by Tim Westover
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The first thing she did when she got up the next morning was call the sheriff’s office. A male officer answered.
“A deputy named Yates told me to call this morning regarding my friend, Pauline Dobson.”
“Yes, ma’am. He left a note.”
“Did you find her?”
“We did. An officer went by her house this morning. She was just fine.”
Lily’s jaw dropped. “How did she get away from the bingo hall?”
The police officer on the other end was quiet for a few moments. “Mrs. Dobson said that she didn’t go to any bingo hall yesterday.”
“What?”
“She said that she didn’t even see you yesterday.”
“But she did,” Lily exclaimed.
“I’m sorry, ma’am. That’s just what she told the officer.”
Pauline won’t remember. She sighed. “I know. Thank you.”
“You’re welcome. Do you have any other questions?”
“I have a hell of a lot of questions, but you can’t answer them.”
Lily hung up and sat in her silent living room. How could Pauline not remember what happened? She wasn’t usually forgetful. Did the thing that made her and the other women googly-eyed at Eric block her memory too?
The woman picked up the telephone. “Maybe I could jog her memory,” she murmured. She dialed the number, and after a few rings, a familiar voice answered.
“It’s so good to hear your voice,” Lily said.
“It’s good to hear yours too,” Pauline replied, her tone questioning.
“So the police went by your house today.”
“They did. What was that all about?”
“You don’t remember?”
“Remember what? He asked me about some bingo hall, but I didn’t go to the church or the lodge yesterday. I didn’t go anywhere yesterday. I didn’t see anyone.”
“But what about Eric? The rat woman? They put something in your cocoa, and you looked at the man inappropriately.”
“I would do no such th—”
“Miniature marshmallows!”
“I think you made this up,” Pauline said sternly.
“I didn’t,” Lily protested.
“I’m not saying you did it to stir up trouble or anything. Maybe you dozed off while watching TV.”
Yesterday’s events started to become foggy in Lily’s mind, as if she didn’t live them. They were like an old story someone had told her years earlier. No. She shook her head. The previous day’s events happened even if no one else remembered. She knew she had to play along, though, because she didn’t want anyone to think she was crazy.
“Maybe that’s what happened,” she said.
Pauline was quiet for a few moments. “Do you need to go to the store?” she asked finally.
“Yeah, I do.”
“I’m heading that way after my stories go off. I’ll see you in about an hour.”
Lily hung up the phone and stared at the soap opera coming on the television. “That’s it!” she yelled. Her purse sat on the kitchen table. She dumped its contents, searching for the gift certificate from the grocery store. “It’ll prove I’m not crazy.”
She shuffled through the pile of candy wrappers and old receipts, but she couldn’t find what she was looking for. “But I stuck it in my purse yesterday,” she lamented.
What if you didn’t? a voice in her head countered. It was a man’s voice.
She shoved the things back into her purse and walked back to the living room.
“No one will believe you,” a man’s voice said.
She turned to the TV and saw a blond man on the screen. He had the same blue eyes, the same smug smile that Eric had. She gasped. The camera panned out, showing him talking to a red-haired woman. She sighed and sat back in her chair.
Lily stared at the television but couldn’t concentrate on the soap opera. She wondered if she was losing her mind. She was eighty after all. Maybe she wasn’t as sharp as she used to be.
She sat there, thinking, when a car honked outside. The soap opera on TV was off, so she assumed Pauline was there for her. She grabbed her purse as quickly as she could, put on her coat, and walked out to Pauline’s car.
“Why didn’t you come to the door?” Lily asked, closing the door. She buckled her seat belt.
“It’s cold. I figured you’d hear me.”
Lily didn’t reply. Neither woman spoke while they traveled to the grocery store. Pauline didn’t ask about the bingo hall, and Lily wanted to pretend it didn’t happen.
Her eyes drifted to the side of the street. A blond man walked down the sidewalk, a red shirt poking out of his black leather jacket. He stared right at her and smiled. She gasped. It was Eric. Speechless, she pulled on Pauline’s sleeve just as her friend steered the car left.
“What is it?” she snapped. “You’re going to make me have an accident.”
Lily pointed to where Eric was. “It’s the man from the bingo hall. Maybe you’ll remember if you see him.”
