The Combs Sisters Were Found in 1931 — What They Carved Into the Cabin Walls Didn’t Match Any…

Part 1

Cold Feather Hollow lay high in Letcher County, Kentucky, beneath the shoulder of a ridge people called Sourwood. In February of 1931, winter had settled over that country with unusual persistence. Snow came during the last week of January, then another fall covered what had not melted, and a third storm sealed the upper trails beneath drifts and hard blue ice.

By the first week of February, the hollow had been nearly cut away from the county seat. Mail stopped coming. A doctor could not be expected except in the gravest circumstances. Horses could make only the lower roads, and even those were treacherous where the sun never reached the turns. Families living on the higher ridges understood what such weather required of them. They stored what they could, cut wood before the storms, and watched the chimneys of their neighbors.

If smoke rose, somebody was still tending a fire.

If no smoke rose, people waited.

Then, if the sky remained empty long enough, somebody climbed.

Emiline Napier lived a mile and a half below the cabin belonging to Verley and Ozella Combs. She was 58 years old that winter, widowed, practical, and strong enough to manage the small holding her husband had left her. She had known the Combs sisters since they were girls riding behind their father in a wagon. She had watched their mother, Elva, grow old more quickly than a woman ought to have. She had been there when the girls’ father died in the fall of 1928, and the following March she had sat beside Elva’s bed and held her hand near the end.

After both parents were gone, Emiline developed the habit of looking toward Sourwood Ridge each morning.

From her yard she could not see the Combs cabin itself. The upper slope hid it. What she could see was the chimney smoke drifting above the timber.

The sisters rarely missed a morning.

Verley Combs was 34 in February of 1931. She was tall and narrow-shouldered, with a stillness that sometimes made strangers think her unfriendly until they discovered that she was simply careful with words. Her hands had belonged, in shape and movement, to her mother’s side of the family: long-fingered, quick, capable hands. People remembered them because they always seemed to know the next motion before Verley herself did.

She read whatever books found their way into the hollow. Once Emiline had carried a package up from the road for her, something ordered from a bookseller in Louisville. The parcel was scarcely larger than a letter but unexpectedly heavy. Verley opened it on the porch and removed a slim volume of poems by an Englishwoman dead more than 100 years. She studied the cover for a moment, put the book into the pocket of her apron, and went back to whatever work had occupied her before Emiline arrived.

She kept an herb garden beside the cabin. In summer it smelled of mint, tansy, feverfew, sage, and things people lower in the hollow knew only by the names Verley gave them. Women sometimes walked from 3 hollows away to ask what to steep for a fever or what root to dry for a child who could not sleep. Verley never claimed more knowledge than she possessed. If she knew, she said so. If she did not, she said that too.

She could handle a horse, mend a fence, sharpen an ax, and dress a wound. She had refused at least 2 marriage proposals, perhaps 3, and had managed it without leaving bitterness behind.

Ozella was 30. She was shorter and softer in build than her sister, quicker to smile, and remembered in Cold Feather for a laugh that carried through a room without seeming loud. She sang while she worked. She could hear a hymn once at church and reproduce the melody that same evening while washing dishes.

People told Ozella things.

She had a face that invited confession and a manner that made silence seem unnecessary. Yet she kept some parts of herself carefully private. She had once been engaged to a young man from Perry County. In the summer of 1926 he went to work in the mines. That October a section of roof came down on him.

Ozella never wore the engagement ring afterward.

She did not throw it away either.

She placed it in a little tin beneath her mattress, beside the ledger in which she kept the household accounts.

The sisters had lived together every day of their lives. After their parents died, they continued running the small holding almost exactly as before. They kept chickens, 2 cows, and a pig each spring. They planted a garden. Verley tended her herbs. Ozella took in mending from families as far away as Whitesburg.

They were neither prosperous nor destitute. Their roof held. Their cellar contained enough jars to carry them through winter. They owned the ground beneath their feet.

Twice a month, if weather permitted, they went down to church at Cold Feather. On the second Sunday they usually stopped at Emiline Napier’s house for supper before climbing home.

Years afterward, in a letter written to a member of the Halcom family, Emiline tried to describe what the sisters had been like together. She wrote that she had never known 2 women who were more completely themselves.

Verley, she said, had been the ridge.

Ozella had been the hollow.

Together they had made a country.

On the morning of February 11, Emiline looked toward Sourwood Ridge and saw no smoke.

She waited.

By midday there was still none.

At evening the sky above the timber remained empty.

The following morning brought the same silence.

Emiline put on her dead husband’s boots, took his walking stick, and started up the mountain.

She failed to reach the cabin.

Above the lower fork, drifts crossed the trail waist-deep. Ice had formed beneath the powder, and several times the stick sank without finding purchase. Darkness came sooner than she had reckoned. Rather than risk breaking a leg alone on the upper slope, she turned back and spent the night on a neighbor’s kitchen floor.

At first light she started again.

This time 2 men went with her.

Sylvanus Boggs was a timber cutter who knew the folds of Sourwood Ridge as well as any man alive. Wardell Sizemore was nearly 60 and walked with a bad hip, but he had known the Combs family since before the sisters were born and refused to remain behind.

At the fork they met Constable Cordell Halcom.

Halcom had ridden as far as the road allowed, then tied his horse and continued on foot. He was 51 that winter, tall, deliberate, and sparing with promises. The county had elected him 3 times because people believed he would tell them what he could do and, more importantly, what he could not.

He had known Verley and Ozella as children.

He had liked their father.

He had respected Elva.

Years later, in notes never meant for a courthouse file, Halcom wrote that something had been wrong in his stomach from the moment he stepped onto the trail leading toward the crown of Sourwood Ridge.

He could not have explained why.

The cabin stood in a natural cup below the crest, surrounded by old sourwood and hickory. A spring rose behind it and ran even in weather cold enough to lock most water in the county beneath ice. The barn stood a short distance downhill. Beyond it was a smokehouse.

The sisters’ father had built the first part of the cabin in 1894, the year he married Elva. Two additions followed. By 1931 the house contained 2 principal rooms and a sleeping loft beneath the rafters. A stone chimney rose against the north wall. A plank porch ran across the south face.

The 4 people climbing toward it came over the final rise shortly before noon.

Halcom noticed the porch first.

It was clean.

Snow lay nearly to the eaves along the north side of the cabin. It sagged in the lower branches and buried the woodpile. But the porch boards were bare.

