In the autumn of 1871, a wagon driver named Elias Corbin came down out of a place called Hollow Fork Valley in the Rocky Mountains of Colorado, his hair gone gray, half his tongue bitten through, and pages torn from a Bible stuffed into the pockets of his coat. He would not say what he had seen, not to the marshal in Fairplay, not to the priest in Buena Vista, and not to the wife who left him within a year. He lived nineteen more months, then hanged himself from a beam in a stable in Cañon City. The note he left behind was a single line: “They are still there.

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For a hundred and fifty years, that line was as close to evidence as anyone ever came. Hollow Fork Valley appears on no modern map. The wagon road that once fed it was buried under a rockfall in 1873, and the Forest Service closed the entire valley to the public in 1928, citing what it called unstable geology and human remains that were never found. The people who lived there were called the Devil’s Kin, and for six generations in the Colorado wilderness their name was a thing not spoken after dark.

Cattlemen crossed themselves. Hunters took roundabout routes. Children were told they were only a superstition, and the adults let them believe it, because the truth was worse. But last year, a survey crew clearing debris for a new pipeline broke through a collapsed wall on the eastern side of the valley.

What they found inside changed everything: forty-seven human remains, all female, all under the age of sixteen, arranged in a circle around a stone altar that predated white settlement by at least three centuries. A ledger bound in what a Denver laboratory later confirmed was human skin. And carved into the ceiling of the chamber, in a script no linguist has yet been able to read, the same seven symbols repeated over and over. The Devil’s Kin were not a myth.

They were a family. And what they did in that valley between 1849 and 1888 is the darkest chapter in the history of the American West you have never heard. Because the men who buried it meant for it to stay buried. To understand how a family like the Devil’s Kin came to exist at all, you have to understand the country they came into.

The high Rockies of Colorado in the 1840s were not the scenic mountains we know today. They were a broken labyrinth of unmapped watercourses and blind canyons, some of them a mile deep and never touched by direct sunlight, threaded by rivers that ran ice-cold in July and choked with dead cottonwoods that could kill a horse in seconds. The Ute people knew the country. They avoided most of it.

There were valleys they did not enter, and Hollow Fork was one of them. The Ute had a word for the valley, recorded by English-speaking hunters as “Shikawaa,” which the ethnographer George Vernon Trask translated in 1904 as “the place where the sky closes. ” Trask, working from interviews with Northern Ute elders near White Rocks, noted that the valley was surrounded by a taboo that predated the Ute presence in the region. The story his informants told him was that something had happened there in ancient times, something that split the earth, and that anyone who slept a night in the valley would wake up with part of his soul missing.

Trask, a man of his era, recorded the story as folklore. He also wrote that in forty years of traveling the West, he never met a single Ute who would guide him to that valley for any amount of money. He did meet men who guided him to places where the last three parties who tried to enter it had been killed. The Kerrins were the first white settlers in the valley.

They arrived in 1849. Bartholomew Kerrin was a blacksmith born in Kentucky, married to Prudence, with eleven children. The youngest was two months old when the family wagon crossed the last ridge and descended into Hollow Fork. Bartholomew, by the records that survive, was not a religious man in any conventional Protestant sense.

He had been run out of three counties in Kentucky and one in Missouri for what Boone County court documents called practices contrary to public order. The documents did not specify what those practices were, but a deposition from a neighbor named Thaddeus Cole survives. Cole described Bartholomew Kerrin as a man who kept a room in his cellar that no one was allowed to enter, and who was known to leave home for three days at a time during certain phases of the moon. The Kerrins settled at the mouth of a side canyon that entered Hollow Fork from the north.

They built a two-story cabin of hewn yellow pine, a barn, a blacksmith shop, and, according to an 1852 survey by a Colorado land surveyor named Amos Wetherly, three separate outbuildings whose purpose Wetherly could not determine. Wetherly noted in his field book that one of these buildings had no windows and no visible door, and that the Kerrin family answered his questions about it with what he described as patient amusement, as if he were a child asking why the sky was blue. By 1855, three other families had joined the Kerrins in the valley. The Beddoes, from Wales, arrived in the spring of 1852.

The Halletts, an old New England family settled in Massachusetts since the 1670s, arrived that same autumn, having left for reasons none of their descendants ever recorded. In 1854, a widow named Ruth Ainsley came from Ohio with her four daughters and no explanation. These four families formed the core of what the region would come to call the Devil’s Kin. By the time the last of them was hanged in 1888, they numbered between eighty and one hundred twenty people.

All related. All born in the valley. All sharing physical traits that the coroner in Fairplay described in his 1888 notes as unmistakable and disturbing. Those traits included a double row of teeth in the upper jaw, a birthmark on the left shoulder blade shaped like an eye, and eyes the coroner described as a color he had never seen in a human being: pale golden brown that seemed to catch light and throw it back in a way more animal than human.

The first recorded death of an outsider connected to the valley came in the summer of 1858. A prospector named Alonzo Meek, working a claim on the hills above Hollow Fork, went down into the valley to trade for salt pork and never came back. His partner, a man named Josiah Wells, waited three days and then went looking for him. Wells found Meek’s mule tied to a fence post outside the Kerrin cabin.

Meek’s rifle was leaning against the wall beside it. Meek’s hat was on the ground. Meek himself was nowhere. Wells, an armed man not easily intimidated, went to the cabin and knocked.

Bartholomew Kerrin opened the door. When Wells asked about his partner, Kerrin smiled and said, “Your friend has gone to be with the family now. He is very happy. ” Wells asked what he meant.

Kerrin said, “You won’t understand until you are with us too. Would you like to come inside? ” Wells did not go inside. He backed away with his hand on his pistol, took Meek’s mule and rifle, and rode at full speed for Fairplay, the nearest settlement of any size.

He arrived just after midnight, pounded on the sheriff’s door, and told a man named Cletus Draper what had happened. Draper, to his credit, took the report seriously. He gathered eight men and rode back to the valley at dawn. They reached the Kerrin cabin around noon the next day.

The cabin was empty. The mule Meek had ridden, which Wells had taken with him, was the only proof Meek had ever been there. Bartholomew Kerrin, his wife, his children, and all the members of the four families were nowhere. The cattle were in the barn, the chickens in the coop, and a pot of stew was still warm on the stove, but the people were gone.

