About the Cedar Organisation

On the night of Saturday, November 22, 1873, frost settled along Cedar Street as the members of the Circle gathered in the parlour behind Whitlow’s Draper. They had arranged a small sitting to mark the season’s first hard freeze. Chairs were drawn into a ring, and candles were set to keep the shadows at bay. It should have been no more than an evening of talk and quiet ritual. Instead, before the hour was out, a murder had been done. The Circle were a curious mix of London tradesfolk and apprentices. They were not an official society but a loose fellowship that borrowed fragments from books and folklore. Some kept notebooks, some spoke solemn words, some dismissed it all as little more than companionship through the winter dark. Whatever their intentions, they became bound together by what happened that night. The details that survive are striking. The beadle, Mr. Cray, later told how the rear door yielded without the bell sounding, as though held open. Inside, he saw candle grease tracing a faint ring on the floorboards and two stubs neatly pinched out. There was a draught, though no window had been raised. Most troubling of all, the Circle’s small journal of notes was missing, last known to have been carried in safely wrapped muslin. Accounts differ on how tensions grew. Some spoke of rivalry, jealousies, or grudges carried in from outside the room. Others whispered that the missing journal was the heart of it — that its pages contained unkind sketches or confessions better left unrecorded. Voices rose, a chair scraped, and by the time the bells of the nearby church marked the half-hour, the Circle was in disarray and one of their number lay dead. Mr. Cray, summoned by neighbours uneasy at the silence, raised the alarm. He found the group shaken, some in prayer, others stunned into quiet. The parlour itself offered only fragments: the disturbed ring of chairs, the candles guttering, the faint scent of smoke where a stub had been hastily snuffed. No formal court record survives to tell what became of the inquiry. London speculated freely: some claimed the guilty party vanished into the night; others suggested confinement, or worse, though no firm account has ever been found. Among the Circle themselves, the story hardened into whispers of betrayal. They said that jealousy over the missing journal soured good sense and that fear of exposure drove one of their number to violence. In the months that followed, members returned to their workaday lives — the shop floors, the ledgers, the needle and thread. They passed one another on Cedar Street with polite nods, careful words, and a silence about that winter evening that was louder than speech. What remains today is less a record than an impression: a frost-bitten night, a door that should have rung and did not, the circle of candle grease on old boards, and a journal that disappeared. The Cedar Street Circle did not set out to make history, but history found them all the same. The first frost of that year was remembered not for its beauty but for the murder that turned their quiet meeting into legend.

On the night of Monday, November 23, 2015, the Cedar Expedition set out along a forest transect south-east of Base Camp Cedro in the Upper Tapajós. The aim was routine: a night survey with audio lures and camera traps, part of the schedule pressed on them by sponsors and the promise of a documentary premiere. The team walked in pairs, lights cutting through the dense canopy, the quad tethered above them. The plan did not hold. Over the radio came a low, steady report of “something” crossing the eastern line near the creek. When the first members reached the caller, they found them streaked with blood, calm but wounded, with marks that looked disturbingly human yet far too broad for any known jaw. They answered questions lucidly, whispering details that, if recorded, remain locked in Cedar’s private archives. Within the group, this became known simply as being “marked.” The forest itself carried its own testimony. A sour, ammoniacal smell clung to the ground. Birds had fallen silent without warning. Fresh, two-toed impressions cut diagonally across the path. A camera trap had been torn down, its SD card warped. The quad’s tether reel hung snapped, twenty-two metres of line gone. A tranquiliser rifle case lay open with darts missing, and a steel cooler lid at Station E was bent as if levered from above. Park ranger João Alves, signalled by a flare, arrived soon after and confirmed the scene. Back at camp the injured member developed fever and welts but remained clear-headed, even offering reassurance to others. Colleagues noted the strange quiet in the canopy and the unease that settled over the fire. Packs were repacked, footage backed up, and arguments began in hushed tones about what to log, what to withhold, and who had the right to decide. The pressure of deadlines weighed heavily, and trust within the group began to fray. At the following debrief, the manifest listed a sealed evidence canister taken from the transect that night. When items were turned over, the canister was missing. Soon afterwards, the documentary pilot was delayed, and one member quietly left assignment without leaving details. Those who remained used a single word: “bearer.” It was not written in the logs, but the meaning was clear—someone had carried proof out of the forest, whether for protection, for profit, or to keep open the possibility of a return. What survives on paper is spare but undeniable: the times, the tracks, the broken equipment, the bent steel, the scent on the air, and the blood on one of their own. What is missing are the pages that should have closed the file. Whether those gaps were deliberate or accidental no longer matters. In the years since, the Cedar Expedition has been remembered less for the footage it promised than for the moment it crossed from routine fieldwork into something far stranger. On that November night, deep in the Tapajós, one of their number was marked, and another became the bearer.

