This was before PASA Park, "The Masters" and other shooting events here. The Hollow they used for this begins here at the farm lawn of the Metcalf home and had the remains of a road wending up through it. In an early day that road was athe main road up to the top of hill turning abruyptly and then on north. At that turn then stood a two story home with a family by the name of Harlow, so when Richards grandfather added that 80 acres to the farm it was always been referred to as the "harlow 80." To add a bit of history, there is a large "sink hole" on that 80 acres which each year is covered with water lillys. Over the years numerous Indian artifacts were plowed up around that sink hole of water giving proof it once had been a favorite camping area for Indians, especially since just down the hill are two active springs along the creek.

You now have the setting. Time passed and the main road was chanted to go straight north of the Metcalf home, the one that is traveled today. The old Hollow road became a field road to get to the fields on top of the hill. It was in that Hollow the Jaycees set up their spooky tour for a week long Halloween event. Not only teenagers came but young children with families. They loved it as you could hear screams as they walked in the dark up the Hollow where wet sponges attached to ropes came swishing down from the trees to splash them in the face and real live ghosts came swinging down past them from the trees. This amid taped moaning and groaning and eerie sounds echoing up and down the dark hollow and there was much more.

It was at that time Richard wrote the fictional Haunted Hollow story to add spice to the event. Today he is a professional writer and had all but forgotten about his tale. Why after all these years it turned up in the local paper is a mystery to him and it isn't even Halloween. The Hollow today is known as "Practical Valley," a part of PASA Park of which is president, where major shooting events are held. Nine shooting ranges encompasses the Hollow. Hopefully this will be the demise of the Haunted Hollow Story, the setting being the Metcalf farm. We're sure no wandering ghosts out on Halloween nights will go near that Hollow with all that shooting going on there. Perhaps some local organization might want to set up a Haunted Hollow in the Barry area come Halloween..
Written by Janita Metcalf, Barry IL.

Settlement of the rural areas of Barry Township in Pike County began during the 1830's. Section 11 in the northern part of the township, near the present location of PASA's White Oak Hollow Sportsman's Park, Was inhabited by several pioneer families during the early years. Smith, Wikes, Buyers, Woosley, and Brown were some of their names. To get to their new properties from the main Barry to Quincy road, these neighbors constructed a wagon trail up a small winding side-hollow that led out of the Hadley Creek Valley up onto the prairies topping the hills above. On the early maps and atlas's of Pike County, this trail shows as a prominent and well-used road, but by 1900 it had become what it is today, abandoned and overgrown, a faint and narrow track used only by newcomers who don't know of the horrible story - or by local folk only in dire emergency - and then only in daylight. This is the tale ....

In the year 1886, a young man from Pennsylvania, Thomas Martire, bought a small tract of land on the edge of the woods at the head of the Hollow. He bought it dirt cheap, from the lawyer for a long-unclaimed estate. Energetic, with high hopes for the future, he and his beautiful new bride, Christine, began to build a small cabin. It was close by the spot where the Hollow's wagon road emerged up from the dark, brushy woods out into the open plain. They were puzzled by the grim looks and shaking heads of their new neighbors in the area, who would only say that they had gotten no bargain.

The young couple was sure, however, that their neighbors, were keeping an eye on them, because when they stayed toward evenings working at their cabinsite, they would often see movement and hear rustings at the dimming edges of the clearing - though no one ever answered their friendly invitations to come on out and have a cup of coffee or cider. Sometimes they heard growls while riding their wagon back down through the Hollow returning to town and Thomas bought a rifle in case there were wolves about. By autumn, the little cabin was roofed. The the happy pair brought all their worldly possessions out from the boarding house in Barry where they had been staying, gathered a small collection of tools and livestock, and one evening in late October - just one hundred years ago -- moved into their new homestead, full of hope and laughter. That moment was the only joy that they would ever share.

Shortly after blowing out the candle and falling into bed, they were awakened by panicked cries and yelps from their watch dog, a large and fearless mastiff that had once driven off an attacking bear in the Pennsylvania woods. Rushing to the cabin door, they could see in the dim moonlight what they first thought was a pack of huge wolves, tearing their faithful hound into pieces. Grabbing a chunk of blazing wood from the fireplace as a club, Matire charged forward to defend his animal - then suddenly realized the creatures turning toward him were not wolves, but something else, even more monstrous and horrible -- and they were walking on two legs! Swinging his blazing torch in fear-driven panic, he managed to keep them at bay as he backed toward the cabin door and his rifle, but was then horrified to hear his wife desperately screaming his name as she was surrounded by still another dozen of the dim and hideous creatures, ripping and tearing at her thin nightdress as they dragged her toward the black woods. Turning to help her, he was struck by a powerful blow on the back of his head, and as he fell dazed to the ground and slipped into unconsciousness, he could hear her increasingly, faint cries for help fading into the depts of the Hollow.

