His wife Margaret was 39, a handsome woman with orbin hair pulled back in a practical bun, wearing a simple but well-made dress of dark blue wool. She curtsied slightly when introduced, her manners impeccable, her smile warm but somehow fixed, like a mask she’d learned to wear perfectly. Their three children were presented in order of age.
Thomas, the eldest at 19, was a younger version of his father, tall and strongly built, with intelligent eyes that seemed to assess Dr. Harrow with uncomfortable intensity. Elizabeth, 16, was delicate and beautiful, with her mother’s orburn hair and an unnaturally graceful way of moving that made her seem to float rather than walk.
The youngest, Rebecca, was 12 with dark curls and a serious expression that seemed far too mature for her age. All of them appeared to be in perfect health with clear skin, bright eyes, and none of the commonailments that typically plagued rural families. No signs of ricketetts, scurvy, consumption, or any of the dozen other diseases that Dr.
Harrow regularly treated in his practice. After the introductions, Samuel led Dr. Harrow to a small study off the main room, closing the door behind them. The study was clearly Samuel’s domain, lined with more books, including several medical texts that surprised the doctor, Gray’s Anatomy, Belle’s Principles of Surgery, and even a copy of Bish’s Physiological Researches on Life and Death, all wellworn and heavily annotated.
Samuel gestured for the doctor to sit, then took a deep breath before speaking, his voice steady, but carrying an undercurrent of what might have been relief or perhaps resignation. He explained that the family’s condition, as he called it, had begun six generations ago in 1720 with his great greatgrandfather, Josiah Witmore.
The original Josiah had been a ship surgeon who had survived a maritime disaster off the coast of the Caribbean, spending three months stranded on a small uncharted island with five other survivors. When rescue finally came, only Josiah remained alive. And he returned to New England, a changed man, not just in spirit, but in his very biology.
Samuel explained that Josiah had discovered upon his return that he could no longer digest normal food. Bread made him violently ill. Meat from livestock caused agonizing cramps and vomiting. Fruits and vegetables produced such severe reactions that he nearly died from attempting to eat them. The only sustenance his body would accept, the only food that provided nourishment rather than sickness, was human flesh. Dr.
Dr. Harrow felt his blood run cold as Samuel spoke, but the man’s tone was not that of a madman or a monster confessing to crimes. He spoke with the clinical detachment of someone describing a medical condition, a hereditary disorder that had been passed down through six generations, growing stronger with each passing decade. Josiah had initially fought against this horrifying reality.
Samuel continued, attempting every possible alternative, every remedy, every medical intervention available in the early 18th century. Nothing worked. His body had been fundamentally altered by whatever had happened on that island, and the change was permanent. What made the condition even more terrifying, Samuel explained, was that it proved to be hereditary, but with a cruel twist.
Josiah’s wife, Martha, had remained normal, capable of eating regular food without issue. But their children, three sons and two daughters, had all inherited their father’s condition. By the age of five or six, each child began showing the same symptoms. an inability to digest normal food, violent physical reactions to anything except the one forbidden sustenance.
The trait passed to every child without exception, and it grew stronger with each generation. By the time of Samuel’s father, the third generation, the Witors couldn’t even tolerate normal food, touching their skin without developing painful rashes. Samuel himself represented the fifth generation, and his children, the sixth, had never in their lives been able to consume anything else.
They had been born into this curse, raised with it as their only reality, and their bodies had adapted so completely that the thought of eating regular food was as foreign to them as the thought of consuming raw sewage would be to Dr. Harrow. The doctor sat in stunned silence, his mind racing through possible explanations, psychological delusion affecting multiple generations, some unknown toxin or parasite, a elaborate hoax perhaps for attention, or to excuse some other crime, but Samuel seemed to anticipate every rational objection. He
stood and walked to a cabinet, removing a thick leatherbound journal that he placed on the desk between them. This, he explained, was the family’s medical record, maintained meticulously by each generation, documenting every attempt to cure the condition, every experiment, every failure.
The journal contained detailed descriptions of symptoms, attempted remedies, and the results of various tests conducted over 120 years. Samuel flipped to a section from 1785 where his grandfather had worked with a physician in Boston attempting a controlled experiment with various foods under medical supervision. The entries were clinical and precise, describing violent physiological reactions to even minute quantities of normal food, reactions that couldn’t be faked or imagined.
