The Briar Creek Boys Were Found in 1958 — What They Told the Sheriff Broke the Case Open

There’s a photograph that sits in the Brier Creek County archives that no one talks about anymore. It shows three boys, maybe 10 or 11 years old, standing in a field with their hands clasped in front of them. Their clothes are torn, their faces are blank, and behind them, just barely visible in the negative, you can see the edge of something that looks like a doorway built into the ground.

The photograph was taken by Sheriff Martin Cass on the morning of June 14th, 1958. The boys had been missing for 9 days when they were found. They were 23 mi from where they disappeared, standing in a clearing that locals had avoided for generations. They weren’t crying. They weren’t calling for help.

They were just standing there waiting. What those boys told the sheriff in the hours that followed would unravel a secret that had been buried in that town for over 70 years. It would end two marriages, force one man to take his own life, and cause the county to seal an entire investigation file that still to this day requires a court order to access.

This is not folklore. This is not legend. This is what happened when three children walked out of the woods in rural Kentucky and told the truth about what they saw beneath the earth. Hello everyone. Before we start, make sure to like and subscribe to the channel and leave a comment with where you’re from and what time you’re watching.

That way, YouTube will keep showing you stories just like this one. The year is 1958. Eisenhower is president. The country is rebuilding itself in the shadow of two wars. And in Brier Creek, Kentucky, a town of fewer than 3,000 people, children still play unsupervised in the woods until the dinner bell rings. That’s what Daniel Hulcom, James Pritchette, and Samuel Low were doing on the afternoon of June 5th.

They were building a fort near the old Marley property, a stretch of land that had been abandoned since the turn of the century. No one had lived there in decades. No one farmed it. No one even walked through it. But the boys didn’t care. They were 10 years old, and the world was still an adventure. By 6:00 that evening, none of them had come home.

When Daniel Hulkcom didn’t show up for supper, his mother assumed he’d lost track of time, boys did that. They got caught up in their games, forgot the world outside the trees. But when the sun went down and the porch light had been on for an hour, she walked to the Pritchard house. James wasn’t home either. Neither was Samuel Low. By 8:00, a group of fathers had gathered in the center of town with flashlights and hunting rifles.

By 9, they were in the woods calling names that echoed back to them with no answer. The search went on through the night. Volunteers came from neighboring counties. Blood hounds were brought in from Lexington. They picked up the boys sent near the edge of the Marley property and followed it for nearly half a mile before the dogs stopped dead, refused to go any further, and began to whine.

The handlers had never seen anything like it. One of the hounds lay down in the dirt and wouldn’t move. Another tried to bolt back toward the road. It was as if something in the air had changed, something the animals could sense, but the men could not. Sheriff Martin Cass was a practical man. He’d served in the Pacific during the war, had seen things that made him stop believing in ghosts or superstitions or any of the old stories his grandmother used to tell.

But standing there in those woods, watching trained dogs refuse to move forward. He felt something he hadn’t felt since Okinawa, he felt watched. He ordered the men to press on anyway. They searched for three more days. They found nothing. No clothing, no footprints, no signs of struggle. It was as if the boys had simply evaporated.

On the fourth day, the state police took over. They brought in more men, more dogs, a helicopter. They dragged the creek. They searched every barn, every cellar, every abandoned structure within 10 mi. They interviewed drifters, checked the registry of known offenders, followed up on reports of suspicious vehicles. Nothing.

By the end of the first week, the official theory was abduction. Someone had taken them, someone from outside the county, someone passing through. The case went cold almost immediately. The families held out hope, but the town had already begun to mourn. And then on the morning of June 14th, a farmer named Eugene Tras was checking his fence line on the far eastern edge of his property when he saw them.

Three boys standing in a clearing, perfectly still, staring at nothing. He called out to them, but they didn’t respond. He walked closer and that’s when he realized who they were. He ran back to his truck and radioed the sheriff. Within 20 minutes, Martin Cass was standing in that clearing looking at three children who had been missing for 9 days and who, by all logic, should have been dead. They weren’t injured.

That was the first thing Sheriff Cass noticed. No cuts, no bruises, no signs of dehydration or exposure. Their clothes were dirty and torn in places, but not in a way that suggested they’d been running through the woods for over a week. It looked more like they’d been kneeling or crawling. Their shoes were caked in a fine chalky dust that didn’t match any soil type in the area.

Later analysis would show it contained traces of limestone and something else, something organic that the lab technician refused to identify. In his official report, he only wrote biological material, origin unknown, and then requested to be taken off the case. The boys didn’t speak at first. They stood in that clearing with their hands at their sides, staring past the sheriff as if he wasn’t there.