Draper searched the outbuildings. He noted in his report that the windowless building Wetherly had described six years earlier still had no visible door. He and his men spent a full hour trying to find the entrance, walking the walls, knocking on the timbers, until one of them, a man named Perkins, thought he heard something. He put his ear to the wall.

He listened for a long time, then stepped back, drew his pistol, and refused to speak for the rest of the day. Perkins hanged himself two weeks later. He left no note. The posse rode back to Fairplay empty-handed.

Meek’s body was never found. Bartholomew Kerrin and his family reappeared in the valley three days later as if nothing had happened. When Draper returned to question them, Kerrin claimed they had been on a hunting trip and had never in their lives seen a prospector named Alonzo Meek. Draper had no proof, no body, and no legal basis for an arrest.

He rode back to Fairplay and closed the case. There is a story from that first summer of 1849 that has stayed in the memory of one Fairplay family and deserves to be told here, because it is the oldest recorded account of the Kin and what they were. It comes from a source who had no reason to lie. The family is that of a woman named Hepsibah Korn, who at the time the Kerrins arrived was the wife of a supply merchant running a small store at the head of the mountain road into the valley.

Hepsibah kept a daily journal, and her descendants preserved it for six generations. The entry for August 12, 1849, three months after Bartholomew Kerrin and his family had passed the store on their way to Hollow Fork, reads as follows: “A Kerrin man came down from the mountains today for the first time since May. He brought two of his sons and a wagon and a list of supplies he wished to buy. Silas waited on him.

After they left, Silas went into the back of the house, sat down at the kitchen table, and asked me for a cup of tea. When I brought it to him, his hands were shaking so badly he could not lift the cup. I asked him what was the matter. He said, ‘Hepsibah, that man is not right.

’ I said, ‘What do you mean? ’ He said, ‘Hepsibah, I have seen all kinds of men in this trade, hard men and violent men and drunkards and thieves, and I have never been afraid of any of them in my life. That man is not any kind I know. His sons do not look at me straight.

They stare at me long and smile too much. And when I turned to fetch the salt pork he asked for, I heard him say something to his sons in a language I do not know. I have lived in this country twenty years. I have heard French and Spanish and Ute and Arapaho, and I have heard mountain men speak the trapper tongue.

That man was not any of those. It was not any thing. Hepsibah, I do not want that man in my store again. ’ I said, ‘Silas, we cannot refuse a customer.

’ He said, ‘Hepsibah, I know we cannot, but mark this, that man will do harm to this country. He will do harm to many, and we or anyone else will not be able to stop him. God help us all. ’” Hepsibah closed her journal that day with a line quoted in every serious history of the Devil’s Kin since.

She wrote: “I think Silas is right. I think there is something wrong with the man from the valley. May the Lord protect every soul who visits it. ” Silas Korn died in 1862 of pneumonia at the age of fifty-one.

He never once refused to serve Bartholomew Kerrin. The trade was too valuable, and the Kerrins, whatever they were, were always loyal customers, always paying in gold, always paying on time. Hepsibah outlived him by twenty-two years and never wrote about the Kerrin family in her journal after Silas’s death. But her descendants say she kept, on the shelf above her bed, a small iron cross her cousin had brought her from Ireland.

And that every time the wind blew down from the mountains toward Hollow Fork, she would take the cross down from the shelf and hold it in her hands and pray until the wind died. Her granddaughter, who died in 1948, said Hepsibah told her only once, in extreme old age, that there were things in this country that had no right to be here, that some of them lived in the mountains, and that the worst of them lived in a valley whose name she would not speak. The granddaughter said she asked her grandmother gently why she would not say the name. Hepsibah answered, “Child, because if I say the name, the name may hear me.

I have lived a long life, and I do not wish to end it now. ”

Between 1858 and 1867, at least nineteen people disappeared in or around Hollow Fork Valley. The number is almost certainly higher. The figure nineteen refers to the documented cases where a family member or partner filed a report with the district marshal, sheriff, or mining company, and the report survived in an archive long enough to be catalogued.

The uncounted ones, the drifters and hermits and men whose families never even knew their destination, are unknown. A 1971 study by the Colorado Historical Society, drawing on railroad passenger lists, mining company employment records, and letters extracted from estate collections, estimated the true number of people who entered the Hollow Fork drainage and never left it between 1855 and 1885 at somewhere between two hundred and four hundred people. Two hundred to four hundred people in a valley no more than nine miles long. The pattern of the disappearances was consistent enough that it should have raised more alarm than it did.

The victim was usually a man, traveling alone or with one companion, usually carrying something the Kerrins or the other Kin families might want. Meek had been carrying a small pouch of gold dust when he vanished. A fur trapper named Honoré Beaumarchais, who disappeared in 1861, had been leading a pack train of six mules loaded with beaver pelts. And a schoolteacher named Miss Adelaide Thornton, who vanished in 1864 while traveling to Leadville, had been carrying her family Bible, bound in leather with silver clasps, passed down through four generations.

The Bible turned up in 1867 in a general store in Cañon City. The shopkeeper said he had bought it from a young woman with pale gold eyes who claimed her grandmother had given it to her. And here the story turns from grim to worse. Because Adelaide Thornton was not carrying gold.

She was not carrying furs. She carried a Bible and a small bag of clothes and books. But the reason she was passing through Colorado at all was that she was answering an advertisement placed in a Chicago newspaper, seeking a young, unmarried, respectable Christian woman of sound moral character to teach the children of a mining community in the Rocky Mountains. The advertisement was placed by a man named Bartholomew Kerrin.

The salary was generous, and the position included room and board. Miss Thornton, twenty-three years old and without family, accepted with great enthusiasm, as her surviving letters describe. She was not the first woman to answer such an advertisement. Between 1859 and 1878, similar notices appeared in newspapers in Chicago, St.

Louis, Cincinnati, Philadelphia, Boston, and in one case even London. The wording varied, but the pattern was the same: young women, unmarried, Christian, in good health, willing to travel to a remote mining community for respectable work. They offered wages that were exceptional for the era. And all of them bore a signature that investigators later traced to one of the four Kin families in Hollow Fork.

The remains found in the 2025 excavation were all female, all under sixteen, not women who answered the advertisements, but something else, something worse. To understand what that something was, you have to consider the ledger. The ledger found in the altar chamber is currently held at the Denver Museum of Nature and Science, and access is restricted to a small circle of researchers under strict confidentiality agreements. Some of its contents have been described in general terms by forensic historian Dr.

