammer with what
• 34:09
  Speaker 1: looked like human teeth embedded in its head. One more thing.
• 34:13
  Speaker 1: There was space for four. One skeleton was missing. The
• 34:16
  Speaker 1: implications were horrifying. The Lowells did not start the ritual.
• 34:20
  Speaker 1: They inherited it, each generation passing it on, cleansing, sacrificing, hiding.
• 34:26
  Speaker 1: Amos had simply refined it, making it more organized, more ritualistic,
• 34:31
  Speaker 1: easier to conceal. He did not invent the evil, he
• 34:35
  Speaker 1: was raised by it. Then came the deeper question. Who
• 34:38
  Speaker 1: was the missing skeleton, the one who had been part
• 34:41
  Speaker 1: of the original circle and escaped burial? Was it Amos,
• 34:45
  Speaker 1: or worse, someone still alive? Someone who ensured that the
• 34:50
  Speaker 1: fourth position remained available for the next cycle. As they
• 34:53
  Speaker 1: climbed out of the pit, Davies noticed something else, stuck
• 34:57
  Speaker 1: in the dirt near the fourth empty spot. A wooden doll, clean, preserved,
• 35:03
  Speaker 1: as if it had never decayed. Inside it, rolled up neatly,
• 35:06
  Speaker 1: was a piece of parchment. It read, he sees through
• 35:10
  Speaker 1: their eyes, he waits until they forget. Lily had also
• 35:13
  Speaker 1: drawn that symbol, only she didn't call it a symbol.
• 35:16
  Speaker 1: She called it the mouth in the fireplace. This question
• 35:20
  Speaker 1: haunted Sheriff Davies, Eleanor Davies. and everyone who read Amos's notebook,
• 35:24
  Speaker 1: who was the missing fourth skeleton. To find out, Eleanor
• 35:28
  Speaker 1: turned to the oldest surviving records of the land itself.
• 35:32
  Speaker 1: Before the forge was built in 1870 by Amos Lowell,
• 35:36
  Speaker 1: before the settlement, before the clearing, the land had belonged
• 35:39
  Speaker 1: to a group of independent miners, active from 1,850 to 1,000 865.
• 35:47
  Speaker 1: There were no official records, no death certificates, and no
• 35:52
  Speaker 1: clear leadership. The people from neighboring towns only knew them
• 35:55
  Speaker 1: as the Deep Diggers. Most people assumed they were gold
• 35:59
  Speaker 1: prospectors or a group of poor miners, but a surviving
• 36:02
  Speaker 1: land deed named Four Founders. All were men, not related
• 36:07
  Speaker 1: by blood, but all had Welsh immigrant surnames. One of them,
• 36:10
  Speaker 1: Thomas Lowell, Amos's grandfather, a report of a mine collapse
• 36:14
  Speaker 1: from 1,865, revealed that their original camp had been buried
• 36:20
  Speaker 1: in a landslide. The cause was unclear, but the report
• 36:24
  Speaker 1: noted a chilling sentence carved into a surviving wooden beam.
• 36:28
  Speaker 1: One broke the pact, the rest must feed. Shortly after
• 36:31
  Speaker 1: the collapse, three of the four men disappeared. No records,
• 36:35
  Speaker 1: no burials. Only Thomas remained, and five years later... He
• 36:40
  Speaker 1: bought the land again, this time in his own name,
• 36:43
  Speaker 1: and began building what would become the Lowell Forge. The
• 36:47
  Speaker 1: exact center of the forge sat atop the collapsed mineshaft.
• 36:50
  Speaker 1: Amos's notebook contained pages that looked out of place, written
• 36:54
  Speaker 1: in a much older hand. They were brittle, the ink
• 36:57
  Speaker 1: a faded brown, with phrases like, The mouth below is
• 37:00
  Speaker 1: never sated, only the firekeeper may walk above. He sees
• 37:04
  Speaker 1: through their eyes, waits until the forge is ready, The
• 37:07
  Speaker 1: handwriting matched samples of Thomas's from the county records. He
• 37:11
  Speaker 1: had kept the pages, perhaps passed down after the collapse,
• 37:14
  Speaker 1: and Edward had read them without fully understanding. This meant
• 37:18
  Speaker 1: it was undeniable. The Lowell tragedy was not a sudden tragedy.
• 37:22
  Speaker 1: They were the continuation of an old pact, passed down
• 37:25
  Speaker 1: from men who believed in feeding something beneath the lamb,
• 37:29
  Speaker 1: something they called the fire. Only one had tried to
• 37:32
  Speaker 1: walk away. He never reappeared, and every generation since... Someone
• 37:37
  Speaker 1: always died. Someone was always spared. But why Lily? Why
• 37:42
  Speaker 1: was she the one they left behind? Back in the cellar,
• 37:45
  Speaker 1: Davies laid out the evidence. Three skeletons in the pit,
• 37:48
  Speaker 1: a fourth space left open, a preserved wooden doll, and
• 37:52
  Speaker 1: the land's history pointing to a ritualistic cycle. Lily's survival
• 37:56
  Speaker 1: was not an accident. It was a choice. Someone had
• 37:59
  Speaker 1: chosen her, just as someone had chosen another Lowell child
• 38:03
  Speaker 1: years ago. The horror was not just in what they did.
• 38:06
  Speaker 1: it was in how long they had been doing it.
• 38:08
  Speaker 1: It was the summer of 1888. Amos Lowell had just
• 38:14
  Speaker 1: turned nineteen. By then, he was already a tough young man, broad-shouldered, strong-willed,
• 38:20
  Speaker 1: and silent in a way no boy should be. But
• 38:23
  Speaker 1: he was also curious, and that curiosity, his father used
• 38:27
  Speaker 1: to say, would be his ruin. He started digging, not
• 38:30
  Speaker 1: because he suspected anything, but because the forge had begun
• 38:34
  Speaker 1: to smell, not of coal, but something more acrid, metallic,
• 38:38
  Speaker 1: like heated iron ore and burnt flesh. It started after
• 38:42
  Speaker 1: a heavy rain. Amos was in the coal cellar taking
• 38:45
  Speaker 1: inventory when he heard something behind the stone wall. A scratching,
• 38:50
  Speaker 1: then a knock, then silence. At first he thought it
• 38:53
  Speaker 1: was a weasel, maybe a fox, but then it spoke,
• 38:57
  Speaker 1: a dry, whispering voice. I told them not to dig deeper.