No drift crossed them.

No scattered crust remained in the corners.

Someone had swept the porch.

They called from the yard.

No answer came.

They climbed the steps and called again.

Nothing.

Sylvanus walked around the cabin before anyone touched the door. When he returned, his expression had changed.

All the shutters, he said, were pulled closed and pegged from the inside.

He had also seen tracks along the north wall.

Halcom asked what kind.

Sylvanus hesitated.

He said he did not know.

The tracks followed the wall for a short distance. They did not approach the cabin from the woods. They did not lead away from it. In one place the snow was smooth, and then the impressions began. A little farther on they simply ended.

Sylvanus described it in the only language that occurred to him.

It was as if whatever had made them had come up through the ground, walked beside the house, then gone back down.

Halcom said nothing.

He went to the front door.

The latch would not move.

When he put his weight against the planks, he felt the wooden bar shift in its brackets on the opposite side.

The door was barred from within.

He knocked and identified himself.

Then he called both sisters by name.

Nothing moved inside.

He waited.

The woods were windless.

He struck the door with his shoulder.

It held.

He struck it a second time, and the upper hinge gave slightly.

The third impact broke the bar from one of its brackets.

The door opened.

For several seconds nobody entered.

What lay inside the cabin was enough that Halcom later wrote at the top of his private account that he wished to God he had never broken the door.

He never described the sisters in detail.

Neither did Dr. Marvin Whitten, who climbed Sourwood Ridge the following day at Halcom’s request.

The necessary facts were simple.

Verley and Ozella Combs had not left the cabin.

The bar had been set from the inside.

There was no sign that another person had entered in any ordinary fashion.

Dr. Whitten examined both women and could not find a natural cause of death that satisfied him. He considered several possibilities before writing exposure on the official certificate.

Years afterward, in a letter to his brother, Whitten admitted that exposure had been the word he chose because he had a family, a medical practice, and a reputation to protect.

The true word, he wrote, was one he would not have known how to spell.

The walls were another matter.

Every exposed plank in the cabin had been carved.

The walls, ceiling boards, doorframes, floor seams, joists, shutters, stairs, furniture, bedposts, and timbers around the chimney were covered in thin cuts.

Some were precise enough to trouble Sylvanus Boggs.

He had worked wood his entire life. He knew the marks left by knives, awls, drawknives, chisels, hatchets, adzes, and saws. Some of the carvings in the Combs cabin were so narrow and so clean that he could not identify the tool that had made them.

Others were rougher.

Those seemed to have been cut hurriedly. Some overlapped. Some dug so deeply into the plank that the wood had splintered around them.

Emiline Napier would not cross the doorway when she returned with the doctor. She stood on the porch while Halcom described what he saw.

A few of the shapes she recognized.

The loops around the doorframe, she said, were old signs.

Her own grandmother had called them keep-out signs.

People in the mountains had once cut them into doors, cradles, smokehouses, and sometimes coffin boards. Their purpose varied depending on who explained them, but the general meaning was plain enough.

Something was being told that it did not belong.

Elva Combs had known the signs.

She would have taught them to her daughters.

There was nothing extraordinary in that.

What disturbed Emiline was where the sisters had placed them.

The keep-out marks did not stop at the front entrance.

They surrounded every opening and every seam through which a determined imagination might believe something could enter.

They ran around the windows.

Around the chimney throat.

Around the trapdoor to the root cellar.

Along the place where the floorboards met the walls.

Across the beams of the loft.

In some places Verley and Ozella had cut the same sign so many times that the plank had been hollowed. Halcom could press a finger into some of the repeated grooves almost to the second knuckle.

The beds in the loft had been moved.

Halcom remembered their old positions.

Years before, while running an errand for his father, he had climbed the ladder and seen the room. One narrow bed had stood against the east wall and the other against the west, with a rag rug lying between them.

Now the beds had been dragged into the center of the loft and pushed side by side.

The rag rug had been rolled into a corner.

Every part of both beds had been marked: frames, headboards, footboards, lower rails, even the underside of the rope supports and the bases of the bedposts.

A complete ring of symbols encircled each bed.

Another surrounded the water bucket.

Another surrounded the salt box.

The intention was unmistakable.

The sisters had been trying to protect themselves.

But another set of symbols had been cut among the keep-out signs.

Those were the ones Halcom could not understand.

They were not letters. They were not numbers. They were unlike Cherokee writing, which Halcom had seen often enough during travel near the North Carolina line to recognize.

They were made from short strokes, hooks, arcs, and curves.

One resembled an ear pressed flat against a wall.

Another looked vaguely like a hand, except that it seemed to possess too many fingers.

Some consisted of nothing but a single downward stroke driven so deeply into the plank that the wood had split along the grain.

There were thousands.

Halcom began to understand, after staring at them long enough, that they were not random.

Certain shapes repeated in groups.

Others appeared only near the doors or beds.

On the partition between the sitting room and the smaller room behind it, the same sequence of 7 marks had been carved in tight columns from floor to ceiling.

Halcom counted each sequence.

There were 220.

The inside face of the front door was different.

It had not merely been carved.

It had been gouged.

Long furrows ran down the planks from near the top of the door. Some were nearly as deep as a man’s finger. Their edges were ragged, unlike the clean signs elsewhere in the cabin.

Sylvanus examined them for a long time.

He could name no tool that would make such a mark.

When Dr. Whitten saw the door the next day, he stood close enough to touch it but did not.

He told Halcom the gouges reminded him of the scars left on a tree after a bear climbed it.

Only these marks were on the inside.

The door had been barred from the inside.

Whatever had happened in that house had happened after Verley and Ozella decided that the danger lay beyond the walls.

For 3 days, Halcom remained at the cabin.

He sent Sylvanus and Wardell down the first afternoon. He spent the first night alone. On the second day Dr. Whitten came. On the third, Reverend Ephraim Coldiron climbed the ridge.

The old preacher had baptized both sisters as adults several years earlier at their mother’s urging. He was 70 by then and wore a wool coat and an old plug hat against the cold.

He entered the cabin carrying a Bible.

For nearly 2 hours his voice could be heard inside, steady at first and then lower, until those waiting outside could no longer distinguish the words.

When he emerged, he sat on the top porch step.

He remained there for the rest of the afternoon without speaking.

According to something his wife told a neighbor much later, Reverend Coldiron took off his boots when he reached home that night and left them on the back stoop.