Cass knelt down in front of Daniel Hulkcom, the oldest of the three, and asked him if he was hurt. Daniel’s eyes slowly focused on the sheriff’s face. He opened his mouth and then he said something that made Cass’s blood go cold. He said, “We couldn’t leave until the man said we could.” Cass asked, “What man?” Daniel didn’t answer.

He just turned his head and looked back toward the tree line, toward the section of woods where the dogs had refused to go. James Pritchette was crying now. Silent tears running down his face, but he wasn’t making a sound. Samuel Lo was humming something under his breath. A melody that didn’t sound like any song Cass had ever heard.

It was rhythmic, almost mechanical, like a lullaby sung backward. The boys were taken to Briar Creek General Hospital. Doctors examined them for hours. Physically, they were fine. Better than fine, actually. They should have been malnourished, dehydrated, suffering from exposure, but their vital signs were normal. Their weight hadn’t changed.

It was as if they’d been fed, sheltered, cared for. But by whom and where the hospital kept them overnight for observation, their parents stayed with them, held them, wept over them, but the boys barely reacted. They ate when food was given to them. They lay down when told to sleep, but they didn’t speak. Not to their mothers, not to their fathers, not to anyone except Sheriff Cass.

He came back the next morning with a tape recorder. He sat in the hospital room with Daniel, James, and Samuel. And he asked them to tell him everything. He promised them they weren’t in trouble. He promised them no one would be angry. He just needed to know the truth. And after a long silence, Daniel Hulcom began to speak.

What he said over the next 43 minutes would become one of the most disturbing recorded testimonies in Kentucky state history. The tape still exists. It’s kept in a locked cabinet in the basement of the county courthouse. Only three people have listened to it in the last 20 years. One of them was a journalist who requested access through a Freedom of Information Act filing.

He listened to the first 12 minutes and then asked for the tape to be turned off. He left the building and never wrote the story. Daniel spoke first. His voice on the tape is flat, almost emotionless, like a child reciting a lesson he’d been made to memorize. He said they’d been playing near the old Marley property when they found the door.

It wasn’t a door to a house or a shed. It was a door in the ground, hidden beneath a collapsed section of rotted timber and wild brush. They wouldn’t have seen it at all if Samuel hadn’t tripped and fallen, his hand landing on something that felt like rusted metal. They pulled away the branches in the dirt. And there it was, a hatch, heavy iron, covered in symbols none of them recognized.

Symbols that looked like they’d been carved by hand, maybe a hundred years ago, maybe longer. James Pritchette interrupted here. His voice was quieter, shaking. He said they knew they shouldn’t open it. They knew. But Daniel had found a crowbar near the tree line, left behind by some longforgotten work crew, and he wedged it under the edge of the hatch.

It took all three of them pulling together to lift it. When it finally gave way, the smell that came up from below was overwhelming. Not rot, not decay, something else, something sweet and wrong, like flowers left too long in a closed room. And underneath that, a scent like wet stone and old metal. There were stairs leading down, wooden steps surprisingly intact, descending into darkness.

Samuel said they should leave, should go get an adult. But Daniel had already started down, so they followed. Boys that age don’t think about danger the way adults do. They think about discovery. They think about being the ones who found something no one else knew existed. They climbed down 23 steps. Daniel counted them. At the bottom was a tunnel shored up with timber beams and stone stretching forward into blackness.

They had a flashlight, just one. Daniel swept the beam ahead and saw that the tunnel opened into something larger. A room? No, not a room. A chamber carved out of the limestone bedrock, and it wasn’t empty. There were things inside. Objects arranged on shelves built into the walls. Jars filled with liquid and things floating inside them.

Things that might have been organic once, but had been preserved so long they’d stopped looking like anything recognizable. There were tools hung on hooks, farming equipment maybe, except the shapes were wrong. The handles too long, the blades too narrow. And in the center of the chamber was a table, a stone table stained dark.

That’s when they heard the voice. It came from deeper in the tunnel. From somewhere beyond the chamber, a place they couldn’t see. A man’s voice. Calm, almost friendly. It said, “You shouldn’t be here, boys.” And then it said, “But now that you are, you’ll have to stay a while.” They ran. Of course, they ran back toward the stairs, back toward the light.

But when they reached the bottom of the steps, the hatch was closed. Daniel pushed against it with everything he had. It wouldn’t move. It was as if someone had placed a tremendous weight on top of it or locked it from the outside, though none of them had heard anything close. They screamed.

They pounded on the metal until their fists were raw. And then the voice came again closer this time, just behind them in the tunnel. It said, “There’s no use in that. No one’s going to hear you down here. They never do.” James described what happened next. He said, “A light appeared in the tunnel. Not a flashlight, not a lantern, something else.

a pale greenish glow that seemed to come from the walls themselves, from some kind of fungus or mineral deposit that activated in the presence of movement. And in that light, they saw him, a man, tall, thin, wearing clothes that looked like they belonged to another century, a collarless shirt, suspenders, trousers held up with rope.