• 39:01
  Speaker 1: They didn't listen. You still can. Amos used an iron
• 39:04
  Speaker 1: bar to pry open the wall. Behind the loose stones
• 39:08
  Speaker 1: was an earthen tunnel, not tall enough to stand in,
• 39:11
  Speaker 1: but long enough to disappear into shadow. He crawled for
• 39:15
  Speaker 1: thirty feet. He moved through clay, rocks, and a smell
• 39:19
  Speaker 1: that grew thicker the deeper he went, and then suddenly
• 39:22
  Speaker 1: a chamber carved by hand, reinforced with wooden beams older
• 39:27
  Speaker 1: than the forge, and there, lying on the ground... was
• 39:30
  Speaker 1: a man his hair was almost all gone his skin
• 39:33
  Speaker 1: was wrinkled and clung to his bones but his eyes
• 39:37
  Speaker 1: they were the eyes of Thomas his father it was
• 39:40
  Speaker 1: Reese one of the original four the one who was
• 39:43
  Speaker 1: said to have run away he hadn't escaped he had
• 39:45
  Speaker 1: been buried alive or perhaps buried himself In the earth
• 39:50
  Speaker 1: beneath the forge, Amos didn't run. He sat with the
• 39:53
  Speaker 1: man for hours. He listened. Rhys told him everything about
• 39:57
  Speaker 1: the pact, about the thing beneath the ground, about the
• 40:00
  Speaker 1: price for endless iron ore. We thought it would make
• 40:03
  Speaker 1: us rich. It did, for a time. But we never
• 40:06
  Speaker 1: stopped paying. One by one, it took us until I
• 40:09
  Speaker 1: was the only one left. And now you've built a
• 40:12
  Speaker 1: forge on its mouth. Amos asked him why he stayed.
• 40:15
  Speaker 1: Why not run away? Rhys laughed dryly. Or tried to.
• 40:20
  Speaker 1: What was left of his lips cracked like charcoal. Because
• 40:22
  Speaker 1: it speaks. Because I hear it in my sleep. And
• 40:26
  Speaker 1: if I leave, it will follow. He held out something
• 40:29
  Speaker 1: to Amos. A small notebook, wrapped in tanned leather, stitched
• 40:33
  Speaker 1: shut with thin metal wire. Amos took it. When you
• 40:36
  Speaker 1: know what's inside, you will understand why you must never
• 40:40
  Speaker 1: stop sacrificing. Years later. That same notebook would be found
• 40:44
  Speaker 1: among Edward Lowell's possessions. Sheriff Davies didn't read it at first,
• 40:48
  Speaker 1: but then Eleanor would. And when she read it, the
• 40:51
  Speaker 1: story would change again. Because what was inside should not exist.
• 40:56
  Speaker 1: Not in 1936. Not in 1888. Nowhere. That night in 1888,
• 40:58
  Speaker 1: Amos sealed the tunnel behind him. He didn't tell anyone,
• 41:06
  Speaker 1: not even his wife, but he began to prepare. He
• 41:09
  Speaker 1: now knew what the forge was built on. He knew
• 41:12
  Speaker 1: why his business continued to thrive while others failed, and
• 41:15
  Speaker 1: he knew that one day he would have to offer
• 41:17
  Speaker 1: something back. Amos didn't open the notebook for years. He
• 41:20
  Speaker 1: hid it under a loose brick in the fireplace where
• 41:23
  Speaker 1: no one dared to touch. His wife once asked him
• 41:26
  Speaker 1: what he was brooding about. He said, about the family's debt.
• 41:30
  Speaker 1: She never asked again, but in 1903, years before Edward
• 41:34
  Speaker 1: Lowell was even born, something changed. A child from the
• 41:38
  Speaker 1: next valley, a boy named Elijah Kane, disappeared while herding sheep,
• 41:42
  Speaker 1: the third child in two years. No bodies, no suspects,
• 41:46
  Speaker 1: no trace, just a string of old stories, whispers from
• 41:50
  Speaker 1: old miners about a black smoke rising from the ground,
• 41:53
  Speaker 1: children lured by the sound of a hammer, and a
• 41:56
  Speaker 1: name that had begun to circulate again. the Lowell Forge.
• 41:59
  Speaker 1: Amos was a middle-aged man by then, still working in
• 42:03
  Speaker 1: the forge, still quiet, still observing. But now he opened
• 42:07
  Speaker 1: the notebook. Inside were pages recording the offerings, names, dates,
• 42:12
  Speaker 1: and chilling descriptions of how the fire demanded. There were
• 42:15
  Speaker 1: fourteen names. Amos read them. He recognized three of them.
• 42:19
  Speaker 1: They were not from Ashwick. They were from other counties,
• 42:22
  Speaker 1: places where missing children were also being reported. Amos copied
• 42:26
  Speaker 1: the names and dates onto a piece of paper, said nothing,
• 42:30
  Speaker 1: and just sent it anonymously to the sheriff's office in
• 42:32
  Speaker 1: the next county. That same month, the sheriff of another county,
• 42:37
  Speaker 1: a man named Manning, received the piece of paper. What
• 42:40
  Speaker 1: he read on it would eventually lead him to start
• 42:42
  Speaker 1: a secret investigation into the Lowell family, an investigation that
• 42:46
  Speaker 1: would be buried for decades. But he didn't believe in curses.
• 42:50
  Speaker 1: He believed in patterns, and these names, they were not
• 42:53
  Speaker 1: just victims. They were all connected to families who had
• 42:55
  Speaker 1: once worked in or near the original Lowell mineshaft, the
• 42:59
  Speaker 1: land that was supposed to have been sealed after the
• 43:01
  Speaker 1: 1865 collapse. But a pattern began to emerge. Every 12
• 43:05
  Speaker 1: years or so, a cluster of disappearances. Always children, always
• 43:10
  Speaker 1: near the land where the original four made their pact.
• 43:14
  Speaker 1: And someone, or something, was collecting mementos of them. Hair, teeth...
• 43:19
  Speaker 1: scraps of cloth, all stored in these boxes. A few
• 43:22
  Speaker 1: of them were later found, one from a dry creek,
• 43:25
  Speaker 1: one from behind an abandoned warehouse, one hidden inside a
• 43:29
  Speaker 1: wall of the old schoolhouse. But Amos's notebook was the first,
• 43:33
  Speaker 1: and it contained something else. No other notebook had it.
• 43:36
  Speaker 1: A map, drawn with what appeared to be charcoal. It
• 43:39
  Speaker 1: traced the tunnels beneath the forge, extending to the forgotten
• 43:43
  Speaker 1: graves of the first miners. That's when Eleanor realized this
• 43:47
  Speaker 1: wasn't just a family tragedy. It was a system. Old. Maintained. Fed.
