December 5, 1884. The eight men crested the final ridge and looked down into the basin, and the smell reached them before they saw anything clearly—unwashed bodies, spoiled food, and something else, something Sheriff Robert Ledbetter’s deputy William Hayes later struggled to describe in his diary. Not just wrong, he wrote. Something mis.
The hunting party had found the girl four days earlier, on December 3, a filthy young woman in a torn nightgown shivering in the December cold at the edge of the Blackwood property. She had fled into the trees when they approached, but not before James Holloway, a man with one year of medical school at Washington University behind him, had taken careful note of her. Her eyes were set too far apart. Her jaw jutted forward at an odd angle.
Her hands were misshapen, fingers of uneven length. And she walked in a shuffling gait, knees turning inward, as though her entire skeleton had grown wrong. She seemed terrified not just of the men but of the forest itself, staring at the trees as if they might come alive. It was the behavior, Holloway wrote in his sworn statement, of someone who had never once stepped beyond an enclosed space.
Now, as Ledbetter’s party descended into the basin on foot—the October floods had washed out the road, forcing them to abandon their horses two miles back—the figures watching from the windows of the outlying cabins made no sound. They simply stood there, eyes fixed on the approaching men. The group had come to investigate reports of a woman in distress. What they found instead would take the rest of their lives to understand, and most of the paperwork documenting it would vanish within two years.
The Blackwood family had arrived in the Ozarks in 1851, appearing in a census that year as Josiah Blackwood, his wife Margaret, and three children, claiming they sought isolation for religious purposes. The census taker noted the reason, found it common enough, and asked nothing more. A single entry in the Methodist Episcopal church records in Hollister described the family as peculiar in their behavior but steadfast in their faith. They bought 156 acres for a surprisingly small sum from a frontiersman named Ezekiel Porter, who according to the deed was eager to leave the property immediately.
Porter left behind improvements—a two-room cabin and a partially built barn—which suited Josiah fine. A note in the margin of the property transfer document, written in a different hand than the main text, read simply: Porter claimed the valley was somehow not right. Porter vanished from the record until 1953, when researcher Dr. James Harrington found a death certificate from Sacramento, California, for an Ezekiel Porter who reportedly fled from Devil’s Own Hollow in Missouri in 1852.
The timing and the specific reference suggested a connection, though nothing could be confirmed absolutely. What Porter experienced in the basin was never recorded. His hasty departure and apparent flight across the continent pointed to profound disturbance. The valley itself was a natural fortress.
The Blackwood land sat in a box canyon, steep ridges rising more than 240 meters from the valley floor on three sides. The only approach followed Stillwater Creek, a tributary of the James River, through a narrow eastern passage. Harrington, who documented the case in his unpublished 1953 study Isolated Communities of the American Interior, described the location as pathologically perfect for a closed society. In his field notes he wrote about the acoustics: sounds did not carry beyond the ridge, and outside sounds did not easily penetrate the valley.
Complete sensory isolation from the wider world. At first, the Blackwoods seemed unremarkable frontier folk. Josiah was described by the circuit preacher Thaddeus Wilson in September 1852 as a man of imposing stature and serious bearing who declined, politely but firmly, an offer to visit his farm for prayer. We practice our own faith in our own way, he said.
In a border region full of religious eccentrics, this was hardly unusual. But over the years the family’s withdrawal deepened. By 1855 Josiah’s visits to town had dropped from monthly to quarterly. By 1860 he appeared only twice a year, always alone or with adult men presumed to be his sons.
When the October 1884 rains washed out the only access road, the family simply disappeared from contact. When Josiah failed to appear in Hollister in early November to pick up his mail and supplies, store owner Thomas Gardner mentioned it to Sheriff Ledbetter. The sheriff shrugged it off. Hill people often went months without showing their faces.
The diary of Margaret Blackwood, discovered in 1943 during a courthouse renovation where it had been misfiled among property deeds, tracked the family’s terrible transformation. The early entries were conventional—clearing land, planting crops, encounters with travelers. Josiah believes we have found our Eden, she wrote in April 1852. Here, far from the corrupting influence of cities and false churches, we can raise our children according to the true word.
But by 1857, the entries darkened. Josiah forbids the children now from speaking to travelers, she wrote in June. He says the outside world carries corruption in its breath. By 1860, contact with outsiders had vanished from the diary entirely.
