This is a creepy town story about clocks. In Hollins Ferry, Ohio, every public clock runs eleven minutes slow. The courthouse, the church, the bank, the diner. People call it Ferry Time and laugh about it. It took me twelve years of living there to find out it isn’t a joke. I’ve lived through a few creepy town stories, but this is the only one that runs on a schedule.
I moved to Hollins Ferry in 2010 when I married Gil. He’s the pharmacist at the only drugstore in town, and his family has been there since before the Civil War. It’s a river town on the Ohio side, about an hour upstream from Marietta. Three thousand people, a lot of brick, a lot of church suppers.
I’m from Columbus. I’m a project manager. I like things to start on time. So the clocks drove me crazy from the first week.
The courthouse clock tower said 9:49 when my phone said 10:00. The clock over the counter at the Riverside Diner said the same. The clock on the bank’s sign out front. The one in the church vestibule. Even the morning DJ on the little AM station would give the “Hollins Ferry time” after the real time, like a joke. “It’s 7:30 in the rest of the world and 7:19 here in the Ferry.”
Ferry Time
Everybody in town had a story about why. Doc Pruitt, the large-animal vet, told me it was because the clock tower’s gears were cast eleven minutes off in 1890 and nobody could afford to fix it. The Fenske twins, who ran the bakery and finished each other’s sentences, told me it was “so the farmers”… “could get to church on time” … “after milking.” The mayor, a big friendly man everybody called Smiley Burke, told me it was “just tradition” and winked.
Three different stories. I noticed that. I’m a project manager. When you get three different answers to one question, somebody is managing you.
In 2013 I volunteered to help clean the church before a wedding. The clock in the vestibule was battery-powered, the cheap round kind. I took it off the wall, set it to the right time, and hung it back up. I thought I was doing everybody a favor.
The next morning it was eleven minutes slow again. Somebody had come in overnight and changed it back.
I asked Gil about it. He laughed and said, “Don’t mess with Ferry Time, honey.” But he didn’t laugh with his eyes. He said it the way you’d say “don’t touch the stove.”
The Girl Who Asked About the Clock
The first time I heard about Laurel Voss was at a Fourth of July picnic in 2016. Somebody’s teenage son was asking about the clock tower, and an older woman told him, “You don’t want to end up like that college girl.” Everybody at the table went quiet, and then they talked about the potato salad.
I looked her up later. It took me a while, because the Hollins Ferry paper had closed in 2005 and the archives were a mess. But the Marietta paper had a few short stories.
In the fall of 1998, a graduate student from Ohio University named Laurel Voss came to Hollins Ferry to research a history of small-town banks during the Great Depression. She spent about two weeks there. She stayed at a bed and breakfast. People remembered she asked a lot of questions at the library and the courthouse.
Then she was gone. Her car was found at the old train depot outside town, which had been closed for decades. Doors locked. Her bag and her notes were never found.
One detail was in all three articles. Her wristwatch was on the dashboard of her car, set eleven minutes slow.
The articles called it a “local curiosity.” The sheriff at the time said she’d probably gotten into somebody’s car and left of her own free will. That was the end of the coverage.
I stopped asking people about the clocks after that.
The Creepy Town Story Nobody Told Out Loud
In February of 2022, Ida Fenske died. She was the older twin by four minutes. Her sister Ada was eighty-eight and lost without her.
The funeral lunch was in the church basement. I was helping in the kitchen, and at some point I found Ada sitting alone in the hallway outside, on a folding chair under the bulletin board. She’d had a little of the communion wine that someone brought down. She was crying. I sat with her.
She held my hand and looked at the clock on the hallway wall. Eleven minutes slow.
She said, “Ida always said we’d go together. She said we’d been lying together for ninety years, we could die together too.”
I asked her what she meant. I asked it gently. I think she’d been waiting a long time for somebody to ask.
She told me about the bank.
In August of 1931, the Hollins Ferry Savings Bank was robbed. The official story, the one in the Ohio history books, is that a drifter came in at 2:11 in the afternoon with a pistol, shot a man who was in the bank that day, and ran off with eight hundred dollars. The drifter was caught two days later outside Parkersburg. He swore he was nowhere near the bank at 2:11. Twenty people in Hollins Ferry swore he was. He died in the state penitentiary in 1940.
The man who was shot was named Howard Teague. He was a bank examiner from the state, sent to audit the books.
Ada said everybody in town knew the bank president, a man named Lyman Burke, had been taking money out of the bank for two years to keep it from failing. To cover farm loans that couldn’t be paid. To keep people from losing their land in the worst years of the Depression. If the examiner had finished his audit, the bank would have been shut down. Half the town would have lost everything.
She said Howard Teague was shot at 2:00 in the afternoon. Not by a drifter.
And at 2:00, eleven minutes before the robbery, Lyman Burke was supposedly sitting at the counter of the diner across the street, eating pie. Twelve people swore to it. The diner clock said so. The courthouse clock said so.
That night, Ada said, someone went around and set every clock in town back eleven minutes. The courthouse, the church, the diner, the bank. And everybody agreed, without anybody ever saying it out loud, that from then on, that’s what time it was in Hollins Ferry.
“Because if the clocks ever ran right again,” she said, “somebody might do the math.”
I asked her about Laurel Voss. Ada closed her eyes and shook her head and said, “That girl did the math.”
That was all she would say.
Eleven Minutes
Ada died that summer. She and Ida are buried side by side.
Smiley Burke is still the mayor. He’s Lyman Burke’s great-grandson. He’s a good mayor. He got the town a grant for a new water plant and he coaches Little League. Gil fills his blood pressure prescription every month.
I told Gil everything Ada said. He listened, and when I was done, he didn’t look surprised. He said, “My grandpa’s farm was one of the ones that loan saved.”
That’s all he said.
So here’s what I think about now. A whole town lied, for ninety years, to protect a man who stole from a bank to save their farms. They sent a stranger to die in prison for it. They kept the lie going so long it became a tradition, a cute thing the DJ says on the radio. And when a young woman came along and asked the wrong question, I think they kept it going one more time.
Was it worth it? Half of Hollins Ferry wouldn’t exist if that bank had failed. My husband might not exist. I wouldn’t have this life.
I don’t know the answer. I’m not sure there is one.
But I’ll tell you what I did, last month, when my watch battery died and I put in a new one.
I set it eleven minutes slow.
For more horror mystery stories with a town at the center, read the small town mystery story about a sexton’s diary, the small town ghost story of a town under the lake, or a rest stop horror story about a payphone that rang for one driver.
Is there a creepy town story where you live?
Some towns keep traditions that nobody can explain without changing the subject. If you know a creepy town story, or one of those scary myths and legends from your hometown that the old-timers still won’t explain, share it in the comments below.
How scary was it?
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The Sexton’s Diary and the Bell That Rang at 3 A.M