Brand New God
Fiction: A disappearance in the wilderness.
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From the Bondurant Daily Telegraph, August 8, 2025
…Police remain baffled regarding the June 28th double murder that occurred along a hiking trail in Devil’s Peak Park. This past Monday, Sheriff Dell Trumbull issued another increase in the public reward, bringing the total to $45,000. Sheriff Trumbull and his office are seeking any eyewitness testimony or genera; information that could help them solve the murders, which are the first in Bondurant County since the death of Carol Spears on Valentine’s Day, 2016.
At approximately 9:30 p.m., married couple Ed, 41, and Shirley, 37, Miskey were found by another hiker near the Overhanging Falls Bridge at the two-mile marker. County Coroner Patrick Scheufele’s report indicated that both Ed and Shirely had died from multiple blunt force strikes, with Ed’s body having evidence of defense wounds on his wrists and forearms. The unnamed discoverer of the bodies could not provide police with any information about a suspect, and the CCTV cameras maintained by the park have similarly offered the police little to no clues.
An excerpt from Clive Wheatley’s book, Fables, Legends, and Monsters of Appalachia (Roman Nose Press, 2020)
(Said book was discovered amongst the personal artifacts of Ross Maust, with this particular section underlined in red pen multiple times.)
The Cherokee tribe of northern Georgia shocked the colony’s Second Provisional Congress when they enlightened an intermediary named Colonel Leonard Marbury about the existence of the “moon-eyed people.” According to their ancient legends, the moon-eyed people were a secretive race of pale and bearded individuals who struggled to see during daylight hours. The Cherokee said that they drove the moon-eyed people out of the Appalachian Mountains long before the arrival of European settlers, although one medicine man informed Colonel Marbury that his ancestors did not drive the moon-eyed people out of the mountains, but rather deeper into the inaccessible recesses of the wilderness. Colonel Marbury took these accounts seriously enough to fund a small archaeological expedition into the Cherokee territory, but little evidence was turned up after two months. Still, once this legend became popularized in the small press of that time, theories abounded about the origins and whereabouts of the mysterious moon-eyed people…
A post on reddit.com/BondurantNews uploaded by a user named @AFlightRISKclledGeoff
I don’t know about y’all, but I’m seeing more and more students (I think they’re students?!) from Kresge coming over into our county and “legend tripping” in Devil’s Peak. From what I gather, there’s some viral trend based off that terrible double murder we had back in June. The goal is to go to the park after dark and race back and forth across the Overhanging Falls Bridge while chanting some gobbled-gook nonsense. The goal is to summon the spirits of the murdered, I guess. It’s really freaking annoying, and apparently, it’s causing the park’s managers to consider closing the place at dusk. That would suck for me personally as I just can’t sleep at night, and walking the trails after dark helps to put my mind at ease. The damned Kresge kids already ruin enough stuff over in Cross County; I don’t want them polluting Bondurant too.
From Blake Allison’s award-winning essay that appeared in the Kresge Chronicle, the online newspaper for students at Kresge College.
(Originally published in the Halloween issue under the title of “The Vanishing of Ross Maust,” the story was reprinted by Vanity Fair in December 2025 as part of a collection highlighting the best student journalism in the United States. The magazine’s New York editors gave Allison’s essay a new title—“What It’s Like to Live Like a God (And Ghost).”)
Ross Maust was the American average. He stood five feet ten inches tall and weighed somewhere around one hundred and seventy pounds. He drove a gunmetal gray 2021 Honda Civic (which the bank technically owned), and for work he held down two part-time jobs: one as a team member at the Sbarro in the Kresge Student Union, and the other as an overnight stocker at Publix. He had a small apartment on the outskirts of Kresge campus—a two-story affair painted in blue and white. Upstairs belonged to Maust’s roommate, a thirty-year-old assistant manager at Domino’s named Kevin Wilks. Wilks, who now lives at home with his terminally ill mother Meredith, will talk about Maust if he trusts you. He only learned to trust me after multiple visits to his home and even more gifts of Busch Light.
“Ross worked all the time, so he was kind of like a ‘ghost’ roommate. He’d come home when I would be asleep, and he’d be snoozing when I’d go to work. We hardly ever saw each other except on rare occasions when we’d both have the day off. Ross was a nice enough guy. A little quiet and very shy, but a good roommate. He wasn’t messy at all, which made him better than all my previous roommates.”
When asked about hobbies, Wilks told me that Maust was a student at Kresge, or at least he took some classes on campus.
