The Hollow Stones of Darby’s Hollow

In the autumn of 1987, my family moved to a dilapidated farmhouse in the remote hills of West Virginia, a place the locals avoided, calling it ‘Darby’s Hollow.’ The name sent shivers, but my father, a staunch atheist and a man of science, dismissed the tales as superstition. He had bought the property for a song, eager to start a new life away from the city’s noise.

We arrived on a crisp October evening. The house was a two-story Victorian with peeling paint and a sagging porch, surrounded by skeletal trees. My mother, a devoutly religious woman, had refused to enter, muttering prayers under her breath. But my father, ever practical, carried our boxes inside, laughing at her fears. I was only five, but I remember the feeling of being watched from the woods, a sensation I couldn’t shake.

The first week was uneventful. The only sounds were the creaking floorboards and the wind through the gaps in the windows. My father spent his days repairing the roof, while my mother tried to make the place feel like home, though she often paused to pray over the strange carvings we found etched into the doorframes—circles with zigzag lines, resembling crude suns.

On the third night, we were woken by a sharp knock at the window of our bedroom. My father grumbled, threw open the curtains, but found nothing but the dark yard and the twisted silhouettes of trees. He muttered about raccoons and went back to bed. But the knock came again, this time from the kitchen window at the far end of the house. My father marched through the dark hallway, his flashlight beam dancing across the walls, and flung the back door open. Nothing. The yard was empty, save for the wind.

As he turned to come back inside, the knocking erupted—not from one window, but from every window in the house simultaneously, rapid and relentless, like a thousand fists beating on glass. My mother screamed, clutching me to her chest. My father ran from room to room, flinging open curtains, but each window showed only the same moonlit emptiness. The knocking was deafening, vibrating the floorboards under our feet.

Then, as suddenly as it started, it stopped. The house fell into an unnatural silence, the kind that presses on your ears. My father stood in the hallway, breathing hard, his eyes darting. My mother whispered, ‘It’s Him. He’s here.’ My father shouted at her to be quiet, that there was no God, no devil, only the wind and the old house playing tricks.

But then came the sound from outside—a low rumble that grew into a roar. We rushed to the front window and saw a hailstorm unlike any we’d ever seen. Stones the size of fists plummeted from the sky, crashing into the roof and the ground, shattering the windows. The glass exploded inward, and I screamed as a stone struck my father’s shoulder, drawing blood. My mother pulled me under the kitchen table as the stones continued to fall, some of them glowing faintly with a sickly red light, as if heated from within.

After what felt like an eternity, the storm ceased. The yard was littered with the stones, some the size of a man’s head, all of them warm to the touch. My father, his shoulder bleeding, walked outside, his boots crunching on the debris. He picked up one of the stones, and as he held it, he noticed it was not a natural stone at all—it was carved with the same circular symbols as the doorframes.

My mother began to wail, pointing at the treeline. There, just beyond the fence, stood a figure—tall, gaunt, wearing a tattered black coat. It had no face, only a smooth, pale expanse like a porcelain mask. It raised one long arm, pointing directly at my father. My father dropped the stone and staggered back, shaking. For the first time in his life, he fell to his knees and prayed.

The figure lowered its arm, then turned and vanished into the woods. We left that night, driving through the dark, my father white-faced and silent. He never spoke of it again, but he started going to church, dragging us along. Years later, I found the diary he kept hidden in his study. The last entry was written on that day, in shaky handwriting: ‘The stones were warm. The stones were warm. The stones were warm.’ It was all he could write.

We never returned to Darby’s Hollow. But sometimes, on quiet nights, I still hear that knocking—a rhythmic tap, tap, tap, as if something is trying to get in, trying to finish what it started. And I know, deep in my bones, that the stones are waiting for us to come back.