• 43:52
  Speaker 1: She wrote in her notes,' This isn't a curse. It's
• 43:55
  Speaker 1: a ritualistic inheritance.' These people didn't believe in demons. They
• 43:59
  Speaker 1: believed in feeding the fire. And now the fire, once again.
• 44:03
  Speaker 1: Amos Lowell left nothing more behind after those notes. But
• 44:07
  Speaker 1: years later, Edward Lowell, in his madness, continued it. A
• 44:11
  Speaker 1: notebook filled with drawings of the tunnels, of the man
• 44:14
  Speaker 1: beneath the earth, and of what was to come. Next,
• 44:18
  Speaker 1: we will explore the notebook. and inside are pages that
• 44:21
  Speaker 1: describe the Black Hammer, a sound that only the Lowell
• 44:24
  Speaker 1: children could hear before they disappeared. Eleanor Price read the
• 44:27
  Speaker 1: notebook alone in the sheriff's office. It was the kind
• 44:30
  Speaker 1: of reading that stains you, not because it was gruesome,
• 44:33
  Speaker 1: though it was, but because it was written like a confession.
• 44:37
  Speaker 1: Edward Lowell's handwriting was shaky, frantic, like someone trying to
• 44:41
  Speaker 1: record a storm raging in his head, page after page,
• 44:45
  Speaker 1: drawings of tunnels beneath the forge. maps of mine-shafts that
• 44:49
  Speaker 1: no longer existed crude illustrations of stick-figure children with hollow
• 44:54
  Speaker 1: faces walking hand in hand toward a burning forge but
• 44:58
  Speaker 1: what chilled her the most was not what he drew
• 45:00
  Speaker 1: it was what he described in just four words the
• 45:03
  Speaker 1: black hammer's sound edward first heard it when he was
• 45:06
  Speaker 1: eight He said it came from beneath the fireplace, right
• 45:09
  Speaker 1: after the first rain. It was always low, like a
• 45:12
  Speaker 1: vibration you couldn't locate but felt in your bones. Not
• 45:16
  Speaker 1: a metallic sound. Not a voice. Something in between. A summons,
• 45:20
  Speaker 1: he wrote. Only children of the line can hear it
• 45:23
  Speaker 1: at first. That's how it chooses. Those who follow never
• 45:26
  Speaker 1: return the same. The Black Hammer's sound is not from
• 45:29
  Speaker 1: the forge. It comes from what sleeps beneath it. Edward
• 45:32
  Speaker 1: claimed his older sister, Abigail, heard it first in 1915.
• 45:37
  Speaker 1: Two weeks later, she disappeared. The family claimed she ran
• 45:41
  Speaker 1: away to a big city, but Edward said he saw it.
• 45:44
  Speaker 1: Abigail walking barefoot in the night, her mouth moving as
• 45:48
  Speaker 1: if whispering to someone, someone inside the smoke. Three days later,
• 45:52
  Speaker 1: their father came home with soot on his overalls and
• 45:56
  Speaker 1: told everyone that Abigail had gone to live with relatives
• 45:59
  Speaker 1: in the east. No questions were asked. No one ever
• 46:02
  Speaker 1: saw Abigail again. But in Edward's notebook, he drew what
• 46:06
  Speaker 1: he saw in the warehouse that night. A girl kneeling
• 46:08
  Speaker 1: on the ground, her head tilted and shadows around her.
• 46:12
  Speaker 1: Too many legs, none of them human. Eleanor Price knew
• 46:15
  Speaker 1: it was madness on the surface. But when paired with
• 46:18
  Speaker 1: the wooden boxes, the missing children, the forgotten land records,
• 46:23
  Speaker 1: something fit too closely to be ignored. Edward ended one
• 46:26
  Speaker 1: entry with a single sentence. If you are reading this,
• 46:29
  Speaker 1: it knows you are near. Eleanor put the notebook down
• 46:32
  Speaker 1: and looked out the window. A man in miner's clothes
• 46:35
  Speaker 1: had been standing at the end of the street since
• 46:37
  Speaker 1: she arrived at the office, saying nothing, doing nothing, just waiting.
• 46:41
  Speaker 1: She made a decision that night. She would not submit
• 46:44
  Speaker 1: the notebook as evidence. Not yet. She needed someone else
• 46:48
  Speaker 1: to see it first. A woman who had once tried
• 46:50
  Speaker 1: to investigate the Lowells in 1920, a retired former nurse
• 46:55
  Speaker 1: named Martha Reed. The same woman who left Ashwick after
• 46:58
  Speaker 1: a triangular symbol was drawn in blood on her door.
• 47:01
  Speaker 1: Eleanor was about to find out why. Retired nurse Martha
• 47:05
  Speaker 1: Reed hadn't spoken to anyone about the Lowells since 1920.
• 47:08
  Speaker 1: After two of the children she cared for disappeared without
• 47:11
  Speaker 1: a trace. All having played near the forge, she packed
• 47:15
  Speaker 1: her bags, quit her job, and moved to another town
• 47:18
  Speaker 1: 50 miles away. But what no one knew was that
• 47:21
  Speaker 1: she had taken something with her. A locked wooden chest.
• 47:24
  Speaker 1: and inside it, sealed notes, illegally copied medical records, and
• 47:29
  Speaker 1: a photograph of a badly burned child. Eleanor Price found
• 47:33
  Speaker 1: her through an old nursing registry. When she arrived at
• 47:36
  Speaker 1: Martha's small house, the woman looked as if she had
• 47:39
  Speaker 1: been waiting for this moment for decades. I told them,
• 47:42
  Speaker 1: She whispered, but they buried the babies and the truth
• 47:45
  Speaker 1: with them. Martha gave Eleanor a folder marked Children of
• 47:48
  Speaker 1: the Fire. Inside were images that had never been filed
• 47:52
  Speaker 1: in any public case. A newborn boy with eyes as
• 47:55
  Speaker 1: black as coal, found alone in the woods near the
• 47:58
  Speaker 1: Lowell property. An anonymous note, it is pure. Do not
• 48:01
  Speaker 1: bring it back. A medical report describing strange burns on
• 48:05
  Speaker 1: the soles of the child's feet, three triangular scars, but
• 48:09
  Speaker 1: the most disturbing file was handwritten. Martha had secretly investigated
• 48:14
  Speaker 1: in 1918. One of the Lowell girls, just 14 years old,
• 48:18
  Speaker 1: had shown up at her clinic, pregnant, barefoot, and nearly mute.