Miriam Halsey, one of the first academics granted access. Halsey said, in a lecture at the University of Colorado in early 2026, that the ledger appears to have been in continuous use from 1849 to 1888, that it is written in at least four different hands, and that it records what she called “transactions” of a kind she was not permitted to specify in a public setting. She did say this much: the record is organized in three columns. The first column contains the date.

The second contains a name. The third contains a symbol, and the symbol is always one of the same seven symbols carved on the ceiling of the chamber above the altar. Halsey said that when she cross-referenced the names in that column with her compiled missing-persons report from the Colorado Territory archives, she was able to match forty-one names in the ledger to forty-one confirmed disappearances. Between 1858 and 1887, she said, the remaining names in the ledger were either not recorded anywhere else, or she had not finished her research.

She estimated the number of entries in the ledger at over three hundred. Three hundred names, seven symbols, and an altar carved from a single piece of stone, which geologists, through analysis of tool marks and the underlying bedrock surface, dated to roughly three thousand years before any European settler reached North America. Whatever the Devil’s Kin were doing in that room, they did not build it. They inherited it.

And from whom they inherited it is a question no one has yet been able to answer. The territorial government of Colorado between 1861 and 1876 was not a well-organized institution. Its records were kept haphazardly, its officials were often unpaid or underpaid, and they moved from post to post with little continuity. Its authority over mountain communities, especially mining districts, was weak at best and nonexistent at worst.

Practically speaking, a group of thirty, forty, or fifty people living in a valley no one wanted to enter could operate for decades with almost no oversight from any legal authority. The Devil’s Kin did not have to hide, or conceal their activities. All they had to do was live in a place no one was searching. The valley was, in effect, a kingdom unto itself, and Bartholomew Kerrin was its king.

Whatever happened within the borders of that kingdom in those years was subject to no law but his. It is also worth noting that the Devil’s Kin were not poor, by any surviving account. The land of Hollow Fork was fertile in patches. The four families raised cattle and sheep, grew grain, ran a blacksmith shop, a tannery, and, according to Wetherly’s 1852 survey, what appeared to be a small mill for processing iron ore from land they controlled on the hills above the settlement.

They traded with the outside world, buying goods from Fairplay and Cañon City. They paid their taxes when a collector could be persuaded to ride up into the valley to ask for them, which was rare. Outwardly, they were a prosperous, self-sufficient community of industrious mountain farmers. That appearance was, of course, what they wanted the outside world to see.

Whatever their real business was, it was not conducted in public. It was conducted in a windowless building. And whatever happened in that building for thirty-three years, no outside witness ever saw and returned to describe. The four families were, from the beginning, intermarried in ways that were difficult for any outside observer to untangle.

Mercy, Bartholomew Kerrin’s eldest daughter, married a Beddoes son in 1854 at the age of fifteen. Ezekiel Hallett, the Hallett patriarch, married two women, both Kerrin daughters, both under sixteen at the time of marriage. Ruth Ainsley’s four daughters were distributed among Kerrin, Beddoes, and Hallett sons within a decade of the families’ arrival. By 1865, the second generation of the Devil’s Kin had begun having children.

By 1875, a third generation had appeared, and the relationships were so tangled that a Cañon City lawyer named Absalom Whitby, asked to draft a will for a dying Kin elder in 1881, refused to complete the work and returned the advance payment, saying he could not in good conscience prepare a document he did not understand. This intermarriage was not an accident. It was deliberate, and it was, in the coroner’s words in his 1888 notes, doctrinal. The Kin believed, or claimed to believe, in the necessity of preserving the purity of the bloodline.

One of them said to a Baptist missionary named the Reverend Josiah Whitmore in 1873: “Thinned blood cannot carry what we carry. ” Whitmore, who rode into the valley in an attempt to bring the gospel to what he had heard was a lost people, spent three days as a guest of the Kerrins and left, in his own account, a broken man. His journal, held in the archives of the American Baptist Historical Society, contains a passage from the third day of his visit worth quoting in full. Whitmore wrote: “I sat with the elder Kerrin at his kitchen table this evening, opened my Bible to the Gospel of John, and began to read to him from the first chapter.

He listened with an attention I at first took for courtesy, then I looked up from the page and saw him smiling, not courtesy, not indulgence, but the smile of a man watching a child sing a nursery rhyme. When I finished the passage, he said to me, ‘Reverend, that is a pretty story. Do you know how old it is? ’ I told him it was nearly two thousand years old, and he laughed.

He laughed as though I had told him a joke, and then he said, ‘Reverend, we have been here longer than that. Your book is a child. Would you like to see my family’s book? ’ I said yes.

He rose from the table and took me by candlelight to a room in the back of the cabin, and what I saw there I will not write, because I fear that writing it down would give it a voice, and I have heard enough voices in this valley to last me all my life. I left the next morning at dawn, and I did not look back, and I will not return, not for my pay, not for my post, not for the souls of any man or woman or child in that place. God have mercy on those who have seen them, if he can bear to look. ” Whitmore left the ministry within a year.

He spent the rest of his life as an accountant for a lumber company in Oregon and never spoke of what he saw in the Kerrin cabin. His journal was found after his death in 1902, sealed in a wooden box on his desk, with a note on the outside reading: “Burn unopened. ” His executor, a nephew, ignored the instruction. The journal has been held in the Baptist archives ever since.

It is one of the most cited primary sources on the Devil’s Kin, and also one of the most fragmentary, as Whitmore appears to have cut a section of roughly forty pages, covering the period from 1874 to 1880, deliberately out with a razor blade before sealing the book. No one living knows what was written on those pages. The first serious attempt by outside authority to intervene in Hollow Fork came in the summer of 1871. That year, Elias Corbin, the wagon driver, left the valley with his hair gone gray.

Corbin was not the first to survive an encounter with the Devil’s Kin and return changed, but he was the first whose story reached a man with the power and the will to act. That man was U. S. Marshal Ambrose Fell, appointed to the Colorado Territory in 1870 with a specific mandate to clean up disorder in the mining districts.

He was known for both toughness and integrity. When Corbin staggered out of Hollow Fork in the autumn of 1871, Fell was the one who finally drew the story out of him. The story, as Corbin told it to Fell over two days and one long night in a hotel room in Cañon City, was this: he had been hired by a mining company to haul a load of blasting powder to a mining site on the hills above Hollow Fork. The route he was told to take ran through the valley itself, and the company foreman warned him not to stop for any reason, not to speak to anyone, and to be through the valley before dark.

