The town of Red Hollow ceased to exist on April 23, 1954, at 11:00 a.m. local time. It wasn’t because of a fire, an epidemic, or relocation. Water took everything.
The new hydroelectric dam needed a reservoir. And the reservoir needed land. A lot of it. That land included 17 communities in the central valley, among them Red Hollow: 238 households, 863 residents, one cemetery, and one church.
The residents were moved out by mid-March. The houses were dismantled log by log. The lumber was hauled off to nearby farms.
That left the cemetery and St. Mary’s Church, built in 1796. The cemetery was supposed to be relocated. The remains were to be exhumed and reburied on higher ground about two miles north.
A crew of 20 men began the work on April 1. By the 20th, they had opened 112 graves out of an estimated 470. Then orders came down to speed things up.
The water was being released ahead of schedule. The church was not demolished. That decision was made at the county level.
The official reason was simple: it wasn’t worth using explosives on a structure that would end up under 40 to 50 feet of water. An engineering report stated that the stone building had a stable foundation and posed no danger to navigation. So on April 23, the floodgates were opened.
The water came in slowly, not as a wall, not as a surge. Quietly. First the low ground flooded, then the gardens, then the streets.
By evening the water had reached the church fence. By nightfall it was up to the windows. By morning the dome was sticking above the surface like a bobber.
A day later, that was gone too. In the official Hydropower Authority report, it was written that the historic structure had been submerged according to procedure. No obstacles to continued filling of the reservoir were found.
There was a signature, a stamp, and a date under the document. Red Hollow was gone. For the first three months, operations continued as normal.
The reservoir kept filling. The water level rose by three to four inches a day. The hydroelectric station approached full capacity.
The turbines ran smoothly. The gates opened and closed on schedule. River traffic continued without interruption.
Then the small problems started. In July, the gate mechanism at Lock No. 4 jammed while closing.
The cause was an unexplained deformation in the guide rails. The metal looked as if it had twisted from the inside, even though the load had stayed within design limits. Repairs took two days.
In August, Lock No. 2 showed unusual wear on its seals. The rubber had broken down in one month instead of the expected two years.
Chemical analysis showed the water was normal. The parts were replaced. Three weeks later, the same failure happened again.
In September, Lock No. 4 had trouble again. This time the control system failed. The relays simply would not engage.
The contacts were clean, the wiring was intact, the voltage was normal. They just didn’t work. The entire control unit had to be replaced.
Five days later, the same thing happened again. The engineers were baffled. The station director demanded answers, but nobody had any.
October brought something stranger. It happened during the night shift of lock dispatcher Frank Kraper. It was October 27, just before 3:00 a.m.
Kraper was a steady man, disciplined, sober, with 22 years of experience on the river and in hydraulic operations. In his report, he wrote that he had observed unusual movement on the water’s surface near Lock No. 4. The water was disturbed even though there was no wind and no current.
The waves were circular, spreading outward from a single point. That point was about 300 feet from the east wall of the lock. The disturbance lasted about seven minutes, then stopped on its own.
The report was filed. An explanation was quickly found: underwater current, temperature differences between water layers, or gas release from bottom sediment. Kraper kept his job, and no one made much of it.
But the disturbance happened again on November 3 during the day shift. Another dispatcher saw the same circles on the water in the same spot. It happened again on November 9 and November 15.
It was always near Lock No. 4, about 300 feet from the east wall. It was always circular ripples, as if someone had tossed a stone into the water. Except no stone had been thrown…