• 48:23
  Speaker 1: She had drawn symbols on Martha's notepad, three interlocking triangles,
• 48:27
  Speaker 1: and the same three scars appeared on her wrist. Martha
• 48:30
  Speaker 1: described the Lowell family with chilling detail. They don't call
• 48:34
  Speaker 1: their children by name, just by their birth order. Each
• 48:37
  Speaker 1: child is taught a song about the forge to hum.
• 48:40
  Speaker 1: The forge is not just for smithing. They hide something
• 48:43
  Speaker 1: beneath it. Something that eats. She had tried to report
• 48:46
  Speaker 1: it to the county authorities three times. Each time the
• 48:49
  Speaker 1: file was lost. No explanation. No appeal. A sheriff just
• 48:54
  Speaker 1: told her. These people don't break the law. They are
• 48:57
  Speaker 1: the law here. Eleanor scanned every page. She couldn't believe
• 49:01
  Speaker 1: how long this had been going on and how many
• 49:03
  Speaker 1: people had looked away. The photo of the burned baby
• 49:06
  Speaker 1: was still on the table and behind it, tucked inside
• 49:09
  Speaker 1: a medical envelope, was a single lock of hair, fiery red,
• 49:14
  Speaker 1: like molten iron, the label read specimen one lowell forge
• 49:18
  Speaker 1: infant unaged eleanor's hands trembled this wasn't just an accident
• 49:24
  Speaker 1: this was breeding harvesting and hiding She looked at Martha.
• 49:28
  Speaker 1: Why are you helping now? The woman didn't blink. Because
• 49:32
  Speaker 1: I still hear it sometimes, that black hammer's sound. And
• 49:35
  Speaker 1: last week, it came from my fireplace. Dr. Alistair Finch
• 49:39
  Speaker 1: had been the county's only doctor for over thirty years.
• 49:42
  Speaker 1: He had seen cases of black lung, typhoid, even the
• 49:46
  Speaker 1: aftermath of brawls in the mines. But nothing, absolutely nothing,
• 49:50
  Speaker 1: had prepared him for the body of the Lowell child.
• 49:53
  Speaker 1: He was not the first to examine the body. but
• 49:55
  Speaker 1: he was the first to say no, no to a
• 49:58
  Speaker 1: hasty sign-off, no to the cause of death being listed
• 50:01
  Speaker 1: as an accident, no to the subtle threat. and that's
• 50:04
  Speaker 1: when he knew he wouldn't be around for much longer.
• 50:06
  Speaker 1: One of the Lowell children, a boy of about ten,
• 50:09
  Speaker 1: was found near the old forge in 1922. No blood,
• 50:14
  Speaker 1: no obvious trauma. But when Finch opened the boy's chest cavity,
• 50:17
  Speaker 1: what he found were not a child's lungs. Instead, a
• 50:21
  Speaker 1: pair of bag-like structures, jet black, veined, tough as leather,
• 50:25
  Speaker 1: with no alveoli, no bronchioles, covered in something like soot,
• 50:30
  Speaker 1: and it emitted a faint heat, even after the body
• 50:33
  Speaker 1: was cold. He immediately contacted the state health department. They
• 50:37
  Speaker 1: told him to bury the body immediately. Instead, he preserved
• 50:40
  Speaker 1: them in alcohol and locked them in an iron safe
• 50:43
  Speaker 1: in his office. Two days later, someone broke into his office.
• 50:48
  Speaker 1: Not the safe, not the medicine cabinet, just the files. Specifically,
• 50:53
  Speaker 1: every record related to the Lowells. But they missed something.
• 50:56
  Speaker 1: Inside an old medical textbook, Finch had hidden glass plate photographs,
• 51:00
  Speaker 1: photos of the structures, and a detailed sketch. What the
• 51:04
  Speaker 1: sketch showed still haunts Eleanor Price to this day. The
• 51:07
  Speaker 1: boy's skeletal structure was subtly altered, as if he had
• 51:10
  Speaker 1: been subjected to heavy labor from a young age. His
• 51:14
  Speaker 1: fingers were longer than normal, his chest was abnormally broad,
• 51:18
  Speaker 1: and his teeth, they were worn down as if he
• 51:20
  Speaker 1: had been chewing metal. Eleanor asked Dr. Finch if any
• 51:23
  Speaker 1: of this could be explained medically. He shook his head slowly.
• 51:27
  Speaker 1: No disease explains this. and no child survives long with
• 51:31
  Speaker 1: whatever was allowing them to breathe. He poured them both
• 51:34
  Speaker 1: a glass of tea and added quietly, I sent a
• 51:37
  Speaker 1: sample to a friend in Lexington. A week later, he
• 51:41
  Speaker 1: sent it back. No note, just a hastily written line
• 51:44
  Speaker 1: on the box. Not human tissue. Burn it. Eleanor asked
• 51:48
  Speaker 1: the question she dreaded. Do you think they were altered? Dr.
• 51:52
  Speaker 1: Finch did not hesitate. I think they were bred for
• 51:54
  Speaker 1: a purpose. But I don't think it worked. Not the
• 51:57
  Speaker 1: way they wanted. And then, with a resigned sigh, he
• 52:01
  Speaker 1: handed Eleanor a single 8mm film reel. No label. Just
• 52:06
  Speaker 1: the year. 1915. The year Edward Lowell's sister disappeared. He
• 52:11
  Speaker 1: looked at her, his face pale. They recorded what they
• 52:14
  Speaker 1: were doing. I've never watched it, but maybe it's time
• 52:17
  Speaker 1: someone did. Eleanor waited until she got home, locked the door,
• 52:21
  Speaker 1: drew the curtains, and poured a cup of tea. Then...
• 52:25
  Speaker 1: With trembling hands, she loaded the old 8mm film into
• 52:29
  Speaker 1: her father's dusty projector. The white wall flickered, scratches, then
• 52:33
  Speaker 1: a faint hissing sound, and then a cellar. It wasn't
• 52:36
  Speaker 1: the Lowell cellar. This one had stone walls, light from
• 52:39
  Speaker 1: a single overhead lamp, and a camera placed in a
• 52:42
  Speaker 1: fixed position. No time code, just the oppressive silence. Three
• 52:47
  Speaker 1: children stood in the center of the frame, barefoot. hair matted,
• 52:50
  Speaker 1: wearing tattered work clothes. Their mouths moved, but no sound
• 52:55
  Speaker 1: came through, just the clicking of the projector, rhythmic, like
• 52:59
  Speaker 1: a countdown timer. Then a man entered, tall, dressed in
• 53:02
  Speaker 1: a blacksmith's clothes, but his face was obscured by shadow.
