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But the story didn’t end with Sarah’s death. In 2020, a surveyor working in the area that was once Hollow Ridge reported finding the remains of the old Dalhart estate. The barn where the children had been found was gone, having collapsed decades earlier, but the main house was still standing, precariously. He went inside out of curiosity. There, he found walls covered with the same symbols that one of the Dalhart children had obsessively drawn in the Riverside Mansion. Hundreds of them were carved into the wood, stretching from floor to ceiling in every room. He photographed them and sent the pictures to a linguist at Virginia Commonwealth University. The linguist couldn’t identify the language, but she noted that the symbols followed a consistent grammatical structure, suggesting they were communicative, not decorative. She also noted that many of the symbols appeared to be instructions: instructions for something, a process, a ritual.
Two weeks later, the surveyor returned to the property to take more photographs. The house was gone; it hadn’t collapsed, it hadn’t burned down, it had simply vanished. The foundation was still there, but the structure was gone. There was no debris, no sign of demolition, just an empty clearing where a house had stood for over 200 years. Since then, more reports have surfaced. Hikers in the area have described hearing a buzzing sound in the woods at night: the same deep, resonant tone that haunted the staff at Riverside Manor. Hunters have found perfectly round circles of dead vegetation in places where nothing should be able to eliminate the undergrowth so completely. In 2022, a family camping near the former Dalhart property reported seeing children in the trees at dawn: 17 of them, completely motionless, watching the campsite. The family gathered their belongings and left immediately. When they reported it to the local authorities, they were told there were no children in the area, no missing persons, no camps, and no youth groups. The family never returned.