The Greer Brothers’ Horrible Traditions — Each Took Turns “Purifying” Their Mother (1887 Kentucky)

In the autumn of 1887, a traveling minister named Reverend Thomas Aldridge arrived in Harland County, Kentucky, carrying nothing but a worn Bible and a letter of introduction from the Methodist Episcopal Church. He’d been assigned to a circuit of small congregations scattered throughout the Eastern Mountains, places where the gospel had to compete with older beliefs where Christianity and something darker lived side by side in the hollows.
On his third Sunday, he rode up a nameless creek to visit a family he’d been told about the Greers. Five brothers living with their widowed mother in a cabin so far back in the laurel thicket that even the male rider refused to go there anymore. When Aldridge finally reached the clearing, he found the brothers waiting for him on the porch, standing in a perfect line like soldiers.

They were polite. They invited him inside. And what he saw in that cabin, what he wrote about in his journal that night by candle light, his hand shaking so badly the ink bled across the page would haunt him until the day he died. He never went back. And for over a century, no one knew why. Hello everyone.
Before we start, make sure to like and subscribe to the channel and leave a comment with where you’re watching from and what time it is there. That way, YouTube will keep showing you stories just like this one. The Greer family had lived in that hollow for three generations. The land was poor rocky soil that barely grew corn, timber too twisted to mill, water that ran rust colored from the iron in the ground. But the Greers stayed.
They weren’t sociable people. They didn’t trade much in town, didn’t marry outside the family line, didn’t welcome strangers. The mother, Eliza Greer, had been widowed young when her husband drowned crossing the swollen Cumberland River in 1873. She raised her five sons alone, Jacob, Samuel, Isaiah, Ezekiel, and Caleb, teaching them to read from the King James Bible and nothing else.
Neighbors said she was a hard woman, cold, that she loved God more than she loved her children, that she believed suffering was the only path to salvation. And when the boys grew into men, they never left. They built their lives around her, around the cabin, around a faith that twisted inward like a vine choking a tree.
By 1887, the youngest son was 23, the oldest was 37, and none of them had ever known another woman. The first sign that something was wrong came in the spring of 1886, more than a year before Reverend Aldridgeg’s visit. A peddler named Henry Watts had been making his rounds through the county, selling needles and thread and lamp oil from the back of a muledrawn cart.

He stopped at the Greer cabin just before sunset, hoping to make camp nearby for the night. The brothers bought nothing, but they were cordial enough. They offered him water from their well and

She sat at the head of the table with her hands folded, lips moving in what he assumed was prayer, but no sound came out. After the meal, the brothers walked him outside and thanked him for his company. But as Watts was packing his cart in the fading light, the youngest brother, Caleb, approached him alone. The young man’s face was pale, his eyes redmmed like he hadn’t slept in days.
He pressed something into Watts’s hand, a piece of paper, folded tight. Then he whispered, “Pray for us,” and disappeared back into the cabin. Watts unfolded the paper later that night by his campfire. Written in crude, childlike script were just four words. “She makes us clean.” Watts didn’t know what to make of it. He asked around town the next day, but no one seemed concerned.

The Greers were strange, sure, but they kept to themselves. They weren’t bothering anybody. One old woman at the general store said Eliza Greer had always been peculiar about cleanliness, that she believed the body was a temple that had to be kept pure, that she wouldn’t let her sons so much as go barefoot in summer for fear of contamination.
4:08
Another man said he’d heard the family practice some kind of ritual bathing, that it was part of their religion, something about washing away sin before it could take root. Watts let it go. He had other routes to travel, other towns to visit. But he kept that piece of paper, and when he heard what happened a year later, he brought it to the county sheriff.
4:27
By the time Reverend Aldridge arrived in 1887, there were already whispers. A woman in town claimed she’d seen the Greer brothers at the general store buying lie soap in quantities that made no sense, 20 bars at a time, every month, regular as clockwork. A doctor said one of the brothers had come to him with chemical burns on his hands and arms, but refused to explain how he’d gotten them.
4:49
A neighbor who lived 2 miles down the creek said he’d heard singing coming from the Greer cabin late at night hymns sung in unison over and over for hours. And there was the matter of Eliza herself. No one had seen her in over 3 years. The brothers said she was frail, that she didn’t leave the house anymore, that she preferred to keep to herself.
