The Counting Rhyme That Buried Seven Names in Calder Hollow

The Counting Rhyme That Buried Seven Names in Calder Hollow

A small town's lullaby hid seven named children and a repeated ending: "and then there were none" - a phrase sung for decades and buried in a composition notebook dated no earlier than 2015 yet pointing to winter 1936. Who took a modern notebook, copied verses that belong to the 1930s, and buried them where the past happened?

In this episode, we follow a folklorist's long pursuit through field journals, interviews, and archive boxes to trace a counting rhyme that survived in Calder Hollow for generations, and ask whether the town's accepted origin story for those seven deaths truly fits the evidence.

Person: Frances Reynolds
Person: Marilyn York
Date: March 2019
Date: winter 1936
Location: Calder Hollow

- A beagle named Coop stopped at a hollow cottonwood stump on Frank Porter Trail on a Tuesday morning in March 2019 and led his owner to a sealed composition notebook.
- The notebook's cover bore the handwritten sentence "Mary had her lambs, and the lambs had names" and contained seven verses, each naming one child and ending with "and then there were none."
- The composition book's manufacturer's markings date it to no earlier than 2015, while its content points back to events in the winter of 1936.
- Frances Reynolds began fieldwork in Calder Hollow in March 2017, driving 60 miles from Clayburn College to walk the landscape before opening any archive boxes.
- A Methodist circuit preacher named Thomas Aiken transcribed three verses of the rhyme in spring 1941, calling it "a local confection," and the rhyme also appears in three Hendrick County folk collections dated between 1940 and 1960.

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