In late July, the state made a decision. The children would be separated and transferred to different facilities in Virginia and Kentucky. They argued that this was the only way to break their bond and give them a chance at a normal life. Margaret Dunn opposed the decision, as did several medical staff members, but the state took further action. On August 2, 1968, the children were loaded into separate vehicles and transported to different locations. That night, each facility reported the same thing: the children had stopped eating and moving. They sat in their rooms, staring at the walls, humming the same low, resonant melody. 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, disease, 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 children who died separated from their families and grew up together. There was no precedent, no protocol, and no legal framework for a situation that shouldn’t have happened. So they did what institutions always do when faced with the inexplicable: they covered it up. In September 1968, the remaining eleven Dalhart children were transferred to a private facility in the Blue Ridge Mountains. The place was called Riverside Manor, even though there was no river nearby and it was far from the mansion. It was a converted sanatorium, built in the 1920s for tuberculosis patients. Abandoned in the 1950s, it had been quietly reopened under a state contract for cases that were supposed to disappear. The children were placed in an isolated wing. There were no other patients, no visitors, only a rotating staff of well-paid nurses and caregivers who were asked not to discuss their work.
The official registry listed the facility as a group home for children with intellectual disabilities. The unofficial truth was that Riverside Manor was a detention center for a problem the state couldn’t solve and wouldn’t disclose. For the next seven years, the Dalhart children lived there. They are older, but not in a normal way. Medical records show their growth was erratic. Some years, they grew by several inches. Other years, they didn’t grow at all. Their physical development didn’t match their apparent age. A boy who appeared to be 19 when they were found still looked 19 in 1975. The youngest girl, who should have been 11 at the time, still looked no older than seven. Blood tests were inconclusive. Genetic tests, rudimentary in the early 1970s, revealed abnormalities that the laboratory couldn’t classify. Their DNA contained sequences that didn’t match any known human marker. A geneticist who examined 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.
Riverside Manor staff reported strange occurrences. Lights went out in the children’s wing, but not in the rest of the building. Temperatures dropped suddenly, without explanation, and were confined to the children’s bedrooms. Objects moved, though not drastically: a cup moved three inches to the left, a chair faced the wall, a door that had been open closed even though no one had touched it. The children never spoke, yet they communicated. Staff members described the feeling of being watched even with their eyes closed. One caregiver recounted waking up in the middle of the night to find all eleven children standing silently around her bed, staring at her. She left the next morning. Another caregiver reported hearing voices in the hallway, conversations in a language that sounded like English played backwards. Upon investigation, she found the children asleep in their beds, but the voices continued until dawn.
In 1973, the state decided to permanently seal all documents related to the Dalhart case. The official reason was to protect the privacy of children in state care. According to a memo that came to light decades later, the real reason was fear of public panic and potential legal liability if the children’s true nature were revealed. The memo didn’t explain what “nature” meant. There was no need. 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 responsible.
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 the same incomprehensible language that no linguist could identify. The staff tried to record them, but the sound was always distorted, as if the sound itself resisted capture. However, they noticed that the children began to differentiate slightly. For seven years, they had moved as a single unit, slept in the same room, ate at the same time, and breathed in unison. But now, subtle differences began to emerge. One boy began spending hours staring out the window. One girl began drawing obsessively, compulsively, filling page after page with symbols that looked like letters but belonged to no known alphabet. Another boy stopped eating meat altogether and ate only ground-grown vegetables, rejecting anything packaged or canned. It was as if they were becoming individuals, or as if the bonds that held them together finally loosened.
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