5:09
But when pressed, they’d grown defensive. hostile even. They said their mother’s privacy was sacred, that outsiders wouldn’t understand, that the family had its own way of doing things, and that was nobody’s business but theirs. Reverend Aldridge wrote in his journal that the cabin smelled like lie and something else, something sweet and wrong, like meat left too long in summer heat. The brothers were respectful.
5:34
They answered his questions about scripture, nodded along when he spoke about grace and redemption. But they never took their eyes off the closed door at the back of the room. When Aldridge asked if he might meet their mother, offer her communion and prayer, the eldest brother, Jacob, stiffened. He said their mother was resting, that she’d been unwell, that she preferred not to receive visitors in her condition.
5:56
Uldridge pressed gently, explaining that spiritual comfort was especially important for the sick and elderly. The brothers exchanged glances. Finally, Samuel spoke. He said their mother would see him, but only if he understood the rules. He was not to touch her. He was not to ask her questions about the family.
6:16
And he was to leave immediately if she became agitated. Aldridge agreed. The door opened, and what he saw inside that room would strip away any notion he had about Christian devotion. Eliza Greer sat in a wooden chair in the center of the room, her hands gripping the armrest so tightly her knuckles had gone white. She was naked.
6:36
Her skin was raw and red, scrubbed nearly to bleeding in places, covered in patches of chemical burns that wept clear fluid. Her hair had been cut short, unevenly as though hacked away with a dull blade. The floor around her was wet. There were buckets lined against the wall, filled with water that had a milky costic sheen.
6:58
A Bible lay open on a small table beside her, its pages warped and stained. Aldridge couldn’t speak. He stood in the doorway, frozen, trying to make sense of what he was seeing. Eliza didn’t look at him. Her eyes were fixed on something only she could see, and her lips moved in silent prayer. Behind him, Jacob spoke quietly. He said their mother had asked for this, that she believed her body had become corrupt, that age and sin had turned her flesh impure, and that the only way to prepare for heaven was to purify herself completely. He said it was their duty as
7:31
sons to help her, to wash her clean, to keep her holy. Aldridge asked how long this had been going on. Jacob said 3 years. Ever since their mother had received a vision, a dream where God told her that the body must be scoured like a temple that no stain could remain when the soul departed, she had instructed her sons to bathe her everyday using lie soap and scalding water, scrubbing until the skin was new.
7:57
At first, she had done it herself. But as the months passed and her strength faded, the task fell to them. They took turns. Each brother had a day assigned. Monday through Friday, one son would enter the room, strip his mother bare, and wash her from head to toe while she prayed.
8:16
They believed they were saving her. They believed God was watching, and if the process caused pain, if her skin blistered and bled, if she wept or cried out, that was the price of righteousness. Jacob’s voice never wavered. He spoke as though he were describing the planting of corn or the mending of a fence. This was simply what needed to be done.
8:36
Aldridge left the cabin within minutes. He rode back to town without stopping, his horse nearly collapsing from the pace. He went directly to the county sheriff and told him everything. The sheriff listened, then asked a question that stopped Aldridge cold. Had Eliza Greer asked him for help? Had she indicated in any way that she was being held against her will? Aldridge hesitated.
8:59
The truth was she hadn’t. She had sat there silently, enduring as though this were her choice. The sheriff sighed. He said, “Unless there was evidence of force or confinement, there wasn’t much the law could do. If a woman wanted to torment herself in the name of God, and her sons were simply following her instructions.
9:20
” That was a family matter, a religious matter, not a crime. But Aldridge couldn’t let it go. He returned to the hollow 3 days later, this time with the county doctor, a man named Silas Puit, who’d practiced medicine in the mountains for over 20 years, and had seen things that defied both science and sense.
9:39
Puit had agreed to come only after Aldridge described the burns, the raw flesh, the chemical smell that clung to everything. When they arrived at the cabin, the brothers were waiting outside, as if they’d known someone would come back. This time, there was no pretense of hospitality. Jacob stood with his arms crossed and told them plainly that they were not welcome, that their mother’s soul was her own business, that interference from outsiders was an affront to God.
10:04
Puit ignored him. He pushed past the brothers and entered the cabin, Aldridge close behind. The backroom door was open. Eliza sat in the same chair in the same position, but now her head lulled to one side. Her breathing was shallow. The skin on her arms and chest had begun to split in places, revealing raw tissue underneath.
10:25
Puit knelt beside her and tried to speak gently, asking if she was in pain, if she wanted help. She didn’t respond. Her eyes were glassy, unfocused. He reached out to check her pulse. And that’s when Isaiah stepped into the room and said very calmly that if the doctor touched their mother, they would kill him. Puit stood slowly. He was not a fearful man, but he understood what he was looking at.