“You’re still talking about that?” Pauline looked in the rearview mirror. “No one’s there.”
Lily peered into the side mirror. No one was on the sidewalk. She strained to turn around in her seat, unbuckling her seat belt to move more freely. Eric had vanished.
“You didn’t see anyone, did you?”
Lily kept her eyes on the floorboard. “No, I didn’t.”
“I hate to say this, especially given how you are,” Pauline began. “I’m not trying to be mean, but maybe it’s all in your head.” She pulled the car into the grocery store parking lot.
Lily looked up at the car’s reflection in the store’s plate glass windows. “Maybe, maybe not,” she whispered.
Tennessee Ghosts
Stephen Newton
In the mid-1970s, I lived for a time in the former home of Stringbean, one of the Grand Ole Opry’s longest running stars. Stringbean was an old-time baggy pants comedian and frailing-style banjo player. On November 11, 1973, two local hilltop thugs broke into Stringbean’s house. They sat in the dark smoking cigarettes and drinking beer, waiting for the old scarecrowlike country star, returning home after a performance at the Opry, to come up the driveway that crossed the creek at the end of the hollow, where the freight trains roared around the bend and shook the walls.
They met Stringbean and struggled just inside the front door, and the two young toughs dragged the fifty-eight-year-old man to the floor and shot him in the chest, killing him. His wife, Estelle, ran out into the yard. They shot her in the back of the head and left her corpse lying in the gravel driveway. Grandpa Jones, the star of the Hee Haw television show, found the bodies the next morning when he came to get Stringbean to go fishing. Rumor had it that Stringbean was rich but cheap and that he had a fortune stashed in his little house. He did have his earnings from the Opry that night in a secret pocket in his bib overalls, but the killers, as stupid as they were murderous, did not find the money.
I lived in this house in the winter of 1978, five years after the murders. At that time, there were still bloodstains under the throw rug in the living room and bullet holes in the front doorjamb. There was a cave a stone’s throw from the back door, the entrance set into the steep, rocky hardwood hillside of the hollow. The Akemans—Stringbean’s real name was David Akeman—had mortared fieldstones around a silver freezer door in the mouth of the dark hole.
Gethsemane. Silver and stone. Moonlight on leaves.
Hanging in the cool darkness inside the cave were heavy stainless steel meat hooks, slaughterhouse weight. The temperature was perfect for curing meat. The Akemans used the cave to hang country hams, but long after they were dead and gone, the silver hooks still hung in the dark.
Around the shoulder of the hill out back was a clapboard house with wraparound porches and an old weathered barn. I vaguely knew the young man who lived there—he was frequently getting drunk, wrecking motorcycles, fighting, getting arrested. Years befor
e, legend had it that his grandfather had bought an old Wurlitzer jukebox, which he kept out in the barn. So far as anyone knew, he had never plugged it in and played any music. One day, the old man walked out to the barn, plugged in his jukebox, turned it on full blast, and hung himself.
When they cut him down, they supposedly left the rest of the rope hanging. It was reportedly still there dangling—frayed, pale in the gloom—when I lived around the corner of the hill. I wondered what song he played when he hung himself, but I never walked back to the barn to see if the frayed rope still hung from the rafters.
Railroad tracks ran along the side of the mountain across the hollow. For years, locals had talked about seeing the lights of a phantom brakeman on this exact stretch of rail. They would go out on the tracks in the dark humid stillness, and a swinging lantern-sized glow would appear, waist-high. If one came too close, the light would disappear and then reappear immediately behind the intruder. It was what local teenagers did for fun—go out to the hollow, walk the tracks, and watch for the swaying light.
I was friends with a young married couple who were renting Stringbean’s little death-house. It was a tiny four-room red cottage at the end of a long gravel drive, shaded by tall old maples. They had a vacant unheated room off the back porch where I stayed for most of that winter, only a few feet from the sealed silver mouth of the meat-hook cave.
My friends had heard what sounded like footsteps on the roof at night. Once, a latched back door flew open, and their dogs went frantic, barking and snarling into the maw of the void. Shit happens, as the T-shirts and bumper stickers tell us; but back in the “Holler Where the Sun Don’t Shine,” as one local wag termed it, or “Dead Man’s Holler,” as another called it, it seemed to be concentrated, focused, channeled.