Corbin, thirty-four years old and a veteran of driving wagons through Comanche country in Texas, was not easily frightened and took the warning for superstition. He reached the upper end of the valley by three in the afternoon and was making good time. Then his lead mule, a huge gray named Solomon, threw a shoe. Corbin had no choice but to stop and reset it, and by the time he had the shoe back on and the wagon rolling again, the sun was beginning to touch the western rim of the valley, and shadow was gathering thick along the road.

He was about two miles from the lower end when he rounded a bend and saw a little girl standing in the road ahead of him. Corbin told Fell she was maybe nine or ten years old. She was barefoot, in a white dress. Her hair was long and dark, hanging to her waist, and her eyes, even from thirty yards, were the pale golden brown the coroner would later describe.

She was standing in the exact middle of the wagon road, and she was smiling. She raised her hand and waved at him, and called out in a voice Corbin described as clear and sweet and utterly unafraid: “Sir, my mother is hurt. Will you please help us? ” Corbin, a father himself, did what any decent man would do.

He stopped the wagon, climbed down, and started walking toward the child. He got within about ten steps before he realized something was wrong. He told Fell that her feet were not touching the ground. She stood at a normal height, but there was a gap of about two inches between the soles of her feet and the dirt of the road.

And in that gap, the shadow was wrong. It was too dark, and it moved, and there was something in it. Corbin stopped. He stood there and stared at the child.

The child stared back. Her smile did not change. Then he heard, from the woods on either side of the road, singing begin. He could not describe the song.

He tried again and again through that long night in the hotel room. Every time, the attempt ended with him weeping and shaking his head. He said it was not a song in any language he had ever heard. It was not a melody.

It was a voice, made of many voices, coming from the trees, and it was getting closer. He turned and ran for his wagon. He climbed onto the box. He cut his lead mule loose with his knife, because Solomon was still favoring the short shoe and would slow him down.

He laid the whip into the remaining mules with everything he had. He said the mules ran as if the devil himself were behind them. And perhaps he was. The last thing Corbin saw before the road turned and the valley fell away behind him, he told Fell, was the little girl in the white dress standing in the middle of the road.

She had not moved. She was still smiling. She raised her hand again and waved. And this time, Corbin said, her voice reached him down the length of the valley, loud and clear and sweet, calling out: “Come back soon, sir.

We will save you a place. ”

Marshal Fell believed Corbin. That is worth noting, because Fell was not a man who believed easily. His written account of the interview, attached as an appendix to a report submitted to the territorial governor in October 1871, makes clear that he considered Corbin sane, sober, and telling the truth as he understood it.

Fell requested authorization to form a posse of deputies and enter Hollow Fork by force. The authorization was granted. In November 1871, Fell entered the valley at the head of a party of eighteen armed men. They found the Kin waiting for them.

Bartholomew Kerrin, then seventy-one years old, his hair and beard gone gray, met the marshal at the entrance to the valley with a group of his men and twelve of his women, unarmed, dressed in what Fell described in his report as their finest clothes. Kerrin greeted Fell by name, though they had never met, and invited the marshal and his men to accept the hospitality of the Kin for the duration of their stay. Fell declined and told Kerrin he had come to conduct a search of the settlement in connection with the disappearance of more than thirty people, and that he expected full cooperation from every man, woman, and child in the valley. Kerrin smiled and said, “Marshal, you may do as you wish.

Welcome. ”

Fell and his men spent four days in Hollow Fork, searching every cabin, every barn, every outbuilding. They found nothing. No bodies, no bones, no bloodstains, no personal effects of any missing person.

Fell noted in his report that the windowless building on the Kerrin property still had no visible door, and when he asked about it this time, Kerrin told him it was a family shrine, that the interior was sacred, and that outsiders could not enter without risking great spiritual harm to all concerned. Fell, acting as a marshal and not a bishop, ordered his men to break through the building with axes. They tried, and spent most of a day trying. The axes bounced off the timbers as if they were iron, and by evening two of the deputies refused to strike another blow, saying that when they hit the wall, they heard something laughing from inside the building.

On the fourth day, Fell gave up. He gathered his men, mounted his horse, and rode out of the valley. In his report to the governor, he wrote that he had found no evidence of a crime, but that he could not in good conscience recommend leaving the settlement untouched. He recommended placing the entire valley under military quarantine and forcibly removing the four families to federal custody for further investigation.

The governor forwarded the recommendation to Washington. Washington took no action. Marshal Fell was found dead in his hotel room in Denver on the morning of December 14, 1871. The cause of death was recorded as heart failure.

He was forty-two years old. The hotel clerk who found him said he had gone to bed the previous night in apparent good health. The clerk also noted, in a statement later given to the Denver Post, that when he entered the room to bring the marshal his breakfast, he found the mirror over the washbasin cracked from corner to corner, and there was a smell in the room, a smell like something burned, though nothing in it was burned. After Fell’s death, no federal or territorial law enforcement officer entered Hollow Fork for eleven years.

In those eleven years, the disappearances continued. The advertisements for schoolteachers and governesses continued. The rumors continued. And the Kin continued to multiply and build and do whatever they did in the dark building behind the Kerrin cabin, with no one holding the power to stop them willing to try.

The disappearances began to change in character during that period. Where the victims had once been mostly lone travelers, men carrying something of value, in the 1870s the pattern changed. Whole families began to disappear. A settler named Amos Kettering, who had homesteaded the eastern edge of the valley in 1874, vanished with his wife, three children, and a hired hand in the spring of 1876.

A neighbor who came to borrow a plow found their cabin abandoned. The stew was on the stove, the children’s schoolbooks were open on the table, the dog was in the yard, alive and well, and the family was gone. In 1878, a party of seven Methodist missionaries traveling from Denver to a mission in the San Juan Mountains lost the wagon road, camped one night at the mouth of Hollow Fork, and were never seen again. Their wagon was found eight months later in a canyon forty miles south, empty, its harness cut, its horses missing.

Inside the wagon, hidden inside a Bible on the seat, was found a single sheet of paper, on which, in an unknown hand, were written seven symbols. The same seven symbols carved on the ceiling of the altar chamber. The same seven symbols that appeared beside the names in the ledger. The paper is currently held in the archives of the Colorado Historical Society.