Blood had been drawn and examined, though the microscopic technology of the era couldn’t reveal much. Vital signs had been monitored. The conclusion had been inescapable. The Witmore family’s digestive system had somehow been fundamentally altered. Dr. Harrow found his voice finally, though it came out and uncertain. He asked the question that terrified him most.
How did they obtain their food? Where did it come from? Samuel’s expression remainedcalm, almost sympathetic to the doctor’s distress as he explained the family’s solution to their horrifying predicament. They had never, he emphasized with clear intensity, never harmed an innocent person. They were not murderers.
They were not monsters, despite what their condition might suggest. Instead, the family had developed a system over six generations that, while still deeply disturbing, operated within a strict moral framework that they had convinced themselves was defensible. They obtained their sustenance exclusively from executed criminals, working through a network of contacts in various state prisons and judicial systems across New England.
When a prisoner was hanged or otherwise executed, certain officials, compensated generously and sworn to absolute secrecy, would ensure that the body was delivered to the Witmore family rather than buried in a porpa’s grave. The system had been established by Josiah’s son, Nathaniel, in the 1750s, and it had functioned with surprising efficiency for nearly 90 years.
The family paid substantial sums. Their wealth accumulated through careful investments and frugal living to maintain this network. They received perhaps four to six bodies per year, sometimes more in years when crime rates were higher and justice was swift. The bodies were preserved in the large cold cellar beneath the barn using techniques adapted from both traditional food preservation and Josiah’s original medical knowledge. Samuel walked Dr.
Harrow through the logistics with the air of someone discussing agricultural practices explaining how they processed, stored, and rationed their supply to last throughout the year. A single adult body properly preserved and carefully managed could sustain the family for approximately 2 months. They wasted nothing, used everything, and maintained their grim lauder with the same attention to detail that other families applied to their root sellers and smokeouses.
Dr. Harrow felt nausea rising in his throat, but he forced himself to maintain professional composure. He asked if he could examine the family medically to conduct his own tests to verify what seemed impossible. Samuel agreed immediately, seeming almost eager for medical validation of their condition.
He called his family into the study, and for the next three hours, Dr. Harrow conducted the most thorough physical examination of his career. He checked pulses, listened to hearts and lungs, examined skin and eyes, tested reflexes, measured heights and weights. Every single member of the Witmore family was in remarkable health. Their hearts were strong, their lungs clear, their muscle tone excellent.
They showed no signs of malnutrition, no vitamin deficiencies, no symptoms of the diseases that plagued other rural families. In fact, they were healthier than 90% of the patients Dr. Harrow typically treated. Their teeth were strong and white, their hair thick and lustrous, their skin clear and unmarked. Even the children, who should have shown signs of any nutritional imbalances, were perfect specimens of health.
Then came the critical test. Dr. Harrow had brought with him various food items: bread, dried beef, apples, cheese, milk, and he asked each family member to attempt consuming small amounts while he observed. Samuel agreed, though he warned the doctor that the results would be unpleasant. Thomas, the eldest son, volunteered to go first. Dr.
Harrow handed him a small piece of bread, less than an ounce, freshly baked by the doctor’s own housekeeper that morning. Thomas held it for a moment, then placed it in his mouth and attempted to chew. The reaction was almost instantaneous. Within seconds, his face pald, sweat broke out on his forehead, and his body began to convulse.
He fell to his knees, wretching violently, bringing up bile and blood. His hands clutched at his throat as though he couldn’t breathe, and his eyes rolled back in his head. Dr. Harrow rushed to assist, but Samuel stopped him, explaining that forcing the reaction to continue would only make it worse. He helped his son to a basin where Thomas vomited repeatedly until the bread was completely expelled from his system.
The entire episode lasted perhaps 3 minutes, but it was 3 minutes of genuine, undeniable physical agony. The doctor tested each family member with different foods, always small amounts, always under controlled conditions. Elizabeth tried the dried beef and had a similar violent reaction. Young Rebecca attempted a small bite of apple and collapsed into convulsions so severe that Dr.
Harrow genuinely feared for her life. Margaret tried milk and immediately broke out in painful looking hives across her skin where drops had touched her lips. Every test produced the same result. Violent immediate physiological rejection. These were not psychological reactions, not imagined symptoms, not theatrical performances. These were real, measurable, undeniable physical responses. Dr.
