Skip to content 
So only Sarah remained, the youngest, the sole survivor. Sarah Dalhart, though that wasn’t her birth name—if she ever had one—lived longer than anyone would have believed. In 2016, she was just over fifty, though she looked decades younger. She had spent most of her adult life in nursing homes, group homes, and halfway houses in Virginia and West Virginia. Sometimes she worked—dishwasher, janitor, night clerk at a store—always in jobs where she didn’t have to talk or interact much with people. Social workers described her as quiet, functional, and profoundly lonely. She had no friends, no romantic relationships, no ties to anyone. She lived on the fringes of society, present enough not to raise suspicion, absent enough to go unnoticed. For nearly 40 years, she never spoke of her origins or her family, until in 2016 a journalist named Eric Halloway found her
Halloway was researching a book about forgotten Appalachian communities when he stumbled upon a reference to the Dalhart children in a declassified court document. Most of the details had been redacted, but there was enough information to follow the trail. He tracked down former employees of Riverside Manor, obtained partial medical records through Freedom of Information Act requests, and eventually found Sarah through a social services database. He wrote to her for six months before she agreed to meet with him. They met at a restaurant in Charleston, West Virginia, on a cold November afternoon. Halloway recorded the conversation. This recording, which lasted more than three hours, was never made public, but excerpts were transcribed and published in a limited-edition article in a little-known history journal in 2017.What Sarah told him that day completely changed everything he thought he knew about the Dalhart clan. She said the children found in 1968 weren’t first-generation. They weren’t even tenth-generation. The Dalhart lineage had existed on Hollow Ridge for over 200 years, but it wasn’t a family in the traditional sense. It was a lineage, a continuation. She explained that her ancestors, the original Dalharts, had come to the hill in the late 18th century, fleeing something in their homeland. She didn’t say where—she didn’t know—but they had brought something with them: a practice, a ritual, a way of ensuring the family would never die out, never weaken, never be diluted by the outside world. They didn’t marry outsiders because they didn’t need to. They didn’t reproduce like other families. Sarah’s words, according to the transcript, were: “We weren’t born. We were hunted.”