So in the spring of 1910 Martin Wills was again plowing his worn out field, trying to get enough crops put in to keep them from starving. Neighbors tried to help him, but he would take nothing from anyone. He was a proud, stubborn man. He would rather die than take charity from other people.
Martin worked all through the spring into summer. His had food on the table now. They were not hungry. He didnt have to hear his wife complain that she had no food in the house. It was summer and there plenty to eat. Martin swore this year things would be different. He would get enough food put by this year. He would not let his family go hungry another winter. He felt better about this crop. It was bigger and doing fine.
Then one evening a terrible thunder storm hit the Ridge. It blew down trees and hail pounded into the fields and all that Martin had planted was bent and broken the next morning. His crop was gone. What had not been beaten into the earth, had washed down the mountain side.
He worked all that day, hoping and praying that he could save at least part of his crop. But nothing could be saved. A terrible fear was in Martin, what could he do.. He could hear in his mind his wife complaining that they had no food. Still the boys only laid around all day and did nothing to help His wife only stared at him, pitying him. What must he do now. They would starve when winter set in. His wife asked if they could maybe get help from their neighbors. But this sent Martin into a fury. He knew now that his wife was against him. She had no trust in him anymore. His sons looked at him and turned their faces from him. They knew he had failed them again. He had to think of something before winter set in. Every day he went to the field. Nothing, but weeds were growing there, but he went anyway. He would stand and stare at the ground, sometimes not even moving for twenty or thirty minutes.
One day his wife told a neighbor that she had looked out and he was standing there in the field with an Axe in his hands. There was nothing in the field that he could cut with the axe and this worried her. Why was he standing there holding the axe.
Martin's wife was beginning to get scared. Martin was acting real strange. This she told to another neighbor who came by to see how they were. The neighbor went to the field to try and talk to Martin. But all Martin would say was that his family would not starve this winter.
As autumn came and the leaves begin to fall from the trees Martin never noticed, he just stood in the weed choked field, with the axe over his shoulder and stared out over his land. This became normal and soon his family excepted this and was getting help from the neighbors. Food had been stored up and they could make it now. But Martin didnt know that. His mind had snapped the long ago morning of the storm. Time had not passed in his mind. He was still trying to decide how he was going to feed his family,come wintertime. And then the answer came as to what he should do.
Martin Wills came from the field, that day with the axe in both his hands. He swung it back and forth. His family would not starve to death. No, he would not allow that to happen. He would fix that right now.
Days later a neighbor thought he would go over and check on the Wills family. And what he saw when he came into the farmyard was a horrible scene that could never be forgotten. The bodies of the two boys were in the yard. They had been murdered with the axe. The wife's body was in the open doorway and she too had died from blows from the axe. After going for help several neighbors came back and they found Martins body, too. He was hanging from the rafters in the house. They had all been dead for days.
But Martin had been right. His family would not starve that winter. And so the Wills Family was buried in the Cemetery on the Ridge. It seemed a fitting place, Murder and suicide victims seemed to always end up there.
Not too long after that a ghostly figure was seen to roam through the old cemetery. It carried an axe and often swung it from side to side. Martin's spirit could not rest. Some say he is still trying to decide what to do.