He never brought them inside again.

The following week he bought a new pair.

While the preacher read, Halcom went through the belongings of the dead women.

Most were exactly what he expected.

Dresses folded in a cedar chest.

Their mother’s wedding ring.

A small store of coins hidden beneath a floorboard.

A family Bible containing births and deaths in 3 generations of handwriting.

Their father’s rifle, cleaned, oiled, and hanging above the door.

Elva’s spinning wheel.

Verley’s herb book, thick with pressed leaves and notes in the margins.

Seed jars marked by year.

The modest possessions of 2 women who had lived carefully and wasted little.

Then, beneath Ozella’s mattress, Halcom found the black ledger.

The engagement ring lay beside it in the small tin where she had kept it since 1926.

The first ledger entry was dated September 18, 1928, 3 days after her father’s death.

The last was February 2, 1931.

Halcom began reading.

At first the entries contained weather, livestock, provisions, repairs, debts owed for mending, and seed saved for spring.

Then, on September 26, 1928, Ozella recorded finding a track in the frost near the woodpile.

She did not recognize it.

Verley said it belonged to a bobcat.

Ozella wrote that she did not believe her.

During the winter, other entries appeared.

Sounds under the floor.

Sounds in the roof.

A noise outside the north wall for which Ozella had no name.

Eventually she called it the leaning sound.

She wrote that it gave her the impression that something outside the cabin had put its weight against the wall and was listening.

Verley blamed the sourwoods moving in the frost.

She gave the same explanation 3 times in 1 week.

After the third time, Ozella stopped asking her about it.

Their mother died the following March.

Dr. Whitten had attended her during the illness and never satisfactorily identified what took her. She lasted 3 weeks and died at home with both daughters beside her.

After the burial, Ozella made an unusually brief entry.

She wrote that she and Verley had opened their mother’s chest.

Inside they found instructions.

They had done what the instructions said.

Halcom found a fragment of that paper folded into the back of the ledger.

It was old foolscap, browned along the edges.

In Elva Combs’s careful handwriting were 3 lines.

The first said to keep the door barred at first frost.

The second instructed her daughters to cut the sign on every side by which a thing could come in.

The third said that if the sign failed to hold, they were to cut the second sign shown on the reverse.

The reverse was missing.

A section had been torn cleanly along a fold.

Halcom believed Verley and Ozella themselves had removed it, perhaps so they could carry the pattern from room to room while they worked.

No copy of the second sign was ever found.

Elva’s mother had died in 1889. Any papers belonging to her were lost when another family house burned in 1906. Whatever knowledge had passed from the older woman to Elva, and from Elva to her daughters, seemed to end there.

Except for the marks covering the cabin.

Two weeks after Elva’s death, Ozella began drawing a hooked shape in the margins of her ledger.

She drew it again and again.

Halcom later counted the repetitions.

Between the spring of 1929 and the fall of 1930, the shape appeared 3,412 times.

It was one of the symbols on the walls.

By the summer of 1930, Ozella was writing openly about the carving.

She and Verley had begun with the front door, following their mother’s instructions.

The signs had not held.

That was the word Ozella used.

Held.

Within a week they added marks around the windows.

Then around the chimney.

Then around the beds.

Verley said they were only being careful.

Ozella wrote that she knew better.

Her sister was frightened.

Then, on August 9, something changed.

Ozella came down from the loft that morning and found a mark beside the woodstove.

Neither sister had cut it.

The groove was fresh.

Wood shavings still lay beneath it.

Verley suggested that one of them might have carved it during the night and forgotten.

Ozella inspected both knives.

Neither had fresh wood on the blade.

More troubling still, the symbol did not resemble anything they themselves had been making.

Another appeared on August 14.

In early September, 3 appeared during a single night.

By October, the sisters were finding new cuts most mornings.

Always fresh.

Always on an area of wood they had left untouched.

They began sleeping in shifts.

Verley kept the first watch.

Ozella kept the second.

Neither saw anyone make the marks.

They merely found them in the hour before dawn, after the fire had burned low and the interior of the cabin turned gray.

On October 22, Ozella resolved to watch the north wall continuously.

She sat on a stool near the woodstove with the lamp turned low.

According to her ledger, she did not turn her head.

She did not sleep.

Near 4 in the morning, she blinked.

When she opened her eyes, there was a new mark in the wall.

It lay 6 in from the place where her hand rested.

Ozella did not wake Verley.

In the morning her sister discovered it.

Verley asked when the mark had appeared.

Ozella said she did not know.

That evening she wrote that she had lied to her sister for the first time in her life.

She had done so because she feared that if she told Verley the truth, they would both understand something neither of them was prepared to say.

Whatever was making the marks was already inside.

Part 2

By November, Ozella Combs had begun counting.

The strange carvings did not appear at random. Some mornings there was 1. Other mornings there were 3, or 7. Sometimes days passed with nothing new, followed by a cluster of marks appearing between midnight and dawn.

She kept a tally in the rear pages of the ledger.

At first she seems to have believed the number itself mattered. Then the entries grew more deliberate.

By early December, she had concluded that the sequence was diminishing.

It was a count.

A countdown.

She never wrote what she expected to happen when it ended.

Perhaps she did not know.

Perhaps writing the thought would have made it too real.

On December 14, another event entered the ledger.

Near dusk, Verley went to the smokehouse to bring in side meat for supper.

The building stood a short distance from the cabin, far enough that trees and falling ground partly concealed it.

Minutes passed.

Verley did not return.

Ozella opened the front door and called her sister’s name.

An answer came from the direction of the smokehouse.

Ozella went back inside.

Approximately 10 minutes later, Verley entered carrying the meat.

She was cold.

The sisters prepared supper.

Only afterward, while cleaning the dishes, did Verley mention that the smokehouse door had been standing open when she arrived.

She had closed it that morning.

She was certain.

She went inside anyway.

While there, she heard Ozella call her name.

The voice came from the direction of the cabin.

Verley answered.

Ozella had heard Verley’s voice from the smokehouse.

Verley had heard Ozella’s voice from the house.

Neither woman had called.

Ozella recorded that they sat at the kitchen table for a long while without discussing the obvious conclusion.

Something on Sourwood Ridge had called to each sister in the voice of the other.

Winter deepened.

The sisters continued carving.

Their routine in those final weeks can be reconstructed only in fragments. Neighbors occasionally saw one or both women below the ridge, but their visits became rare. They still attended church for a time. They still traded. Nothing in the recollections of people who spoke to them suggests madness or confusion.

