Silas Corwin's uncle, Colonel Henderson Price, the president of the State Historical Society, resigned his position in the summer of 1903, citing failing health. He returned to his home in Charleston, where he lived quietly for another 16 months. In February of 1905, he was found in his study dead of what the coroner called a an apparent self-inflicted gunshot wound. Though the pistol, which was found on the floor beside his chair, had not been discharged, and there was no residue on either of his hands, and there was no wound anywhere on his body that could have been produced by the pistol found beside him.
The coroner nevertheless recorded the death as suicide, and the case was closed without further investigation. Cassie Peele, the housekeeper, outlived all of them. She continued to live in Pickens, working for the family that eventually bought Wickham's house until her retirement in 1924. She lived alone in a small cottage until her death in 1936 at the age of 82.
She gave the WPA interview to Ruth Anna Fetman 5 years before her death. And it is that interview along with the letters from Wickham's sister and the surviving fragments of Dr. Cade's official medical report that constitutes the bulk of what we now know about the case. Fetman's original interview notes were held at the Library of Congress until 1968, at which point they were along with a substantial portion of the WPA West Virginia oral history collection, transferred to an off-site storage facility whose contents were destroyed in a fire in 1973. A transcribed summary of the Peele interview prepared by Fetman in 1932 survives in the papers of a fellow WPA collector and is the source for most of what has been quoted from that interview in subsequent scholarship.
The case of the boy at Pickens is not, when viewed in the wider context of Appalachian folklore and historical anomaly unique. It is in fact one of at least 14 documented cases from the region between 1860 and 1940 in which a young child was found alone in wilderness circumstances in apparently good physical condition but showing signs of prolonged confinement and in which the child described before subsequently disappearing, dying, or being adopted into a family that then moved away and severed all contact with the community an underground place inhabited by beings that were not human. Marjorie Salow cataloged six of these cases in her article. A follow-up study by an independent researcher named Heston Reeves in 2007 expanded that catalog to 14.
And Reeves argued in a monograph privately published and later pulled from circulation at the author's request in 2009 that the true number across the region was probably closer to 40. The pattern in these cases is remarkably consistent. The child is always young, typically between 5 and 9 years of age. The child is always calm upon discovery and displays none of the behavioral signs one would expect from a child who had been genuinely lost or abandoned.
The child bears in nearly every case some form of physical marking that suggests medical or scientific intervention. The scars on Thaniel are one variant. In an 1874 case from Eastern Kentucky, the child had a small circular impression in the skin behind the right ear from which a fine thread of some unknown material could be extracted. In an 1891 case from Pocahontas County, Virginia, the child had a series of small tattoos on the soles of both feet arranged in patterns that no local artist could identify.
In a 1912 case from Tennessee, the child was found to have upon full medical examination a small metallic object embedded in the tissue at the base of the neck, which the local physician attempted to remove and which then, according to his written report, moved of its own accord to a position deeper in the neck tissue where it could not be reached without endangering the child's life. The stories the children tell when they are willing to speak are also remarkably consistent. There is always an underground place. There are always other children.
There are always beings that walk on two legs and have faces like human faces but are not human. There is often a language the child can understand but cannot repeat. There is frequently a mention of feeding on a paste or gruel that has no taste. There is almost universally some reference to being measured or tested or examined at regular intervals.
And there is in every case where the child speaks for more than a day or two some form of warning about what will happen if the story is repeated or investigated. The warning is not always heeded. When it is not heeded, the pattern of what follows is also consistent. The adults who investigate the story die, disappear, or go mad in numbers and in sequences that no honest coincidence can account for.
Reeves's monograph identifies what he called the corridor, a geographical band running roughly from the northern edge of the Cumberland Gap up through the mountains of eastern Kentucky, southern West Virginia, and southwestern Virginia, and continuing north into the ridges of central Pennsylvania. Within this corridor, according to Reeves's mapping, virtually every documented case of the phenomenon has occurred. The corridor corresponds imperfectly but suggestively to the geological formations of the central Appalachian coal basin, and it corresponds, more suggestively still, to the belt of unexplained pre-industrial stone construction that runs along the same ridges. The corridor also corresponds, according to Reeves, to a pattern of unusually high rates of certain kinds of unexplained disappearance, unusually high rates of certain kinds of local folklore about beings that live underground, and unusually low rates of certain kinds of official documentation of historical events between the 1850s and the 1920s, as though someone or something had been quietly ensuring that the written record of the region was less complete than it might have been.
The Tartarian framework applied to Reeves's corridor suggests a specific interpretation. If the underground structures beneath the central Appalachian region are the remains of a Tartarian settlement, and if the surviving inhabitants of that settlement have persisted in some form for the six or so centuries since the surface catastrophe, then the corridor is not a random pattern of anomaly. It is the map of a continuing occupation. And the children who have been taken and returned according to this reading are not victims in the conventional sense.
They are messengers or samples or in some readings the products of a program whose purpose is only partially understood. The seven scars on Thaniel's chest in this interpretation are not the marks of casual medical curiosity. They are the marks of a specific procedure performed on infants at intervals over their first year of life whose purpose is to prepare the child for something that comes later.