No one has ever translated the symbols. No one, as far as is known, ever will. The Kin did not, however, last forever. In the summer of 1882, a young woman named Sara Ainsley, granddaughter of the original Ruth Ainsley who had come to the valley in 1854, walked out of Hollow Fork alone, on foot, at the age of seventeen.

She was found two days later by a rancher on the plains to the east, barefoot, starving, her dress torn, but alive and conscious. She was taken to the town of Salida and turned over to the chief of police, and she told him everything. Sara’s testimony, eighty-seven pages in the court record held in the Colorado State Archives, is the most detailed account ever given of the inner life of the Devil’s Kin. She was born in the valley in 1865 and had never left it until the day she walked out.

She said she had grown up in a family she considered, for most of her childhood, normal, if strict and strange. She learned prayers and songs, and there were nights, four times a year, when the whole family gathered in the dark building behind the Kerrin cabin. On those nights, the children were kept in a separate room and told to be silent no matter what they heard. Sara grew up hearing things on those nights, but she did not ask about them.

She told the chief of police that what changed her mind was her sister. Sara had a younger sister named Prudence, after the original Prudence Kerrin, and Prudence turned fourteen in the spring of 1882. On the night of the summer solstice, which the Kin observed as one of their four great holy nights, Prudence was taken into the windowless building with the adults for the first time. She was not kept in the separate room with the other children.

She went with the adults. When the observance ended, Prudence did not come out. Sara waited three days. She asked her mother, her father, her grandmother, and received from all of them the same answer: “Prudence has gone to be with the family now.

She is very happy. ” It was the same phrase Bartholomew Kerrin had used to Josiah Wells twenty-four years earlier about the disappearance of Alonzo Meek. Sara understood its meaning the moment she heard it. That night, she packed a small bundle of food and clothing, walked out of the valley in the dark, and did not stop walking until she reached the plains.

The chief of police of Salida believed her. He telegraphed the territorial governor. This time, the governor did not wait for federal authorization. He ordered the Colorado militia to muster, and in September of 1882, a force of one hundred twenty men under Colonel Everard Byrne rode into Hollow Fork with orders to arrest every member of the four Kin families and search the settlement thoroughly, without regard for anyone’s feelings.

The militia found the valley empty. Not abandoned. Completely empty. The cabins still stood.

The barns were still full of hay. The cattle were still in the pastures. There was food in the storerooms, clothes in the wardrobes, tools in the blacksmith shop, books on the shelves. Everything was in its place except the people.

All of them. Every man, woman, and child of the Devil’s Kin, numbering, by Sara Ainsley’s count, one hundred thirteen people at the time, was gone. Colonel Byrne searched the valley for three weeks. He found no bodies, no graves, no footprints leading out of the valley in any direction.

By then, the militia had every trail and every ridgeline covered, so no one could have left after their arrival. He did find the windowless building. When his men attacked it with axes, and then with a small charge of gunpowder, its walls collapsed. Inside, Colonel Byrne wrote in his report: “We found a single room, about thirty feet to a side, its floor and walls of polished stone.

In the center of the room was an altar of dark stone, the work of craftsmen such as I have not seen in this country or any other. Carved into the ceiling above the altar were seven symbols in a script unknown to me and to the two educated men I had brought with me for the purpose of translation. There was no other exit from the room. There was no cellar.

There was no tunnel. There was no place where one hundred thirteen human beings could have gone. And yet they were gone. I do not know what happened in this valley before we came.

I do not know what happened in this room. But I will say this: when my men broke through the wall and I entered, I felt a cold I have not felt since. And I heard, or thought I heard, from somewhere below the floor, the sound of many voices singing. I ordered the building demolished and the altar stone broken up.

My men carried out the order. But when we were finished, and I stood in the ruins of that room in the fading evening light, I was not sure we had accomplished anything at all. ” Colonel Byrne’s report was filed and forgotten. The state of Colorado issued no press release.

The name Devil’s Kin, whispered across the mountains for three decades, vanished from the official record. The valley was left alone. In 1888, six years after the disappearance, a group of prospectors working the hills above Hollow Fork reported finding a family of six living in one of the original Kerrin cabins, a father, a mother, and four children, all of whom they said had pale gold eyes and strange smiles like the Devil’s Kin. The prospectors reported this to the Fairplay sheriff.

A deputy was sent to investigate. The deputy found the cabin empty. There was a pot of stew on the stove, still warm. Colonel Byrne himself did not live long after filing his report.

He returned to Denver in the first week of October 1882, a changed man by the testimony of all his subordinates. He no longer took his meals with his officers. He no longer attended Sunday service at the Methodist church he had frequented for twenty years. He kept a lantern burning in his room all through the hours of darkness.

When his aide asked him why, he answered only that he no longer wished to be in the dark. In February of 1883, he requested a transfer to San Francisco. It was approved. He left Colorado on February 12 and arrived in San Francisco on February 23.

Six weeks later, he walked out of his rented room on Powell Street into a driving rainstorm without a coat or hat, walked down to the waterfront, walked out onto a pier, and jumped off the end of it into the bay. His body was recovered three days later. In his trouser pocket was a piece of paper, and on the paper, in his own hand, were the seven symbols from the ceiling of the room in the building. He had drawn them, apparently, over and over, filling both sides of the paper.

The final drawing, in the bottom right corner, was incomplete. The pen had slipped at the end of the last line, as if his hand had been shaking too badly to finish. Whether he was drawing the symbols to remember them, to practice them, or to answer them, no one could say. The last documented sighting of a person believed to be of Kin descent was in 1901, when a Denver newspaper reported that a young woman had been arrested at a hotel in Cheyenne, Wyoming, for attempting to abduct a five-year-old girl from the hotel lobby.

The woman identified herself as Charity Kerrin. She was described as about twenty years old, dark-haired, with eyes, in the words of the arresting officer, “the strangest eyes I have ever seen. Like sunlight through amber, and cold. ” She was placed in the Laramie County jail.

On the morning of her court appearance, her cell was found empty. The door was not open. The window was not open. There were no footprints in the dust of the floor except her own, walking to the center of the cell and stopping.

The deputy sheriff who found the empty cell reported seven symbols scratched into the plaster of the wall above her bunk. He could not read them. No one else could either. Now we must separate what can be verified from what cannot.