“He spent a lot of time at the university library,” Wilks told me between heavy sips of beer. “If he had time off, Ross was either at the library or holed up in his room on his computer. The dude was into some weird stuff. Liked a lot of cyberpunk and sci-fi things, plus he would speak about local ghost tales and whatnot. Spooky stuff, you know?”
I pressed Wilks about Maust’s online life. The older man admitted that he knew next to nothing about his roommate’s online history.
“He never talked about it with me. I can tell you I was pretty shocked when all of that stuff came out after his disappearance.”
‘That stuff’ includes Maust’s prolific history of posting on an eclectic message board that has since been taken down by the owners. Called the Hadit Forum, the message board appealed to various internet sub-cultures, from conspiracy-minded posters to hardcore anime enthusiasts. A 2023 hack that temporarily shut the server down revealed that among the Hadit Forum users, a startlingly large number were university undergraduate or graduate students. Some even attended Kresge. At the time of the hack, Ross Maust, aka TheGodhead, was a new user and still registered as a junior at Kresge. Miraculously, Maust (whose name and university email address were published online) managed to avoid any negative repercussions, even despite the Hadit Forum being listed by both the ADL and the SPLC as a “source of hate online.”
Maust’s good luck started to dwindle in 2024. Unbeknownst to his roommate, Maust dropped out of Kresge owing to financial difficulties and poor grades. In that same year, his brief relationship with Kresge senior Alexa Priestman ended abruptly. (I reached out to Priestman for information, but none of my emails were answered.) Out of school and out of his only meaningful relationship, Maust dug himself deeper into the bottomless rabbit holes of the Hadit Forum. There, TheGodhead became a popular poster whose threads on Thelema, magick, and American folklore got just as many reads and responses as his more personal posts about his unsuccessful attempts to meet girls or his dissatisfaction with being a minimum wage worker.
For myself and others, TheGodhead’s most important post was his last. Uploaded on September 26, 2025, the post simply read: “Going to put my words into practice tonight, boys. Finally going to see if we still have moon-eyed people in my neck of the woods.” This remains the sole clue regarding what happened to Ross Maust. He would not be reported missing for another three days. The first person to care enough to call the police was his manager at Sbarro, who reportedly sounded more annoyed than worried. Wilks himself proved rather blasé about the whole situation, casting Maust aside as yet another internet-poisoned kook.
“Ross had a lot of strange ideas and obsessions. People like that do funny things,” Wilks said. He finished the can he was drinking, crumpled the cold aluminum, then opened another. “I think Ross either slipped and fell out at Devil’s Peak, or he went out there to end it all. Suicide, you know. Of the two options, I like to think it was an accident.”
In 2010, a self-reported taphophile named Margaret Burbage wrote to the Bondurant Daily Telegraph about the weirdest things she had ever discovered in a cemetery. To her, the oddest experience occurred in Devil’s Peak Park, which houses at least two small cemeteries dating back to the 1760s. Ms. Burbage informed the editor at the time, Gary Rescorla, that the Devil’s Peak cemeteries all included foreboding graffiti on certain tombstones: “Our girls have the moon in their eyes.” Ms. Burbage also reported seeing the same phrase repeated throughout the park. Both Burbage and Rescorla theorized in the Editorial section of the Telegraph that the messages referred to the prevalence of missing women (and some men) who were last seen in Devil’s Peak:
· Laura Cosgrove, 19. Went missing on April 30, 1967.
· Edna May Robinette, 25. Went missing on November 5, 1972.
· Clara O’Dwyer, 16, and Courtney Grabowski, 17. Both went missing on June 18, 1988.
· Bill Hankerson, 58. Went missing on February 11, 1996.
· Jenny and Jeff Collinson, both 33, disappeared on October 13, 2008.
· Ross Maust, 23. Went missing on September 26, 2025.
The frequency of these disappearances led to a popular belief in the existence of a serial killer operating in Bondurant and Cross counties, and some amateur criminologists even linked the unknown and unnamed slayer with other disappearances along the greater Appalachian Trail. More obscure and occulted voices, such as some users on the Hadit Forum, echoed the work of TheGodhead by suggesting a more supernatural explanation, i.e., malevolent entities in the park were responsible. The Devil’s Peak phenomena eventually found its way into the hands of David Paulides, who made a Missing 411 documentary about the events, including the strange case of Ross Maust.