This was a kind of unclean monkey business, however, to be even distantly associated with the sanctified, sanitized monument to gingham Main Street that is the Grand Ole Opry. Tourists come to Nashville to escape, and as much as they love drama and tension, they still want the heavens to open with redemption at the denouement. Perhaps the South knows gothic all too well, and Southerners don’t want it in their entertainment.
Maybe they just don’t want it on vacation, which is entirely possible, but it also could be that this is an example of the kind of thinking that gives rise to the gothic in the first place—that is, that the denial and repression of the shadowy side makes it amplify and energize and morph, precisely because these primal energies have been forbidden. The imp of the perverse may be trapped for the short term, but it always finds some way to escape.
In Dead Man’s Holler, these twisted forces seemed to have gone to otherworldly, even demonic, extremes, a hell-bound train from Memphis or New Orleans or Montgomery or Nashville that roared through the Dixie night, spraying pestilence and horror in its wake.
I’ve never known one way or the other if I was imagining things back in the Hollow Where the Sun Don’t Shine, but I can say for sure that thirty-four years later, it still feels like I had a brief glimpse into a side of the South that I had only read about.
It’s nothing more than that. It’s just a feeling.
It’s a feeling, however, that still gives me a chill to think about, when I picture the silver door of the cave in the moonlight, in back of the little house where the Opry star and his wife were murdered. I can still hear the sound of the train rattling through the hollow, and I remember the way that I pictured the engineer being a skeleton in an engineer’s cap, balling the jack on his hell-bound train.
The Gift of Understanding
Sherry Fasano
My family’s not superstitious. Not really. We’re Baptists from way back, and everybody knows Baptists don’t believe in such; but my Grandmama Minnie’s people were from the low country of South Carolina, and they believed there were some things that couldn’t be explained, and it was best not to try. She attached certain meanings to everyday happenings that made no sense. When a bird flew into the window and broke its neck, she exclaimed, “Lord, have mercy, children, you know what that means.” A dog howling when church bells rang was even more ominous. None of the women in the family thought it wise to sweep sand out of the house when it was raining; and her mother, Granny Cribb, saw visions and declared whenever she heard ringing in her ears that it was a “death bell,” and sure enough, somebody died shortly thereafter. They all stayed indoors during the month of August—dog days. Mad dogs roamed the countryside, and sores didn’t heal. Sadly, these gifts have been slipping away with each new generation, but Mama still remembers one strange occurrence and vows it’s true. It happened when she was a little girl in the 1930s. The story was retold for years on Grandmama’s front porch, when summer darkness settled in and whippoorwills began calling.
Grandmama Minnie and Granddaddy Clarence sold their house in town and bought property adjoining that of Minnie’s sister, Sarah Jane, and her husband, Spurgeon, when Mama was a little girl. The property was old farmland and had a frame house with no electricity or indoor plumbing, but Minnie was expecting again, and because her mother lived with Sarah Jane, she was overjoyed to be near family. With quite a few acres, Clarence could farm some and supplement his growing family’s table with game.
The property was remote and only accessible by a narrow dirt road winding several miles off the highway. Few visitors came to call; most were family. The folks from Conway came once in a while and usually traveled by bus. Their visits were preceded by a letter to let the family in Columbia know when they would be arriving and was posted weeks in advance in case it wasn’t convenient. Since the closest bus stop was out on the highway, Clarence and Spurgeon drove out on the day promised and gathered them up. Mama said they were always thrilled when aunts and uncles paid a visit, and it was a special treat when cousins came along. Preparations included a thorough house cleaning with the airing out of mattresses and rugs and a scrubbing down of the outhouse. Times were hard, but Minnie and Sarah Jane shared groceries and cooked together for days. Breads and jelly cakes were baked, and Mama and her cousins were sent out to the edge of the woods to pick wild blackberries for cobblers. The sisters each sacrificed fat hens from their yards to fry up crispy brown or bake with cornbread dressing. Clarence gathered whatever could be used from the garden, and Spurgeon provided game. The whole time cooking was going on in the kitchen, family stories were being told. Children weren’t usually privy to family gossip, but if they hid under the table and kept quiet, they could pick up all sorts of tidbits. They learned which aunts dipped snuff on the sly and who was in the family way again. The occasional recounting of sickness and death was whispered in hushed tones. One incident was remembered over and over, and as I said, my mama witnessed it.