In September 1858, Margaret wrote of a new development: Josiah has begun leading the family in what he calls the old worship. The children must stand in a circle while he reads from his private book and marks signs with ash on their foreheads. I fear this is not the Christianity we brought from Tennessee. The most disturbing entries appeared around 1861, when the eldest daughter, Rebecca, was about sixteen.
Josiah has announced that Rebecca will soon be joined, Margaret wrote. When I asked with whom, he looked at me as if I were speaking nonsense, and said: With the family, of course. As it was in the beginning. I do not understand his intention, but his eyes frightened me into silence.
By 1863, Margaret had begun to realize something was fundamentally wrong. What Josiah calls purity, I can no longer recognize as such, she wrote. The children now being born carry the mark of our sin in their own flesh. Yet he sees this as evidence of divine favor.
He says we are returning to the original state before the world was corrupted. Baptism records from a church in Hollister showed that Margaret bore seven more children after the family’s arrival in the Ozarks, the last recorded birth in 1863. The records existed only because Josiah had every newborn baptized, a practice he stopped that year for undocumented reasons. The clergy noted ominous details: child appears unhealthy, one wrote.
Infant displays unusual features. In 1862, one pastor recorded: Requested medical help for the child, which the father refused. May God have mercy on this family. Then there was the testimony of Elias Whitmore, postmaster of Hollister from 1855 until his death in 1892.
Questioned by investigators in November 1884, Whitmore described how the Blackwoods appeared in town three or four times a year, always arriving with heavily loaded wagons full of ginseng root, animal hides, and occasionally unusual carved objects that found eager buyers among tourists visiting the region’s new spa resorts. They kept to themselves, Whitmore said. Josiah did all the talking. The women—and there were several of them—never spoke.
Not once in all the years I knew them. They kept their faces hidden under their bonnets, even in the heat of summer. Whitmore noted that Josiah picked up mail but never sent any. He asked if there was mail for Blackwood, Whitmore recalled, but there never was.
Not once in nearly thirty years. Pressed on who the women accompanying Josiah were, Whitmore grew vague. There were resemblances, he said. More resemblances than there should have been, if you take my meaning.
Thomas Gardner, owner of the general store, agreed. The old man, Josiah, he grew old like anyone else, Gardner said. But the women with him, they had a sameness that wasn’t natural. Year after year they looked too much alike.
When pressed, Gardner added: I’m a God-fearing man. I don’t like to speak ill without certainty. But there weren’t enough different faces among them for the number there was. Gardner’s sales records, preserved in the Taney County Historical Society archives, documented the family’s purchases through the years: basic supplies like flour, salt, ammunition, and tools, but also strikingly large quantities of medical items—laudanum, camphor, and various patent medicines.
In 1876, Josiah bought six bottles of Dr. Wilton’s Quieting Syrup for nervous conditions, a preparation known to contain significant amounts of morphine. The event that finally exposed the Blackwoods came in October 1884, when an unusually severe autumn storm dumped over 38 centimeters of rain on parts of the region in nearly a week, the most substantial rainfall recorded since observations began in 1837. Stillwater Creek overflowed its banks.
The narrow trail to the Blackwood property washed out. Landslides further isolated the valley. When Josiah failed to appear in early November, Gardner told the sheriff, and Ledbetter dismissed it, nothing happened until December 3, when James Holloway’s hunting party stumbled on the distressed woman. Now, two days later, the eight men stood before the main house.
Josiah Blackwood came out to meet them. He looked far older than his age suggested, with a long white beard reaching nearly to his waist and skin weathered like tanned leather. He showed no surprise at their arrival, no concern—only the detached curiosity with which one regards an unusual insect. When Sheriff Ledbetter explained the purpose of the visit, to investigate reports of a woman in distress, the old man smiled in a way that made Hayes’s blood freeze.
My family suffers no distress, he said. We are as God made us and wills us to be. Inside, the investigators found a world that defied their understanding. Twenty-seven people of various ages lived in conditions of extreme filth and moral decay, as the official report clinically stated.
