Eric Halloway attended her funeral. There were six people present, including the priest. No family, no friends, just social workers and a few curious locals who had heard about this strange woman who never aged. She was buried in a public cemetery on the outskirts of town, in an unmarked grave. Halloway stood at the edge of the plot after everyone had left and later wrote that he felt something shift in the air as soon as the first shovelful of dirt touched the coffin. Not a sound, not a movement, but a presence, suddenly absent, as if a pressure were being released. He described it as the sensation of a held breath finally being exhaled. He stayed until the grave was filled, then returned to his car. He never wrote the book he had planned. He never released the full recording of his conversation with Sarah. In 2019, he moved to the Pacific Northwest and stopped researching Appalachian history altogether. When asked why, he simply replied, “Some stories aren’t meant to be told.” Some things are better left buried. Family
But the story didn’t end with Sarah’s death. In 2020, a surveyor working in the area that was once Hollow Ridge reported finding the remains of the old Dalhart estate. The barn where the children had been found was gone, having collapsed decades earlier, but the main house was still standing, precariously. He went inside out of curiosity. There, he found walls covered with the same symbols that one of the Dalhart children had obsessively drawn in the Riverside Mansion. Hundreds of them were carved into the wood, stretching from floor to ceiling in every room. He photographed them and sent the pictures to a linguist at Virginia Commonwealth University. The linguist couldn’t identify the language, but she noted that the symbols followed a consistent grammatical structure, suggesting they were communicative, not decorative. She also noted that many of the symbols appeared to be instructions: instructions for something, a process, a ritual.
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