Harrow’s medicaltraining provided no framework for understanding what he was witnessing. He had seen allergic reactions before, severe intolerances to certain foods, but nothing like this. Nothing that affected every type of normal food, nothing that had been inherited across six generations, nothing that left the sufferers in otherwise perfect health. As the evening approached and lamplight began to fill the house, Dr.
Harrow asked the question he had been dreading. He needed to see them eat their actual food, to observe whether they could genuinely consume and digest human flesh, or whether this entire situation was perhaps a mass delusion masking some other condition, some alternative food source they had convinced themselves was human remains.
Samuel regarded him for a long moment, then nodded slowly. He explained that they typically ate in the evening once per day as their bodies seemed to process their food very efficiently, requiring less frequent meals than normal people. He offered to prepare supper for the family to allow Dr. Harrow to observe the entire process from preparation to consumption.
The doctor agreed, though every instinct screamed at him to refuse, to leave this house, to ride back to civilization and forget everything he had seen. But his scientific curiosity, that fundamental drive to understand the inexplicable, overrode his revulsion. Samuel led him to the barn as the sun set behind the mountains, casting long shadows across the snow.
Inside, the barn was divided into several sections. One area contained tools and equipment. Another held firewood and supplies, but the largest section featured a heavy wooden door set into the floor secured with a substantial lock. Samuel produced a key from his pocket and opened the door, revealing stone steps leading down into darkness.
He lit a lantern and descended, gesturing for Dr. Harrow to follow. The cold cellar below was extensive, perhaps 20 ft by 30 feet, with a ceiling high enough to stand upright. The temperature was just above freezing, perfect for preservation, and the air was dry and still. Along the walls hung several bodies in various states of processing, wrapped in cloth suspended from hooks, looking disturbingly like sides of beef or pork in any farmhouse ladder.
Samuel’s manner was matterof fact as he explained that these were the remains of four men and one woman. All executed in Massachusetts and Connecticut within the past 8 months. All convicted of murder or legally executed by their respective states and all delivered here through the network his family had maintained for decades.
Dr. Harrow stood in that cold cellar, his lantern casting flickering shadows across the preserved remains, and felt his understanding of medicine and human biology crumbling around him. Samuel selected a portion from one of the wrapped forms with the practice efficiency of a butcher choosing a cut for a customer, explaining as he worked that they had developed very specific preparation methods over the generations, techniques that maximized nutrition while minimizing waste.
He treated the task with neither reverence nor revulsion, simply the mundane familiarity of someone performing a daily chore that had been part of his life since childhood. As they returned to the house, the wrapped portion carried in a clean basket, Dr. Harrow found himself noticing details he had missed during his initial arrival.
The kitchen was equipped with specialized tools, knives of particular shapes, grinding implements, preservation equipment, all custommade and maintained with obvious care. This was not the kitchen of amateurs or madmen. This was the workspace of people who had perfected a horrifying craft across multiple generations.
Margaret took over the preparation with the quiet competence of any farm wife preparing supper for her family, and Dr. Harrow watched with a mixture of scientific fascination and moral horror as she worked. She handled the meat with neither disgust nor inappropriate enthusiasm, treating it exactly as she would any other ingredient.
The portion was cleaned, trimmed, and prepared using techniques that seem to blend traditional butchery with medical precision. She explained without prompting that different parts required different preparation methods, that the family had learned over generations which portions provided the most nutrition, which were easiest to digest, which could be preserved longest.
Her tone was educational, almost proud of the knowledge accumulated by six generations of Witmores, forced to become experts in this grotesque dietary science. She ground some of the meat, seasoned it with herbs from her winter garden, shaped it into portions, and cooked it in a large iron skillet over the fire.
The smell that filled the kitchen was not dramatically different from cooking any other meat, perhaps slightly sweeter, with an undertone that Dr. Harrow’s mind refused to fully process. When the meal was ready, the familygathered around the table with a formality that spoke of long tradition. They held hands, and Samuel spoke a prayer that chilled Dr.