Sarah Jane worked a night shift job over at Camp Jackson, and one afternoon, she was getting ready for work in her big front bedroom while giving her daughter instructions for the younger children. Standing in front of the mirror combing her hair, she saw the reflection of the huge oak out in the front yard, and there was a man sitting up against the trunk. As she turned around to look, she recognized his face and grabbed her daughter’s hand. “Lord, Bobby, it’s Uncle Richard. He’s come to visit without letting us know and walked all the way out from the highway. Let’s go help him in. He must be exhausted!” Excited, Bobby jumped off the bed and followed her mother through the living room and out the front door. When they got out to the front porch, no one was under the tree or anywhere else in the yard.
Minnie was sweeping the front porch and Mama and her sisters were playing on the steps when Sarah Jane pulled her big sedan into the driveway a short while later.
Before Sarah Jane got to the porch, she called out, “You younguns run play. I need to talk to your mother.” All the children scattered, except for Mama, who quietly kept her place on the steps.
“Minnie, something bad’s gonna happen down in Conway. If you get word this evening, send somebody to let me know.” She recounted her vision, and they grabbed each other�
��s hands and hugged.
Minnie was tense all evening, hurrying supper and putting the children to bed early, but all was quiet. It wasn’t until the next night that news came. Mr. Ralph from Cooper’s Community Store brought the telegram to the house, and she knew it held bad news before she opened it. It did, indeed. Their brother Richard had died that afternoon in Conway, quite unexpectedly, the telegram said.
The whole family was heartbroken, and arrangements were made for Minnie, Sarah Jane, and Granny Cribb to get to Conway as soon as possible for Richard’s laying out and burial. It was a long and tiring trip, especially for Granny Cribb. After arriving in Conway and reuniting with family, they learned more sad news. Richard’s grown son, Cleveland, had recently been diagnosed with leukemia.
When they returned home some days later, Granny Cribb was exhausted and took to her bed. Her family assumed it was the grief of burying her oldest son and the sad news of her grandson’s illness. They hoped time would lessen the grief and she would become functional again. Her grandchildren took turns sitting in the rocking chair by her bed and begged her to tell the old stories she loved to tell, but all she would do was sleep.
Within a few months, Minnie received another telegram from Conway, saying Cleveland was much worse, and if the family in Columbia wanted to see him again, they had better come soon. It was decided Minnie and Sarah Jane would go. On the Wednesday morning they were to leave, their mother summoned them to her bedside with a specific message for Cleveland: “Tell Cleveland I’ll see him early Sunday morning.”
Assuming she was overcome with emotion, they tried to soothe her. She looked at them with more clarity than she’d shown in months and again said, “Tell Cleveland I’ll see him early Sunday morning.” They both kissed her and promised to deliver the strange message. When they arrived in Conway, they weren’t able to keep their promise; Cleveland was in a coma and never regained consciousness. He died on Friday, and their mother died two days later, early Sunday morning.
My family’s not superstitious. Not really. We just believe there are some things that can’t be explained, and it’s best not to try.
Bradford House
Laura Haddock
To hear the old aunties tell it, Bradford House has more ghosts than a hound has itches. Of course, they are only the best type of ghosts—genteel ladies in hoop skirts and compliant servants in headscarves. At least those are the ones they’ll discuss in front of company.
I grew up in the house, so I know the rest.
“It’s good for business, at least,” Aunt Hattie told me. She had me show her how to post comments on TripAdvisor and set up a website for the inn. Once she figured out the potential, she coordinated an October ghost week with the Memphis travel bureau that started with a walking tour through Elmwood and ended with dinner and an overnight stay at the Bradford at a ghostly good rate!
Every little bit helped, what with the recession and the raise on minimum wage. We were down to one nonfamily employee, Titia. She was lazy and often late, but nobody could match her biscuits. Bradford Biscuits. We were famous for them.
The aunties converted the family house to an inn nine years ago, when the last of the Bradford men passed this life. Monroe T. Bradford, my uncle, went before his time, according to Aunt Lenore. It couldn’t have come sooner, if you asked most folks. Monroe may have been a business success, but he was a drunk and a letch, and the ghosts all despised him. The official cause of death was accidental—broken neck—but I know the house did him in. Which one of them pushed him, I don’t know, but young as I was at the time, I still sensed the absolute glee with which all our specters flew about the house, singing,
“Deaddeaddeaddeaddeaddead!”