The upper floor of the main house was not divided into ordinary bedrooms but into small cells, each locked from the outside with a wooden bar. Inside the cells lay simple straw pallets, many showing signs of restraint—ropes and leather straps fixed to the walls. In the central room, larger than the others, they found Margaret Blackwood, surrounded by what Deputy Hayes described as a twisted attempt at feminine luxury: faded ribbons hanging from the ceiling, crude drawings of flowers on the walls, and disturbing dolls made from corn stalks arranged in a semicircle around her bed. The residents showed physical characteristics indicating shared ancestry among what should have been separate family lines, Hayes wrote.
Many displayed deformities of the skull and limbs. Some could not speak but made animal sounds when approached. Most disturbingly, there were clear signs of familial relationships that violated every natural law and human taboo. Questioned, those who could speak identified themselves simply as Blackwood, without first names or specific family ties.
They called Josiah simply father, regardless of their apparent age. The outbuildings revealed a structured society. One cabin held only women and girls aged perhaps five to forty, all engaged in repetitive handicrafts—weaving, sewing, making the strange dolls. Another housed what appeared to be a primitive school, with Bible verses on slate boards and crude anatomical drawings suggesting a preoccupation with human reproduction.
The third cabin served as a nursery, with seven babies and young children cared for by two women who resembled each other so strongly they could have been twins, though one was considerably older than the other. Dr. Elias Porter, the county physician called in to examine the family, refused to include his full findings in the official file. His report contained frequent editorial excisions and allusions to conditions he declined to specify out of consideration for public decency.
His private medical diary, found after his suicide in 1887, was more forthcoming. I have observed in these persons physical and apparent mental degeneration that can only result from prolonged reproduction among close blood relatives, he wrote. Some individuals display such extreme abnormalities that I question whether they can be classified according to established medical taxonomy. Porter’s diary recorded precise measurements: unusual skull shapes, asymmetrical facial features, polydactyly—extra fingers and toes—and various skeletal deformities.
His notes on the relationships were the most disturbing. Subject fourteen, female, approximately sixteen to eighteen years old, displays physical characteristics suggesting she is both daughter and granddaughter of subject one, Josiah Blackwood. Subject seven, male, approximately thirty years old, appears to be both son and half-brother of subject fourteen, while simultaneously son and grandson of subject one. He documented high rates of epileptic disorders, developmental delays, and impaired immune function.
The overall health of the population indicates a gradual decline in viability that, if continued, would eventually lead to complete sterility of the offspring. Porter also described a book. The subject refers constantly to a leather-bound volume, written in a script I cannot identify as any known language, he wrote. When questioned about this text, he becomes animated and claims it contains the original truth from before the corruption.
He allows no one else to touch this book and carries it with him at all times. The text was never found; it vanished during the chaos of the family’s removal. Josiah, questioned by authorities, showed no awareness that his living conditions violated any societal norm. For what crime?
he asked with genuine confusion when told he would be taken into custody. This is my family. This is our way. He spoke of purifying the bloodline and returning to the ways of the patriarchs, citing biblical examples of familial marriage.
He described what he called the circles of connection, in which each generation was bound back to earlier generations to strengthen what he called the sacred essence. When asked directly whether he understood that such practices led to the visible abnormalities among his younger family members, he answered that these were not defects but the appearance of the original form from before the world’s corruption. He seemed genuinely incapable of comprehending the suffering his practices had inflicted on his own descendants. Margaret Blackwood, in her sixties, lay bedridden and seemingly unaware of her surroundings.
Porter’s examination found advanced senility inconsistent with her biological age—either premature mental decline or the effects of long-term trauma. Her diary ended abruptly in 1869. The final legible entry read: The children now have children of their own. Josiah says, Thus we remain pure.
God help me. I no longer know what purity means. Earlier entries tracked her growing awareness and resistance. An entry from 1865: I tried to send Rebecca away when the trader came.
Josiah found out. He has taken her to the cave. When they return, she will be changed like the others. The cave appeared repeatedly in the diary, always in connection with punishment or with people who tried to leave the family complex.
No cave was documented in the official investigation, leading later researchers to believe it was located in one of the surrounding ridges, possibly serving as both a detention place and a site for the ritual practices Josiah had developed. One entry from 1867 suggested Margaret herself had been coerced into participation: I helped prepare Sarah today. I told her it was a blessing, as Josiah insists. I showed her the signs to make and the words to say.