Harrow to his core. He thanked God for their continued survival, asked forgiveness for the burden they carried, and expressed gratitude that no innocent had suffered to provide their sustenance. The prayer revealed something crucial about how the Witmores had maintained their sanity across six generations. They had constructed an elaborate moral framework that allowed them to see themselves not as monsters but as victims of a terrible affliction, doing their best to survive ethically within impossible constraints.
They had convinced themselves that by consuming only executed criminals, people whose lives had been legally forfeited by society, they were somehow maintaining a moral high ground, that they were different from murderers, that their curse carried a strange kind of justice. It was a rationalization born of desperation and generations of reinforcement. But Dr.
Harrow could see that they believed it absolutely. The family ate with normal table manners. Nothing rushed or anim animalistic. Nothing that suggested depravity or loss of humanity. Thomas cut his food into proper portions. Elizabeth used her utensils correctly. Young Rebecca chewed carefully and swallowed politely. They conversed during the meal about ordinary topics, the weather, repairs needed on the barn roof, a book that Samuel was reading, the upcoming spring planting.
Margaret asked Elizabeth about her needle work. Samuel discussed with Thomas the proper maintenance of their equipment. Rebecca mentioned that she had finished her arithmetic lessons. It was a scene of perfect domestic normaly except for the unspeakable nature of what they were consuming. Dr.
Harrow had been offered regular food that Margaret had prepared separately. A simple meal of bread and cheese that she assured him came from the town, but he found he had no appetite whatsoever. He forced himself to take a few bites to avoid seeming judgmental, but each swallow was an effort of will. After the meal, as Margaret and Elizabeth cleared the table and cleaned the dishes, Samuel invited Dr. Harrow back to the study.
The doctor’s mind was reeling, trying to reconcile what he had witnessed with everything he knew about human physiology, psychology, and morality. Samuel seemed to understand his turmoil and began to explain the family’s history in greater detail, pulling out documents, letters, and journals that had been preserved across six generations.
The original Josiah Witmore had been 32 years old when his ship, the merchant vessel Pesphanany, had wrecked during a hurricane in 1719. He had been the ship’s surgeon, educated in Edinburgh, skilled in his profession, and by all accounts a man of good character and strong moral principles. The ship had carried a crew of 47 men, and was transporting cargo from Jamaica to Boston when the storm struck.
Josiah’s journal from that period, which Samuel showed to Dr. Harrow, revealed a man desperately trying to maintain sanity and humanity in impossible circumstances. The six survivors, Josiah and five crew members, had washed ashore on a small island that appeared on no maps, a volcanic rock perhaps 3 mi in circumference with limited fresh water and almost no edible vegetation.
For the first month, they survived on shellfish, seabirds, and desperate hope of rescue. By the second month, two men had died from infected wounds and exposure. The remaining four, weakened and starving, had faced the unthinkable choice that has haunted shipwreck survivors throughout history. Josiah’s journal entries from this period were brief and agonized, recording the decision to consume the bodies of their dead companions to survive.
What made the Witmore case unique, what transformed it from a tragic tale of survival into something far stranger and more terrible was what happened during the third month on that island. Josiah wrote about discovering a cave system in the island’s volcanic rock. And within those caves, evidence of previous human habitation, bones, artifacts, and strange carvings that seem to depict rituals of consumption.
He wrote about a fever that struck all four remaining survivors, a delirium that lasted for days, during which they experienced vivid shared hallucinations of ancient peoples performing ceremonies in those caves. When the fever broke and rescue finally arrived, Josiah was the sole survivor, the other three men having succumbed to the illness.
He was emaciated but alive and he was brought back to Boston where he attempted to resume his normal life and medical practice. Within weeks the symptoms began. He couldn’t eat bread without violent illness. Meat from animals caused agonizing pain. Vegetables produced convulsions. In desperation and horror, he attempted to consume a small portion of flesh from a cadaavver in the medical college where he sometimeslectured.
A body donated for anatomical study. A man who had died from a fall. The relief was immediate and complete. His body accepted the food, processed it, drew nutrition from it. Josiah was horrified but pragmatic. He documented everything with scientific precision, conducted experiments on himself, and ultimately concluded that something on that island, whether the fever, something in the cave, or some combination of factors he couldn’t identify, had fundamentally altered his biology at a level too deep for the medical science of 1720 to understand.
