Sermon of the 13th Bell: Lost Hiker

By C. Jasen McEndree

Some places are erased from history. Others refuse to be forgotten.When twenty-two-year-old film student Quentin Lucas sets out alone to hike Pennsylvania's remote North Country Trail, his goal is simple: capture an award-winning documentary about solitude, wilderness, and the forgotten communities swallowed by the Kinzua Reservoir. Armed with a borrowed camera, weeks of supplies, and more confidence than experience, he believes the greatest challenge will be surviving the isolation.
He couldn't be more wrong.
Deep within the endless forests of Allegheny National Forest, the silence feels unnatural. Fog lingers where it shouldn't. Footsteps echo through empty woods. Bells ring from places no church has stood for decades. His camera begins recording moments he cannot remember filming. Time itself fractures. Hours disappear. Trails loop back on themselves. The same crow appears again and again, as though waiting for him to understand something impossible.
Then Quentin discovers what the reservoir has been hiding.
Far beneath the still water lies Corydon, a town sacrificed to progress in 1965 when the valley was intentionally flooded. Everyone believes the town died beneath the rising waters.
Everyone is wrong.
Buried with the streets and homes was the First Church of Returning Light, whose charismatic leader, Bishop Thaddeus Laettner, preached a terrifying doctrine that time is not a straight line but a spiral, and that death is not an ending, but a return. His followers awaited the tolling of the mysterious Thirteenth Bell, a sound said to open the path between flesh, memory, and eternity.
As Quentin uncovers forgotten sermons, missing government records, and evidence that dozens of townspeople were never accounted for after the flood, the line between history and nightmare begins to dissolve. The deeper he investigates, the more the forest seems to remember him. Strange figures appear within the fog. Dreams become memories. The camera reveals things his own eyes cannot see.
Most disturbing of all, Quentin begins to suspect he is no longer documenting the mystery.
He has become part of it.
Blending psychological suspense, cosmic horror, Appalachian folklore, and the haunting atmosphere of America's drowned towns, The Thirteenth Bell explores the terrifying possibility that some places exist outside the flow of time, and that history is not buried beneath the water, but waiting beneath it.
Because when the Thirteenth Bell finally tolls...You do not move forward.You do not escape.You return.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: B0H9JXMQTN
• ISBN13: 9798188079666
• Release Date: July 2026
• Publisher: Independently published
• Length: 311 Pages
• Weight: 0.83 lbs.
• Dimensions: 9.0" x 0.7" x 6.0"