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At about eleven o'clock, Owen Thomas noticed that the water bucket needed filling. "Oliver, lad," the Welsh farmer said to his son, "we'll be needing some more water. It's yet an hour 'til midnight, and throats will soon be parched from singing." Ever the obedient son, Oliver slipped into his boots and his heavy overcoat. He had not been gone ten seconds when the entire party heard the boy scream for help. The minister grabbed a paraffin lantern as everyone rushed outside to see what could possibly have happened to the boy. The lantern's sputtering light pushed back the darkness from the snowy yard, but Oliver was nowhere to be seen. He was, however, amply heard. "They've got me! Help, help! They've got me!" Oliver's voice was heard to scream again and again. "His voice seems to be coming from the sky!" the minister said, casting the feeble beam of the paraffin lantern into the black, starless sky above them. Oliver's parents were on the edge of hysteria as they desperately sought a glimpse of their son. He was simply not to be seen and his cries for help became weaker and weaker. At last, there was nothing left but the echo of the boy's screams in the stillness of the cold winter night. With the deep, virgin snow as witness, the horror-struck Thomas family and their friends could see by Oliver's! footsteps that he had gone about 75 feet across the yard toward the well, when his tracks stopped as suddenly as if he had been yanked upwards by a snare rope. The wooden bucket that he had carried lay about fifteen feet away from the footprints. There were no other tracks or impressions of any kind in the unblemished snow. As Christmas Day was welcomed in by the chiming of church bells in the Brecon valley, the minister offered a prayer of hope for the sobbing and grief-stricken Thomas family. Their wonderful Welsh Christmas Eve party had been turned into a nightmare of terror by some unknown assailants.