10:50
Five grown men, isolated for years, locked into a delusion that had calcified into doctrine. He told them their mother was dying, that the burns were infected, that her body was shutting down, that without medical intervention she had days at most. Jacob shook his head. He said death was not something to be feared, that their mother was ready, that she had been preparing for this moment for 3 years, and that when God finally called her home, she would be spotless, pure, worthy, asked what would happen after she died. Would they allow
11:22
a proper burial? Would they notify the authorities? Jacob smiled, a thin, joyless expression that made Aldridge’s stomach turn. He said they would take care of everything. That the family had its own traditions, that the world outside had no place in what came next. Puit and Aldridge left without another word.
11:44
There was nothing more they could do. Eliza Greer died 6 days later on a cold morning in late October. The brothers did not report her death. They did not send for a minister or an undertaker. Instead, they wrapped her body in white linen they’d boiled in lie water until it was stiff as canvas. They carried her to a clearing behind the cabin, where they’d already dug a grave in the rocky soil, and before they lowered her into the ground, they performed one final purification.
12:13
According to a journal entry later found in the cabin written by Samuel in meticulous script, they washed her body one last time. They used boiling water. They scrubbed her until the skin sluffed away in sheets until nothing remained but muscle and bone. They believed they were giving her the cleanest possible vessel for resurrection.
12:34
They believed they had done what God required. And when they finally buried her, they sang hymns until their voices gave out, then sat in silence around the grave until the sun went down. No marker was placed. No name was carved. The earth simply swallowed her. And the brothers returned to the cabin as if nothing had changed.
12:53
It was Reverend Aldridge who eventually brought the law back to the hollow. 3 weeks after Eliza’s death, he rode out with the sheriff and two deputies, armed with a rit to investigate a suspected unlawful burial. The brothers did not resist. They led the men to the grave without argument, even helped them dig.
13:11
When the body was exumed, the doctor who examined it, notuit, who refused to return, confirmed what Aldridge had feared. The cause of death was sepsis from chemical burns compounded by malnutrition and dehydration, but the state of the body after death was worse. The flesh had been deliberately removed in places, scrubbed away postmortem.
13:33
It was desecration, the doctor said, but the brothers called it devotion. The trial took place in the spring of 1888 in a courthouse so packed that men stood three deep along the walls and women fainted from the heat. The charge was unlawful burial and abuse of a corpse. The prosecution argued that what the Greer brothers had done was an abomination, that they had tortured their mother under the guise of faith, that they had mutilated her body after death, and that no civilized society could tolerate such acts, no matter the
14:04
religious justification. The defense was simple. Eliza Gria had been of sound mind when she requested the purification rituals. She had initiated them herself. She had never once asked for them to stop. And as for what happened after her death, the brothers had only been following her final instructions. Written in her own hand in a letter that Samuel produced in court.
14:28
The letter was brief, written in shaking script on a page torn from the family Bible. It read, “When I am gone, wash me one last time. Let no corruption remain. Give me to the earth clean. As I came into the world, the jury deliberated for 4 hours. They returned with a verdict of not guilty. The courtroom erupted.
14:50
Half the crowd cheered. The other half sat in stunned silence, unable to reconcile what they just heard. The judge, an elderly man named Asa Combmes, who’d presided over the circuit for 30 years, looked at the brothers and said something that would be quoted in newspapers across Kentucky for weeks afterward.
15:10
He said, “You are free men in the eyes of the law, but you are not innocent. What you have done may not be a crime, but it is a sin against nature, and you will answer for it in a court higher than mine.” The brothers showed no reaction. They walked out of the courthouse together, climbed into their wagon, and rode back into the mountains.
15:28
They were never seen in town again. Within a year, people stopped talking about the trial. The story became something shameful, something families didn’t discuss. And slowly over decades, the memory faded into rumor, then legend, then nothing at all. But the story didn’t end there. In 1932, a surveyor working for the state forestry service stumbled across the remains of the Greer cabin while mapping timber tracts in Harland County.
15:57
The structure had collapsed in on itself. The roof caved in, the walls rotted through. Inside he found five skeletons arranged in a circle on the floor. Their hands clasped together as if in prayer. There were no signs of violence. No indication of how they’d died. The local coroner estimated they’d been dead for at least 20 years, possibly longer.
