Rafael Duarte and the Voice on the Ridge
Filed October 3, 1951 · Recorded by Ada Merrick, with Dr. Helen Whitaker
The county wrote its explanation in eleven days. He has been writing his ever since.
The Testimony
My wife Elena was a practical woman. She did not wander and she was not careless. Our daughter Marisol was four and she collected stones out of the creek behind the house, and Elena went with her because that is what you do with a four year old and water.
On the third of October 1951 they went down to the creek after lunch. I was at the kitchen table with a drawing I had been at for two days. I did not go with them.
They left at two. It was bright. It is a quarter of a mile through light second growth and you can see the house from the bank.
At four they were not back and I was not worried.
At five I walked down.
The bar where they always went was empty. There was nothing on it. I called for them and the sound went about thirty feet and stopped, which it does in there, the timber takes it.
I looked for an hour. The ground is thick off the trail and it is easy to be turned around in.
Then I heard Marisol.
She was calling papa, papa, from further up, away from the water.
I went towards it. It moved. It came from up the slope and then it came from behind me and then from both, and I could not put it in one place, and I kept going anyway because she was four.
I want to write down what I understood standing there, because I understood it at the time and I have not been able to unknow it since. I was the only one calling. It was my voice coming back at me off the ridge and my own head putting her into it, because that is what I needed to hear.
I say that and I still went towards it.
There was something in the trees uphill of me, turned away. I thought it was Elena. The shape was right and I would have sworn the coat was right. Then I looked at how the back sat over the hips and how the arms hung and it was not right, and when I went at it, it was further off than it had been, without seeming to have moved.
I said her name.
It did not turn around. I could feel the size of it from where I stood.
I went towards it three times and three times it was further into the dark, and I understood I was being walked, so I ran.
I heard voices behind me the whole way down. Hers. Marisol's. Mine. All of them pitched slightly wrong, the way a thing sounds when it has been learned rather than meant.
I got to the house and I locked the door, which I have thought about every day since, because they were out there and I locked the door.
I reported them in the morning. The search ran eleven days. They found no clothing, no trail, nothing at the house that should not have been there and nothing in the creek. The county wrote that Elena had left and had taken the child.
I have never accepted that and I am not going to start.
For about six months afterwards I heard them at night. I never answered. Then it stopped.
Something still watches me and has for two years. It is not threatening. It is interested. I think it is working out how a man behaves who did not come with the rest.
Sometimes in the dark I hear my own voice out on the ridge, and I do not know whether it is mine coming back or something practising the way I speak.
I have been drawing it since that October. None of the drawings are right. I keep them anyway.
Documentation Notes
Investigator: Ada Merrick, with Dr. Helen Whitaker
Mr. Duarte came to the room above Pruitt's in December 1953 and gave this account in one sitting. He is twenty nine. He is a millwright. He asked for nothing.
I have written it down exactly as he gave it, which is what this Institute does, and I am going to be careful in these notes about the difference between what he told me and what anybody has since added to it.
What is established. Elena Duarte and Marisol Duarte, aged four, left their house on the afternoon of October 3, 1951 and did not return. The county search ran eleven days and recovered nothing. The county's finding is that Elena left and took the child. That finding is on the record and this file does not overturn it, because this file cannot.
Dr. Whitaker's note, which she asked be included in full. The county's explanation is the likeliest one and remains so. A woman leaves, and a search of second growth finds nothing because there is nothing to find. I have said this to Mr. Duarte directly and he did not argue with me and he did not change his account. I add, as a physician, that a man looking for his wife and child for three hours in failing light will hear their voices, and that this is ordinary and is not evidence of anything. He says so himself, in the account, before I could say it to him. That he understood it at the time and went towards it anyway is the only part of this I am not able to file under anything I know.
On the name. This account was filed for a time under a name out of Kwakwaka'wakw tradition, from Vancouver Island and the north coast, several hundred miles from this valley. It was put there by a member after the fact. Mr. Duarte used no name at all. It is a real tradition belonging to living people and it was never ours to borrow, so it has been struck from the file, and this paragraph is here so that striking it does not also hide that we did it. The Institute has not identified what Mr. Duarte saw and is not going to.
What the Institute concludes. Nothing. He was not asked to prove anything and we have not asked it of him since.
What is open. Elena Duarte and Marisol Duarte. This file stays open.
Filing. Class II, on the sighting. The disappearance is filed separately as a disappearance, which is what the record supports.
The creature in this account is catalogued in the field guide, and can be photographed in the app.