• 53:06
  Speaker 1: He moved to each child and placed his hand on
• 53:08
  Speaker 1: their forehead. Each time, the child trembled, as if with
• 53:12
  Speaker 1: a high fever, but no one screamed, no one even blinked. Next,
• 53:17
  Speaker 1: Another man entered the frame. He wore the black coat
• 53:20
  Speaker 1: of a preacher, but his face was terrifyingly familiar. He
• 53:23
  Speaker 1: pushed in a wheelbarrow. Lying on it was a body, female,
• 53:27
  Speaker 1: perhaps in her twenty seconds, eyes open, unblinking, not breathing.
• 53:32
  Speaker 1: The man in the blacksmith's clothes leaned down and whispered
• 53:35
  Speaker 1: something in the body's ear. Then the woman in the
• 53:38
  Speaker 1: wheelbarrow opened her mouth and began to— Two days later,
• 53:42
  Speaker 1: Eleanor returned to the Lowell property alone, no back-up, No camera,
• 53:46
  Speaker 1: just a flashlight, gloves, and the same nauseating feeling that
• 53:50
  Speaker 1: had been growing since she watched the film. She didn't
• 53:53
  Speaker 1: tell Sheriff Davies, because if what she found down there
• 53:56
  Speaker 1: was real, he would bury it along with her. The
• 53:59
  Speaker 1: cellar was sealed off by then. A wooden plank nailed
• 54:02
  Speaker 1: across the door. A warning written in charcoal. Do not enter.
• 54:07
  Speaker 1: Unstable mineshaft. But Eleanor pried it open anyway. The stone
• 54:11
  Speaker 1: steps were cold under her feet as she descended. The
• 54:14
  Speaker 1: air was different now. not just dry, it was warm,
• 54:17
  Speaker 1: as if breathing, on the far wall, behind the old forge,
• 54:21
  Speaker 1: was a trap door, just like on the map, a
• 54:24
  Speaker 1: heavy iron rim, locked with a rusted padlock, Eleanor used
• 54:28
  Speaker 1: the iron bar to pry it open, with a screech
• 54:31
  Speaker 1: like tortured metal, the lock shattered, and what she saw
• 54:34
  Speaker 1: below was a shaft, narrow, lined with old stone with
• 54:38
  Speaker 1: iron rungs leading into the darkness, she climbed down ten feet,
• 54:42
  Speaker 1: then twenty, the air grew hotter, thicker at the bottom
• 54:46
  Speaker 1: an earthen tunnel stretched out in both directions supported by
• 54:50
  Speaker 1: wooden beams slick with a black oily substance she used
• 54:54
  Speaker 1: her flashlight there were symbols carved into the beams runes
• 54:58
  Speaker 1: numbers and one word repeated over and over the forge
• 55:02
  Speaker 1: further down the passage the walls changed from stone to
• 55:06
  Speaker 1: organic thick black roots had overtaken everything thick vein-like strands
• 55:12
  Speaker 1: pulsing slightly as if alive and in the center of
• 55:15
  Speaker 1: the chamber, a mound covered in canvas, child-sized. She approached slowly,
• 55:20
  Speaker 1: her breath catching. The canvas was old, hand-stitched, a name
• 55:24
  Speaker 1: carved in charcoal, Abigail Lowell. But Abigail was supposed to
• 55:28
  Speaker 1: have run away. Or was she? Eleanor pulled back the canvas.
• 55:32
  Speaker 1: The body beneath was small, preserved, but not like a
• 55:36
  Speaker 1: normal corpse. Its skin was ash-gray, hard, and too perfect.
• 55:41
  Speaker 1: The eyes were slightly open, glassy, but not dead. And
• 55:45
  Speaker 1: from the back of the skull, black roots had grown out,
• 55:48
  Speaker 1: burrowing into the ground like a tree. The girl wasn't decomposing.
• 55:52
  Speaker 1: She was growing. Eleanor stumbled back, horrified. But before she
• 55:56
  Speaker 1: could run, she heard it. The same hissing sound from
• 56:00
  Speaker 1: the projector. Not a sound. More like a frequency vibrating
• 56:04
  Speaker 1: in her teeth. She turned. At the far end of
• 56:07
  Speaker 1: the tunnel, three more figures were emerging. Small, Pale. Rooted.
• 56:13
  Speaker 1: All with their eyes open. All watching her. She ran.
• 56:17
  Speaker 1: Back in the daylight, she vomited beside her car. She
• 56:20
  Speaker 1: wanted to call for help. But how do you report
• 56:23
  Speaker 1: something like that? Yes. Hello. I just found a nursery
• 56:27
  Speaker 1: of children growing beneath a cursed forge. She couldn't. Not yet.
• 56:31
  Speaker 1: But now she knew the truth. And someone had intentionally
• 56:34
  Speaker 1: built the forge. Eleanor didn't sleep that night. Not after
• 56:38
  Speaker 1: what she'd seen under that forge. The word The Forge
• 56:41
  Speaker 1: haunted her. What kind of person plants a child, and
• 56:45
  Speaker 1: more importantly, who planned it? She returned to her evidence board.
• 56:49
  Speaker 1: In the corner of that board, pinned for weeks and
• 56:52
  Speaker 1: barely noticed, was an old name. Ewan Davies, Land Surveyor, 1870-1895.
• 56:57
  Speaker 1: He was Sheriff Davies's grandfather. Ewan had worked for the
• 56:59
  Speaker 1: mining company, mostly mapping mine shafts and water veins, but
• 57:09
  Speaker 1: in the late one thousand, eight hundred and seventy seconds,
• 57:12
  Speaker 1: he was privately hired by Amos Lowell to chart geological
• 57:16
  Speaker 1: anomalies beneath the forge. Eleanor found the record in a
• 57:19
  Speaker 1: county archive written in pencil, request for mapping of auxiliary
• 57:23
  Speaker 1: shaft beneath Lowell Forge, noted unusual root growth, no follow-up requested,
• 57:29
  Speaker 1: signed E. Davies. She found Ewan's son, Sheriff Davies's father,
• 57:33
  Speaker 1: an old man on his deathbed in a nursing home,
• 57:36
  Speaker 1: He was almost ninety, didn't recognize her or anyone, but
• 57:40
  Speaker 1: when she placed a copy of the map in his lap,
• 57:42
  Speaker 1: his hand began to tremble. Then he said one word.