16:19
On the wall above them, someone had carved a single line of scripture into the wood with a knife. It was from the book of Leviticus 15. And when he that hath an issue is cleansed of his issue, then he shall number to himself seven days for his cleansing, and wash his clothes, and bathe his flesh in running water, and shall be clean.
16:42
Below it, in smaller letters, were five names: Jacob, Samuel, Isaiah, Ezekiel, Caleb, and beneath those names, one final word. Carved so deep the wood had split. Mother. The bodies were buried in the county cemetery in unmarked graves far from the main plots. No investigation was launched. No descendants came forward to claim them.
17:06
The cabin site was eventually swallowed by the forest, and the state never recorded its exact location. But in the years that followed, hikers and hunters occasionally reported strange things in that part of the mountains. The smell of lie soap drifting through the trees on windless days. the sound of hymns sung by voices that seemed to come from underground.
17:27
And in the winter, when the snow was fresh and untouched, they said you could sometimes see tracks leading to a clearing that no longer existed. Five sets of footprints walking in perfect formation, circling a place where nothing grew. 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 family? Reverend Thomas Aldridge never recovered from what he witnessed in that hollow.
17:53
His journal, discovered after his death in 1903, contained dozens of entries about the Greer family, written over the course of 15 years. He couldn’t stop thinking about them. He couldn’t stop asking himself if he’d done enough, if there was something he could have said or done differently that might have saved Eliza Greer from her sons or saved her sons from her.
18:14
Because that was the question that haunted him most. who had been the victim. The entries grew darker as the years passed. He wrote about nightmares where he saw Eliza sitting in that chair, her skin peeling away, her eyes fixed on heaven while her children destroyed her in the name of love. He wrote about visiting other families in the mountains, looking for signs of similar practices, convinced that the Greers couldn’t be the only ones, he found nothing, but he also found that no one wanted to talk about it.
18:44
The trial had embarrassed the county. It had made people look backward, superstitious, complicit. So, they buried it the way they buried everything uncomfortable with silence and time. But Aldridge also wrote something else, something that complicates the story in ways that are hard to accept. In an entry dated November 1894, he described a conversation he’d had with an elderly woman in Harland County who claimed to have known Eliza Greer as a girl.
19:12
The woman said Eliza had been abused by her father, beaten, starved, locked in a cellar for days at a time whenever she disobeyed. She said Eliza grew up believing that suffering was love, that pain was proof of devotion, and that the only way to be worthy of God was to be broken.
19:31
When Eliza married and had sons, she raised them the same way. She taught them that the body was corrupt, that desire was sin, that the only pure relationship was one built on sacrifice and control. And when her husband died, leaving her alone with five boys who knew nothing of the world beyond that hollow, she became both mother and god to them.
19:53
She didn’t force them to wash her. She convinced them it was holy. She made them believe that in hurting her, they were saving her. and they never questioned it because they’d never known anything else. Aldridge wrestled with this. If Eliza had been a victim herself, if the ritual purification was the only way she knew how to process a lifetime of trauma, did that make her sons victims, too? Or were they willing participants in a cycle of abuse that had been passed down like a family bible, inevitable and unbreakable? He never arrived at an answer. His final
20:25
entry, written just weeks before his death, was only one sentence long. I have spent 17 years trying to understand evil, and all I have learned is that evil does not need to be understood to destroy. He died of a heart attack in his sleep. His journal was found in a trunk in his attic, sealed with wax. His family burned most of his papers, but a nephew kept the journal, unsure what to do with it.
20:50
It eventually ended up in the archives of the Kentucky Historical Society where it sat unread for decades until a graduate student researching Appalachian religious practices stumbled across it in 1976. That student, a woman named Caroline Webb, became obsessed with the Greer case. She spent years trying to verify the details, cross-referencing Aldridge’s account with court records, census data, and newspaper archives.
21:16
Most of what she found supported his story. The trial had happened. The brothers had been acquitted. The bodies had been discovered in 1932. But there were gaps. No photographs existed of the family. No surviving relatives could be located. And strangest of all, the grave site where Eliza was originally buried had never been officially recorded.
21:36
Webb traveled to Harlland County multiple times, interviewed elderly residents, and even hired a guide to help her search the mountains for the remains of the cabin. They found nothing. It was as if the hollow itself had been erased. In her final report published in a small academic journal in 1983, Webb concluded that the Greer case represented something uniquely American, a collision of extreme isolation, religious fanaticism, and familial loyalty so intense that it became indistinguishable from madness. She wrote that the story
22:08
mattered not because it was shocking but because it was believed because everyone involved the brothers, the mother, even Reverend Aldridge had acted according to their own understanding of righteousness. And that was the most terrifying part. The question that remains is not whether the Greer brothers were guilty, but whether guilt even matters when everyone involved believed they were doing the right thing.