Samuel explained that Josiah had kept his condition secret from everyone except his wife. Martha, who despite her horror, had remained loyal to him. Josiah had developed the first version of the system that the family still used, quietly arranging through his medical connections to obtain bodies of executed criminals and porpers who died unclaimed.
He had tried desperately to find a cure, corresponding with physicians across Europe, conducting experiment after experiment on himself, but nothing worked. The change was permanent and profound. When Martha became pregnant in 1721, Josiah had hoped desperately that the child would be normal, that whatever had happened to him wouldn’t affect his offspring.
Their son, Nathaniel, seemed healthy at birth and remained so for his first 5 years, eating normally, showing no symptoms. Then, just after his fifth birthday in 1726, Nathaniel suddenly began rejecting normal food. The symptoms appeared almost overnight, as though some genetic timer had activated. Within months, Nathaniel could only consume the same diet as his father.
The curse was hereditary. Over the next three decades, Josiah and Martha had four more children, three daughters, and another son, and the pattern repeated with each one. Normal development until around age five, then this sudden irreversible change. Josiah’s medical journals from this period, which Samuel showed to Dr. Harrow, revealed the man descending into despair and obsession.
He filled hundreds of pages with theories, diagrams, speculations about what had caused the transformation and how it might be reversed. He examined his own blood under primitive microscopes, dissected his own tissue samples, even performed what today would be called a biopsy on his own digestive tract, all seeking an answer that remained elusive.
He corresponded with physicians and natural philosophers across Europe, always carefully disguising the true nature of his condition, presenting it as a theoretical question or describing it as affecting a patient rather than himself. No one had any answers. By the time Josiah died in 1763 at the age of 76, he had been living with the condition for 44 years and had passed it to five children, all of whom survived into adulthood.
all of whom went on to have children of their own. The second generation, led by Nathaniel, had refined the family system and established the network that still functioned in 1840. Nathaniel had recognized that the family’s survival depended on absolute secrecy, the careful planning, and sufficient resources to maintain their supply.
He had invested the family’s money wisely, purchasing remote properties where they could live without close neighbors, establishing connections with prison officials and judges through careful bribery and appeals to various motives. Some officials were motivated by money, others by a genuine, if misguided, sympathy for the family’s plight, still others by threats of exposure of their own secrets.
The network had grown sophisticated over the decades with contacts in Massachusetts, Connecticut, Rhode Island, Vermont, and New Hampshire. Documents were forged. Records were altered. Bodies that should have been buried in unmarked graves were instead delivered to the Witmore property in the dead of night. The family paid extraordinarily well for these services, and over 120 years, not a single person in the network had betrayed them. Samuel showed Dr.
Harrow the family’s financial records, not to boast, but to demonstrate the resources they had accumulated to sustain their terrible existence. The Witors were, by the standards of 1840 rural Vermont, quite wealthy. They owned their property outright, had substantial investments in various enterprises, and maintained accounts in several banks across New England.
They paid taxes faithfully, contributed to church funds through the reverend, though they rarely attended services themselves, and were generally considered odd, but respectable by the few neighbors aware of their existence. The isolation was intentional and carefully maintained. They couldn’t risk anyone discovering the truth.
Couldn’t allow visitors who might see or smell something suspicious. Couldn’t participate in the normal social fabric of rural communities. The children had been educated at home by their parents, never attending local schools, never playing with other children. Theirentire world consisted of the family, the property, and the terrible secret that defined every aspect of their existence. Dr.
Harrow asked about the third, fourth, and fifth generations, wanting to understand how the condition had evolved, and whether there had been any instances of it skipping a generation or affecting children differently. Samuel’s response confirmed the most troubling aspect of the curse. It was absolutely consistent and apparently growing stronger.
The third generation, Samuel’s grandfather, Ezekiel, and his siblings, had shown symptoms even earlier than their parents, around age four instead of five. The fourth generation, Samuel’s father, Aaron, had manifested the condition at age three. Samuel himself and his siblings had been unable to consume normal food from birth, never experiencing even a single year of normal eating.
His own children, the sixth generation, had been born with the condition fully active. They had been fed with their cursed diet from their first solid foods, had never tasted bread or fruit or any of the foods that normal children enjoyed. The progression suggested that whatever had changed in Josiah’s biology in 1719 was becoming more deeply embedded in the family’s genetic inheritance with each passing generation.
