It is said that the diary is made up of 30 pages of a very unusual parchment and each page contains information about each of the 30 original settlers and how they died—the last page talks about Jean-Louis himself. It was as if somebody else had finished the diary since Jean-Louis couldn’t have written about his own death. The local Indians couldn’t write in French, so there is much speculation about who wrote the final page. Each death was said to be different, but equally gruesome. The details have been lost, or else the old-timers have decided not to repeat them except to point out how unspeakably horrible they were. All those stories were enough to keep my wife and I from ever venturing in to The Bottoms. The first year we moved out here, we thought it would be fun to go into The Bottoms on Halloween, but we didn’t get 20 feet down the slope before a strange gurgling sound got us too spooked to continue. We later deduced that it must have been the spring, but we haven’t gone back since. The rain finally stopped on the sixth day. Our cat had been missing for three and the neighbors apparently still hadn’t found their dog. -->Next Page