• 57:46
  Speaker 1: He paid. It took hours of coaxing, but the old
• 57:49
  Speaker 1: man slowly began to speak. Fragments of memory surfaced. He
• 57:53
  Speaker 1: said the tunnels were too perfect to be natural. The
• 57:57
  Speaker 1: roots were not from any tree he knew. They followed
• 57:59
  Speaker 1: the underground water veins. His father believed someone had been
• 58:03
  Speaker 1: feeding the soil. When he reported it to Amos Lowell,
• 58:07
  Speaker 1: he was told to burn the notes. Three days later,
• 58:10
  Speaker 1: his father was offered a large sum of money. Cash.
• 58:13
  Speaker 1: No more questions. So, he took it and kept silent,
• 58:17
  Speaker 1: but Eleanor pressed harder. Who built the tunnels? The old
• 58:20
  Speaker 1: man looked up, tears in his eyes. Not built. Guided.
• 58:24
  Speaker 1: My father said the ground already had it in it.
• 58:27
  Speaker 1: They just helped it remember. She left his room in silence.
• 58:31
  Speaker 1: her mind racing. That meant someone knew the lower land
• 58:34
  Speaker 1: was different, had chosen it, and had used it. So,
• 58:38
  Speaker 1: Eleanor returned to her car, flipped through the land reports,
• 58:42
  Speaker 1: cross-referencing every parcel Ewan Davies had surveyed with similar notes.
• 58:46
  Speaker 1: A pattern emerged. Four properties, each with strange child disappearances.
• 58:52
  Speaker 1: each with a geological anomaly noted, each with a report
• 58:55
  Speaker 1: of a mysterious fire filed decades earlier. The Lowell Forge
• 58:58
  Speaker 1: was just one branch of a much older root system.
• 59:01
  Speaker 1: Back in Ashwick, Eleanor visited the only living person who
• 59:05
  Speaker 1: had once owned land adjacent to the Lowell family, an
• 59:08
  Speaker 1: old hunter named Silas Kane. He opened the door before
• 59:11
  Speaker 1: she knocked. You finally found the tunnels, he said. Silas
• 59:15
  Speaker 1: Kane was 87, sharp-eyed, and already dressed as if he
• 59:19
  Speaker 1: had been expecting Eleanor. His cabin smelled of pine wood
• 59:23
  Speaker 1: and gunpowder. Old maps were rolled up on the walls.
• 59:27
  Speaker 1: He motioned for her to sit. I wondered when someone
• 59:29
  Speaker 1: would come asking. He said, You're about thirty years too late.
• 59:33
  Speaker 1: Silas had inherited the property from his father, land adjacent
• 59:37
  Speaker 1: to the Lowell Forge, and he remembered everything about what
• 59:40
  Speaker 1: lay beneath it, not just the tunnels, but the rituals.
• 59:44
  Speaker 1: He called them the Forgings, said they would happen every
• 59:46
  Speaker 1: fifteen years or so, never the same family twice, but
• 59:50
  Speaker 1: always the same signature, Children Go Missing. The land dries up.
• 59:55
  Speaker 1: The land becomes quiet. Eleanor asked the obvious. Who was
• 59:59
  Speaker 1: behind it? He said it wasn't who, but what. The land.
• 1:00:03
  Speaker 1: He said there was something in it. A hunger. He
• 1:00:06
  Speaker 1: had seen his father find a child's shoe in a
• 1:00:08
  Speaker 1: hole near the forge. He showed Eleanor a newspaper, clipping
• 1:00:12
  Speaker 1: from 1,903. One she had never seen. boy vanishes near
• 1:00:18
  Speaker 1: Lowell property. Only shoe found, but no follow-up article, no
• 1:00:22
  Speaker 1: public search. The county authorities sealed it. Why? Because Silas
• 1:00:27
  Speaker 1: made a deal. In 1910, a strange man came to
• 1:00:30
  Speaker 1: his door, didn't give a name, but offered a sum
• 1:00:33
  Speaker 1: of gold to buy a portion of his land, on
• 1:00:35
  Speaker 1: the condition that he never ask about what they were
• 1:00:37
  Speaker 1: digging there. He agreed. The following spring, the land was leveled.
• 1:00:42
  Speaker 1: No markers, no construction, just a new fence. and for years,
• 1:00:47
  Speaker 1: it remained quiet until another Lowell took over the forge.
• 1:00:51
  Speaker 1: Eleanor stared at Silas. You knew children were being taken.
• 1:00:54
  Speaker 1: I knew worse, he whispered. I knew where they ended up.
• 1:00:57
  Speaker 1: He led her to his warehouse. Beneath the floorboards was
• 1:01:01
  Speaker 1: a trapdoor, rusty, sealed. He hadn't opened it in decades,
• 1:01:05
  Speaker 1: but now he insisted. What she saw below was not
• 1:01:09
  Speaker 1: a tunnel. It was a burial pit, lined with stone, circular,
• 1:01:13
  Speaker 1: almost ceremonial, and at the center, a forge hammer was
• 1:01:17
  Speaker 1: driven into the floor, cracked with baby teeth embedded in
• 1:01:21
  Speaker 1: its head. Eleanor's hands trembled as she took photos. The
• 1:01:25
  Speaker 1: deeper she looked, the more she saw what seemed to
• 1:01:27
  Speaker 1: be child-sized indentations in the dirt, as if something had
• 1:01:31
  Speaker 1: grown out of them, not into them. She turned to Silas,
• 1:01:35
  Speaker 1: who stood pale. I never touched it, he said, but
• 1:01:38
  Speaker 1: someone did, more than once. Before she left... Silas gave
• 1:01:42
  Speaker 1: her a small box. Inside was a notebook belonging to
• 1:01:46
  Speaker 1: someone named Sister Elspeth Lowell. The name sent a chill
• 1:01:50
  Speaker 1: down her spine. The notebook was dated before Amos Lowell
• 1:01:53
  Speaker 1: was even recorded as the owner of the forge. Next,
• 1:01:56
  Speaker 1: we open Sister Elspeth's notebook, and what she wrote inside
• 1:02:00
  Speaker 1: redefines everything Eleanor thought she knew about the Lowells. The
• 1:02:04
  Speaker 1: leather cover was cracked, the pages curled with age, but
• 1:02:07
  Speaker 1: the ink was sharp. as if written yesterday. On the
• 1:02:10
  Speaker 1: first page, these are the things I must confess, not
• 1:02:14
  Speaker 1: to God, but to whoever survives us. E. L. 1868.
