The Rest of the Legend
The FATE version of the legend, though written by Palmer, was claimed by him to just be a trans-litteration of the story as told to him by Sarah Lang -- daughter of the vanished man -- in 1931, about fifty years after the events would have taken place.
First, a brief re-cap and some variation: In this version, on that afternoon of September 23, 1880, Mr. Lang had just arrived back from a business trip to Nashville, and, when he vanished, both children were busy arguing over the toys he had brought them from that trip; so the two children didn't witness the actual disappearance, only looking up after their mother started screaming. So there were only three witnesses; Emma Lang, Judge Peck, and Peck's brother-in-law, identified here as a Mr. Wade from Ackron, Ohio. After the immediate search of the field, the children were taken to the kitchen by 'Mammy Sukie' -- "our colored cook and friend" -- and confined to the house.
An extensive search turned up nothing, and the county surveyor stated that bedrock started just a few feet below the surface, so no cave-in could have occurred. Local papers supposedly hinted that Mr. Lang had merely run away. Mammy Sukie prayed for the children's father nightly, gave the children charm bags to wear, and distincly warned the children to never go into that field again.
Despite that,the children snuck out one evening to visit the field -- no date is given -- and found an irregular circle of "rank and tall" meadow grass with an odd yellowish-green color. The circle was about fifteen feet in diameter; and the boy, George, claimed that horses refused to even walk across it... he had been watching them. the circle contained no living creatures, no mice or bugs of any kind, even though it was surrounded by such activity. George caught and threw a loud cricket into the circle, with the result that it stopped making noise and hopped out of the circle immediately... then sat down and began to chirp again.
Sarah suggested they call for their father. After several minutes, they heard his voice feebly calling back... but by the time Sarah related the story to Palmer, she had long forgotten what her father might have actually said. At the sound of the disembodied voice, both children ran screaming back to the house and told Mammy Sukie what had happened; the next day, all servants but Mammy Sukie left the house. When the children told their mother the next day, she admitted that she had heard him too on her frequent visits to the field, growing fainter each time she heard. Shortly after, their mother died, the house was sold, and the children went to Virginia to live with their grandparents. As an afterthought, Sarah added that she had heard that a later owner of the house tried to plow up the field, but the strange circle just kept growing back; and she said she had returned to the farm once when she was old enough, but makes no statement as to whether or not the circle was still there.
In her later years, Sarah turned to Spritualism for answers. For years, she expended time and money trying to contact both of her parents through "the most famous mediums" -- people who claim to communicate with the dead. Eventually, a medium in Philadelphia gave her a message from her mother: "She says that she is seeking as you are seeking... and that she is waiting as you are waiting. And she says that you can come to her directly..." Sarah interpreted this to mean that she, herself, could learn to communicate with her dead family without the help of an outside medium, and thus spent a long time learning how to contact the hereafter. She eventually found she could used a planchette -- a piece of wood with a pencil attached -- to recieve messages written by the dead using her hand.
For years afterwards, she regularly recieved messages from her dead mother which, unfortunately, showed that her mother was still searching for the missing Mr. Lang also. Sarah slowly stopped trying to contact her mother, but on a day in April, 1929, at ten o'clock in the morning, she was suddenly impelled to try one last time.
The pencil danced uncontrollably across the paper at first, but soon produced a message written in a style completely different from her mother's handwriting; it read, "Together now and forever... after many years... God bless you." Although she waited, no further writing appeared. Sarah then followed a hunch, and located a copy of Charles Lamb's Tales from Shakespeare which her father had given her. The hand-written inscription on the flyleaf of the book, written by her missing father, matched the handwriting in the strange message from beyond (careful lady that she was, Sarah says she had a handwriting expert confirm this for her).
And so Sarah was at last at peace; she told her story to Stuart Palmer, who wrote it down, and then both signed an affidavit dated October 30, 1929, stateing "that in every detail this story is true." The story was run in FATE accompanied by re-productions of David Lang's handwriting from the flyleaf of the book, the mysterious message from beyond, and the affidavit; and Stuart Palmer added at the end of the account that a student of Clark Sellers, "perhaps the nation's foremost expert in handwriting and the study of questioned documents," confirmed that the handwriting on the flyleaf and in the message belong to one and the same person.
And so ends the earliest version I can find of this story.