It was the year 1890, and the fog in eastern Kentucky refused to dissipate. Dense, damp, and strangely alive, it enveloped the valleys and canyons in an unnatural silence. At the heart of that fog was Black Mars Hollow, a place that seemed to have stopped in time, where an old log cabin kept a secret that was not only ancient, but also profane.

What would be discovered by a simple census taker and, later, by a stubborn circuit judge, would become one of the most horrific and systematic family crime cases in American history: the nightmare of the Rodenbeck brothers.

The story began with Abel Fry, a young census taker who arrived at Black Mars Hollow expecting only a routine of numbers and statistics. He found the cabin, sturdy and strangely well preserved, and four men at the door: Silas, Malachi, Hezekiah, and Jubel Rodenbeck.

They were pale men, with eyes described as “dirty glass,” and they spoke with a rehearsed slowness, as if they were one voice.

When Fry asked about the number of residents, Silas smiled warmly and replied,
“None you need to count.

The refusal, by itself, was only a small offense to the pride of a census taker. But as he mounted his horse to leave, a subtle movement caught his attention. High up, behind the distorted glass of the attic, a pale face appeared for an instant: fragile, frightened… and disappeared immediately.

Fry attributed it to his imagination, but the image obsessed him. In his report he wrote a single enigmatic line, a footnote among mundane facts:

“Woman’s face observed in the attic. Illegible expression. Access denied.”

That simple line made its way to the desk of Circuit Judge Elias Thorne.

Elias Thorne was not a man of rumors. But something in Fry’s tone, in the trembling handwriting and habits of the Rodenbecks, disturbed him. He believed that “evil leaves a record.”

He began researching commercial and land ownership records.

Soon after, Judge Elias Thorne traveled to Black Mars Hollow with two sheriffs and a country doctor.

The air grew thicker with each step, as if the fog itself refused to let the truth through.

When they arrived, the cabin seemed abandoned; however, from inside came a low murmur, almost a litany.

Thorne broke down the door.

The interior was a prison of wood and bones. In the attic, bound with rusty chains, they found three young women… or what was left of them. Translucent skin, colorless eyes, premature white hair. They looked like imperfect copies of the same mother.

When the doctor asked their names, one of them, barely able to articulate, murmured:

“We are not daughters. We are the echo.

The basement revealed something worse: ledgers.
Not of money, but of blood.

Meticulously recorded generations: crosses between siblings, children born from the same womb, clinical notes on mutations, fertility and “preservation of the pure Rodenbeck lineage”.

Six generations of deliberate incest.
A family experiment that had begun in 1791, with a patriarch who believed that divine purity lay in not mixing blood.

Thorne ordered the brothers arrested. But before dawn broke and the fog cleared, the Rodenbecks had hanged themselves in a row in front of the cabin, leaving a note written in blood:

“The seed is already planted. The echo does not end.”

Months later, Judge Thorne filed his report. The case was sealed, the remains incinerated, and Black Mars Hollow was declared cursed territory.

But the country doctor, Dr. Grieves, kept a small vial with a sample of blood found in the house. Out of scientific curiosity, he sent it to a laboratory in Louisville.

The result left him cold:
The sample was not human.
Or, rather… not at all.

The DNA showed an altered strand—a mutation that should not have existed—something the lab described as “a pre-human regression.”

Days later, the bottle mysteriously disappeared from his office.
And with it, so did Dr. Grieves.

In the next Kentucky census, an attendee recorded something peculiar in a forgotten area of the map, near the old Mars Hollow Valley:

“Cabin inhabited by a pale-skinned woman. She introduces herself as ‘Thorne Rodenbeck’. Mother of twins.”