What people did remember, afterward, was fatigue.

Verley looked thinner.

Ozella no longer sang much while working.

Once, at Emiline Napier’s house, Ozella stopped in the middle of supper and looked toward the ceiling.

Emiline asked whether she had heard something.

Ozella smiled and said no.

The conversation continued.

No one thought much of it then.

The final entry in the ledger was dated February 2, 1931.

The handwriting was recognizably Ozella’s, but the pencil strokes wandered.

The count that morning had reached 1.

The final mark had appeared on the inside of the front door.

She and Verley had barred themselves in.

They intended to remain inside until whatever was coming had passed.

Verley had told her not to look at the door.

Ozella wrote that she would not.

The entry ended there.

Nine days later, Emiline Napier saw no smoke.

Halcom took the ledger down Sourwood Ridge in his saddlebag.

He did not place it in the county evidence file.

His official report described the cabin, the weather, the interior, and the doctor’s conclusions, but the ledger remained in a locked drawer in Halcom’s home.

The county record called the deaths an accidental exposure during a severe winter storm.

Halcom added one recommendation.

The cabin should remain standing.

No one should enter without cause.

He also arranged for a notation to be placed in the county assessor’s book stating that the property was not to be sold or leased without written approval from the sheriff.

For as long as Halcom lived, the instruction held.

Spring opened the roads.

Snow retreated from the hollows.

The streams rose.

Dogwood bloomed.

The lives below Sourwood Ridge resumed.

Halcom did not.

He made copies of 42 symbols from the walls. His pencil reproductions were painstakingly exact. He wrote to a professor at the University of Kentucky in Lexington, describing the marks without naming the sisters or identifying the precise location of the cabin.

He asked whether the symbols belonged to any known alphabet, folk practice, religious tradition, or indigenous writing system.

He requested discretion.

There was no reply.

Halcom wrote again.

Still nothing.

Nearly a year passed.

In the spring of 1932, he traveled to Lexington himself.

The professor received him in an office lined with books.

For a time their conversation was ordinary.

Then Halcom placed the drawings on the desk.

The professor looked down.

According to Halcom’s later notes, the man’s expression altered so slightly that another person might not have noticed. But Halcom had spent much of his adult life watching faces across desks, in doorways, beside bodies, and in rooms where someone had decided not to tell the truth.

The professor examined the pages for a long time.

Then he asked where the markings had been found.

Halcom told him.

The professor gathered the drawings together and pushed them back across the desk.

He said he could not help.

Halcom asked why.

The professor told him that if the symbols were what he believed them to be, no good would come from drawing further attention to them.

He advised Halcom to return home.

Burn the copies.

Say nothing more.

Halcom asked what the marks meant.

The professor stood.

He opened his office door.

The meeting was over.

Halcom carried the drawings back to Kentucky.

He did not burn them.

He also did not return to the Combs cabin for 9 years.

In the summer of 1940, a hunter named Peavey Ingram came to see him.

Ingram was 29 years old, born in the county, and regarded as a man unlikely to frighten himself with shadows. He had been following a wounded deer along Sourwood Ridge late one afternoon when the trail brought him unexpectedly into the cup where the cabin stood.

He knew the story.

Everyone did, though people seldom told it directly.

Ingram stopped at the edge of the yard.

He did not approach the door.

There was no snow that season, but the porch caught his attention anyway.

The boards were clean.

The wind had been dropping pine needles and dry leaves throughout the afternoon. They covered the yard and gathered along the sides of the cabin.

None lay on the porch.

The planks appeared recently swept.

As Ingram watched, a noise came from inside.

He later described it as a careful wooden sound.

A cut.

A pause.

Another cut.

The noise continued slowly, as though someone inside were working with great patience.

Ingram counted 13 strokes.

Then he walked away.

He did not run.

He simply turned and began down the ridge and did not stop until he reached his own kitchen.

Halcom climbed Sourwood later that summer.

He went alone.

When he reached the clearing, the porch was bare.

He remained in the yard.

He did not enter.

For several minutes he stood at the door and listened.

The cabin was silent.

He returned home and wrote a single conclusion in the private notes kept in his desk.

He believed the count had begun again.

He did not know what came at the end.

From then until his retirement in 1949, Halcom maintained a separate record of incidents connected to Sourwood Ridge.

The notes eventually filled 11 pages.

Many reports were no more than rumor: lights in timber, missing animals, voices carried strangely by weather. Halcom did not treat every tale as evidence.

A few he recorded in detail.

In the summer of 1934, Iva Blevens, a 62-year-old widow living on the far side of Cold Feather Hollow, reported hearing her own name called from somewhere high on the ridge.

The night was still.

The voice was hers.

She recognized not only its sound but its particular manner of saying her name.

Iva did not answer.

She closed her door, took out her Bible, and remained awake until daylight.

In 1937, a trapper named Alice Wooten abandoned a line he had worked for years along the north face of Sourwood.

He moved to Ohio.

Before leaving, he told Halcom that on his final morning in the mountains he found one of his fox traps sprung.

The animal was gone.

Beside the trap stood a sourwood tree.

Freshly cut into its trunk was a symbol Wooten did not recognize.

Sap was still rising from the wound.

He left the trap where it lay.

Halcom went to the site.

The carving remained.

He copied it into his notebook.

It matched a sign from the Combs cabin.

In 1939, schoolteacher Zelthia Mullins wrote Halcom a letter. She had spent part of the summer with her sister near Cold Feather and had discovered a wooden post in a stand of timber below the ridge.

It was not attached to a fence.

It stood by itself.

The post came roughly to her hip and was carved with several figures.

Zelthia copied them as accurately as she could into the letter.

Halcom placed her drawing beside his own copies.

The symbols matched.

On the following Saturday he searched for the post.

He could not locate it.

He went back 3 times over the next year.

It was gone.

In his notes he wrote that someone had removed it.

He did not speculate who.

The most detailed account after the sisters’ deaths came from Marcus Ammon of the State Road Commission.

In the summer of 1944, Ammon was sent to Sourwood Ridge to determine whether a proper access road could be built across the upper ground.

He remained on the mountain for 2 days.

Then he came down.

His final report consisted largely of practical surveying language, except for its conclusion.

The ridge, he wrote, was unsuitable for development of any kind and should remain as it stood.

No engineering explanation adequately supported that recommendation.

