The Bird farmhouse is said to still be standing at the far end of Stillwater Creek, its windows obscured by dust and its roof bowed like a spine. In the summer of 1877, the inhabitants of Monroe County realized that the two ladies living there, Prudence and Mercy Bird, had not spoken to another soul in nearly six years.
When the county doctor finally forced the door open, he found the house reeking of smoke, iron, and old sickness. The air itself seemed to remember pain. The sisters had been born to a farmer named Jonas Bird, a man once respected for his land, but feared for his temper. After their mother’s death, the girls were rarely seen outside the property.
By 1870, there were rumors that Jonas had become blind and that the girls were oddly devoted to him. No one had ever seen a funeral, but by 1877 the neighbors were whispering that he had passed away long before. The floors were black and distorted as the sheriff's deputy entered the parlor. Through a hole in the floor, an iron chain was coiled.
It went to the cellar where they discovered Jonas Bird alive but wasted, a man reduced to breath and bone. He attempted to speak, but his tongue had become dry and pallid. For over five years, he had been shackled there. A flower tin contained Prudence's diary. It related the tale of two daughters who thought that their father's sin had tainted the family line and that the only way to purify it was to keep him underground until God made a different decision.
The initial entries were almost delicate. She stated, "Father prays for mercy, but mercy is something we no longer own." What came next was not insanity. It was customary. Whispering scripture they hardly knew, the sisters took down a bucket of food and drink each night. He was informed that he was undergoing purification.
He warned them that they were starting to resemble him. Later, the residents of Monroe County would vouch that they had always known there was a problem in that residence. However, every family carried a small amount of insanity in the years following the war. Nobody wished to take a close look.
Tell me where city you are viewing from and what time it is where you are at this moment before we proceed. Remember to subscribe if you want me to reveal the truth about what actually transpired inside that farmhouse. We will next follow the doctor who went back to Stillwater Creek when the cries resumed months after the sisters were removed.
In the pale winter of 1878, when Dr. Alton Reeves rode back to Stillwater Creek, the land itself appeared unwilling to recall what had transpired there. The townspeople claimed to have heard voices coming from the farmhouse at night, even though the Bird sisters had long before passed away and were imprisoned in the county institution. Reeves insisted on going back despite the sheriff's request to secure the area, stating, "If evil can root itself in a place, then it must be studied."
The home silently welcomed him. Its windows gazed out like blind eyes, and its roof sagged. The overturned chair, the Bible coated in dust, and the charred hole in the parlor floor where Jonas Bird had once been bound were all still there. Reeves knelt next to it, his lamp shaking. Still rising from below was a subtle iron odor, as acrid as blood on cold metal.
He proceeded into the cellar and discovered only pieces of rope and the bones of ancient furniture. One end of the iron chain that had restrained Jonas was buried in dirt and had been broken clean. Reeves’s lamp created long, twisted shadows around the walls. At that moment, he became aware of the scrapes. Hundreds of them—layered, overlapping scratches, as if several hands had reached for release at different moments, rather than simply one man's frantic clawing.
"Dear God, how many were there?" he said to himself.
Then, from someplace farther down, came the sound of a dragging step. Raising his light, Reeves noticed a door on the distant wall. It was partially buried in the ground, constructed of black iron, and secured with wooden pegs. The nails were brand-new. It had just been sealed by someone.
Leaning forward, the physician ran a touch over the surface. Beneath the grime, small phrases were engraved into the metal: Forgive us. The air was polluted by his breath. There was a gentle rustle from behind the door, like cloth rubbing against stone. Reeves went cold. Then he heard three slow taps coming from the opposite direction. His shoulder struck the stairs as he staggered back.
The lantern almost went out. He believed he spotted movement at the top of the cellar steps when he peered up. Two individuals stood still, observing. By daybreak, Reeves’s horse was found still tied outside the farmhouse gate. His footsteps went inside, but they never emerged. The sheriff followed them down into the cellar, finding only the shattered light, a few drips of blood, and one ripped page from Prudence Bird’s diary: “Father said the earth would keep our secrets. However, the earth never forgets.
Stillwater Creek was still again that night, and anyone who passed the farmhouse after dark claimed to see a faint glow beneath the floorboards that pulsed like an unstoppable heartbeat.
The Bird Farmhouse was a prohibited landmark by the spring of 1879, a skeleton on Stillwater Creek's brink that no one dared to approach after dark. Sheriff Thomas Kale, the officer who had initially discovered Jonas Bird shackled beneath the parlor floor, was the only one who did. Thomas could no longer bear the burden of the unanswered issues raised by Reeves's disappearance.
The sky was bruised purple and the wind was as dry as bone dust when he arrived at dark. When he touched the door, it opened on its own, and he was confronted by the same horrible smell—iron, mildew, and something sweeter, almost like decay attempting to pass for perfume. The floor inside seemed uneven, as though the house had grown weary of standing. Thomas made his way to the cellar after lighting a lamp.
There was still a tiny trace of dried blood on the rim of the broken light. The iron door's nails were strewn like fangs, and it had been ripped from its hinges. Beyond it, the soil opened into a small, human-carved tunnel filled with wet, chilly air. After hesitating, he entered. Every sound was completely absorbed.
His lantern caught a flash of white material after what seemed like hours. He grabbed it, a bundle knotted with hair and covered in linen. Inside was a little diary, its cover stained by soot. There were just three words on the first page: Mercy, please forgive me. The subsequent pages were not written by Prudence, although the handwriting was. The tone grew imploring, the sentences got irregular, and the ink altered.