Everybody hated Uncle Monroe, which is why I couldn’t understand when Aunt Lenore decided to bring him back. She hemmed and hawed and danced around the subject until, finally, Aunt Hattie caught on.
“Jesus H., Lenore, please tell me you do not intend to call back Monroe. I will not have that man back in my house, dead or no.”
“Hattie, it’s only that I need to ask him about the key. It’s driving me to distraction not knowing what it fits.” Lenore’s hands trembled as she poured the sweet tea. “Couldn’t we just bring him back temporary-like?”
In the end, Hattie threw up her hands and agreed to let Lenore ask Titia to do a calling spell for Monroe, but only if they finished and sent him packing before the guests arrived next week for the Victoriana Fair.
Titia sent me out to pick the herbs from the kitchen garden. “Rosemary, thyme, and the one with the red flower,” she instructed. “And the one that smells like pineapple.” She pulled down jars full of ugly dried things that may have once been animals and commenced to mixing it all up in her special pot. “Get the aunties,” she said.
By now, the ghosties were aware that something was brewing, and they filled the corners of the kitchen and sat in every chair so that we all had to stand. I could sense their excitement.
Titia hummed as she stirred, and the room grew hot, and I felt drowsy. I found a vacant spot under the table and lay down for a minute to cool off. The next thing I knew, Hattie was shaking me. “Get up, Annalee. We’ve got a mess on our hands. Get on up now.”
The kitchen was full of smoke, and Hattie was waving a Ladies’ Home Journal around to clear the air. “What happened?” I asked, but right away, I knew. When the ghosties realized who Titia was calling from the other side, they ruined the spell.
“It just went wrong is all,” said Aunt Hattie. “Shouldn’t be knocking on that door anyway, if you ask me. It’s unnatural.” Titia rolled her eyes at this and set her pot to soak.
Aunt Lenore paced the kitchen, wringing her hands, and I felt sore sorry for her until I had a thought.
“Aunt Lennie,” I said. “What if we don’t even need old Uncle Monroe?”
“What do you mean, child?”
“I just wonder if maybe one of the others knows about the key?” As soon as I said it, I felt a cold pinch on my shoulder. It was the young lady from the attic. We weren’t the best of friends, but she wasn’t the devious sort, so I knew she meant to help. I held out my hand, and Aunt Lenore passed me the key, which immediately flew up and out of the room.
“Run!” I yelled and chased after, with Aunt Hattie, Lenore, and Titia following. I thought I’d lost it, but there on the stairs, the key hovered in midair waiting for us. We followed along, up two flights to the attic. We lost Titia halfway, when she sat down to catch her breath, but the aunties and I gathered around and waited to see what happened next.
“What now?” Hattie asked.
I was about to answer with something smart-mouthed when the attic door slammed, and we all jumped. Aunt Lenore covered her face, and I thought she might faint.
“Well, that was a nasty trick,” Hattie said. I agreed, but it didn’t seem like something the young woman of the attic would do. Then I saw—
“Would you look at that?” Behind the door was a wall safe, hidden until now.
“Well, I’ll be,” Hattie said.
“Oh, bless your heart!” Lenore said to the ghost.
“What do you suppose Monroe kept in there?”
“Let’s find out,” I said. I tried the key, and after a couple of jiggles, the lock caught and the safe opened. Lenore dove right in, rifling through the stacks of money. “What are you looking for, Aunt Lennie?”
“Oh, I don’t know. I thought there might be a note or something. Nothing but money.” She looked disappointed. “I just thought maybe Monroe left me something special.”
“I’m sorry, Auntie,” I said. “At least now we don’t have to rent out rooms.” Now I noticed that Aunt Hattie looked downcast.
“I don’t see why we can’t keep the inn open. I like it myself. Keeps a soul busy.”
So we decided to use some of Uncle Monroe’s money to paint and spruce up, and the house seemed happy with this. There was enough left for me to start college next year and for Hattie to
design and print a new brochure for Bradford House Inn, Home of the Bradford Biscuit. She left off the ghosties this time to try a new slant.