May God forgive me this lie. There is no blessing in what we do, only the continuation of something that should have ended long ago. On December 12, 1884, Judge Thomas Wilson ordered the Blackwood dependents dispersed to appropriate institutions where they could receive care consistent with Christian charity. The clinical language masked what Hayes described as a scene of deep misery.
Separating family members who, despite their dysfunctional relationships, knew no other community resulted in a howling that echoed through the courtroom and far beyond—sounds less human than animal, yet expressing human grief in their terrible intensity. During the dispersal, a young woman identified as a daughter of Rebecca, Josiah’s eldest daughter, broke free from the deputies escorting her to the transport wagon. But she did not run toward freedom. She ran back into the courtroom where Josiah was held, screaming in a language no one could understand.
Restrained, she bit her own tongue so hard blood streamed from her mouth, but she kept making sounds that resembled a call to the patriarch. Josiah, hearing her cries from his cell, answered in the same unknown language, his voice carrying an authority that immediately calmed the young woman, who then went meekly with her escorts. The incident left all witnesses deeply shaken by the implication that the old man maintained a kind of control over his descendants that transcended normal family bonds. Josiah was transferred to the Missouri State Asylum in St.
Louis, where he died three months later without ever acknowledging any wrongdoing. He insisted to the end that the world would one day understand the purity I have achieved. The attending physician, Dr. Ambrose Wilcox, noted that despite his advanced age and primitive living conditions, Josiah displayed surprising erudition on certain subjects, particularly ancient religious practices and genealogical theory.
He expounded on what he called the science of blood purity, citing obscure religious texts and historical precedents with a fluency suggesting he had received formal education at some point in his early life—a detail absent from the known family history. Confronted with evidence of physical and mental degeneration in his descendants, he interpreted these as transitional forms necessary to achieve what he called ultimate perfection. He seemed genuinely unable to recognize the suffering of others, particularly those he considered family. Wilcox diagnosed a profound delusional disorder, possibly exacerbated by decades of isolation and unchallenged authority.
Josiah died on March 17, 1885, of pneumonia complicated by general debility. During his final illness he refused all medication. The pure do not need the mixtures of the corrupt, he told his caretakers. He spent his last hours writing continuously in an unknown language on every available surface, including his own skin, when paper was kept out of his reach.
These writings, if preserved, were never made available to researchers. He was buried on the asylum grounds without family present. The fate of the other family members was fragmented across various institutional records. Many apparently died within a few years of their removal from the only environment they had ever known.
The youngest children were placed in orphanages under new identities, an attempt to give them a chance at integration into normal society. The institution records from Josiah’s short stay noted a remarkable fact: despite his age and circumstances, other patients did what he told them to, and even some staff seemed to fall under his influence. Wilcox spent hours with him, taking notes like a student with a professor. After Josiah died, Wilcox seemed changed, more withdrawn, obsessed with genealogy and ancient religions.
He resigned six months later and disappeared. Some said he went west to found a community of his own. No record of his later activities was ever found. What makes the Blackwood case particularly remarkable is not just the disturbing nature of the family’s situation but the apparent conspiracy of silence that followed.
Within months of the intervention, official documents relating to the case began vanishing from county archives. Newspaper accounts, initially sensational, stopped abruptly. By 1886, it was as if the Blackwood family had never existed. Correspondence between Sheriff Ledbetter and Judge Wilson, preserved by Ledbetter’s grandson and made available to researchers in 1961, revealed the motivation.
I agree that public knowledge of the full circumstances can serve no useful purpose, Ledbetter wrote in February 1885. The reputation of our county and state would needlessly suffer from association with such abnormality. Moreover, those innocents who may yet be saved from their heritage deserve protection from the stigma of their origin. A more sinister interpretation emerged in the 1960s, when historian Eleanor Pruitt discovered correspondence between Judge Wilson and several prominent Missouri families suggesting the Blackwoods’ isolation may not have been as complete as official records indicated.
A letter from Wilson to state senator Thaddeus Crawford, dated April 1885, contained the cryptic passage: The matter we discussed regarding certain mountain people has been resolved with complete discretion. Everyone with knowledge has been sworn to secrecy and the records are being handled appropriately. You may assure our mutual associates that no connection will ever be established. Some researchers interpret this as evidence that the Blackwood family had undocumented relationships with more respectable families in the region—relationships that powerful interests wished to conceal.