In their nightmares, it described the evenings when Jonas Bird stopped talking and started whispering, his voice coming from under the ground. Prudence wrote that Mercy had begun responding to him and that she thought unity, not punishment, might purify their father's spirit. Scripture verses were altered until they lost all significance, the pages darkened, and lines were crossed out. Then there was an entry with the words "We opened the door" written in what seemed to be blood. The physician refused to intervene. He claimed to have heard his mother's voice over there, but it wasn't her.
Thomas's hands were shaking. He froze when he turned the last page. Between the sheets, a piece of cloth had been pushed flat. Jonas Jr. is a child's name sewn in small characters on white muslin. For an instant, the air felt heavier and the tube appeared narrower as he gazed up.
Something moved somewhere deeper; it was sluggish, moist, and intentional. With the lamps flickering, he turned and ran. A quiet chuckle was heard behind him. Two voices in perfect harmony. Dawn was breaking outside. He continued till he arrived at the sheriff's station. All morning, the diary was left open on his desk, its pages breathing in the air.
I'll now pose the identical query to you that I posed at the start of this tale. What city are you watching from? And what time is it over there? Remember to subscribe if you want me to tell you what happened to the Bird Sisters when the tunnel was shut. Part Four's reality is considerably worse than anyone could have predicted.
Surrounded by desolate meadows and a fence too flimsy to contain its spirits, the Stillwater County Asylum stood on a low hill. Prudence and Mercy Bird had been imprisoned there for almost four years by 1881. Although they were described as peaceful in official records, the attendants were aware that they were prone to extended silences and periods of devotion.
The sisters would repeatedly murmur, "He's still in the earth," when they woke up in the middle of the night.
Dr. Luther Wayne, the asylum doctor, was the first to observe that Mercy's condition became worse every time the moon was full. She would plead to be taken back home to complete what was buried, her hands trembling and her nails becoming black as if drenched in dirt. Conversely, Prudence had been almost silent. She was stitching shreds of ripped linen into little infant-like figures while sitting by the window, each one marked with a red thread across the chest.
Wayne meticulously documented his sessions because he believed he was seeing a type of shared hallucination known as "folie à deux" in modern medicine. However, his faith in reason started to waver on the evening of June 3. A storm came across Stillwater that evening, and the asylum’s lower hallways flooded with icy rainfall. From Mercy's cell, the guards heard her cry.
She was standing barefoot in the corner with her arms extended as though to greet them when they broke through the door. Prudence lay in the middle of the puddle of water at her feet, her lips moving silently and her lifeless eyes wide. Dr. Wayne claimed to have heard two whispers coming from her throat: "Father!" and "Forgive!"
He gave the order to bind Mercy, but she laughed through her tears and chewed through the leather strap, bleeding blood. When Wayne went back to examine Prudence's body a few hours later, it was vanished. All that was left was the drenched bed and a little, child-like trail of muddy footprints in the corner that led to the hallway.
Mercy was discovered dead in her cell the next morning, her hands wrapped around a little piece of paper. A few phrases were still readable even though the ink had run: "He forgave us." He's waiting for you now.
Two months later, the facility closed when a different patient reported seeing two ladies, with features as pale as candle wax, strolling through the flooded basement. Years later, when the structure was emptied, workmen discovered iron chains twisted under the floor and a nameplate for a doctor, Alton Reeves, imbedded in the muck.
Locals still claim that you may hear a faint voice beneath the earth on some evenings if you stand at the edge of the former asylum grounds. It doesn't ask for assistance. Scripture is whispered, followed by laughter.
Seventeen years after the Bird Sisters’ case was buried under dust and skepticism, Stillwater Creek awakened to a dry summer morning and the fragrance of churned soil. Workers hired to clean the site after the old asylum was sold to a coal company discovered something their shovels shouldn't have touched. It wasn't a coffin. There were shackles within the pit.
The young, recently appointed sheriff who arrived to look into the matter was dubious of ghost stories. However, his attitude altered as he noticed the iron links curling through the ground like veins and the faint outline of human ribs underneath them. The remains could not have belonged to an adult man since they were too tiny. Two skulls facing each other were connected by a single piece of wire that was wrapped tightly like a wedding knot, giving them an almost delicate appearance.
It was merely noted by the coroner: "Unidentified female remains, probably early adult." The approximate burial date was 1878. But when he saw a little leather-bound item wedged between the skulls, he stopped writing. It was the half of Prudence Bird's diary that was missing.
The handwriting was irregular and the ink was fading, as if it had been scrawled quickly. The last notes described something that had trailed them, something that bore their father's memories like a mask yet was not their father. From beneath the ground, it reached out to them, offering forgiveness if they allowed it to surface. They had, too.
"We thought we were burying a man, but the man had already gone," one text said. Hunger is what we bound, and hunger never goes away.
The workmen who uncovered the remains declined to handle the journal once again. The foreman heard cries when he woke up that night. From his tent, one of the diggers had disappeared. They discovered him partially buried by the creek in the morning, his body contorted as if he had been dragged underground, his mouth full of muck, and his fingernails packed with black dirt. Within a week, the business left the location.
Although others claim he burnt the evidence later that evening, the sheriff submitted his report and sealed it in the county archive. Nevertheless, word got out. Passersby in Stillwater reported hearing a woman's voice humming a lullaby next to the stream, which usually ended in a prayer. Occasionally, a deeper, slower, more patient voice would join her when the wind subsided.
The farmhouse is still deserted, its cellar releasing chilly air onto the fields and its roof exposed to the sky. Locals steer clear of it. Youngsters challenge one another to approach, but none ever make it to the stairs. But every few years, when the river floods and the earth moves, something shines through the mud: a length of iron chain, a piece of linen, or the corner of a page that won't break down.
"He's still in the earth" is the identical statement that appears on that page every time, penned in a shaking hand that might belong to any one of them or to all of them at once.
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