• 1:02:20
  Speaker 1: Eleanor Price turned the pages slowly. The notebook was part confession,
• 1:02:25
  Speaker 1: part instruction manual. It began years before the Lowell family
• 1:02:29
  Speaker 1: officially owned the forge. before they even had children, and
• 1:02:32
  Speaker 1: it was not addressed to a pastor, it was addressed
• 1:02:35
  Speaker 1: to the fire. Elspeth Lowell was not a nun by
• 1:02:38
  Speaker 1: any church's standards, but she called herself a servant. She
• 1:02:42
  Speaker 1: wrote of vows, a cleansing pact, an inheritance from the earth.
• 1:02:46
  Speaker 1: In one passage, she described her mother giving birth in
• 1:02:49
  Speaker 1: a mineshaft on a cold winter's night, a birth attended
• 1:02:52
  Speaker 1: only by the men of the clan. and something she
• 1:02:55
  Speaker 1: called the Faceless Blacksmith. Eleanor read that part twice. The
• 1:02:59
  Speaker 1: Faceless Blacksmith appeared frequently in the pages, always capitalized, sometimes
• 1:03:04
  Speaker 1: followed by, Do Not Speak His Name. He was described
• 1:03:07
  Speaker 1: as having no face, a presence that watched their family
• 1:03:10
  Speaker 1: from the smoke, from the fire, from their dreams. She wrote,
• 1:03:15
  Speaker 1: We were the last line of the Firekeepers. We kept
• 1:03:18
  Speaker 1: him bound, but we broke the rhythm. We spared the sun.
• 1:03:22
  Speaker 1: Eleanor froze. spared the sun. The entries changed after that.
• 1:03:27
  Speaker 1: Elspeth's tone shifted from devout to frantic. She wrote of visions.
• 1:03:31
  Speaker 1: She described the ground beginning to whisper again. The forge
• 1:03:34
  Speaker 1: demands more when we resist. One child every twelve years
• 1:03:38
  Speaker 1: or the ground will swallow three. It is mercy. Eleanor
• 1:03:41
  Speaker 1: felt sick. She skipped to the final pages. Dated one thousand,
• 1:03:46
  Speaker 1: eight hundred and eighty-five. The handwriting was shaky, smudged with
• 1:03:50
  Speaker 1: what looked like ash. I can't hold the youngest back anymore.
• 1:03:54
  Speaker 1: She hears him too clearly. Last night, she spoke in
• 1:03:56
  Speaker 1: his voice. If you find this, it means she has
• 1:03:59
  Speaker 1: opened the way. May the fire forgive us or consume us.
• 1:04:03
  Speaker 1: No name, no clear ending, but one detail stood out,
• 1:04:07
  Speaker 1: scrawled in the margin next to the final page, a
• 1:04:10
  Speaker 1: symbol Eleanor had seen before, three interlocking triangles, and just
• 1:04:14
  Speaker 1: below it, ask Lily where the real Forge Island, Lily Lowell,
• 1:04:18
  Speaker 1: The only known survivor, the girl Eleanor once believed was
• 1:04:22
  Speaker 1: too traumatized to speak. Now she wondered, what if Lily
• 1:04:25
  Speaker 1: isn't mute because of trauma? What if she's waiting? Eleanor
• 1:04:28
  Speaker 1: returned to the Lowell property just before dusk. She didn't
• 1:04:32
  Speaker 1: call for backup, didn't take a radio, she didn't want interference.
• 1:04:37
  Speaker 1: Not this time. The sun sank behind the hills, painting
• 1:04:40
  Speaker 1: the horizon red. She stood at the threshold of the
• 1:04:43
  Speaker 1: ruined forge, her heart pounding, Elspeth's notebook in her coat pocket.
• 1:04:48
  Speaker 1: There was no other mineshaft on record, according to the
• 1:04:51
  Speaker 1: county records. No blueprint, no mention. But Elspeth's last note
• 1:04:56
  Speaker 1: was clear. Ask Lily where the real Forge Island. Lily
• 1:04:59
  Speaker 1: Lowell was seven when the tragedy happened. Found huddled in
• 1:05:03
  Speaker 1: the cellar, silent, covered in blood that wasn't hers. She
• 1:05:06
  Speaker 1: hadn't spoken a full sentence in almost a year. Not
• 1:05:10
  Speaker 1: to the doctors, not to the sheriff. But Elinor remembered something.
• 1:05:14
  Speaker 1: When she first met the girl, she kept drawing triangles,
• 1:05:18
  Speaker 1: three of them interlocked. She had found that drawing in
• 1:05:21
  Speaker 1: her case file, the same symbol Elspeth had drawn. Inside
• 1:05:25
  Speaker 1: the forge, the decay was deeper, the stones covered in moss.
• 1:05:29
  Speaker 1: The air was damp with ash and memory. She found
• 1:05:32
  Speaker 1: the iron trapdoor where she had once seen Lily staring.
• 1:05:35
  Speaker 1: But this time she looked closer. Behind a pile of
• 1:05:38
  Speaker 1: scrap metal, hidden by a stone that had once been
• 1:05:40
  Speaker 1: carefully placed, she found it. A crack in the stone.
• 1:05:44
  Speaker 1: No handle. Just three carved triangles. The symbol again. She
• 1:05:48
  Speaker 1: pressed her palm against it. Click. The stone shifted without
• 1:05:52
  Speaker 1: a sound. Steps led down into complete darkness. Not a mineshaft,
• 1:05:56
  Speaker 1: but a room colder than the rest of the forge.
• 1:05:59
  Speaker 1: The stone walls were slick with moisture, and carved on
• 1:06:01
  Speaker 1: them were dozens of names. Not just Lowell's, but dozens
• 1:06:05
  Speaker 1: of family names, generations, but some had been violently scratched out.
• 1:06:10
  Speaker 1: Others were freshly carved. She found her name, Price, her
• 1:06:14
  Speaker 1: breath catching in her throat. She backed away, but something
• 1:06:17
  Speaker 1: creaked behind her, a second wooden door, ajar. Beyond it,
• 1:06:22
  Speaker 1: a small room, no furniture, just ash on the floor
• 1:06:25
  Speaker 1: and a wooden doll lying in the center. She crouched down,
• 1:06:28
  Speaker 1: on the wall above the ash, written in charcoal. He's
• 1:06:31
  Speaker 1: awake again, suddenly a voice behind her. a childlike, fragile voice.