Halcom traveled to Frankfort that October and found Ammon in his office.

The surveyor had been drinking.

After shutting the door, Ammon asked whether Halcom was the constable who had investigated the deaths of the Combs sisters.

Halcom said he was.

Ammon told him what happened on the second night of the survey.

He had been lying in his tent when he heard a voice among the trees.

At first he thought another worker was awake.

Then he realized the sound was coming from farther up the ridge.

Someone was speaking quietly.

The rhythm seemed repetitive.

After listening for a while, Ammon decided the voice was counting.

The words were in no language he recognized.

He put on his boots, lit a lamp, and followed the sound.

It led him between the sourwoods until he reached a circular patch of earth approximately 6 ft across.

No leaves covered the ground inside it.

Nothing grew there.

The counting stopped when he approached.

At the center of the circle lay a small object made of wood.

Ammon would say only that it appeared to have been left for him.

Halcom asked what it looked like.

Ammon refused to describe it.

He had not picked it up.

He turned away and went back to his camp.

The counting followed him.

Not footsteps.

Not movement in the brush.

Only the voice.

It continued outside his tent after he lay down.

Ammon told Halcom it counted him to sleep.

At daylight he packed his equipment and walked off the ridge without turning around.

For some time the 2 men sat silently in the office.

Then Ammon added one thing.

“Whatever it is up there,” he said, “it knows how many of us there are. And it knows the order we go in.”

He opened the door.

Halcom left.

Marcus Ammon died of a heart attack in 1946 before reaching 60.

Two years before his death, another letter had reached Halcom from outside Kentucky.

The writer was Delia Yerri, related to the Combs family through marriage.

She lived in Indiana.

Delia asked whether the cabin was still standing.

For 3 consecutive nights, she said, she had dreamed of her long-dead aunt Elva.

In each dream Elva asked her to send a message to the constable.

Keep the cabin door closed.

Halcom replied that the door was closed.

He did not tell Delia the full truth.

The bar Verley and Ozella had set in 1931 had broken when Halcom forced his way inside.

The following spring, Sylvanus Boggs repaired the door at Halcom’s expense.

On Halcom’s orders it was secured from the outside.

No one was supposed to enter again.

Halcom also did not mention that during an earlier visit he had discovered 3 fresh strokes carved into the porch step.

He cut the section of wood away with his pocketknife and carried it home.

The fragment went into the same wooden box as the drawings.

In the summer of 1947, an itinerant preacher named Barl Trart arrived in the county for a revival.

He was not local and had no patience for the quiet agreement that had formed around Sourwood Ridge.

Against advice, he announced that he would climb to the Combs place and pray over it.

He intended, he said, to set whatever troubled that ground to rest.

He left in the morning.

Darkness had fallen before he returned.

He would not say what occurred.

People who saw him that night agreed only that he seemed changed.

He preached one more service the following Sunday.

Halfway through a sentence, he stopped.

He stood behind the pulpit for nearly 1 minute without speaking.

Then he closed his Bible, walked out of the church, got into his automobile, and drove home to Tennessee.

His widow later said that for the rest of his life he refused to sit in a room with an open door behind him.

He would rearrange the furniture first.

Constable Cordell Halcom died during the winter of 1953.

He was 73.

His wife had died before him. His children were grown. The youngest son, by then a lawyer in Hazard, came to sort through his father’s possessions.

In the bottom drawer of Halcom’s desk he discovered an unmarked wooden box.

Inside were the private notes, drawings, letters, the piece of carved porch step, copies of documents, and Ozella Combs’s ledger.

The son read enough to understand that none of it belonged to the ordinary paperwork of a county constable.

He was a practical man.

He did not know what to do with it.

So he kept it.

That decision mattered because there was almost nothing left at the courthouse.

In the summer of 1938, fire destroyed the county records in Whitesburg dating from 1819 through 1935.

The official Combs file vanished with them.

What survived did so because Halcom had distrusted the official record enough to keep another one at home.

His grandson, Corus Halcom, inherited the material later. Corus taught history at a small college in eastern Tennessee. During the 1970s he spent years arranging his grandfather’s notes and comparing them with whatever external records he could locate.

He produced a monograph.

He never published it.

A few copies circulated among colleagues.

From those pages emerged evidence that whatever had occurred in the Combs cabin might not have begun with Verley and Ozella.

In Perry County, in the summer of 1897, an unmarried woman named Mahala Sloan had been found dead after a hard winter.

Her cabin door had been barred.

The walls had been carved.

The constable wrote exposure on his report.

In Buchanan County, Virginia, a folklorist working during the 1960s interviewed an elderly midwife who described signs her grandmother had taught her to cut around the doorway of any mountain house where a person had died alone.

The woman had not been prompted with drawings.

Several of the marks she described resembled those Halcom copied from Sourwood Ridge.

Then Corus found the photographs.

They had been taken in 1922 by a geologist named Frell Kretic while working near the West Virginia line.

One image showed a remote rock face.

Cut into the stone was a sequence of 7 symbols.

Kretic noted in his field book that the carvings seemed very old.

Local residents refused to approach the rock.

They also refused to tell him what the marks meant.

The sequence was the same one found in the Combs cabin.

The sequence Verley and Ozella had carved 220 times into the partition wall.

For Corus Halcom, that should have settled only one question.

The signs had not originated with the sisters.

Instead, it opened another.

How long had people in those mountains known them?

The answer, when it came, would reach backward much farther than the Combs family.

But before Corus found it, Sourwood Ridge produced one last official case.

It began in October of 1955, when a timber company received permission to survey the upper ground.

Cordell Halcom was dead.

The old warning in the county assessor’s book had disappeared.

And 6 men climbed toward the cabin carrying tents, survey chains, stakes, provisions for a week, and no reason to believe they were walking into anything except timber.

Part 3

The survey crew reached Sourwood Ridge on October 15, 1955.

Their foreman was Otis Slimp, 54 years old, Tennessee-born, Baptist, and by the accounts of men who had worked beside him, difficult to frighten.

Five men accompanied him.

They were all younger, mostly in their 20s and 30s, and all had worked with Slimp before. The company regarded them as an experienced crew.

They carried 3 tents, 2 mules, enough food for 1 week, and the usual surveying equipment.

Their assignment was straightforward.

Walk the upper ridge from the shoulder to the crown.

Mark passable ground.

Determine whether a logging road could be cut without excessive grading.