The most bizarre chapter in the saga of Ross Maust occurred when a clairvoyant in Portland, Oregon named Olga Fursenko reached out to several people involved in the story, from Blake Allison to Kevin Wilks. Each time Mrs. Fursenko’s emails were left unread, so the dogged necromancer (who had previously worked on several homicide cases with the Oregon State Police) began penning handwritten letters. Again, her missives were usually left behind in wastebaskets. However, one letter somehow wound up in the hands of Wilks’s neighbor, Mr. Lee Eckes. Mr. Eckes sent the letter to the county police in Bondurant, who in turn forwarded a copy of the letter to a private investigator working for the Maust family named Jed Thompson. Thompson was ultimately responsible for the letter’s publication and dissemination online and in print. What follows is the so-called “meat” of Mrs. Fursenko’s discoveries from the astral plane.
Our shared god Hadit, the bringer of light and the keeper of the burning will, has allowed me visions of what happened to our beloved Ross Maust. In my visions I see Maust as a nighttime traveler going towards a location charged with special energy. I believe that this location is called Devil’s Peak Park. The energy there is extremely powerful and almost entirely negative. It is a very old place that has seen much horror since time immemorial. It is a giant mouth that swallows souls and sucks their energy. It is a malignant place, even if the entities who dwell there are not necessarily evil.
Our beloved Ross Maust went to that place full of despondency and despair. Such emotions are bad for a conjurer, for black feelings welcome in and absorb other black feelings. Like attracts to like, and since our beloved Ross Maust journeyed to Devil’s Peak to communicate with the dead, he made a fatal error.
Yes, his goal was necromancy. Our beloved Ross Maust sought to uncover the killer behind a double murder. The great Hadit told my spectral self that these murders were mistakes—the killers did not set out to kill, but rather to conceal. The unfortunate dead saw something that they should not have, and for that they were ritually silenced by the old people of the mountains.
Yes! Our beloved Ross Maust knew the truth but wanted confirmation from the spirits of the dead. The great Hadit showed me how our beloved Ross Maust journeyed deep into Devil’s Peak well after midnight. There, after crossing a bridge several times, our beloved Ross Maust uncovered a fairy light that illuminated a deep burrow that led far into the depths of the earth. He followed the light down into the tunnel and reached a point where escape became impossible. Our beloved felt fear in this moment—fear that became panic as soon as the small, cold hands reached his feet and pulled him further down. These strong hands pulled and pulled until our beloved Ross Maust was lost to our world forever.
But rejoice! The great Hadit has told me and shown me multiple times that our beloved is still alive. There is no point in searching for his corpse, and there is no point searching for him at all. He shall live out the rest of his mortal life in splendor amongst his subjects.
Yes! Yes! Yes! The great Hadit wants me to inform you and all who still care about our beloved Ross Maust that he is a brand new god amongst the old people of the mountains. He is worshipped and adored and given libations by the small, pale dwarves who have lived so long in the caves and burrows and bowels of the earth that they regard common humanity as immortal. Our beloved Ross Maust is their latest deity, and he shall perform this function until bodily death. At that point, his soul will walk with Hadit in Elysium, while the white people of the mountains will seek out a new god from among the living.
The esotericism of Mrs. Fursenko’s letter was rejected outright by the Maust family. However, they, Jed Thompson, and a small number of volunteers focused their time and energy on searching Devil’s Peak Park for Ross’s remains. (A month into the disappearance, everyone directly involved in the case operated under the assumption that Ross had perished sometime in late September.) As of this writing, no remains have been found, and no clues have been discovered. The only notable result of this private affair was the confirmation that the graffiti first noticed by Margaret Burbage in 2010 remains and has even multiplied across the park.
The case of Ross Maust is still considered open and ongoing, but the citizens of Bondurant County already speak of him as the newest addition to the county’s long record of the permanently missing. Sheriff Trumbull’s last press conference was in October 2025, and since then his office has not mentioned Ross Maust at all. Jed Thompson is still on retainer but claims that the Maust family has not paid him for the past four months. It appears that the case will stand forever frozen in time until something unexpected happens, like finding Ross’s DNA on a tree branch or coming across a wild-eyed and bearded hermit along the Appalachian Trail who knows far too much about the Hadit Forum or the innerworkings of Sbarro pizza. Until then, summer strollers and hardy hikers will come and go in Devil’s Peak. Then, at night, some of the braver citizens will continue to dare each other to cross the Overhanging Falls Bridge. Life will go on, just without Ross Maust.
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