The stretch of road locals call Cedar Lane runs for fifty-six miles through backcountry Ontario, a ribbon of tarmac hemmed in by cedar windbreaks, snow fences, and long distances that make strangers of the towns at either end. Between 1988 and 2002, that road gathered a reputation. The name came later, in headlines and late-night radio: the Cedar Lane Killings. Before there was a name, there were only finds — the sort that start with a hunch in the gut and end with tape strung between trees. The first reports were scattered and ordinary in their beginnings. A trucker pulled into a lay-by and noticed an idling car with the lights off. Hunters, skirting a drainage culvert at dawn, stepped onto soft ground that yielded in a way soil should not. One winter, a county snowplough crew shearing a drift off the verge saw something pale in the cut, and the operator took his foot off the pedal as if the machine itself had flinched. Calls went out. Deputies arrived. In most cases the vehicles were found locked and oddly tidy, as though the owner had meant to be back within the hour. Personal effects — a purse, a jacket, a handful of coins, a folded bus timetable — turned up intact a short walk from where remains were later recovered. Graves were shallow and close to the highway; the town line signs never seemed far away. The road told you almost nothing. Footprints blurred under new weather and old traffic. Tyre marks braided and crossed in patterns that might have been from last night or last season. The cedar rows kept their own counsel. What investigators did keep, and the papers repeated, were the fragments that wouldn’t sit neatly: a vehicle parked at a peculiar angle, a map folded to a page no one could explain, a set of keys left where the owner could not have used them again. Lists formed. Numbers were attached to the dead in ways that shifted with each new discovery — seventh known victim, ninth, twelfth or perhaps thirteenth — depending on which files were in hand and which were still waiting for spring to thaw. Stories grew around the gaps. Some spoke of a single hand that learned to move without leaving much behind. Others insisted on a pair, a senior and a shadow, whose routes braided up and down the corridor, teaching, testing, and returning to the same pull-offs until the pattern itself became a kind of shrine. Police would not say. When arrests finally came, the trials were sealed. Journalists were escorted from the gallery; jurors were sworn to silence and excused from future service. Filings vanished behind sweeping injunctions. What could be pieced together later survived only in clippings printed before the orders came down and, years after the fact, in the loose recollection of a juror telling more than he should have in a Toronto bar. Even with the paperwork shuttered, Cedar Lane kept its inventory. It had the roadside crosses hammered into frost-heaved soil and the bouquets that browned under salt spray. It had miles where the radio turned to static and the sky felt larger than weather. It had the lay-bys where engines cooled while the occupants never returned, and the culverts where thaw lifted what winter had hidden. Fourteen years taught the region a new way of reading the verge — not for answers, which never came cleanly, but for the small signs that something had happened and then been made to vanish into the ordinary. The road remains, and so does the name people gave those years, because a name is what you reach for when certainty will not come.

Cedar Wick was a small East Anglian parish strung along a green between the tithe barn and the mill road. Between 1645 and 1647 the people of the village lived through what later broadsides called the Witchings of Cedar Wick. They were years of failed harvests, bad weather, and fever. The Civil War had stripped the parish bare of men and of patience. Shortages and enclosure disputes turned neighbourly grievances into open accusations, and soon the church courts were burdened with talk of witchcraft and malefic deeds. Almost nothing survives in the formal record. The story is pieced together from loose folios found in the churchwardens’ chest, fragments of printed broadsides, and the commonplace book of a parish scribe whose habit was to fill every margin. Between them runs a thread of fear. There are notes of night-riding and pinching, poppets made of wax and found in hearth ash, spectral cats seen by children in fever, and the testing of marks that would not bleed. The accounts are short and plain, more clerkly than dramatic, but the meaning between the lines is easy enough to read. Examinations were held in the tithe barn when the weather allowed. The Witchfinder would stand before the elders and call the accused by turn. The parish scribe recorded each deposition in a narrow hand, leaving space for later marginal notes. Witnesses spoke of muttered charms, of milk that would not churn, of wheat blackening at the edge of the field. The gaol cart came and went from Mill Beck, and the constable’s ledger shows payments “for watch and keep of prisoners” charged back to the parish. Ten names are found again and again in these leaves: Corwin Hale, Mercy Rooke, Thomas Kettle, Prudence Vale, Elias Prowse, Alice Fen, Barnaby Cleve, Goody Merton, Silas Nettles, and Widow Hart. They are ordinary people, caught in the gravity of an extraordinary moment. A beekeeper, a carter, a midwife, a weaver, an old woman with herbs pegged to her rafters. Ordinary people placed at the turning of events. Each surviving folio carries a number and a season—Lady Day 1645, Michaelmas 1645, Candlemas 1646, Midsummer and All Hallows of the following year. The charges change but the pattern holds: a child falls ill, a neighbour’s name is spoken, evidence is gathered, and an outcome written in the same dry tone—bound over for further examination, committed to parish custody, to be presented again after Sunday service. Somewhere between the lines a conscience stirs. One entry reads, “God forgive the zeal of men when it outruns mercy.” Another, fainter, notes that the parish seal was cracked at the rim and the gaol fee marked paid. Even in fear, the business of the world continued. By the summer of 1647 the entries grow thin. The war moved on, the fever eased, and the village turned back to its ordinary quarrels over dues and ditches. The Witchfinder’s name disappears. The scribe’s ink rusts brown. Years later, when the chest was opened again, the folios were brittle and half-illegible, but the story they told was still clear enough: how a handful of ordinary people found themselves written into a history of suspicion, and how the paper, more than the memory, preserved their voices. The Cedar Wick Trials are remembered now only through those surviving scraps—half legend, half record—kept safe from damp and fire by chance more than care. What remains is not a tale of sorcery, but of a parish undone by its own need for certainty.