Dr. Harrington’s 1953 investigation encountered constant obstruction from local authorities. His research notes documented repeated instances of being denied access to files that should have been publicly available. There seems to be a coordinated effort to erase this incident from collective memory, he wrote.
Elderly residents who were alive at the time refused to discuss the matter; they changed the subject or claimed to know nothing, despite evidence to the contrary. One breakthrough came when Harrington found Jacob Weaver, a former asylum nurse in his nineties who had cared for Josiah. The old man was not like other patients, Weaver recalled. He had a certain power about him, even locked up on that ward.
Harrington’s investigation led to the discovery of a cemetery on the former Blackwood property with simple markers containing only initials and dates. Many of the dates clustered around 1862, 1870, and 1877, suggesting periodic events that led to multiple deaths. Soil samples he collected were sent to colleagues at Washington University in St. Louis, but the results of any analysis were never published.
His correspondence from this period contained increasingly paranoid references to being watched and followed. In March 1957, Harrington wrote to his department chair at the University of Chicago: I am now convinced that the Blackwood case represents something significant, more than an isolated instance of degeneracy. The systematic nature of the record suppression, the persistent reluctance of local people to discuss the matter seven decades later, and certain physical evidence I have uncovered suggest a phenomenon with deeper historical roots and possibly wider geographical distribution than initially thought. There are indications that local authorities were aware of the Blackwood situation long before the 1884 intervention, and that similar enclaves have existed, and may still exist, in remote areas throughout the Ozark region.
In April 1957, Harrington traveled to Springfield, Missouri, to meet an unknown source who claimed access to sealed records relating to the Blackwood case. He never returned. His abandoned car was found at a rest stop along Highway 60, about thirty miles from the former Blackwood property. The official investigation into his disappearance was closed after six weeks without conclusions.
His research materials, which might have provided the most complete account of the case, were reportedly destroyed in a fire at his university office the night he disappeared. A curious footnote emerged in 1963, when a hiker in the Mark Twain National Forest found a battered notebook wedged in a rock crevice near the former Blackwood property. The notebook contained notes in Harrington’s handwriting, dated April 15, 1957—days after his reported disappearance. The fragmented notes described his meeting with the unknown source, who showed him documents indicating complicity at the highest levels of government in concealing aspects of the Blackwood case.
The final message, partially illegible from water damage, read: The cave found. Matches running out. Strange signs on the walls, similar to the book of JB. Someone else has been here recently.
I hear. It ends abruptly. Eleanor Pruitt’s 1965 investigation attempted to find descendants of the family members dispersed across various institutions. Her findings, published in an obscure academic journal shortly before it ceased publication, suggested that several young Blackwood women gave birth to children during their institutional stays, and that these children were adopted without any trace of their biological origins.
The disturbing possibility exists, Pruitt wrote, that descendants of the Blackwood family have been unknowingly integrated into the broader population, carrying genetic material shaped by generations of isolation and inbreeding. Her article ended with a question that remains unanswered: Is the clear attempt to erase the Blackwood case from historical memory motivated by humanitarian concern for descendants who bear no responsibility for their origins, or by a deeper societal unwillingness to face evidence that such extreme departures from human norms could arise in our relatively recent national past? Pruitt also discovered the existence of a trust fund anonymously established in 1886 to provide for the care of certain patients in various state institutions. The beneficiaries were identified only by numbers, but cross-referencing admission dates strongly suggested they were Blackwood family members.
The source of the funding remained unknown, but its existence implied someone with considerable financial resources had an interest in ensuring the family’s continued care—and perhaps their continued isolation from public scrutiny. The fund made payments until 1932, the year the last of the original beneficiaries reportedly died. Pruitt’s research ended abruptly when she accepted a position at an Australian university in late 1965. Her colleagues reported she became increasingly anxious in the weeks before her departure, claiming to have received anonymous threats warning her to stop her research.
No evidence of such threats was ever found. The possible connection to pre-existing local folklore remains one of the case’s most intriguing threads. Vance Randolph’s collection of Ozark beliefs contained references to hollow people or hidden peoples said to live in remote valleys, honoring ancient traditions that normal society had long abandoned. Whether such stories circulated before 1851 raises the possibility that the Blackwoods were not the first to establish an isolated community in the region but rather continued or revived traditions with deeper historical roots.