Because the story of the Devil’s Kin, as told over the past hundred and fifty years, has passed through many hands, and some of those hands were more careful with the truth than others. The first fact: the four families, the Kerrins, the Beddoes, the Halletts, and the Ainsleys, existed. They are documented in territorial census records, land patent applications, tax records, and the correspondence of neighboring settlers. They lived in Hollow Fork between 1849 and 1882.

That is beyond dispute. The second fact: a large number of people disappeared in the vicinity of the valley during those years. The nineteen documented cases are from court and police records. The higher estimate of two hundred to four hundred is a scholarly extrapolation based on multiple independent data sources.

It is an estimate, but it is not an invention. The third fact: in September of 1882, all of the residents of the four families, approximately one hundred thirteen people, disappeared from the valley simultaneously and without a trace. The Colorado militia under Colonel Everard Byrne investigated the disappearance, and his report remains on file in the state archives. Colonel Byrne did not find them.

No one has ever found them. The fourth fact: in 2025, a survey crew broke through a collapsed wall on the eastern side of Hollow Fork and discovered a chamber containing forty-seven sets of human remains, all female, all prepubescent, along with a stone altar, a ledger, and carved symbols. This is documented in the published archaeological record. The remains are currently being studied at the Denver Museum of Nature and Science.

The ledger is sealed. The symbols are not yet translated. Everything else, the singing in the woods, the little girl in the white dress, the marshal who died with a cracked mirror, the doors that did not open, the voices heard beneath the floor, comes from firsthand testimony recorded at the time by people who claimed to have witnessed it. Every one of those people was, as far as any investigator could determine, sane and sober, with no clear motive to lie.

It is left to you to decide whether to believe them. I am only telling you what they said. I am also telling you that Elias Corbin, the wagon driver, hanged himself. That Reverend Whitmore left the ministry.

That Marshal Fell died in a locked hotel room. And that Sara Ainsley, the young woman who walked out of the valley in 1882, lived to be eighty-nine, married a rancher near Salida, had four children, and from the day she left that valley until her death in 1954 refused to speak the names of any of her relatives aloud for any reason. Her granddaughter, still living, gave an interview to a Denver newspaper in 2019 in which she said her grandmother had one house rule that could never be broken: no mirror hung facing the bed. Asked why, the granddaughter said she did not know.

She said her grandmother told her as a child that mirrors were doors, and that there were things you did not want to let in. The granddaughter also said, in that same interview, that her grandmother kept, in a locked cedar box on the top shelf of her bedroom closet, a single object she had carried with her when she walked out of the valley on the night she left, and that this object was the only thing Sara had ever owned. Sara never voluntarily showed the box to any living soul in her long life. When she died in 1954, she instructed in her will that the box be buried with her, closed, in her coffin, and that no one attempt to retrieve it.

The instructions were carried out. Whatever Sara brought out of Hollow Fork in the summer of 1882 is now buried in a small cemetery outside Salida, Colorado, in the coffin of an eighty-nine-year-old woman who spent seventy-two years trying to forget the place she was born, and who took the last piece of it with her into the ground. The granddaughter said that once, when she was about ten, she tried to open the lid of the box while her grandmother dozed in the next room. The box was locked.

But she said that when she put her ear to the lid, she thought for a moment she heard something moving inside it. As for the remains found in the altar chamber, all the victims were female, all under sixteen. The eldest was estimated at fifteen at death, the youngest at seven. Forensic analysis has so far established three things about these individuals.

First, they were killed. In every case where enough of the skeleton survived for a determination of manner of death, the fatal trauma followed a specific and consistent pattern of injuries to the base of the skull and upper cervical vertebrae, consistent with a single sharp blow from behind with a curved, chisel-like edged instrument. Second, they were killed over a long period of time. Radiocarbon dating of associated organic material places the deposits in the chamber across at least four decades, from the mid-1840s to the mid-1880s.

Third, they were not from the valley. This last point deserves emphasis. DNA analysis of the remains, conducted in a Denver laboratory in 2025, revealed no genetic link between the forty-seven victims and any of the surviving descendants of the Devil’s Kin families. The Kin intermarried, and their descendants, a few of whom still live scattered across Colorado, share the close genetic fingerprint one expects from six generations of endogamy.

The forty-seven girls in the altar chamber share none of that fingerprint. They came from elsewhere, from many other places. Preliminary ancestry analyses indicate they came from at least twelve distinct genetic backgrounds, including Northern Europe, the Mediterranean, sub-Saharan Africa, and, in three cases, Indigenous America, from lineages more consistent with the Great Plains than with the Colorado mountains. They were gathered from everywhere, brought to this chamber, killed there over forty years, their bodies arranged in a circle around the altar, their names recorded one by one in the ledger.

And beside each name, one of the seven symbols. Dr. Halsey noted in her lecture that the symbol drawn beside each name appears to correspond to criteria she has not yet been able to determine. “There is a pattern,” she said, “but I have not yet understood it.

”

Now we come to what the Kin themselves believed. Because this is not, in the end, a story of ordinary criminals who were simply good at hiding their crimes. If it were, the story would be horrible but comprehensible. The Kin were something else.

The evidence for their beliefs comes from a source not yet mentioned: the testimony of Sara Ainsley. As noted, Sara gave an eighty-seven-page testimony to the chief of police of Salida. Much of it concerned the specific events of her sister Prudence’s disappearance and the family’s response to Sara’s questions. But a significant portion of the testimony, roughly the last third, concerned what Sara had been taught from childhood about the family’s history and beliefs.

Here the story becomes, if possible, stranger. Sara said the Kin believed they were descended from a people who had inhabited the valley long before the Ute arrived, long before any other people an outside historian might recognize. Bartholomew Kerrin told her, when she was seven or eight years old, that the four families had not come to the valley in the 1840s and 1850s. They had returned to it.

He told her their ancestors had been driven out of the valley thousands of years before, in his words, by a great and terrible division, and had scattered across the world, living for many generations among strangers, waiting for the day they would return home. He said the Kerrins traced their line through Kentucky, through the Carolinas, through the ships that brought their ancestors from a place in the old country he would not name. The Beddoes came from Wales, from a valley in its mountains with a reputation much like Hollow Fork. The Halletts traced their line to a village in Massachusetts that, in the 1690s, was the scene of a religious dispute so severe that all of its inhabitants were either hanged, exiled, or driven into the wilderness, from which some of them, apparently, made their way west.

