At the end of July, the state made a decision. The children would be separated and transferred to different facilities in Virginia and Kentucky. It was the only way, they argued, to break the bond that united them and give them a chance at a normal life. Margaret Dunn opposed the decision, as did several members of the medical staff, but the state proceeded. On August 2, 1968, the children were loaded into separate vehicles and taken to different locations. That night, every facility reported the same thing: the children stopped eating and moving. They sat in their rooms, staring at the walls, humming that same low, resonant tone. Three days later, two of the children were found dead in their beds. The cause of death could not be determined. Their bodies showed no signs of trauma, illness, or suffering. They had simply ceased to live. By the end of the week, four more had died. The state reversed its decision. The surviving children were reunited, and the deaths stopped.
The state of Virginia didn’t know what to do with the children who died separated from their families and thrived together. There was no precedent, protocol, or legal framework for a situation that shouldn’t have been possible. So they did what institutions always do when faced with the inexplicable: they covered it up. In September 1968, Dalhart’s remaining eleven children were moved to a private institution in the Blue Ridge Mountains. The place was called Riverside Manor, though there was no river nearby and it was far from a mansion. It was a converted sanatorium, built in the 1920s for tuberculosis patients. Abandoned in the 1950s, it was quietly reopened under a state contract for cases that were meant to disappear. The children were housed in an isolated wing. There were no other patients, no visitors, just a rotating staff of well-paid nurses and caregivers who were asked not to discuss their work.
The official registry listed the institution as a group home for children with intellectual disabilities. The unofficial truth was that Riverside Manor was a holding cell for a problem the state couldn’t solve and didn’t want exposed. For the next seven years, the Dalhart children lived in that facility. They are older, but not in a normal way. Medical records show their growth was erratic. Some years they grew several inches. Other years they didn’t grow at all. Their physical development didn’t match their apparent age. The boy who looked 19 when they were found still looked 19 in 1975. The youngest girl, who should have been 11 by then, still looked no older than seven. Blood tests were inconclusive. Genetic testing, primitive in the early 1970s, showed abnormalities the lab couldn’t classify. Their DNA contained sequences that didn’t match any known human marker. A geneticist who reviewed the samples noted that certain segments resembled developmental remnants, traits that should have been eliminated from the human genome years ago. He was asked not to publish his findings. He agreed.
Staff at Riverside Manor reported strange occurrences. Lights would fail in the children’s wing, but not in the rest of the building. Temperatures would drop suddenly, without explanation, and were confined exclusively to the children’s bedrooms. Objects would move, though not drastically: a cup shifted seven centimeters to the left, a chair faced the wall, a door that had been open closed without anyone touching it. The children never spoke, yet they communicated. Staff members described feeling watched even with their eyes closed. One caregiver recounted waking in the middle of the night to find all eleven children standing silently around her bed, staring at her. She left the following morning. Another caregiver reported hearing voices in the hallway, conversations in a language that sounded like English played backward. Upon investigating, she found the children asleep in their beds, but the voices continued until dawn.
In 1973, the state decided to permanently seal all records related to the Dalhart case. The official reason was to protect the privacy of the children in state custody. According to a memo that surfaced decades later, the real reason was concern about public panic and potential legal liability if the subjects’ true nature became public. The memo didn’t explain what “nature” meant. It didn’t need to. By then, everyone involved understood that the Dalhart children weren’t simply traumatized or developmentally delayed. They were something else: something that had lived in those mountains for generations, hidden in plain sight, masquerading as human. And now the state was liable.
In 1975, something changed. The children began to talk, not to the staff, not to the doctors, but to each other. Whispered conversations, always in that same unintelligible language that no linguist could identify. The staff tried to record it, but the audio always came out distorted, as if the sound itself resisted being captured. What they did notice was that the children had begun to differentiate themselves slightly. For seven years, they had moved as a single unit, slept in the same room, ate at the same time, breathed in unison. But now, small differences were emerging. One boy began to spend hours staring out the window. One of the girls began to draw obsessively, compulsively, filling page after page with symbols that looked like letters, but didn’t belong to any known alphabet. Another boy stopped eating meat altogether and only consumed vegetables grown in the ground, rejecting anything that came packaged or canned. It was as if they were becoming individuals, or as if what held them together was finally loosening.
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