His face was hard to describe, James said. Not because it was disfigured or monstrous. But because it was too normal, too plain. The kind of face you’d forget the moment you stopped looking at it. Except for his eyes. His eyes didn’t blink. He told the boys to sit down. He told them he wasn’t going to hurt them.

He just needed company for a while. It had been a long time since anyone had come down to visit. He spoke like a man who’d been alone for years and had forgotten how to talk to people. his sentences stilted and strange, his tone shifting between warmth and something that felt like barely concealed anger. He asked them their names. He asked them what year it was.

When Daniel said 1958, the man laughed. A low, joyless sound. He said, “That long already. Time moves different down here.” He fed them. That’s what Samuel Lo said. and his voice on the tape goes almost silent here, as if saying it out loud made it more real. The man brought them food, bread that tasted stale, but wasn’t moldy.

Dried meat that might have been venison. Water from a metal cup that was ice cold despite the warmth of the chamber. He told them stories while they ate, stories about the town above, about families they’d never heard of, about things that had happened before their grandparents were born. He talked about the Marley family, about how they’d owned this land once, about how they’d built these tunnels for a purpose the town had tried to forget.

If you’re still watching, you’re already braver than most. Tell us in the comments what would you have done if this was your bloodline. The man said the Marleys had understood something that modern people had forgotten. That the land wasn’t just dirt and rock. that there were spaces beneath the surface where old things lived, old agreements that had been made long before anyone wrote them down.

He said the tunnel system stretched for miles, connecting to places all over the county, places that used to be gathering sites, places where offerings were made. He said the boys were sitting in one of those places right now. And then he said something that made Daniel start crying. He said, “Your people used to bring children here.

Not often, but when the crops failed, or when the sickness came, they knew what had to be done. The boys couldn’t tell how long they’d been down there. There was no day or night in the chamber. No way to measure time except by sleep and waking. The man let them rest on bed rolls that smelled of mildew and age.

Blankets that might have been down there for decades. He didn’t chain them. He didn’t lock them in a separate room. He simply told them they couldn’t leave yet. And somehow they believed him. Maybe it was fear. Maybe it was something else. Samuel said it felt like the air itself was holding them in place.

Like the tunnel had a weight to it that pressed down on their chests and made them too tired to fight. The man talked constantly, rambling monologues about the town’s history, about families who’d lived and died, about deals that had been struck in the dark. He said his name was Ezra, though he never gave a last name.

He said he’d been down in the tunnel since 1917, tending to the old places, making sure the agreements were kept. When Daniel asked, “What agreements?” Ezra smiled. He said, “The kind that keep a town alive when everything around it is dying. The kind that make sure your wells don’t run dry and your children don’t get sick and your men come home from wars they shouldn’t have survived.”

He showed them things. Objects he kept in the deeper chambers, artifacts that made no sense. A bundle of letters tied with wire, all addressed to people who’d been dead for 50 years. A collection of teeth, human teeth, sorted by size in small wooden boxes, a ledger filled with names and dates, written in a careful, slanted hand.

Daniel said he recognized some of the names. Families that still lived in Brier Creek, families that had been there for generations. Next to each name was a number. Sometimes it was a one, sometimes it was a two next to the name Hulcom. Written in 1893 was the number three. On what the boys thought was the fifth or sixth day, Ezra brought them to a different part of the tunnel system, a narrow passage that sloped downward, deeper into the earth until it opened into a natural cavern.

The ceiling disappeared into darkness above them. The floor was uneven, slick with moisture, and in the center of the cavern was a pool of water, black and still. Ezra stood at the edge and stared into it for a long time. Then he said, “This is where it lives. This is what your grandfathers fed.”

He told them the town had stopped making offerings after the First World War, stopped believing in the old ways, and that’s when things had started to go wrong. Crops failed. Businesses closed. People left. He said he’d stayed behind to keep watch. To make sure the thing in the pool didn’t get angry enough to come up, James asked what would happen if it did.

Ez returned and looked at him. And for the first time, there was something like sadness in his face, he said. Then Brier Creek stops being a town. It becomes a hole in the ground that people drive past and don’t remember. He knelt down in front of the boys and told them they were lucky. He said he’d thought about keeping them, about adding their names to the ledger, about giving the pool what it wanted.

But he decided against it. He said the world above had changed too much, that there were too many people asking questions now, too many records and phones and police. He said, “You’ll go home, but you’ll remember. And when you’re older, when you have children of your own, you’ll understand why some doors should stay closed.” On the ninth day, Ezra led them back to the stairs. The hatch was open.