The Ainsleys came from Ohio, but Ruth Ainsley, the matriarch, was born, according to family lore, in a place that appears on no modern map. Bartholomew told Sara that the four families had met over the centuries, maintaining faint threads of contact across the diaspora through marks and songs and specific words known only to their kind. When the time came, they returned home. And they returned to do what their ancestors had done in the valley long ago: to serve the thing that dwelled beneath the altar.

Sara was asked in the transcript whether her grandfather had ever told her what the thing beneath the altar was. She said he had not. She said that when she asked him as a child, he would smile and say, “You will meet him, daughter, when you are old enough. He will love you.

He will protect you. He has protected us for longer than any book can count. ” When the sheriff pressed Sara on this question, she said something that has haunted every researcher who has read the case file. She said, “Sheriff, I do not know what my grandfather worshipped in that room.

I never entered it. But I will tell you this. On the four holy nights of every year, from the time I was a small child, I lay in my bed and heard the chanting coming from the temple. I heard it for hours.

And after a while, I would begin to hear a second voice singing beneath the voices of my family. That second voice was not human. It was not a human voice. It came from below the floor of the temple, from a place very far down, and very far away.

It was old, Sheriff. It was old in a way I do not know how to describe to you. I heard that voice every year of my life until I walked out of that valley, and I still hear it on some nights when the wind blows in a certain direction. I do not think it has forgotten me.

I do not think it forgets anyone. ”

Sara Ainsley died in 1954. Her testimony sat in the state archives for nearly a hundred and fifty years. Dozens of researchers read it.

It was cited in academic papers and true crime books, and in a very brief mention in a 1972 documentary about frontier violence in Colorado. Until 2025, it was possible to read it and dismiss it as the traumatized memories of a young woman who grew up in a strange and cruel household, projecting supernatural significance onto the ordinary evils of a cult family. It was possible to read Elias Corbin’s account and explain it as heat exhaustion or hallucination. It was possible to read Reverend Whitmore’s journal and conclude he had suffered a nervous breakdown.

It was possible to read Colonel Byrne’s report and assume the Kin had escaped the militia through a tunnel or hidden trail that the search parties missed. It was possible to dismiss all of it and say the Devil’s Kin were merely an interesting folk tale of the frontier. That is harder to say now. The room is real.

The altar is real. The forty-seven girls are real. The ledger is real. The seven symbols are real.

And they are old, three thousand years older than the settlement of the valley. They are carved on stone cut with tools that no one who has examined the inscriptions has been able to identify. The surviving descendants of the Kin, the very few who remain alive and carry the distinctive genetic fingerprint of the four families, have all refused to comment when researchers reached out in the past year. Every single one.

No living person of Kin descent has agreed to an interview. No one has agreed to look at photographs of the chamber. No one has even agreed to publicly acknowledge belonging to the families that inhabited Hollow Fork in the nineteenth century. They know something.

Whatever it is, they will not tell us. The Forest Service, as of the winter of 2026, has closed the entire valley to the public again. The stated reason is ongoing archaeological excavation. The unstated reason, according to a source who spoke to a Denver newspaper on condition of anonymity, is that in the months following the opening of the chamber, three members of the survey crew reported hearing, at night, while camping near the site, many voices singing.

And beneath those voices, they heard a second voice coming from below the chamber floor, an old voice, and they said it was closer than it had been the night before. The Forest Service closed the road to Hollow Fork on December 14, 2025. That date deserves note, because it is the anniversary of Marshal Ambrose Fell’s death in his Denver hotel room in 1871. Whether that is a coincidence, I cannot say, and I do not think anyone can.

The Forest Service, when asked about the date by the same Denver newspaper, declined to comment. The three survey crew members who reported hearing the voices have all left their positions with the agency. Two moved to another state. The third retired to a small house in eastern Colorado, where, according to a neighbor interviewed by a local television station, he built a fence around his property nine feet high, topped with a strand that looks from a distance like braided horsehair.

When the neighbor asked why he built the fence, the retired surveyor answered simply that some things do not like crossing running hair. The neighbor asked what that meant. The surveyor did not answer. The remains of the forty-seven girls from the chamber remain, at the time of this writing, at the Denver Museum of Nature and Science.

Efforts continue to identify them by DNA and trace them to living descendants. So far, three have been tentatively matched to families in the eastern United States who reported a daughter missing between 1855 and 1885. In each of those three cases, the disappearance was never solved, and of course, the family had long since given up hope of ever knowing what happened to their child. The museum has reached out to the descendants of those families.

Arrangements are being made quietly to return the remains to their homes and give the girls a proper burial. It is not enough. It will never be enough. But it is something.

The ledger remains sealed. Dr. Halsey stated in her lecture that she believes the ledger contains, in addition to the names and symbols, a set of instructions. She did not say why she believed this.

She said the ledger has been read continuously since its recovery by a rotating team of researchers, and that at least two of them have withdrawn from the project. One for personal reasons. The other for what he described as an inability to sleep. The museum has refused to publish the ledger, in whole or in part, and has confirmed it does not expect to publish it in the near future.

Dr. Halsey has been asked more than once whether she believes the ledger poses any danger to whoever reads it. Her official answer is that she does not comment on speculative matters. But, according to a colleague, she said something different off the record.

She said, according to the colleague: “There are books that describe things, and there are books that call things by name. I am afraid this book is the second kind. ”

The final part of this story is the one I have been holding back. It comes from a source that has not been made public until now, and I will tell you what it is, and you may interpret it as you wish.

In the spring of 2026, a man approached a producer at a small documentary company in Denver and told him he had a document he wished to share. The man was in his eighties, the grandson of the Cañon City lawyer named Absalom Whitby, the one who had refused to complete a will for a dying Kin elder in 1881. The grandson said his family had kept for over a hundred years a sealed envelope left by his grandfather with instructions not to open it unless public interest in the Devil’s Kin case revived. With the discovery of the chamber in 2025, the grandson said, the time had come.

The envelope contained a single page, folded three times, written in the grandfather’s hand. The document has not been authenticated by any forensic laboratory, and I present it with that caveat, but the handwriting matches, to the naked eye, the handwriting in other surviving Whitby documents from the same period. It reads as follows: “I, Absalom Whitby, of Cañon City, Colorado, set down this document for the benefit of my descendants who may one day need it. In the summer of 1881, I was summoned to the Hollow Fork settlement to prepare a last will for an elder of the Kerrin family.

