On a Tuesday in November, eight years after the events I had spent four years trying to write about, I sat in a diner in a small Indiana town across from a woman who had agreed to talk to me only if I did not record her, did not write her name, and did not tell her she was the seventh person I had asked. She drank her coffee with both hands. She said: I don’t know what you want me to tell you that you don’t already know. I said: I want you to tell me whether it was real. She looked at me for a long time. Then she said: It was real, and it was a game, and those were not the same thing.
I should say at the outset that I do not know what happened inside any of the buildings I am about to describe. What I know is how the buildings looked after, and who was standing outside them, and what time the clock said when the first call came in. In three of the four cases I am going to describe, that time was 6:05 in the morning. I have not found an explanation for this. I have, after four years of looking, stopped expecting to find one.
What follows is what I have.
I — How I Found This
The first time I heard the word Gauntlet in this context was in the spring of 2016. A historian named Pell — whose essay appears elsewhere in this issue — was working on a book about post-war Catholic youth ministry in the rural Midwest. She had been reading bulletin archives at a diocesan library and had found, in three different parishes across nineteen years, a recurring program with a recurring structure. An email-based challenge series, administered by a youth leader who had invariably come from somewhere else. Puzzles, physical tasks, escalating difficulty. A week or more of morning emails. The Gauntlet.
The third announcement she found was for a program that ended the night a church burned down. Pell had set the file aside. The book was about something else. She thought I might want a look.
I said: probably not. She sent it anyway. It sat unread on my desk through the summer. In October I went to Hollow Creek for an unrelated assignment, and on my last morning, with two hours to kill before my flight, I drove out County Road 7 and stood in the field where St. Caedmon’s used to be. The foundation stones are still there. The cemetery is still there, neat and well-kept by the parish association, which continues to meet. There is nothing else. I stood in the grass for about twenty minutes. Then I went back to my hotel and read Pell’s file.
II — The Four Incidents
St. Caedmon’s Catholic Church
The church was small — about ninety families, shared with a parish in the next county, budget under sixty thousand dollars, one full-time pastor. The youth director was a man named Tyler Vance, who had come to the parish in 2011 and had been running a version of the Gauntlet with youth groups since, he told a colleague in 2013, he was "twenty-two years old and inherited something he didn’t ask for."
That summer, Vance recruited fourteen high school students for a seven-week challenge series. The premise, as he described it in the parish bulletins: a daily email, delivered each morning at 6:05 AM, containing a puzzle, a task, or a question. Contestants had until the following morning to respond. The challenges would escalate. The final challenge would be different from the others.
The early challenges, by accounts of two participants willing to describe them in general terms, were clever puzzles and scavenger tasks — the kind a creative youth pastor might devise in an afternoon. By week three, the challenges had become harder to describe. By week six, participants were receiving instructions that required them to go places at specific hours, meet strangers, deliver messages they had not read. One participant told me: I assumed it was still a game. I didn’t know what it would have meant for it to stop being a game.
The final challenge email arrived on the morning of July 19, 2015, at 6:05 AM. No participant I have spoken to will tell me what it said. What they will tell me is that they all went to the parish hall that night.
The fire was reported to the county dispatcher at 6:05 AM on July 20 by a neighbor who saw light through the windows. The fire marshal’s report placed ignition substantially earlier; the exact time is redacted in the public release. All fourteen teenagers were found standing in the cemetery at dawn, having left the building at some point during the night that none of them remembers clearly. Vance was not among them. His remains were not recovered.
Camp Hosanna
The earliest case I can verify, and the worst documented. A Methodist youth camp in the Idaho panhandle, running since 1968. In the summer of 1996 the camp chaplain — a man I will call Daniel L. — ran a three-day challenge program he had not submitted for approval. He described it to a colleague as "something I’ve done before, at two other camps. It goes fine."
The challenges were delivered on paper slips at the camp’s morning assembly, which was held each day at 6:05 AM. Per surviving schedules: always 6:05. A former counselor, who agreed to speak to me on condition of anonymity, described the later challenges as "not appropriate for a camp setting, not appropriate for teenagers, not — I didn’t know how to say this at the time — appropriate for anyone."
On the morning of the third day, twelve participants were found at 6:05 AM by overnight staff in a state the camp records describe only as "shared exhaustion." All twelve were hospitalized. The records were sealed under a settlement agreement. Daniel L. left the ministry within the year. He was last reliably placed in eastern Oregon in 2004. His sister told me: he kept asking about the candles. He wanted to know where the candles had come from. He had been asking since 1996.