Return no later than October 22.

The season was mild.

There was no snow.

Two of the younger men carried fishing poles for use in the creeks if there was spare time.

No one at the timber company considered the job dangerous.

The crew spent 1 night on the ridge.

Only Otis Slimp came down.

On the morning of October 17, he entered the courthouse at Whitesburg alone.

His clothes were dirty from the mountain.

He would not tell the clerk what had happened to the others.

He would not say whether they were dead, missing, injured, or still on Sourwood Ridge.

He asked for paper.

The clerk gave him a sheet.

Slimp sat down and wrote slowly.

The clerk later remembered the handwriting because of how careful it seemed.

The note stated that the survey had ended.

The ridge was not to be entered again.

Slimp had left something on the porch of the cabin near the top.

Whatever it was, he wrote, would explain itself to anyone foolish enough to go and look.

He signed the paper.

He handed it to the clerk.

Then he walked out.

No deputy stopped him.

At that point there was no evidence that a crime had occurred.

Slimp drove south.

Three days later, someone recognized him at a gasoline station in northern Georgia.

After that, no confirmed sighting was ever reported.

No one went to the Combs cabin to see what he had left on the porch.

A formal inquiry began into the disappearance of the other 5 men, although later records disagree on whether 1 worker had turned back before the first night, leaving 4 who were truly missing with Slimp. The surviving county paperwork concerned itself with names, employment records, equipment, and presumed routes.

Search parties worked parts of the ridge.

They found no bodies.

The investigation remained open for 2 years.

Eventually it was closed for lack of evidence.

The families were given the explanation most likely to fit the available facts.

The men had probably suffered an accident in rough country. Their remains might have been scattered or concealed by weather, animals, or the following spring’s water.

There was nothing else official to offer.

Most relatives accepted the explanation because grief cannot wait indefinitely for a better one.

One woman did not.

Her husband, Hershel Kilburn, was the youngest of the missing men.

In the spring of 1956, his wife traveled to Whitesburg and asked to see the investigation file.

The clerk showed her what the office possessed.

It was not much.

She asked for the note written by Otis Slimp.

The clerk went to the drawer where it had been kept.

The note was gone.

He was certain it had been there earlier that day.

He searched the drawer.

Then another.

He checked files on the adjoining desk.

He went through papers stacked in the office.

The note did not reappear.

He apologized.

Hershel’s wife remained in the courthouse for a long time.

Finally she stood, thanked him, and returned to Louisville.

On the anniversary of her husband’s disappearance, she wrote to the county attorney.

She asked whether anything new had been found.

The following year she wrote again.

Then again.

She continued for 11 years.

The county answered the first 3 letters.

After that, replies stopped.

In 1967, she sent the last one.

She was ill by then and did not believe she would write again.

She asked only that something be placed on the record.

Her husband had been a good man.

She believed something existed on Sourwood Ridge that no official wanted to name.

If the county attorney knew what had happened and had chosen not to tell her, she hoped he would remember that decision at the end of his own life.

She died the following year.

Her letter survived.

When Corus Halcom examined the remaining county material in 1972, he copied it into his monograph.

By then, nearly everything connected with the original Combs investigation had passed out of living memory.

Emiline Napier was gone.

Sylvanus Boggs was gone.

Dr. Whitten was gone.

Reverend Coldiron was gone.

Cordell Halcom was gone.

What remained were papers, recollections, carved marks, photographs, and the cabin.

The cabin itself had endured in a manner that struck people as unusual even if they refused to assign meaning to it.

Mountain houses abandoned for decades do not ordinarily remain intact without repair. Roofs sag. Chimneys separate. Rot begins at the sills. Vines pull at the boards. Animals enter. Snow and rain finish what neglect begins.

The Combs place weathered more slowly.

Its roof held for years beyond what people expected.

The walls remained standing.

Families who owned surrounding parcels developed an unspoken understanding about the cup of ground below the crown of Sourwood Ridge.

They did not build there.

They did not log there.

They did not hunt near the cabin if another route was available.

Nothing formal bound them.

No surviving law forbade entry.

The arrangement passed by habit.

A father told a son.

An aunt told a niece.

A surveyor marked another slope.

A timber crew chose a different stand.

The upper cup remained.

So did the story of the porch.

Hunters occasionally reported that it was clean when the rest of the clearing was covered in leaves.

A few said they had seen no broom.

Others declined to discuss the place at all.

One man who climbed partway toward the ridge in the early 1960s later said he heard someone striking wood slowly somewhere above him.

He turned around before seeing the cabin.

Another hunter reported hearing a woman’s voice from the timber.

He thought it belonged to his wife until he remembered that she was 20 miles away.

He did not answer.

Such reports are difficult to weigh.

Once a place acquires a reputation, every snapping branch becomes evidence to somebody.

Corus Halcom understood that.

His training was in history, not folklore, and the monograph he prepared during the 1970s was cautious almost to the point of frustration. He separated testimony from physical documentation whenever he could. He noted discrepancies. He admitted when a claim rested on memory alone.

The marks troubled him because the marks were not memories.

They had been copied.

Some had been photographed.

Some survived in physical form.

One fragment remained in the wooden box taken from his grandfather’s desk.

Most important, the designs appeared in places that had no obvious connection to Verley and Ozella Combs.

Corus spent years looking for Elva’s missing second sign.

He never found it.

He searched family papers.

He contacted descendants of relatives who had moved away.

He examined regional folklore collections, missionary records, old medical journals, church notes, county histories, private correspondence, and material gathered by folklorists before mountain customs disappeared into radio roads, electricity, and modern medicine.

There were hints.

Nothing conclusive.

Older residents sometimes remembered signs cut into doorframes.

A few called them keeping marks.

Some were intended to protect a newborn.

Some were said to confuse a wandering spirit after death.

Others were supposed to prevent something unnamed from crossing a threshold.

The explanations contradicted each other.

That did not particularly bother Corus.

Folk practices often outlive the reasons behind them.

A grandmother teaches a motion.

A daughter repeats it.

A granddaughter remembers the shape but not the story.

Within 3 generations, a warning becomes decoration.

The Combs women were unusual because they appeared to have preserved both instruction and urgency.

Elva did not merely show her daughters a symbol.

She left written directions on her deathbed.

Bar the door at first frost.

Cut the sign on every side a thing can come in.

If the sign does not hold, use the second.

Something in that language mattered.

Not someone.

A thing.