During that commission, the elder showed me a room in his house that no outsider, to my knowledge, had ever entered before or since. In that room there was a book lying on a stone of ancient workmanship. The elder read to me from the book, and he read for approximately a quarter of an hour. I did not understand a single word of what he read, but when he finished, he closed the book and looked at me and said, ‘Counselor, you will not remember this.

’ And I did not remember it for eleven years. I forgot the room, the book, the reading, and even my journey to the valley. I remembered only that I had gone to write a will and had returned with it unfinished. And I could not, when asked, explain why I had done so.

In the summer of 1892, exactly eleven years after my visit, I woke in the night and remembered. I remembered everything. I remembered the room, and the book, and the words the elder read, and I remembered them in the language in which he read them, though I had never spoken that language and had never heard it before that day or since. And I understood, lying in my bed in the darkness of my house in Cañon City, the meaning of those words.

I will not write them here. I will not speak them. I will say only what their purpose was, and I will say it once, and then I will fold this paper and seal it, and pray that no one ever reads it. The words were an invitation.

The Kerrins and the Beddoes and the Halletts and the Ainsleys did not leave. They did not die. They did not flee. They did not go down into any tunnel or cave.

They answered an invitation. They went where they were called. And I have known since that summer night in 1892 that the invitation is still open. It was not addressed to them alone.

It was addressed to all of us. It is addressed to anyone who will stand in that room and read the book aloud at the proper time. The Kin did it first. If you are reading this, I beg you, do not read the book.

Do not enter the room. Do not, if you can help it, speak the names of any of the four families aloud at any point in your life. They are listening. They have always been listening.

And if you speak to them, they will answer you. Absalom Whitby, this thirtieth day of August, 1892. ”

The book still exists. The room where it was kept was destroyed by Colonel Byrne’s men in 1882, but the ledger found in 2025 is, according to Dr.

Halsey, not the same book Whitby described. The book Whitby saw was bound in wood, and its pages were made of a material he could not identify, though he was certain it was not paper. The ledger in the altar chamber is bound, as I have said, in what a Denver laboratory confirmed to be human skin. Its pages are paper.

It is written in ink. And it appears to be a record kept by the Kin themselves of the transactions they conducted in service to whatever they served. In other words, it is not the book. The book Whitby saw, the book from which the Kerrin elder read in the summer of 1881, was something else.

No one knows where it is now. Perhaps it went with the Kin when they answered the invitation. Perhaps it is still buried somewhere in the valley. Perhaps it was never a physical thing in the sense we understand.

Perhaps, as Dr. Halsey’s colleague suggested about the ledger, it is something that calls, and its pages exist only as long as there is need for them to be read. I do not know. All I know is what I have told you.

And I know that at this hour, three men who used to work for the Forest Service cannot sleep at night. I know that at this hour, an unknown number of living descendants of the four families walk the streets of ordinary American towns and work ordinary American jobs, and do not answer their phones when a researcher calls. And I know there is a chamber beneath the eastern wall of a valley in the Rocky Mountains of Colorado. In that chamber, there is a stone altar three thousand years older than anything that should be there.

Above the altar, seven symbols are carved into the rock. The symbols are still present tonight. They are waiting. I have told you this story because it deserves to be told.

The forty-seven girls in the chamber deserve to have their names recovered, their stories told, and their bodies returned home. The families who lost daughters and sisters and wives and mothers at Hollow Fork over four decades deserve to finally know what happened to them. And the men and women who tried, each in their own way, at the cost of their careers and their sanity and in some cases their lives, to stop what was happening in that valley, Marshal Fell, Reverend Whitmore, Colonel Byrne, Sara Ainsley, Elias Corbin, deserve to be remembered for trying. But I have told you this story also because I believe that buried things do not stay buried forever.

I believe the earth gives up its secrets when the time is right, and not before. And I believe that when the time is right, we are obligated to look. The room is open. The remains are recovered.

The ledger is being read. Whatever the Devil’s Kin served in that valley, whatever answered their call in the autumn of 1882, I do not think it is finished with us. And I think it is better that we know its name and its shape and its history than that we do not. The Kin believed they were the last of their kind.

They believed the four families were the end of a bloodline that had scattered across the world after an ancient division, waited thousands of years to return home, and finally come back to the valley to complete a work begun long before any book we know how to read was written. Perhaps they were right. Perhaps they were wrong. Perhaps they are still out there in the American West, in mining camps and mountain valleys and small towns where no one asks too many questions, families keeping the old marks and the old songs and the old words, waiting as the Kin waited for the day the invitation comes to them.

I do not know. I hope not. I am afraid hope alone is not enough in this matter. If you are a descendant of one of the four families and are watching this, I want you to know that I am not asking you to speak.

I understand why you are silent. I understand there are things you were told as a child in a language your family has preserved through six generations of exile in America, things you were told never to repeat, and you have kept that promise and will keep it to your dying day. I understand. I am not asking you to break your silence.

All I ask is that you know we have all seen the room now. We have counted the girls. We have read what we could of the ledger. We know part of what your ancestors did in that valley, and we know part of what they served, and most of us will spend the rest of our lives trying not to think about it too much, and failing, and lying awake at night wondering, as you have wondered all your life, what lies beneath the floor of that room, and whether it is still there, and whether it hears us when we speak its name.

I do not think we should speak its name. I do not know its name, and I hope I never do. The valley is closed. The chamber is sealed for now.

The ledger is in a museum vault in Denver, and Dr. Halsey and her colleagues will continue to work as long as they are able to read it and try to understand what it reveals. The forty-seven girls will go home, one by one, to be buried, as their families are found. The Devil’s Kin have been gone from the valley for a hundred and forty-four years.

Perhaps they are gone forever. Perhaps they are only waiting. I have told you what I know. I have told you what the survivors said.

And I have told you what the men who tried to stop them wrote before they died. What you do with it is up to you. But if there is one thing to take from this, let it be this. If you are ever traveling and are invited to a house in a mountain valley by a family who smiles too wide and has eyes the color of amber, and offers you their hospitality, and asks you to stay for dinner, and to come with them into a room at the back of the house where they will read to you from a book, do not go.

Turn around, mount your horse, or get in your car, or set out on foot, and do not look back, and do not stop, and do not, whatever you do, speak the family’s name aloud. Not to yourself, not to your companions, not to the sky, not to the wind, not to anything at all. Because they are listening. They have always been listening.

And if you speak to them, they will answer.