St. Olave’s Parish
St. Olave’s is where the name first appears in documentation I have collected. A small Catholic parish, about sixty families, in the foothills west of the Willamette. The youth director, a woman named Margaret Kessel, had run a version of the challenge program for two years before the autumn of 2003. She had, in a document I obtained through a diocesan FOIA request, described it in writing as “an email-based challenge series I have administered previously at other parishes, with consistently positive outcomes.” She called it the Gauntlet.
The final challenge of the 2003 series was sent at 6:05 AM on October 25. By that evening, fourteen participants had gathered at the parish hall. They left the building together at four in the morning, each walking home separately, in silence, in different directions. None of them spoke about what had happened. The diocese declined to comment beyond a statement noting the event “was not authorized” and “will not recur.” From a former participant, located in Salem, who answered his door and then immediately regretted it: “I have nothing to say to you, ma’am, and I would prefer that you did not come back.” He was crying when he opened the door and crying when he shut it.
One of the fourteen sent a text to her mother at 6:05 AM, while she was still in the building. The text said: I love you, I am fine, I will be home soon. Her mother still has it.
Sacred Heart of Aldwych
The most recent case, and the most documented, and the one I find hardest to write about because the parents will return my calls.
Sacred Heart is a coastal parish that empties to a skeleton congregation in October when the summer people leave. The youth pastor in 2018, a man named Adrian Kell, had come to the parish two years earlier from “two summers at a Catholic parish in Indiana.” I have found this phrase in the professional histories of three of the four leaders described in this article. It appears verbatim in each. The summers do not overlap. I have not been able to determine which Indiana parish is meant. I have a hypothesis.
Kell ran the Gauntlet in September 2018, by email as his predecessors had, delivering challenges each morning at 6:05. Twelve students participated. The program ran for five weeks. On the night of September 28, all twelve gathered at the parish hall for what Kell’s final email described as “the resolution.”
Eli Brennan, sixteen, was among them. He was Adrian Kell’s nephew. He was last seen on security footage from a gas station 0.6 miles from the church at 6:05 AM the following morning, walking away from the camera. He has not been found.
His father told me: “We know exactly when he left because the final challenge arrived at six oh five. I saw him pick up his phone. I thought it was a school thing. He put his shoes on and went out the door. I watched him go.”
Eli’s parents will speak to me. They have spoken at length. They want me to keep writing this story. I have promised them that I will.
III — What Repeats
Here is what I find when I line the four incidents up.
A youth leader who has done this before, at another parish, in another state, often relocated under unclear circumstances. The phrase “two summers at a Catholic parish in Indiana” appearing verbatim in three of four professional histories.
An email-based challenge series, delivered in the early morning — early enough that participants see it before school, before work, before their parents are awake. The challenges begin innocuously. They escalate. The final challenge, in every case I have examined, arrives at 6:05 in the morning.
Candles. In every case. Lamp oil, votives, pillar candles, from an unnamed donor, always present, always lit for the final night.
The number seven or fourteen. I have counted three times and arrived at the same number.
A senior member of the clergy who is not there that night.
A surviving cohort that does not speak.
And the time. 6:05 AM. I have a theory about the time. I have written it down. I am not going to publish it here, on a website, where anyone can read it. If you want to discuss it, write to me and put the word “Caedmon” in the subject line and I will know you have read this far.
IV
I am not saying these incidents are connected. I am a magazine reporter in Iowa City who covers rural America, and I am aware that patterns can be willed into existence by the people who want to find them. Coincidences happen. Small parishes have fires. Youth leaders leave ministry without explanation, because ministry is difficult and the pay is poor and sometimes people simply leave.
What I am saying is that I have found a thing four times, in places I would not have known to look. Each time I have set it down, it has refused to stay down. The families of the missing are not done. The people who went in and came out are not done, even when they say they are, even when they close the door.
If you know something — if you were in one of the cohorts, or you are a relative of someone who was, or you know what became of Vance or Daniel L. or Margaret Kessel — you can write to me at the address below. I will not name you. I will not publish what you do not want published. I will, if you want, simply listen. I have been told by three separate sources that there are eleven incidents, not four. I have not been able to verify this. I am trying.
And if you know why the email always arrives at 6:05: I have been thinking about it for four years. I would like, before this is over, to think about it with someone who was there.