Coming to, how much later he did not know, Thomas stumbled to his feet. Pieces of his dog's body, partially devoured were scattered in a circle around him and stuck to his blood-smeared clothes, as if they had been delibertely flung on him- as a warning. The silence from the Hollow was deafening. Overpowered by fear and desperation, he staggered blindly across the partly-harvested hilltop fields toward the home of his nearest neighbor - elderly widower William Buyers. Buyers answered his midnight visitor's frantic knocking with concern - but not surprise. And as the near-hysterical young man poured out his tale, the old pioneer could only shake his head in pity. Buyers had lived on the hills above that dark Hollow for nearly 50 years, and this was not the first nighttime horror he had heard - or the first time he had been called to help search for someone missing. Nor could he close his mind to the memory of how his own wife had died ten years before in her 60th year, strapped to her bed in nightmares of madness, after having been found wandering aimlessly at the edge of those woods where she had stayed too long one late afternoon while picking Autumn berries. Like his other neighbor, Buyers had long avoided the 40 acres at the back of his land where the Hollow began, and only dared to work near there at planting and harvest - beneath the noonday sun. For several seasons the Hollow had been quiet. But now that the young Martires had trespassed on its borders, it was awake again.

The modern reader must pause to remember how it was among the rural folk in the 1800's The woods surrounding their fields werestill home to wild beasts, and even an occassional Indian (though even the Indians never hunted in that particular small, twisted hollow). People of that era were superstitious, and held what they saw close among themselves. The farming families of the vicinity kept quiet outside of themselves all the ugly tales of the Hollow, all the names of daughters and wives who had disappeared -- "run away" -- over the years, all the traveling peddlars who had departed Barry saying they were heading out to visit the farmers in the northern township - and for some reason never came badk to town again. It wasn't really a conspiracy of silence -- just that they all knew their lands would be worthless if the tales of the Hollow were spread abroad. So they said little, even to each other, and turned their heads the other way when the wind from the South carried strange sounds.

Thus it was that William Buyers coaxed young Thomas Martire to wait until daylight, when more help could be summoned, before going out into the hollow to look for his missing young wife. And as the sun climbed high into the sky the next morning, the neighboring farmers gathered to begin yet another search, down into the Hollow, dark and dank even at midday, going through the motions, finding nothing. Weeks passed. Town talk at the Barry Inn held she had been stolen away by a marauding band of half-breed Indians that was rumored to sometimes roam up and down the Mississippi River bluffs. It was a shame, people said. She had been only 17 years old.

What happened to her desparate husband? Thomas Martire stayed on - for awhile. He wandered the hills surrounding the hollow, and combed its depths - even after the sun slipped below the hilltops. His cabin fell into ruin, but he slept there still, and would appear like a ghost at neighbor's doors -- unshaven and haggard -- begging for food and trying to describe once again the undescribable shapes that had fallen upon him and dragged his Christine away. Ears remained deaf, but he was always given something to eat, and as he would wander off into the night, heads would shake again in pity. It was clear that he was slowing going mad. When he disappeared a year later, no one as really surprised. Wandered off, they said at the Barry Inn. Probably went back to Pennsylvania.

Old William Buyers knew different. He never told anyone, just wrote it down in the diary that rests today on the dusty back storage shelves of the Barry library. Buyers had looked up from his evening chores one day to see Thomas Martire standing silently by. It was the evening of Wednesday, October 28, 1887, "Take these papers and these things," Martire said, passing over the deed to his land and a watch and some small pocket items. "You won't be seeing me again." Then he told Buyers that the night before he had been down in the Hollow again, by moonlight, silently hoping to see something - anything - that could give him a clue to things that had taken his Christine. Pushing through a tangled thicket in the hollow's darkest heart, he had stumbled into a recently dug pit - a pit not beg enough for a grave, but big enough to bury a few scrap bones, perhaps. Brushing the dirt from his face, he lit a match to help him find his way out of the tangled briars and saw what appeared to be a slab of wood or perhaps a big piece ofrock sitting at the edge of the open hole. Crudely scratched on its surface, as if by powerful claws, was the word "Thomas" and a date - October 31, 1887". Looking around he realized that the entire thicket was dotted with markers over small overgrown mounds, all bearing crudely scratched names and all with the date of the last day of October -- many years of dates. When his eyes fell on one that was more recent and less overgrown than the other, "Christine," its name was spelled.

So I know where I'm going," Thomas Martire told William Buyers. "But I have to get ready." He showed the old man a heavy corn knife. "This needs to be sharp. And there's not much time." He disappeared off into the evening. For the next two days the wind was from the South, and it carried to Buyer's ears, over the hilltop from the direction of Martire's cabin, the sound of a grindstone turning and rasping for hours on end. Then it was the afternoon of October 31st. And the grinding stopped. Forever.