In 1992 in Shrieves, West Virginia, three young divinity students drinking a bit heavily

after graduation from their master's program got involved in a car accident on a remote

country road.

Their car struck a young boy and shattered both his legs, and he was almost killed.

The students were ordered by their scholastic advisor and elder to spend one week fasting

in praying and isolation as a tonement for the accident.

The advisor's family owned a tiny cabin in the Appalachian mountains to which the students

would hike together and seclude themselves totally, meditating on the near tragedy all

the while.

The students hiked 14 miles to the cabin, carrying two gallons of water between them and nothing

else.

Two days into their period of atonement, one of the young men went into his squalid,

one furnished room and would not come out, would not answer when the others banged on

the door and asked him what was wrong.

Two days went by, and from inside his room there came only an eerie silence.

The young man had a history of alcoholism and abuse in his family and had twice committed

himself as an undergraduate to a mental health facility in his hometown.

The others finally broke the door down for a fear the young man may have committed suicide,

but he was not inside the room at all.

In his place was a middle-aged woman, a haggard pale creature with dirty black hair who

only lay motionless in bed.

Her filthy white dress was of a time period long since extinct.

...