Even more disturbing, the physical reactions to normal food had grown more severe over time. Josiah’s journals indicated that while he became ill from eating regular food, the reactions were initially just digestive upset and discomfort. By the third generation, the symptoms had escalated to violent convulsions and temporary paralysis.
By Samuel’s generation, even touching normal food to their lips caused painful physical reactions. The sixth generation, Samuel’s children, couldn’t even tolerate the smell of cooking vegetables without experiencing nausea and headaches. It was as though the family’s biology was diverging further from normal humanity with each generation, becoming more specialized, more adapted to their horrifying diet, more incompatible with the food that sustained the rest of the human race.
Samuel spoke about this progression with quiet dread, wondering aloud what it meant for future generations, whether his grandchildren, if he ever had any, would be even more severely affected, whether there would come a point where the condition would be impossible to manage or sustain. The family had tried repeatedly across six generations to find alternatives or cures. Samuel showed Dr.
to harrow extensive records of these attempts, experiments with every possible food substance, treatments with various medicines and compounds, consultations with physicians who were told they were dealing with a severe digestive disorder. The second generation had tried gradual exposure therapy, attempting to build tolerance by consuming microscopic amounts of normal food mixed with their usual diet.
The result was weeks of agonizing illness with no adaptation. The third generation had tried various herbal remedies and compounds including substances brought from China and India specifically for their reputation in treating digestive ailments. Nothing worked. The fourth generation had worked with a physician in Philadelphia who specialized in unusual constitutional disorders.
And while the doctor had been brilliant and dedicated, he had ultimately concluded that the Witmore condition was beyond any medical intervention available in the 19th century. He had examined tissue samples, observed symptoms, conducted tests, and finally admitted defeat, though he had at least provided validation that the condition was genuinely physiological rather than psychological.
One particularly tragic attempt had occurred in 1810 when Samuel’s father, Aaron, then a young man of 20, had tried to marry a woman from Boston who knew nothing about the family’s condition. Aaron had hoped desperately that love and a normal life might somehow cure him, that the psychological impact of joining a regular family and living a conventional existence might overcome his biology.
He had attempted to eat normal meals with his new bride, forcing himself through the agony, determined to be normal. The experiment had nearly killed him. He had spent 3 weeks bedridden, convulsing, bleeding internally, while his terrified wife nursed him and grew increasingly suspicious about the nature of his illness.
Eventually, Aaron had been forced to confess the truth, and his wife had fled in horror. The marriage was quietly enulled. Records were sealed through expensive legal maneuvers and Aaron returned to the family property broken and resigned to his fate. He never attempted to leave again, never sought another relationship, and raised Samuel and his siblings with a stern emphasis on accepting their condition and never hoping for escape or normaly.
As the evening grew late and the fire in the study burned low, Samuel revealed something that clearly weighed heavily on him, he explained that eachgeneration had kept detailed journals, not just of the medical aspects of their condition, but of the psychological and moral toll it extracted. He showed Dr. Harrow entries from his grandfather, his father, his uncles and aunts, all grappling with what they were, with what they had to do to survive.
Many entries revealed periods of deep depression, suicidal ideiation, rage at God or fate, or the ancestor whose survival had cursed his entire lineage. Some family members had refused to have children, choosing to let the curse die with them. But others had clung to the hope that future medical advances might provide a cure, that condemning the family line to extinction would be giving up too easily.
Samuel’s own entries which he shared with heartbreaking honesty revealed a man who loved his children desperately but was haunted by guilt for bringing them into a world where they would never know normaly. Never taste an apple or fresh bread. Never sit at a table with friends without fear of discovery. Never live without the knowledge of what they were.
The most disturbing revelation came when Samuel explained that the family had developed something he called the transition ritual. When Witmore children reached the age where symptoms typically appeared, usually around 5 years old in earlier generations, but from birth now in the sixth generation, there was a formal ceremony where the child was educated about their condition, about their family history, and about the moral framework that the Witors had constructed to justify their existence.
The ritual involved showing the child the family journals, explaining Josiah’s original ordeal, walking them through the elaborate justifications for why consuming executed criminals was morally acceptable, and swearing them to absolute secrecy. For children born in recent generations who had never known normal food, the ritual was more about identity formation than explanation.