22:32
There’s a tendency to look back at stories like this and search for a villain, someone to blame, someone to condemn. But the truth is messier than that. Eliza Greer was not dragged to that chair. She sat down willingly. She instructed her sons to scrub her flesh until it bled. And when they hesitated, she reminded them that obedience to God required sacrifice.
22:53
The brothers were not monsters. They were sons who loved their mother so completely that they couldn’t see the difference between devotion and destruction. They spent 3 years washing her, praying over her, believing that every act of violence they committed against her body was an act of salvation. And when she finally died, they didn’t grieve.
23:13
They celebrated because in their minds, they had succeeded. They had delivered her to heaven spotless and pure, exactly as she’d asked. But here’s what keeps people awake at night when they hear this story. It’s not the burns or the lie or the grave in the clearing. It’s the realization that this could have continued.
23:34
If Reverend Aldridge hadn’t come to that cabin, if the trial hadn’t forced the community to confront what was happening in that hollow, the brothers might have lived out the rest of their lives believing they’d done something holy. And maybe they would have found wives, raised children, and taught them the same lessons their mother had taught them, that the body is corrupt, that suffering is proof of love, that purity requires pain.
23:56
The cycle would have continued, generation after generation, until someone from the outside finally looked close enough to see what was hidden in plain sight. That’s the real horror of the Greer case. Not that it happened, but that it almost didn’t matter. In the decades since Caroline Webb’s research was published, the story has resurfaced occasionally in true crime forums and Appalachian history circles.
24:20
Some people argue that the brothers should have been charged with murder, that Eliza’s consent was meaningless given her obvious mental state. Others insist that the family’s religious beliefs, no matter how extreme, were protected by law, and that the trial’s outcome was correct. A few researchers have even suggested that the story itself might be exaggerated, that Aldridge, traumatized by what he saw, embellished details in his journal to make sense of something he couldn’t understand.
24:48
But the physical evidence is hard to dismiss. The trial transcripts exist. The bodies were found. And the carving in that collapsed cabin, the scripture and the names, and that single word, mother, was documented by the surveyor who discovered it, photographed, and filed in state records before the site was lost to the wilderness.
25:09
There’s a small museum in Harland County now, tucked into a building that used to be a general store. It houses artifacts from the region’s history, coal mining equipment, Civil War memorabilia, photographs of families who lived and died in the mountains. In the back corner, in a display case that most visitors walk past without noticing, there’s a single item related to the Greer family.
25:31
It’s a bar of lie soap, brownish yellow and cracked with age, recovered from the ruins of the cabin in 1932. The placard next to it is brief. It gives the family name, the year of the trial, and one sentence. A reminder that faith, when isolated from compassion, can justify anything. The soap sits there behind glass, untouched and unremarkable, a relic of a belief system so absolute that it consumed everyone who practiced it.
26:03
And if you stand there long enough staring at that simple, terrible object, you start to understand what Reverend Aldridge meant when he wrote that evil doesn’t need to be understood to destroy. Sometimes it just needs to be believed. The Greer brothers died together in that cabin, their hands clasped in prayer, their mother’s scripture carved into the wall above them.
26:25
No one knows if they starved or froze or simply decided they’d lived long enough, but in the end, they got what they wanted. They stayed faithful. They stayed pure. They stayed together. And they stayed forgotten. Buried in unmarked graves in a county that wanted nothing more than to move on. But stories like this don’t stay buried. They seep up through the soil like groundwater.
26:49
Slow and persistent until someone stumbles across them and realizes that the past is never really passed. It’s just waiting in the dark, patient and quiet, for someone to finally listen. And now you have, now you know what happened in that hollow in 1887. Now you carry it with you, the way Reverend Aldridge did, the way everyone who hears it does.
27:11
Because some stories aren’t meant to be forgotten, they’re meant to be remembered and repeated and warned about. So that when faith starts to look like fanaticism, when love starts to feel like control, when devotion starts to demand destruction, someone will recognize it for what it is. And maybe, just maybe, they’ll do what no one did for Eliza Greer and her five sons. They’ll say no.
27:34
They’ll walk away. They’ll choose mercy over righteousness. They’ll choose life over purity. And they’ll understand that sometimes the most faithful thing you can do is refuse to believe.