And not if the sign fails.

If it does not hold.

The word appeared again in Ozella’s ledger.

That repetition convinced Corus that the mother and daughters were describing an inherited practice using inherited language.

The practice itself was older than any of them.

How much older became clearer in 1968.

That year, an archaeological excavation took place at a rock shelter in eastern Kentucky. Among the carvings documented near the mouth of the shelter was a figure that drew little public attention at the time.

The carving was weathered.

Its archaeological context was dated independently to somewhere between 800 and 900 of the common era.

The figure matched one of the recurring symbols associated with the Combs case.

It was the same hooked form Ozella had drawn 3,412 times in the margins of her ledger.

The same basic figure appeared in Frell Kretic’s 1922 photograph from near the West Virginia line.

Whatever the symbol meant, it was old.

Older than the Combs cabin.

Older than Letcher County.

Older than the state of Kentucky.

Older than the English language in which Ozella tried to describe the leaning sound.

Corus did not claim that this proved anything supernatural.

No serious historian could.

A repeated symbol can travel through families for centuries without anyone remembering its original meaning. Shapes that appear identical may arise independently. Oral traditions change. Old marks are easily misread by people who want them to fit a pattern.

He wrote all of that.

Then he returned to the evidence he could not set aside.

The cabin door had been barred from the inside.

The sisters had carved protective signs over nearly every exposed surface.

Some carvings had appeared, according to Ozella’s ledger, without either woman making them.

The final unknown sign appeared on the inside of the barred door.

The inner face of that door bore long gouges resembling the marks of claws against a tree.

After the cabin was abandoned, witnesses repeatedly described the porch as swept.

Peavey Ingram heard 13 cuts from inside.

Marcus Ammon heard counting in an unknown language and abandoned a state survey.

A preacher climbed the ridge intending to cleanse it and came down unwilling ever again to sit with an open door behind him.

Otis Slimp took a survey crew up in 1955.

The others did not return.

Slimp left a written warning and disappeared.

None of those facts, taken separately, proves very much.

Together they form the shape that Halcom had spent the last 22 years of his life refusing to name.

That shape begins with the sisters’ parents.

There is no surviving account from their father explaining whether he knew what Elva believed about Sourwood Ridge.

He built the cabin in 1894.

Whether he chose the upper cup knowingly or simply because it offered spring water and protected ground cannot be established.

The family lived there for decades without any recorded disaster.

Yet Elva possessed instructions that were specific to the house.

The first frost mattered.

The door mattered.

The points of entry mattered.

She knew a first sign and a second.

Her daughters obeyed those instructions only after she died.

That suggests a possibility Corus considered but never stated as fact.

Perhaps Elva herself had been doing something each winter.

Perhaps Verley and Ozella did not know.

A mark renewed here.

Another cut behind a piece of furniture.

A door barred on a certain night.

An old woman waking before her daughters and stepping outside to examine the porch.

If so, whatever system she maintained ended when she did.

Within weeks of her burial, Ozella began recording new sounds.

By the following year, the sisters were carving openly.

The implications remained only implications.

There is no diary from Elva.

There is no testimony from the father.

There is only the foolscap fragment.

There is also the matter of the clean porch.

The first people to discover the sisters noticed it immediately.

Snow stood deep around the cabin.

Yet the porch was bare.

That detail may be the least dramatic in Halcom’s notes and the hardest to explain without adding something not in the record.

A porch can be swept.

Snow can be blown away.

Leaves can be carried by wind.

But through the decades, different witnesses used the same word.

Swept.

Not windblown.

Not clear.

Swept.

Peavey Ingram saw it in summer.

Halcom saw it.

Others claimed the same after the cabin had been empty for years.

Whatever occurred there seemed to leave the house neglected in every ordinary way except that one.

The porch remained ready for somebody to arrive.

There were stories Corus refused to include in the body of his monograph.

He placed a few in an appendix.

One came from a family living several miles away. During a winter night in the late 1950s, their dogs began barking toward Sourwood Ridge.

All 3 animals stopped at the same moment.

They remained silent until morning.

Another concerned a boy who claimed to have found a carved stick in a creek below the mountain and thrown it back because it felt warm despite lying in snowmelt.

There was no object to examine.

No second witness.

Corus listed such stories without endorsing them.

More valuable to him were the older comparisons.

Mahala Sloan’s 1897 death in Perry County.

The Buchanan County midwife.

Kretic’s photograph.

The rock shelter.

Taken together, they suggested that the practices surrounding the Combs cabin belonged not to one family but to a much wider belt of mountain tradition.

What the traditions guarded against remained unclear.

No consistent name appeared.

That absence may have been deliberate.

In several Appalachian folk traditions, names carry power in both directions. To name a thing is to identify it, but it is also to acknowledge it.

The old people who taught the signs may simply have considered a name unnecessary.

A thing outside the door did not need to be understood.

It needed to remain outside.

Ozella’s ledger is more disturbing because it records the moment that distinction failed.

At first the danger was beyond the walls.

The leaning sound came from outside.

The signs were placed at thresholds.

Then fresh carvings appeared indoors.

Then voices began crossing distance.

Ozella heard Verley where Verley was not.

Verley heard Ozella where Ozella was not.

Finally, the last mark appeared on the inner face of the door.

The sisters barred themselves inside anyway.

Perhaps it was the only choice their mother had given them.

Perhaps by then the bar was no longer intended to keep something out.

It may have been intended to keep the sisters from answering.

One line in the final ledger entry deserves particular care.

Verley told Ozella not to look at the door.

Not to open it.

Not to touch it.

Not to listen.

Not to pray.

Do not look.

That is what Ozella chose to record.

The sentence suggests that by February 2 the women believed sight itself carried some danger, or that something about the door had changed.

There is no description of what they saw.

No final page.

No note written between February 2 and the day Emiline stopped seeing smoke.

Only the physical evidence remained.

Beds dragged away from the walls.

Protective circles around water and salt.

Thousands of cuts.

The single pattern repeated 220 times.

And the gouges.

Dr. Whitten’s comparison to a bear climbing a tree was only that: a comparison.

The marks were not identified as animal scratches.

They were simply deep enough and irregular enough to remind him of them.

But he also knew which side of the door he was examining.

He knew the bar had been inside.

He knew where the sisters had been found.

And when the time came to write a cause of death, he chose the word exposure.

It is an ordinary word.

That may have been its purpose.