On the evening of Friday, November 23, 1973, Cedar Falls High School was alive with preparations. Students and staff were decorating the old gym corridor ahead of the Thanksgiving weekend game. Paper banners, bleachers, and rolls of tape crowded the hallways, and the atmosphere was meant to be festive. Music played faintly from a portable radio, pupils carried benches and paint trays back and forth, and the custodian noted once again how unreliable the corridor lights had become. They flickered so often that a loose starter was later recovered from the fixtures. Around the same time, a side fire door was found wedged open, though the alarm never sounded, and muddy sneaker prints tracked a short way inside before fading against the cinderblock wall. It was the custodian, Mr. Reeves, who first noticed something amiss. The equipment closet stood ajar, several folded benches left half out of place. What he discovered in that corridor brought the evening to an end and began a chain of inquiries that stretched far beyond the school’s walls. For in the middle of what should have been an ordinary night of winter decorations, a murder had taken place. The discovery shocked the town of Cedar Falls, a place where nothing of the kind was expected. Among the class of 1973 was a loosely bound group of ten friends who called themselves, half in jest, the “Circle of Ten.” They were never an official club, though they borrowed symbols and stories from folklore books and whispered legends that were circulating at the time. Their meetings were said to take place by the stone bridge outside town or in the school after hours. Sometimes they brought chalk, candles, or scraps of almanac pages. To some, it looked like a harmless game of teenage experimentation; to others, it suggested something darker. Members of the group were varied — an art assistant, a swimmer, athletes, a choir singer, shop apprentices, library aides. Some had a fascination with charms or moon charts, others with sketches and stories passed down from family. Teachers remembered them as bright but distractible; classmates recalled them doodling symbols in margins or timing their evenings by phases of the moon. On that November night, many of the Circle were present to help with decorations. Witnesses later remembered laughter, singing, and arguments about paint and tape. But they also remembered tensions that ran beneath the surface: a notebook said to have gone missing, jealousies and rivalries that occasionally flared, and a sense that not all bonds within the Circle were as secure as they appeared. When investigators tried to reconstruct events, they cited rivalry, jealousy, and resentment as contributing factors. Later speculation suggested that the Circle’s late-night meetings and the missing book may also have played their part in what unfolded. What is certain is that the evening ended with a body in the gym corridor and a town shaken to its core. The official investigation left more questions than answers, and in the years since, fragments of the story have been retold again and again. Some of the Circle moved on to ordinary lives, clerical jobs, carpentry, travel, or nursing. Others stayed close to Cedar Falls. All carried the shadow of that year, and of a November night when the ordinary turned to tragedy. Though incomplete, the surviving fragments endure: the flickering light, the silent fire door, the prints that stopped short, the missing notebook, and the Circle of Ten whose lives would never be the same again.

Between 1715 and 1721, the Caribbean port settlement of Port Cedar stood as a rough and weathered outpost on the eastern Jamaican coast. It was a harbour of privateers and merchants, salt-mariners and debtors, and a place where the Crown’s justice arrived by ship only when wind and circumstance permitted. The colonial court there, housed in a timber building above the harbour marsh, kept a ledger of its sentences — names, origins, crimes, and the briefest details of punishment. For decades after the town’s destruction, that ledger was thought lost. The great quake and hurricane of 1722 swept Port Cedar into the sea, scattering its jail, its gallows, and its record books into the mud of the bay. In the 1890s, dock workers clearing the remains of an old sugar-store cellar unearthed a salt-blackened book sealed in a chest of lime and tar. Its spine was broken, its pages warped, but the ink still faintly visible. Each page bore the same grim rhythm — a list of those “condemned for robbery upon the high seas”, and the date and place of their hanging at the gallows that once stood on the headland above the port. But the ledger was not consistent. Some names were crossed out once, or marked with hesitant marginalia in a second hand — words such as “SPARED”, “TURNED”, or “REMOVED before dawn.” These notes were written more lightly, perhaps added later, and they suggested a truth that official records had never declared: that some among the condemned were not executed at all. For historians, the Port Cedar Gallows Ledger has become an obsession. Some see in it a symbol of mercy; others a hint of bribery or manipulation in a colonial system already fraying. The identities of the spared are unknown — only the marks themselves endure, alongside the ordinary fates of those who were not struck through. When Port Cedar finally sank beneath storm and tide, the scaffold itself was said to have toppled into the surf, dragging its last occupants with it. Yet the legend persists that two prisoners — whether by luck, favour, or foul bargain — walked free before dawn and vanished into the mangroves. The ledger, now housed in a sealed archive and too fragile to open fully, remains one of the few surviving artefacts of a town erased by the sea. Its rediscovery, and the faint contradictions within it, gave rise to the name by which it is now remembered: The Gallows Ledger of Port Cedar.