• 1:06:37
  Speaker 1: You shouldn't be down here. She turned, Lily Lowell standing there, unafraid.
• 1:06:42
  Speaker 1: But her eyes, they were not the eyes of a
• 1:06:44
  Speaker 1: traumatized child. They were aware, and worse, waiting. The girl
• 1:06:49
  Speaker 1: didn't look at her, just passed her toward the wall.
• 1:06:52
  Speaker 1: Did she write about me? She asked. Eleanor nodded. Lily exhaled.
• 1:06:57
  Speaker 1: I was the one they weren't supposed to keep. She
• 1:06:59
  Speaker 1: stepped toward Eleanor. What's down here, Lily? The girl smiled,
• 1:07:03
  Speaker 1: almost kindly. Not what. Who? And then she raised her
• 1:07:07
  Speaker 1: hand and pointed to the wall again. There, right next
• 1:07:11
  Speaker 1: to the words, He's awake again, was something newly carved.
• 1:07:15
  Speaker 1: Welcome back, Eleanor. Lily didn't move. Neither did Eleanor. The
• 1:07:19
  Speaker 1: silence between them was oppressive, but not empty. It was
• 1:07:22
  Speaker 1: watching them. Eleanor's flashlight flickered. She tapped it, still dim.
• 1:07:27
  Speaker 1: She took a step back toward the chamber door, but
• 1:07:30
  Speaker 1: Lily spoke again, her voice older than her years. Did
• 1:07:33
  Speaker 1: you ever wonder why Elspeth left you the notebook? Eleanor stopped.
• 1:07:37
  Speaker 1: You thought it was random, the girl continued. You thought
• 1:07:40
  Speaker 1: she chose you because you were good, honest, different from
• 1:07:44
  Speaker 1: the others. Her head tilted. She chose you because you're
• 1:07:47
  Speaker 1: from here. Eleanor felt a chill run down her spine.
• 1:07:50
  Speaker 1: She was born in Lexington, but was adopted. She had
• 1:07:53
  Speaker 1: never known who her biological family was. You're a Lowell,
• 1:07:57
  Speaker 1: Lily said quietly. No, Eleanor whispered. You were part of
• 1:08:02
  Speaker 1: the ritual, but your mother ran away before they could finish.
• 1:08:05
  Speaker 1: Elspeth found you later. She gave you to another family
• 1:08:09
  Speaker 1: without telling anyone where you came from. She tried to
• 1:08:12
  Speaker 1: break the cycle. Lily pointed to the wall again. Your
• 1:08:16
  Speaker 1: name carved there wasn't a message. It was a summons.
• 1:08:20
  Speaker 1: In the far corner of the room, the stone wall
• 1:08:22
  Speaker 1: began to vibrate, almost as if it were breathing.' Eleanor
• 1:08:26
  Speaker 1: slowly turned, the flashlight trembling in her hand.' The surface shifted,
• 1:08:31
  Speaker 1: revealing not stone, but something organic beneath.' Black veins, faint movement.
• 1:08:37
  Speaker 1: There was something inside the wall.' The blacksmith wasn't a man,'
• 1:08:40
  Speaker 1: Lily murmured.' He was a seed, a first flame, the
• 1:08:44
  Speaker 1: thing behind that wall.' That' s the forge, the root.'' Eleanor stared.'
• 1:08:49
  Speaker 1: You' ve seen it,' she realized.' You remember it?' Lily nodded,
• 1:08:53
  Speaker 1: her eyes glinting in the darkness.' I was five when
• 1:08:56
  Speaker 1: they put me in front of it. It showed me things.
• 1:08:59
  Speaker 1: It showed me. all of us things She took a
• 1:09:01
  Speaker 1: slow breath And now it wants you The wall cracked
• 1:09:05
  Speaker 1: A black, oily smoke began to seep out from between
• 1:09:09
  Speaker 1: the stones The chamber trembled Far off A deep roar
• 1:09:14
  Speaker 1: echoed as if something ancient was shifting underground Eleanor pulled
• 1:09:18
  Speaker 1: out her silver crucifix' Lily didn't flinch.' You can't kill it,'
• 1:09:22
  Speaker 1: she said.' But you can make it sleep again.' You
• 1:09:25
  Speaker 1: just need a firekeeper.'' Her eyes met Eleanor's.' That' s why
• 1:09:29
  Speaker 1: Elspeth brought you back.' That' s why you were always meant
• 1:09:32
  Speaker 1: to return.'' Eleanor' s flashlight, long, weak, suddenly hissed.' Through the crackling,
• 1:09:38
  Speaker 1: a whisper.' Don' t let it out.' It was Elspeth's voice.'
• 1:09:41
  Speaker 1: Eleanor turned.' The flashlight burned out completely.' She had one choice.'
• 1:09:46
  Speaker 1: She lunged toward Lily, holding her tight.' The girl didn't resist.
• 1:09:52
  Speaker 1: It's okay, she whispered. I'm ready. Behind them, the room
• 1:09:55
  Speaker 1: lit up with a dull red glow like embers inside
• 1:09:58
  Speaker 1: the earth. She hugged Lily, shielding her. Lily collapsed. The
• 1:10:02
  Speaker 1: wall behind her screamed, then fell silent. Outside, the ground rumbled.
• 1:10:08
  Speaker 1: The Lowell Forge collapsed inward as if swallowed. Eleanor crawled
• 1:10:11
  Speaker 1: out just in time, bruised and trembling. From the treeline,
• 1:10:16
  Speaker 1: she looked back once, where the forge once stood. now
• 1:10:20
  Speaker 1: just a black pit of earth, but in the air,
• 1:10:22
  Speaker 1: faint and drifting like ash, a song about a forge,
• 1:10:25
  Speaker 1: the song Edward had hummed, the song Eleanor remembered from
• 1:10:29
  Speaker 1: her childhood dreams. That night, she didn't file a report.
• 1:10:33
  Speaker 1: She didn't report it. She drove straight to her mother's grave. There,
• 1:10:37
  Speaker 1: she placed the notebook on the ground and said only
• 1:10:40
  Speaker 1: one word, thanks. She never spoke of what happened again.
• 1:10:43
  Speaker 1: But if you go to the Lowell property now, you
• 1:10:46
  Speaker 1: will see nothing, just a clearing, no foundation, no ruins.
• 1:10:51
  Speaker 1: But sometimes, if you stand in the right place, you
• 1:10:54
  Speaker 1: will feel warmth beneath your feet, as if a forge
• 1:10:57
  Speaker 1: was still smouldering deep below.