Ordinary words close files.

They allow a clerk to place paper in a drawer.

They permit a physician to return to his patients.

They let families bury the dead without adding a question no preacher can answer.

Halcom used the word too.

His official report did not contain the professor in Lexington.

It did not contain Elva’s instructions.

It did not contain Ozella’s countdown.

It did not contain the copies of the symbols.

Those went home with him.

The official record later burned.

The private one survived.

Whether Halcom intended that survival is impossible to know.

He could have destroyed the box at any time.

The professor told him to burn the drawings.

He did not.

He could have destroyed Ozella’s ledger.

He kept it.

He could have stopped recording the stories that reached him from Sourwood Ridge.

Instead he wrote them down for nearly 2 decades.

A man may keep a secret because he wants it forgotten.

He may also keep it because he fears forgetting would be worse.

Corus Halcom died in 2008.

His monograph never became a formal publication.

Copies circulated quietly.

By then many details had become impossible to verify. County lines changed, properties passed through families, witnesses died, and old cabins across eastern Kentucky disappeared under vines or collapsed into their own cellars.

The Combs place was said to remain.

Reports continued occasionally, though none carried the weight of Halcom’s original notes.

Hunters spoke of a structure in a stand of old sourwoods.

Some found the trail.

Some turned back.

One account described the porch as free of leaves after an autumn storm.

Another described a sound from inside the walls, too regular to be an animal.

No recent account has resolved what happened there in 1931.

Perhaps none can.

The historical core of the story remains small enough to state plainly.

Verley Combs was 34.

Ozella was 30.

They had lived nearly all their lives on Sourwood Ridge.

Their parents died within 6 months of each other.

Their mother left instructions concerning signs and a barred door.

Ozella recorded unfamiliar tracks, unexplained sounds, new carvings, copied voices, and a numerical pattern she came to believe was counting downward.

On February 2, 1931, she recorded the number 1.

The sisters barred themselves inside.

Nine days later, there was no smoke.

Their door remained locked from within.

Their cabin was covered with carvings.

Neither woman survived.

What followed was not one continuous haunting but a sequence of small disturbances scattered across decades.

A voice on a summer night.

A carved tree.

A missing post.

A surveyor counting sounds in the dark.

A dream sent from Indiana.

A preacher who would never again sit with a doorway behind him.

A timber crew that went up with ordinary equipment and did not all come down.

A note that vanished from a courthouse drawer.

Each event might be reduced to coincidence, fear, embellishment, or the natural growth of a local legend.

The symbols resist reduction only because they existed before the legend.

They existed before Verley and Ozella.

They existed before Elva.

Kretic photographed them in stone in 1922.

The 1968 excavation placed a matching figure in a context more than 1,000 years old.

Whatever meaning the form once carried had survived generations of forgetting.

It passed from stone to wood.

From grandmother to daughter.

From mother to daughters.

From the wall of a cabin to the margin of a ledger.

Perhaps the shape did not represent the thing at all.

Perhaps it represented the act of keeping it away.

That distinction matters.

It would mean the oldest evidence is not evidence of something people worshipped or summoned.

It is evidence that they were afraid of it.

There is no surviving source stating what the count measured.

Ozella believed it was approaching an end.

Marcus Ammon later heard something counting beneath its breath.

Otis Slimp took multiple men onto the same ground, and only he returned.

Halcom wondered whether the count had begun again.

But numbers can invite patterns where none exist.

It is possible that Ozella, exhausted by months of watching, imposed order on random marks.

Possible that Ingram’s 13 cuts were the movements of an animal.

Possible that Ammon heard a bird, an insect, a man beyond the trees, or the pulse of his own blood in the dark.

Possible that the missing survey workers died by ordinary accident.

Possible.

The record permits those answers.

It simply does not require them.

What remains most difficult is the private behavior of people who had little to gain from invention.

Dr. Whitten did not publish a sensational account.

He wrote exposure and went home.

Reverend Coldiron did not preach about what he saw.

He discarded his boots.

Marcus Ammon did not seek attention.

He recommended abandoning the road.

Barl Trart arrived eager to confront whatever local superstition he believed haunted the cabin.

He left Kentucky.

Otis Slimp offered no story.

He wrote a warning and disappeared.

And Cordell Halcom, who had been elected repeatedly because neighbors regarded him as a careful man, spent 22 years keeping 2 versions of the same case.

The public version said the Combs sisters died of exposure.

The private version kept asking why.

Perhaps that is the only honest way to leave the matter.

The door at the Combs cabin was barred.

The marks were inside.

The women had been warned by their mother before either of them understood why the warning mattered.

They followed her instructions.

First the signs went around the door.

Then the windows.

Then the chimney.

Then their beds.

Then the water.

Then the salt.

They carved until almost no unmarked place remained.

Still, something answered.

Still, something left fresh cuts.

Still, the count descended.

The oldest mark found in the later archaeological record had rested in stone for centuries before Verley or Ozella were born.

Its maker left no explanation.

Only the shape survived.

There is a certain restraint in that silence.

Whatever the people who first carved it knew, they did not preserve the knowledge in words that reached the present.

Maybe words were never the important part.

Perhaps the instruction was always simpler.

Keep the door barred.

Mark every place a thing can come in.

If the first sign does not hold, use the second.

And if the second does not hold, there is no surviving instruction for what comes after.

On Sourwood Ridge, the upper ground remained undeveloped long after timber elsewhere had been cut.

The trail faded.

The old agreements softened into family habits.

People who had never met Cordell Halcom continued choosing other routes.

The mountain changed around the cabin.

Trees grew.

Trees fell.

Creeks shifted after storms.

Roads reached places they had not reached in 1931.

Electric lines came through the county.

Coal altered whole slopes.

Families left and returned.

Yet the cup of ground below the crown was largely left alone.

The cabin, according to the last accounts attached to Corus Halcom’s papers, still stood among the sourwoods.

No one could say with certainty who maintained it.

No one admitted repairing it.

No deed recorded a caretaker.

And more than one person approaching through fallen leaves claimed to notice the same thing Emiline Napier, Sylvanus Boggs, Wardell Sizemore, and Cordell Halcom noticed when they climbed through the February snow in 1931.

The yard looked abandoned.

The trees stood close.

The windows were dark.

But the porch boards were clean.

As if somebody had swept them.

As if somebody had been expecting company.

Or as if, after all those years, something inside still understood the importance of keeping the threshold clear.