Lenore splurged and took the Amtrak to New Orleans with her church group, and when she came home, she seemed all aglow. Aunt Hattie thinks she met someone.
I just hope the ghosts like him.
Storm Fronts
Michael Hodges
The doe bounded through the woods of North Carolina, leaping over deadfalls and brambles. Behind her, the dark sky rumbled, the clouds a dense mixture of white, black, and steel. The rain plunged into the canopy in sheets and fell to the ground through layers of vegetation. Sweet grass and ferns received the cool water with verdant arms.
The doe moved to a patch of spruce, using it as a shield from the cold rain. She twitched her tail and dug a hoof into the soft soil, her breath hushed by the pattering drops.
Perfect, Jansen thought. He sat twenty feet high in his deer stand, wearing a camouflage weatherproof poncho and an orange wool cap. He adjusted his shooting glasses with his left hand and then pulled the trigger. The Winchester rifle flashed and crackled through the woods. The doe took a half-breath and slumped to the forest floor, held by a brace of lady fern and dead aspen branches. Blood trickled from her tan hide onto a carpet of spruce needles. Still now. Brown eyes open and lifeless.
Jansen slung the rifle around his shoulder and climbed down. Careful, you don’t want an injury all the way out here, he thought. Jansen trotted to the deer, pulse racing.
“Gotcha,” he said to the forest, patting the deer on the side. “You’ll feed me for a long time.”
He looked to the canopy, noticing the rain had stopped. He removed a massive knife from his hip belt, the blade at least ten inches long. Jansen field-dressed the animal, cutting along the center of the stomach north then south. The knife ripped through tough skin and sinew, and the guts of the thing slithered out like bloody balloon animals. The forest taking back what it gave. He cut with zeal, eyes dancing as the stench of fresh organs permeated the area. Satisfied, Jansen began pulling the animal to his ATV just over the rise. He grunted as he dragged the deer, jerking it hard when it caught on a branch. A trail of slime flowed out behind him, mixing with the pungent needles and vibrant leaves. When Jansen reached the ATV, he laid the deer into a metal trailer and surveyed the forest. Twenty more days of hunting season, he thought, and ten more tags to fill. The Department of Natural Resources awarded him a surplus this year, thanks to a rising population. Some of the men back in town said that a high density of logging roads combined with climate change had allowed for white-tailed deer to explode in numbers. He didn’t know about all that, but he knew there was a hell of a lot of deer. Jansen started the ATV and followed his own personally cut trail back to the cabin, the trees flushing cool drops of water onto his poncho. Hemlock, aspen, white pine, and red pine guarded his path home, and creatures in all directions scurried away from the sound of the motor. Agile wings flashed behind countless trunks, and the rumps of black bears disappeared into bogs.
The cabin was made of dark logs, and in the center, a stone fireplace rose to a vaulted ceiling. He’d built it for Dolores, who was long gone, God bless her. She’d died from lung cancer a year ago, her oxygen mask still sitting on her oak dresser in their bedroom. It’d been a hard year, the hardest he’d ever known. She’d been his only true friend. All he had left now was the woods—not the best companion for conversation, although he tried.
Jansen entered the cabin, sat on a Santa Fe–patterned couch, and put a bottle of Seagram’s to his lips. I earned all of this, he thought. A sigh of pleasure escaped his throat, and he belched and walked back outside. He unhinged the metal trailer and rolled it into the garage. Inside were worktables pushed against the walls, and on the ceiling hung three sturdy hooks. Jansen took a white stepladder, slid it under a random hook, and set the deer by the hole in its chest. It hung there, neck bent, tongue lolling. Jansen stepped back and observed the deer with a grin. Nice start to the season, he thought. His hungry eyes scanned the animal, and he noticed a white pattern on the deer’s right side, like a brand. Two white lines, each six inches long, crossed each other at the center. He raised an eyebrow and thought of a game farm.
“Nah,” he said to the dead deer. “You aren’t from a game farm.” He knew the closest game farm was at least a hundred miles away. Sure, a deer could cover the distance, but the odds were low. Just a peculiar marking is all—like a birthmark. Jansen quartered the deer, placing the chunks into neat rows inside the horizontal garage freezer. He needed to make room for much more.