Sunlight poured down into the tunnel so bright it hurt their eyes. He told them to climb up and walk east until they found a road. He told them not to look back. He told them not to tell anyone where the door was or what they’d seen or what he’d said. And then he said something that Daniel Hulkcom would repeat to Sheriff Cass in a voice barely above a whisper.

He said, “If you do tell, I’ll know, and I’ll come back for you when you’re sleeping.” The boys climbed the stairs. When they reached the top and looked back down, the tunnel was dark. There was no glow, no sign of Ezra, just stone and shadow. They walked east just as he’d told them, and within an hour, they were standing in Eugene Tras’s field. They didn’t speak to each other.

They didn’t cry or celebrate. They just stood there waiting to be found because some part of them wasn’t sure they were really free. Sheriff Martin Cass listened to the entire testimony without interrupting. When the tape ended, he sat in silence for several minutes. Then he asked the boys if they could take him to the door. All three of them refused.

Daniel said he didn’t remember exactly where it was. James said he’d never be able to find it again. Samuel just shook his head and started humming that strange melody. Cass didn’t push them. He could see the fear in their eyes. The kind of fear that doesn’t fade with time or comfort.

He thanked them, told them they were safe now, and left the hospital. He went back into the woods alone. He searched the Marley property for 3 days straight, covering every inch of ground where the boys said they’d been playing. He brought a metal detector. He brought surveying equipment. He found nothing. No hatch, no disturbed ground, no trace of an entrance.

It was as if the door had never existed or as if someone had made very sure it could never be found again. Cass filed his report with the state police. He included the tape recording and his own notes. The official conclusion was that the boys had been held by an unknown individual in an unknown location and had either been released or had escaped.

The case was classified as unsolved. The tape was sealed by court order 6 months later after Daniel Hulkcom’s father threatened to sue the county for emotional distress. The boys never spoke about it again, not to reporters, not to investigators, not even to each other. Daniel Hulkcom left Brier Creek the day he turned 18 and never came back.

He moved to Ohio, changed his name, and refused all contact with anyone from his childhood. James Pritchette stayed in town but became a recluse living alone in his family’s house until he died of a heart attack in 1994. Samuel Lo joined the ministry. He became a traveling preacher, speaking at revival meetings across the South.

But those who heard him preach said there was something strange about his sermons, something obsessive. He talked constantly about doors that should never be opened, about things that lived beneath the earth, about the price of forgetting. Sheriff Martin Cass retired in 1967. In his final interview with the local paper, a reporter asked him if he ever solved the Brier Creek boys case.

Cass stared at the man for a long moment. Then he said, “Some cases aren’t meant to be solved. Some things are better left buried. He died 3 years later. In his personal effects, his daughter found a map of the Marley property with dozens of X marks scattered across it and a handwritten note that said, “I heard him, too.”

The Marley land was sold to a development company in 1982. They planned to build a subdivision, 40 homes on 2acre lots. Construction began in the spring of 1983. By July, three workers had quit, claiming they heard voices coming from the ground. By August, the project was abandoned after the excavation crew reported finding a network of tunnels beneath the property.

Tunnels that weren’t on any historical survey. The company went bankrupt. The land was seized by the county for unpaid taxes. It sits empty to this day. No one builds there. No one farms it. And if you visit Brier Creek and ask the older residents about what happened in 1958, most of them will say they don’t remember.

But if you push, if you ask them about the boys, about the door, about what’s really under that land, they’ll look at you the way Daniel and James and Samuel looked at Sheriff Cass in that hospital room, and they’ll tell you the same thing Ezra told those boys in the dark. Some doors should stay closed. The photograph I mentioned at the beginning, the one that sits in the county archives, has a detail most people don’t notice at first.

Behind the boys, in the background, just barely visible in the treeine, there’s a figure, tall, thin, watching. The archavists say it’s a trick of the light, a shadow from the trees. But if you look closely, if you really study the image, you can see that the figure is smiling, and in his hand, barely visible, is something that looks like a crowbar.

Some people believe the tunnels are still there. Some believe Ezra is still down there waiting. And some believe that every few decades when the town starts to forget, when the old agreements grow weak, the door opens again. Not for everyone. Just for the ones who wander too close, just for the ones who are curious enough to pull away the branches and lift the hatch and descend those 23 steps into the dark.

If you ever find yourself in Brier Creek, Kentucky, if you ever walk through those woods on the eastern edge of town, and you see something that looks like a door built into the ground, do yourself a favor. Keep walking. Don’t stop. Don’t look back. Because some mysteries aren’t meant to be solved.

Some stories aren’t meant to have endings. And some things, once you let them out, never go back in. Thank you for watching. If this story affected you, let us know in the comments. And remember to like and subscribe. There are more stories like this one. Stories the world tried to forget.