The Hollow Ridge children were found in 1968: what happened next defied nature. The children …

By 1980, only four of the original eleven children were still alive. The state decided to close Riverside Manor. The residence was too expensive, raised too many questions, and wasn’t producing results. The surviving children were transferred to a standard group residence in southwest Virginia. They were given names—Sarah, Thomas, Rebecca, and Michael—from a list of common names with no connection to their past. They were enrolled in a program designed to integrate adults with developmental delays into society. It didn’t work. In less than six months, Thomas disappeared into the woods behind the residence and never returned. Search teams found no trace of him. Rebecca stopped speaking altogether and spent her days rocking back and forth, humming the same low voice that haunted the Riverside staff. He died in his sleep in 1983. Michael remained there until 1991. He lived in a supervised apartment, worked part-time at a supermarket, and, by all accounts, seemed almost normal until the night he found himself caught in highway traffic near Roanoke. He wasn’t running, he wasn’t stumbling. Witnesses said he simply stepped into the roadway and stood there, arms at his sides, staring at the headlights of the oncoming car. He died instantly.

So only Sarah remained, the youngest, the sole survivor. Sarah Dalhart, though that wasn’t her birth name—if she ever had one—lived longer than anyone would have believed. In 2016, she was just over fifty, though she looked decades younger. She had spent most of her adult life in nursing homes, group homes, and halfway houses in Virginia and West Virginia. Sometimes she worked—dishwasher, janitor, night clerk at a store—always in jobs where she didn’t have to talk or interact much with people. Social workers described her as quiet, functional, and profoundly lonely. She had no friends, no romantic relationships, no ties to anyone. She lived on the fringes of society, present enough not to raise suspicion, absent enough to go unnoticed. For nearly 40 years, she never spoke of her origins or her family, until in 2016 a journalist named Eric Halloway found her.