Archaeological evidence lent some support: a 1962 survey by archaeologist Robert Chambers documented remains of what appeared to be earlier settlements in several remote valleys, including structures predating European colonization. Some sites showed evidence of continuous habitation well into the nineteenth century. Chambers noted symbolic markings on rock walls near several settlements that resembled no known indigenous rock art or typical pioneer graffiti. The symbols appeared to form a coherent notation system, he wrote, possibly related to astronomical observations or a form of ritual calendar.
The photographs in his report showed geometric patterns and stylized human figures arranged in circular formations reminiscent of the circles of connection Josiah Blackwood described to investigators. The physical location of the Blackwood property has been reclaimed by the wilderness. Aerial surveys in 1960 showed no surviving structures, and the access road had long since disappeared under new forest growth. In 1968, the land was added to the Mark Twain National Forest, effectively closing it to further investigation.
Forest Service maps show no indication of prior habitation, simply marking the location as part of an ecological research zone not accessible to the public. A Forest Service employee, speaking anonymously to a local newspaper in 1997, said certain areas of the forest were off-limits even to most staff members, though he offered no explanation beyond vague references to sensitive research projects. In 2003, during renovation of the old Taney County Courthouse, a sealed metal box was discovered hidden in a wall cavity. It contained a single document: a hand-drawn map of what appears to be the Blackwood property, marked with symbols resembling those in Chambers’ archaeological survey.
The map bore no date or signature, but an inscription on the back read simply: Let this place be forgotten. County officials transferred the map to the Missouri State Archives, where it reportedly lies in a locked depository, accessible only to researchers with specific permission. The final disturbing episode came in 1969, when construction workers clearing land for a new highway near Branson discovered a small cave containing human remains. According to the coroner’s report, the remains included skeletons of at least seven individuals, all showing signs of physical abnormalities similar to those in Dr.
Porter’s private notes on the Blackwood family. Carbon dating placed the remains in the cave between 1865 and 1870, matching the period when Margaret Blackwood’s diary made cryptic references to family members being taken to the cave. Most disturbing was the arrangement: the remains were placed in a circular pattern around what appeared to be a primitive altar of piled stones. The discovery received brief attention in local newspapers before the remains were quietly removed and reportedly transferred to the state archaeology department for further study.
No findings were ever published, and questions about the discovery were answered with the claim that the remains had been lost during a departmental reorganization. In 1998, a forensic anthropology student at the University of Missouri claimed to have found some of these remains in an unlabeled storage container in the university’s anthropology department. Her preliminary analysis, documented in notes later made available to researchers, indicated genetic abnormalities consistent with prolonged inbreeding, including unusual skull shapes and evidence of polydactyly. Before she could complete her study or publish her findings, the remains were reportedly reclaimed by the state archaeology service and vanished again from the records.
Her academic advisor discouraged further investigation, citing the political sensitivities surrounding the issue. The Blackwood case stands as a dark reminder of how completely a human community can disappear from historical memory when its existence challenges our fundamental assumptions about society and family. It raises disturbing questions about what other hidden chapters of our national story might lie buried in forgotten archives or lost in the remote valleys of America’s vast interiors. Stories that, like that of the Blackwoods, we have collectively chosen to forget rather than confront.
The mist-shrouded valleys of the Ozarks reveal little to the casual observer, and the locals maintain their traditional reticence toward outsiders who ask too many questions about the past. Some stories, it seems, are better left untold. Some valleys are better left unexplored. But for those who know where to look—in the fragmented records, in the institutional histories, in the genetic legacy that may still subtly manifest in descendants unaware of their origins—the Blackwood case remains a disturbing testament to what can arise when human communities turn too far inward.
Perhaps the most disturbing aspect of the case is not what we know but what remains unknown: buried in lost archives, carried to the grave by those who witnessed the intervention, or simply erased from official history by those who found the truth too disturbing to preserve. As with many of history’s darkest chapters, we are left with fragments pointing toward horrors we can only partially reconstruct. And perhaps that incomplete knowledge is a mercy rather than a historical loss. The forest has grown over the foundations of their dwellings, ivy has covered the rough gravestones, and time has dissolved the material traces of their existence.
But the questions their case raises about human nature, about the consequences of isolation, about our capacity to deviate from societal norms when removed from their influence—those questions remain, echoing softly through the hidden valleys where the Blackwoods once created their disturbing, isolated reality.
