Beatrice Cobb

Postmistress

Wrote hers down the same night.

Bea ran the Hollowfield post office for eight years and walked home past the mill every night she closed it. On December 2, 1953, at approximately 11:40pm, she saw something standing on the loading dock, and went home and wrote four pages about it before she slept.

Those four pages are the archive's model document, and the reason the Institute asks members to file immediately: her account contains details she could not reconstruct a week later and did not, at the time, think were important.

She noted that the dogs in the mill yard did not bark. She noted that she could hear the river, which on any normal night the machinery drowned out.